Showing posts with label The Replacements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Replacements. Show all posts

Tuesday, 6 May 2014

Lorde "Swinging Party"

I'm not a grumpy old man.

But clearly, I am an old man.

My friend Lori TB gave me the heads up that Lorde does a cover of The Replacements' "Swinging Party."  (She wrote "I 100% always think of you when I hear anything at all to do with the 'mats.")

My first thought was "How does Lorde even know this song?"

My second thought was the realization that this song came out in 1985.  Lorde wasn't born until 1994!

I'm not complaining that a young artist covered The Replacements.  I just find it shocking.  In the same way I'll find it shocking when they move Wheel Of Fortune's time-slot on the TeeVee.


Hear the song on Youtube.

Monday, 21 April 2014

The Replacements "Cruella De Vil"

This week, I'm on vacation with the family at Disneyworld.  So I thought I'd write some posts about Disney songs.

With a 6 year old in the house, I'm starting to see the change . . .

She has a younger brother, and every once and a while there will be some thing that she used to love, but she suddenly rejects, because "That's for little kids."

There is a lot of this in life.  At a certain point, you age out of particular toys, games, music, activities, etc.

But an unexpected delight of adulthood, is that sometimes you age back in.

By high school, I had aged out of Disney movies.  In the 80s, there was no way you were going to catch me in the theaters for "The Great Mouse Detective" or "The Black Cauldron."

Then a funny thing happened in college.

The Replacements covered "Cruella De Ville" for a compilation of Disney songs called "Stay Awake."  And while I think their delivery was somewhat ironic, I think it also holds an appreciation for the classic song-craft that went into tunes like this one.

And suddenly it was okay to like Disney songs.  Even find them fun, enjoyable and cool.

Which is why it's not unheard of for me to be the one in our house who is most enjoying Sesame Street or the Sit-N-Spin . . .


Hear the song on Youtube.

Wednesday, 26 February 2014

The Replacements "Everything's Coming Up Roses"

"Yeah, your late 20s can be pretty dramatic."

I was saying this to a friend of mine, who is in her late 20s.  She'd been telling me tales of drama and awkwardness and other silliness that comes with being single and having roommates and lots of independence and no money and such.

Her stories, and the emotional ups and downs within, made me think back on that same period in my life.  I've had it in my head that this was a pretty dramatic, eventful period in my life too.

But I decided to find out.

For most of my late 20s, I kept a pretty comprehensive journal.  Every month or so I'd fill up an entire yellow legal pad with the comings and goings of my life, the loves and hookups and drama, and the vomiting of feelings onto the page, as I tried to make sense of it all.

I remember it feeling dramatic.  But was it really as dramatic as it felt at the time?

At random, I grabbed a legal pad, of the dozens in a box in the basement and read through it.

In short, either I picked the most loaded journal of the bunch, or yes, life was dramatically dramatic when I was in my late 20s.

Within the month that I read through, I'd found out my Aunt had cancer, and old friend stopped speaking to me, another friend's husband committed suicide, my ex-girlfriend's cat died in the middle of the night and she made me come over to her house to deal with the cat-corpse, and, as the capper, my friends and I all lost our jobs.

Despite all this, the journal ends on an up-note, sort of.


"Well, what can you say about a month like this?  Emotionally exhausting and I'm glad it's over.  It'll certainly be interesting reading at some distant date, but right now it's pretty painful.  

Friday night we did the Relay For Life (American Cancer Society fundraiser).  Somewhere near 6am, an annoying 10 year old who'd been hanging around near me, for reasons unknown, the kid took a tennis ball and threw it as hard as he could intentionally hitting me in the nuts.  

The good news is that I think my luck might be changing."

It's nice to know that despite the drama, I kept my sense of humor and a bit of light in the darkness and pain.


Hear the song on Youtube.