ascension day

Well, I've been having a thing lately that I don't really want to get into, but suffice it to say: yes, I know I have not been posting with any kind of regularity. Management regrets the inconvenience.

Okay, so, just so this isn't the complete waste of space that it could be, I will mention here that I am in a recording studio at this moment, listening to various pieces of music that I may or may not mix onto a Veterans Day piece I've committed to for Friday. (And yes, I know that Veterans Day is Sunday. This needs to air before Veterans Day.) I keep lots of pieces of music in a file here just in case the perfect thing comes up. Fair use covers a lot of this, and our BMI/ASCAP contract covers the rest. I assure you that I purchased all of this. Anyway, if I hear a thing that I like a little bit of, I save it here and then can come back to it if I need it. This makes the craziest list -- sort of an iPod playlist gone all wrong. I just finished listening to a passacaglia that I like and the Brahms Clarinet Concerto. I have decided against both. I am noticing that virtually all of the music I have in here is kind of...well, either ethereal or sad, depending on how you want to look at it. (With the exception of a White Stripes piece I used for a commentator's thoughts on music and his father.) Anyway, it's good to go back through all this stuff occasionally and see what can be deleted. I have a disproportionate amount of Radiohead up here, apparently. That's another strange story, because I was determined that I did not like Radiohead, based entirely on my experience of their first record. I had a friend who adored this tape and played it endlessly and I didn't like it one bit. So, in short, I gave up entirely on Radiohead before they started making music that was right up my alley. I heard some of their other songs purely by accident and couldn't believe I had written this band off. Okay, lesson learned. So now there is a lot of Radiohead on file in studio E. I was kind of delighted to see just now that I have The Hollies' "The Air That I Breathe" in this file. I just love that weird whiny guitar opening with all the wocka-wocka processing on it.

At any rate, the thing I have up here that I want to use but cannot even think about is the Talk Talk song "Ascension Day" from their record Laughing Stock. I am just crazy about that record and have been for years. There's not a lot of instances in which I can use it, but sometimes I just come in and listen to it and it (exceedingly oddly) makes me feel better.

So. Go get yourself a copy of Laughing Stock and don't listen to the recordstore guy who will invariably tell you that this is not what you really want (unless you go to the record store in Lawrence and your counterguy is Kelly, who will cheerfully agree that this is an excellent choice, and that his wife listens to it all the time). Unless this guy is one of those crazy audiophile types, in which case he will probably go completely wiggo over you. But in that case, you should ignore his exhortations for you to buy it on the gold disc or the remastered pressing or get the original Verve release rather than the Polydor...all that stuff is just nuts.