Posts Tagged ‘Music’

I was 12 years old when Jann Arden released Living Under June.

I remember falling in love with Could I Be Your Girl like I had never fallen in love with a song before. I was too young to know what it meant, or how desperately sad its lyrics are (“I am worthless sounds compared to all your perfect words”), but I loved it. I taped it from the radio and listened to it over and over again, writing out the lyrics in school notebooks, with hearts dotting the eyes.

I added it to my Christmas list that year. I remember standing in the record store a week before Christmas, holding the CD in my hands, wanting it right then like nothing else.

Santa didn’t bring me Living Under June for Christmas that year. Neither did my parents or grandparents. I took the money that I got for Christmas and bought it before the new year came. It’s not only the first CD I remember buying, it’s the first one I listened to front to back over and over and over again.

This Christmas marks 17 years since that Christmas. And while Living Under June was my first Jann Arden album, it was far from my last. Ten albums and five concerts have gotten me through my share of tween and teen heartbreak, self-doubt, self-loathing and  finally, to my own self-acceptance.

I can’t explain what that music means to me. It was a life-preserver when I needed one. A shoulder to cry on when I had none. It was someone who understood what I was going through like no one else could. I strive to be myself, if only because the fridge magnet I got at the first Jann Arden concert I went to tells me to.

I was 24 when met Arden for the first time when she was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2006. It was the first time I had interviewed anyone on camera. I interviewed a dozen celebrities before her, including Eugene Levy, Jennifer Coolidge and Brendan Fraser, and didn’t bat an eye. When it came to Arden, my 12-year-old self took over and I broke down crying. She was gracious and helped me get through it, but I was mortified. (And oh, yes, it’s all on video, which I still have and cringe every time I watch it.)

Not my most shining professional — or personal — moment.

So when I heard this year Arden was releasing not just another album, but a memoir as well (Falling Backwards), I knew I had to read it. And when I heard she was doing a Q&A and autograph signing, I set my sights on redeeming myself.

And I did. She didn’t remember me, which is good, but she told me not to let it get me down, “everyone has moments like that.”

I was glad to get to pose for a picture with her without tears welling in my eyes, and to be able to talk to her like the grown up — and professional — I am. Maybe I’ve grown up in the five years since, or maybe I just realize that while that 12-year-old hearing Could I Be Your Girl for the first time on the radio will always exist inside of me, it doesn’t mean I wear her on my sleeve.

As for Arden’s memoir? I’m halfway through it and will give a full review when I’m done (along with some of the other 52 in ’11 posts I’ve been neglecting), but suffice it to say, I’m not at all disappointed with the book.

Thanks for everything, Jann.

The blog post below was originally published in the Kincardine News in April of 2005. I was reminded of it today when I was listening to Alanis Morissette, and thought I’d share it here. (I even managed to find the MacLean’s article that inspired me!) It’s one of my favourite pieces of writing. I’d love your comments on it. Happy May 2-4.

In last week’s issue of Maclean’s magazine, Shanda Deziel said Alanis Morissette has sold out because she is re-issuing her album Jagged Little Pill (JLP) as an acoustic album for sale exclusively at Starbucks.

Selling out? I don’t think so!

Deziel said Morissette has lost her edge in her music since her JLP days, that she has finally come to embrace the fame and fortune she once ran scared from. I don’t think that’s true either.

JLP was a groundbreaking album — for music, for Morissette and for women — when it was released in 1995. Morissette released JLP after becoming a success in Canada singing dance music, while doing the running man.

The album showed an angry 20-year-old Morissette. She was no longer the girl getting slimed on You Can’t Do That on Television or the dancer with the big, poofy hair. She gave scorned women everywhere an anthem with her hit You Oughtta Know.

Deziel didn’t really like JLP either, saying the album “connects with some key demographics, mainly 12-year-old girls hungry for their first rotten boyfriend.” Well, I was one of those 12-year-old girls. So I decided to relisten to JLP as a woman around the same age Morissette was when it came out, to see if it spoke to me differently.

As I blasted the songs, that I still know all of the words to 10 years later, I noticed something. Morissette never claimed she wanted to be angry forever. In some of her songs she claimed she was just looking for her soulmate. The album isn’t as angry as Deziel portrays it.

Deziel also says Morissette didn’t stay angry long enough. When her sophomore album came out, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, it was nearly four years after JLP and a lot more mellow.

While I’m not a fan of Morisette’s first single off that record, Thank U, there are still classic Morissette songs on it. That I Would be Good is a prime example — to many it seems like a love song, but to any true Alanis Morissette fan it is a song about not being worthy for the one you want.

Under Rug Swept was the next album Morissette put out. Deziel criticises this album because Morissette uses “her unique form of poetic licence, inverts phrases and overloading on syllables.”

