Tag Archives: Journey

10 For The Playlist – Vol 2

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Time for another round of tunes that I love, and would like to share with more people who may not have heard them yet. So, without further adieu.

Suzanne – Journey – Pure, unadulterated ’80’s Pop Rock. This gets off on the jump with pulsing synthesizers, and doesn’t take a moment to slow down. Journey doesn’t need any ink from me, since everyone already knows all the lyrics to a couple of their songs, and gleefully sing along in pubs across the world. But “Suzanne” is a bit lesser know than their big hits, though it’s message of pining for a lost love who may not even remember your name is a sentiment most everyone can related to.

Favorite Lyric – “I wonder if you’re really happy / And if you saw me, would you know my name / I’m the one you used to hold onto / You’re the one who used to wear my ring / Remember our last September”

For Me This Is Heaven – Jimmy Eat World – Young love by way of Emo-Rock in full effect. A song about watching the stars with someone, and counting the minutes that you have with them before having to part. The butterflies never really leave your stomach until you’re with them again.

Favorite Lyrics – “When the time we have now ends / And when the big hand goes round again / Can you still feel the butterflies? / Can you still hear the last goodnight”

Poison & Wine – The Civil Wars – A lovely duet telling you that love can be complicated, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth sticking around for. Times can get tough, and the better you know someone, the better you know how to hurt them. But you still regret it every time, because the reason you know them so well, is because you’ve been with them for so long. And you’ve been with them for so long, because you love them, and can’t stand to be without them.

Favorite Lyric – “Oh, your hands can heal / Your hands can bruise / I don’t have a choice / But I’d still choose you”

Breathe In Breathe Out – Mat Kearney – Starts low, and slow, only to build up to a cathartic confirmation of love. This sounds like the greatest Coldplay song that Coldplay never recorded and, frankly, better than just about anything they have.

Favorite Lyrics – “We push and pull / And I fall down sometimes / I’m not letting go / You hold the other line / Cause there is a light in your eyes / In your eyes”

I Choose You – Sara Bareilles – A simple love song that may not have been written with a parent’s love for their child in-mind, but I first heard it after my oldest was born, so that’s where it landed for me. As the song says, it’s impossible to truly be prepared for parenthood, and that makes it really scary. But there’s nothing more rewarding in the world than overcoming your fears, and doing right by your kids.

Favorite Lyrics – “I am not scared of the elements / I am under-prepared, but I am willing / And even better / I get to be the other half of you”

The Secret Of My Success – Night Ranger – From a band best know for “Sister Christian” and a soundtrack from the most overlooked of Michael J. Fox’s peak 1980’s trilogy (the two more well-known movies being “Back To The Future” and “Teen Wolf”) this is pure ’80’s excess hair metal. I mis-heard the part of the chorus that goes “The secret of my success is that I’m living / Twenty-Five hours a day” as” “The secret of my success is that I’m doing / Twenty-Five pounds of cocaine” But, frankly, it works just as well. If not better.

Favorite Lyrics – “Worlds collide / And hearts will be broken / Over and over / It’s the same every day”

I Will Survive – Cheap Trick – No, not the disco megahit from Gloria Gaynor. And from the hit film “Gladiator”, but not the Oscar winning blockbuster starring Russell Crowe. It’s the one from 1990 about an underground boxing tournament starring the guy from Twin Peaks (not that guy), Brian Dennehy, and a young Cuba Gooding, Jr. Just trust me, if you’re feeling down and need a little pep in your step, this song should do the trick.

Favorite Lyrics – “You think you’re shaking my innocence / But you’re wasting time / ‘Cause you don’t know who I am”

Icehouse – Icehouse – An atmospheric, new wave, horror, folk tale if taken at face value. A metaphor for unrequited, or lost love to a less literal interpretation. My favorite song by Icehouse will always be the new wave adrenaline shot of “Electric Blue” but this is the song they named their band after (or vice versa) so it’s clearly important to them as well.

