Pointless Nostalgia on a Friday Night

[taste_is_sweet]

I have a thing, it turns out, where I'll buy a CD (or download an album), listen the hell out of it for weeks, then put it away and not look at it again for years. My problem is that I almost never have music on during the day. Unless I'm in the car, where we generally just tune in to the least-crappy of the local radio stations, my day is silent other than the cats and my swearing at the computer. I can't write and listen to music at the same time, and I tend to forget to turn it on when I do chores. Hence the years of abandoned CDs.

So even though I'd copied all the songs from Barenaked Ladies' Gordon album to my phone a good while ago, it was just this week when I actually listened to it again.

Funny how I'd remembered the songs but forgotten how excellent most of them were. This song is one of my absolute favorites:

Not the most awesome video, but Steven Page could sure rock a 90s haircut and frilly shirt.

I bought Gordon (way) back when it came out in 1992, and heard "What a Good Boy", and basically had my personal angst theme-song for the next ten years. Just the lines: I wake up scared; I wake up strange; I wake up wondering if anything in my life is ever going to change encapsulated the gormless anxiety I seemed to carry with me all the time, and singing the song at the top of my lungs offered an aggressive pathos that made me feel both connected to every other miserable twenty-something on the planet and smugly isolated at the same time.

My 90s were kind of terribly awesome.

That decade was an astonishingly long time ago, but I still have the Gordon album, and the songs are still amazing. The others I've been listening the hell out of are "The Flag" (an achingly beautiful song about domestic abuse), and "Wrap Your Arms Around Me" (the line, Do you believe we are all innately good? in that gorgeous harmony gets me every single time).

I really should listen to it more often. And my other CDs as well.

::Eyes Evanescence::

Well, maybe not all of them.

Comments

[pyewacketsid.livejournal.com]

Oh, excellent. I was a latecomer to the BNL fandom; One Week's popularity first alerted me to their existence. Gordon, though... Jim's bowing on the bass fiddle in The Flag pulls my spine right out through my guts every time. They are so much more than a pop novelty band (although you might not know it from their latest album, ugh).

I think our 90s life stages were concurrent, but the bulk of my angst was poured into the Indigo Girls' Kid Fears. ;)

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Spine out through your guts--yeah. That's it exactly. :)

I didn't hear much from the Indigo Girls. But IIRC we are of an age, you and I. ::angsty high-fives::

BNL's latest album isn't good, eh? That's sad. Ed Robertson is a good writer, but Steven Page was, I think, the real poet.

[draycevixen.livejournal.com]

Gordon was the first BNL CD I bought but the title of it makes me nostalgic anyway because the first time I knew the band existed was because of "The Ballad of Gordon" being a station break on one of the kids' TV channels:



It made me look the band up and then listen to and buy Gordon. :D

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

I've never heard that song before. I love how poignantly funny those guys could be back in the day. :D Thank you for introducing it. (I've also loved their random sampling of other songs--I guess they didn't get in trouble for it because it counted as parody?)

I haven't heard all their albums to really say for sure, but I've always felt that Gordon was the best.

[ride-4ever.livejournal.com]

*high-fives fellow BNL fangirl*

I didn't know you were into BNL! I got into BNL through due South fandom.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

::High Fives::

Did BNL soundtrack part of the series? Or was it via fandom discussions or the like?

I'm pleased to say that I saw one of their first concerts (way) back during Frosh Week at McMaster University. They were one of the bands performing, and they were so fantastic the entire audience kind of gave the next band up (I Mother Earth, I think it was) a hard time about not being BNL. :D

[ride-4ever.livejournal.com]

The BNL connection is a "general C6D" connection...and a lot of times BNL lyrics have been used as dSC6D fic prompts.

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Ah. That's cool. :D Unusual way of finding new music, too.

[ride-4ever.livejournal.com]

It might even be that almost all my music discoveries since coming into fandom are related to dSC6D. *points to icon as additional example*

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Headstones seem vaguely familiar...

I've found so much awesome music through fandom! And awesome stories and people to talk to, too. ;)

[ride-4ever.livejournal.com]

...and Headstones lead guy Hugh Dillon also has a movie and TV presence : Hard Core Logo, Flashpoint, Durham County (to name a few).

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Neat. I'll check him out. :D