I see Under Rug Swept as the best album she has put out. The audience no longer saw her as an angry babe, but a woman maturing. She was still using music to comes to terms with past relationships (Hands Clean) but unlike JLP, she doesn’t scream about how much she hates the man but instead, music is a positive way to move through it.

Her fourth album, So-Called Chaos, finally brought the 30-year-old Morissette to the spotlight. She had grown up and fallen in love.

She shed the hair that she was once known for and instead sported a cute shag. She wore make up. She got engaged. She didnt sell out — she grew up.

And despite that, she still has the Alanis Morissette spin on her tracks. Even her love song, Everything, is about how much she despises things about herself that her partner loves anyway.

If Morissette had stayed the angry 20-year-old from JLP, critics would be saying it was getting old — fast.

After all, the music industry is all about reinventing yourself. Just look at Madonna or mom-to-be Britney Spears.

And if Morissette’s angry feminist persona has died, she lives on in artists like Pink who sings about how much she hates herself and her family.

But eventually even Pink, who can be considered this generation’s Morissette, will mature and put out records that are deeper than hate and conjure all kinds of emotions.

Morissette is not a sell-out. She’s an adult who is making her own business decisions. If that means selling her album at Starbucks, then so be it.

I think most of the caffeine junkies in line at Starbucks would be Morissette fans anyway.

After all, those 12-year-old girls hungry for their first rotten boyfriend? Well we’ve had him already, but we still need our caffeine to get through the day.

Thursday morning news broke that the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council had deemed Money for Nothing by Dire Straits “unfit” for Canadian radio due to their use of the word “faggot” in the lyrics.

In response, Dire Straights has been a trending topic on Twitter for two days now, it’s been steadily climbing up the iTunes Canada chart (as of this writing it was No. 56) and three radio stations plan to play the song for an hour straight in protest Friday night.

So in the spirit of the Canadian Broadcast Standard Council, here are some other songs that came out years ago, but due to political correctness, should be banned from Canadian radio until the offensive term is bleeped out.

5. Louie Louie by the Kingsman (1963

Did the FBI ever fully complete their obscenity investigation into the lyrics of this song? Until we know what they’re really saying here, we should cut this from radio.

4. Blame Canada — South Park (1999)

Really, this should go without saying.

This song incites hate toward Canada, and puts our wonderful nation at fault for everything it can think of (“it seems everything went wrong since Canada came along”). And, they have the nerve to call us “not a real country anyway.”

Don’t even get me started on the Robin Williams performance of this at the Oscars in 2000 (just goes to show you, even the Oscars can reward hate speech).

3. I Touch Myself — the Divinyls (1991)

Come on, we all know what she really means here and Canadian radio is not the place to talk about such things.

Could you imagine being in a car and having to explain these lyrics to a child? What are the radio programmers out there thinking?

Absolute disgust.

2. Relax — Frankie Goes to Hollywood (1983)

“Relax don’t do it/When you want to go to it/Relax don’t do it/When you want to come.”

Released in 1983, this song barely made much a splash on the charts. But after it was banned in 1984 by the BBC due to the sexual nature of the album’s artwork and this song’s lyrics, it shot to No. 1 on the U.K. charts.

Perhaps Money for Nothing will see the same sort of chart explosion after it’s ban in Canada.

1. Raise a Little Hell — Trooper

Yes, Trooper is a classic Canadian band and I don’t like banning them from Canadian radio either, but sometimes you have to make hard decisions.

This song is a call to arms, encouraging revolution (“If you don’t like what you got, why don’t you change it?”) and we can’t be encouraging Canadian citizens to participate in changing their country.

This song also must be the next song banned on Canadian radio after its use on This Hour has 22 Minutes where Canadians politicians encouraged the Canadian public to vote in the 2000 election. Just sickening.

What songs do you think should be banned from Canadian radio and why?

Co-worker, fellow Twitter buddy and all-around fun gal Jen Wilson and I saw Easy A Tuesday afternoon.

In it, main character Olive bemoans that she wishes her life was directed by John Hughes, including (of course) her own musical number for no apparent reason.

This then caused Jen to pose the following tweet:

Pondering: If my life included a musical number for no apparent reason, what would it be? What would yours be?

Now, of course, the Easy A reference came from this:

Easy A then had its own musical number for no reason (not on YouTube yet, but even if it was I wouldn’t want to ruin what is the crux of the movie). Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Easy A aren’t the first films to employ these. 500 Days of Summer did to hilarious results (you’ll never listen to Hall and Oates the same way again):

(There’s also a deleted scene that is a companion to this one on the film’s DVD I highly recommend checking out, you can do so here.)

Back to Jen’s tweet though: What would my musical-number-for-no-apparent-reason be?