Favorite Lyrics – “The devil lives inside the icehouse / At least that’s what the old ones say / He came a long time ago / He came in the winter snow / Now it’s colder every day”

Stolen – Dashboard Confessional – A song about capturing that little bit of love and beauty while you can, before it fades like the seasons. A sepia-toned flashback of a song from when I was younger, and love was more fleeting. It sounds like the bittersweet end of summer captured in three minutes.

Favorite Lyrics – “We watch the season pull up its own stakes / And catch the last weekend of the last week / Before the gold and glimmer have been replaced / Another sun soaked season fades away”

Breathe – Michelle Branch – The argument you have with yourself when you can’t seem to say what you really mean to the person you love wrapped up in pop-rock with a hook that keeps pulling you back in. Michelle Branch has had bigger hits, but this one is my personal favorite.

Favorite Lyrics – “So just give me one good reason / Tell me why I should stay / ‘Cause I don’t want to waste another moment / Saying things we never meant to say”

Crying Like A Man

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What sort of things make men cry?

I won’t pretend to speak for all men, but I’ll speak for myself and maybe that will shed some light on men at large.

Musical tends to be a major factor in firing up my tear ducts, in fact it is the most frequent culprit. A swelling string section can get to the soft, gooey center of just about any man who is not dead inside.

That’s true whether in an orchestra film score,  or incorporated into a ballad or lament. Give me the cellos stirring things up deep down inside, and then the higher pitched choir of the violins to grant the release of tears.

Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back album,  especially The Book Of Love, is a prime example of blending pop music with classical trimmings.

Same can be said about Damien Rice songs like Amie, Delicate or Colour Me In.  Something with a slow build and a big finish a la With Or Without You, Journey’s Faithfully or Bloc Party’s Sunday tend to get my emotions roiling as well. It’s that they’re working the body bag of my emotions before knocking my block off.

Thematically speaking, the idea of letting go of a dream, a belief, or especially a loved one, can often hit my soft spot. Of course, that’s usually accompanied by the aforementioned musical cues.

John Barry’s theme from Somewhere In Time calls to mind the great essence of an otherwise flawed story about love made possible by impossible circumstances and then torn asunder by the unstoppable force of time.

Meet Joe Black, is a bad three hour movie that might have made a pretty decent two hour movie buried in there somewhere. But the ending featuring Anthony Hopkins saying goodbye to his family and friends with the fireworks and the swelling Thomas Newman score building out of What A Wonderful World always gets me misty.

Stand By Me starts with a simple string rendition of the titular song and ends with the main characters having to leave the innocence of childhood behind. So it gets me every time.

James Horner’s score from Braveheart is fantastic. At one point it takes a fairly over the top torture and execution scene and turns it into the build up of a moment of pure catharsis. The musical score bangs home the idea that, while they may have killed William Wallace, they did not destroy his beliefs. It’s one of those all too rare swelling-tears-pumping-fist moments.

I can occasionally be caught off-guard by understated pieces of a story that are not punctuated by a 50 piece orchestra. Stallone’s locker room interaction with Michael B. Jordan in Creed where he briefly talks about what he’d give up for one more day with his late wife is a recent such emotional movie moment.

Another moment is in Of Mice And Men, when George kills Lenny to save him from a more painful death at the hands of the lynch mob, but also because he knows Lenny can’t help himself but be dangerous sometimes. Either way, he killed the only person who he really cared for, the only thing he really had to hold onto in the world, and that’s a button pusher for me.

As Flowers For Algernon winds down the formerly mentally handicapped narrator starts losing his super intelligence and falls back into his lesser intellectual state. You can tell that he can, and cannot, sense him losing himself again and it’s pretty heartbreaking.

And, good lord, do not even get me started on anything that involves someone’s pet or animal companion dying. That’s the one thing that breaks me down every single time, even if it’s hammy or kinda rudimentary.

At any rate, it’s healthy to have a good cry every once in a while – manly or otherwise. So I’m always happy to revisit the things that bring me the sweet release of sorrow, and you should be as well.