Velvet Underground

Beginning to See the Light

Velvet Underground – Beginning to See the Light

We decided what we’re doing for Thanksgiving and it does not involve me driving up to fetch my mom, nor frantically cleaning my house to have it mom ready. I had been feeling a little guilty about it but now that the weekend is here, I am so glad I am not giving up both days to sit in my car.

I also got some good news on the work front and both kids are doing well at the moment, *knock-knock* so things are looking up. Oh! And the Christmas cactus I was sure I had killed has one flower and three buds on it! The world is a shit show but the things I can control are positive and I think that’s worth celebrating.

Rock & Roll

The Velvet Underground – Rock & Roll

Some of my fellow Still in Rotation contributors have started up a new site called Raised on the Radio and they invited me to put together a playlist for the Twisted Mix-tape Tuesday feature. Just to make it more fun, every week there’s a new theme. This week the theme is anything goes so I got to choose my own theme.

I can be a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to creating a playlist (or a CD or tape, back in the day), so half a dozen ideas that popped into my head were rejected after I was unable to settle on five songs. I decided on songs in foreign languages partly because that limited the number of songs I knew and made it easier to keep it to five.

The name of the site and the idea behind it reminded me of this Velvet Underground song. Such a classic, and so true.

Then one fine morning she puts on a New York station
You know she don’t believe what she heard at all
She started shaking to that fine, fine music
You know her life was saved by rock & roll.

I grew up outside of New York City and the station we listened to was WLIR. I didn’t realize how lucky we were to have that station until we moved up to Maine half-way through my high school years. There were some pretty glaring gaps in our classmates’ musical knowledge, at least to our way of thinking, though they seemed happy enough.