I don’t think there’s a clear-cut answer to that. Musical-numbers-for-no-apparent-reason work so well in film because they represent a moment in that character’s life. Like the full musical format, they are a way for a character to express how he’s feeling at any given moment in a way that strict words cannot.

Look at the 500 Days of Summer clip above. The scene is called “The Best Morning Ever” and comes after Summer and Tom have spent their first night together. (Similarly, the deleted scene is known as “The Worst Morning Ever” and comes after the two broke up.)

Need another example? I give you the late, great Heath Ledger:

Music is a way for us to communicate like no other. While often used in non-musical films to convey love or romance (see clips above), it’s also a way for us to feel what the character is.

I remember going to see 13 Going on 30 and feeling a pit in my stomach when Jennifer Garner’s character Jenna starts to do the Thriller dance by herself at a work function and no one is joining in. She has to force her old pal Matty to start dancing with her, then her co-workers follow suit:

When you boil it down, musical-numbers-for-no-apparent-reason do have a reason for being — they express a character’s inner feelings at that moment in time. It’s because of this I don’t think anyone can define themselves by one musical number.

When you’re in love, your musical-number-for-no-apparent-reason will likely be different than when you’ve just been dumped.

Can music define a period or time in your life? Undoubtedly. That’s why music has the power to take you back to a place where you were when you first heard that song, when it meant something to you. Does it make you want to break out into song and sing and dance? Most often, no.

Do I want my very own Ferris Bueller moment? Yes, but I don’t need to have a parade singing Twist and Shout in order to get it.

What about you? Have you ever had the feeling of wanting to break out into song? Care to share why? Or what’s your favourite musical number in a non-musical movie (or TV show!)? Why? Leave a comment.

To put it bluntly: I was skeptical when Rock of Ages debuted on Broadway. ’80s rock songs backing a musical? Really? Had We Will Rock You not already tried to do a rocking musical (and failed miserably at that?)? Had Mamma Mia not shown that pop songs can be a musical and it can be done right? Why bother trying? And don’t even get me started on using American Idol‘s Constantine Maroulis as the lead character in a form of “stunt” casting.

Then the 2009 Tony Awards came. Rock of Ages won best musical, but I still had my reservations (I didn’t even remember the performance for Rock of Ages from the 2009 Tony’s, instead all I remember is Brett Michaels getting hit in the head with the backdrop during the opening of the show).

Late last year, it was announced the show was coming to Toronto. The press had a field day. And the commercials for it played nonstop on the radio. There’s only so much of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ that you can hear before you go crazy. So I decided I wanted to go.

Saturday night, I went with my family for my birthday. I was blown away.

It was nothing like I expected. It was far better than I expected. It may be one of the best things I have seen on stage in a long, long time.

Rock of Ages beats We Will Rock You for so many reasons, but the main one is because Rock of Ages actually has a story and character development something WWRY lacked, in my humble opinion (full disclosure: I saw WWRY twice when it was in Toronto and had problems with it both times).

To me, WWRY picked Queen songs and then tried to write a story around them. Book writer Ben Elton just reached too far, and didn’t spend enough time developing Galelio and Scaramouche (the two main characters, and no, I’m not kidding about their names), so we don’t really care for them all that much.

Rock of Ages, on the other hand, not only had a story, but knew there was only one way to get away with telling their story: break — no, wait, make that tear down — the fourth wall: Talk to the audience, and know what you’re doing is crazy.

Like Into the Woods before it, Rock of Ages knows it’s a show — or at least the narrator Lonnie does. He is often interacting with the crowd, talking to them directly, or as an aside. The character of Lonnie is by far the best part of that show. The characters in Mamma Mia sort of wink to the crowd that what they’re doing is silly, but they never really jump out and say it. Rock of Ages tells you from the beginning: This is a show, enjoy the ride.

Then there’s the dancing. Oh, the dancing. I’m not a dance person — can’t do it, don’t really understand it — but all of the movement in Rock of Ages would put any “real” Broadway show to shame. And you just don’t get the full effect of it by the video at the top or from their performance at last year’s Tony’s (it shows that TV really is crap at showing theatre, as Ben Elton said at the press conference for WWRY back in 2006).

Yvan Pedneault, who was in WWRY, kicks butt in this role. He is beyond fantastic as Drew. As for Elicia MacKenzie? One would never know this Sherrie was ever a Maria. I had my reservations when she won How do you Solve a Problem Like Maria?, but in Rock of Ages, MacKenzie knocks it out of the park.

And, while the content is not appropriate for children around the age of 9, it is hilariously funny. I won’t ruin any parts, because it’s more fun to be surprised (in fact, the program doesn’t even list the songs in the show, so that’s a great surprise, too). I can’t wait to go back with someone who has never seen it, just to see their eyes light up the way mine did.

And, like every great musical before it, you leave the theatre thinking dreams really can come true. Even if you are an ’80s rocker.