Lights

As I was showering the other morning, the worst part of getting music stuck in my head struck: I had a song stuck there but didn't hardly know any of the words. I was stuck half humming lines like:

They show the lights are maybe

cold in the stone, show me baby co-o-old.

and:

Cause I'm calling, calling calling you

(repeat ~12x before realizing I don't know the next line)

The worst part was that I wasn't sure enough on any of the lines to really be able to google the lyrics. I tried humming the tune into soundhound, but that didn't work. Finally, one of my searches brought up Lights by Ellie Goulding. Even then, I wasn't sure that I had found the right song as I read through the lyrics. I'm not the most poetically savvy individual, but I couldn't make heads or tails of the song. After listening to it (a very 80's music video too), I realized it was, indeed, the correct song.

And then I had to figure out what sense I could make out of the lyrics to lead to a blog post :/

Luckily, as I was searching for the song, I came across something that made me much more excited: I found out that Boyce Avenue did a cover of her song. It's good (better than the original I would say), but the real reason that I got excited was that it was an excuse to put Boyce Avenue's channel on play and just let it stream.

If you haven't checked out their music, I would highly recommend it. I think one of the most impressive things you can do is take something that is good, stay true enough to it that it is clear that the foundation came from the original, and wildly rethink it to make it better. A great example of this is their cover of "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry. By simply changing the perspective and altering a few words, a whole different spin is put on the song and (from my somewhat conservative point of view) greatly improves the song.

One more example:

In 1900, L. Frank Baum wrote a novel "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" which later became The Wizard of Oz. In 1995, Gregory Maguire re-imagined the world of Oz and destroyed all that was good and praiseworthy in the story. I attempted to read it (for reasons I'll get to shortly) and couldn't bring myself to finish it. There are few books that I have not finished, but Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West was so filled with trash and such a farce in the face of what Baum had created so many decades before.

Fast forward another 8 years. Stephen Schwartz premiered what I feel is one of the best musicals of all time. Wicked tells the story that Maguire was trying to tell: the history of Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West. Their past friendship and the world that Dorothy dropped in on were things which gave the musical purpose and meaning. Schwartz's genius was in making the show funny, quick-paced and beautiful. It was so inspiring to me after I saw it, that I went and checked out the book that it is "based" on to read. That's why I got as far as I did in to the book. I kept telling myself, "the musical is so good, I just need to keep reading, it's going to get better. I know it is." But it didn't. Schwartz really did take something that was awful, keep enough of the premise to have the foundation in place, and then recreated the rest into the musical which is still wildly successful today.

As Ellie Goulding says:

Noises, I play in my head

Touch my own skin and hope that I'm still breathing

whatever that means :)