I’m making another themed music mix, and since you guys were so helpful last time I thought I’d throw out another challenge for you. This mix’s theme is aging, so all of the songs have to talk about being a certain age or about getting older. There seem to be an abundance of songs about teenagers, but material starts to scarcer the older you get. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Sound of Music – Sixteen Going on Seventeen
Stevie Nicks – Edge of Seventeen
Janis Ian – At Seventeen
Ace of Base – Blooming 18
Paul Hardcastle – Nineteen
The Who’s Tommy – Twenty-One
Gin Blossoms – 29
Aimee Mann – 31 Today
Dido – See You When You’re 40
The Beatles – When I’m 64
Five for Fighting – 100 Years
Joni Mitchell – The Circle Game
ETA: (Forgot this one!) Band of Horses – Older
ETA: (Thought of another one!) Rod Stewart – Ooh La La (I Wish That I Knew What I Know Now)

Have you got any other songs for me? Songs should be about aging, not just about a number. So, “Three is the Magic Number” or “One” don’t really fit even though they have numbers in the song titles.

Ok, GO!

I used to make mixed tapes for friends, actual tapes, which is one of those signs that I’ve been on the planet longer than a steadily growing percentage of the population. I make mixed CDs now and don’t even own a tape player, which means I won’t be listening to the recordings of my 6th grade band concert any time soon.

Sometimes I get high-concept ideas for CD mixes, like a mix of songs that track the progress of my life. Or a CD where all the tracks are covers of the same song. My latest concept is “Same Name, Different Song” which consists of songs that have the same name but aren’t covers, just totally different songs. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

Forever Young – Rod Stewart
Forever Young – Alphaville (Though I personally prefer the Youth Group cover)
Breathe – Erasure
Breathe – Sixpence None the Richer
Breathe – Jane French (The theme from “Passions” oh how I miss you)
Breathe – Maria McKee
Photograph – Weezer
Photograph – REM feat. Natalie Merchant
American Girls – Weezer (No link, sorry!)
American Girl – Tom Petty (Ok, not an exact title match, but close!)
Trouble – Ray Lamontagne
Trouble – Shampoo
Trouble – Shawn Colvin
Blush – Ben Lee
Blush (Only You) – Plumb
Independence Day – Imani Coppola
Independence Day – Ani DiFranco
Dancing in the Dark – Bruce Springsteen
Dance in the Dark – Lady Gaga (Again, not an exact match, but close!)
Heart – Pet Shop Boys
Heart – Stars
The Boxer – Simon and Garfunkel
The Boxer – Carbon Leaf

Can you guys think of any others? If I were a programmer and cared more, I could probably write a script to parse my media library and find all the matches for me, but it’s more fun to ask you guys.

BTW, I realize my last two posts have been about music. I promise this isn’t going to become PQ’s Music Blog. It’s just a coincidence.

So, I was messing about on the Internet this week trying to do a bazillion things at once, and I somehow stumbled upon the Radio link at the top of the Last.fm home page.

Ok, let me backup. Last.fm is an audio scrobbler, which is a funny phrase that means it tracks all the music you play on your computer. (Well, all the music you play in programs supported by the plugin, like iTunes, WinAmp, etc. I think it can also download your iPod stats.) I’ve used Last.fm to track my songs for years now, and you can see my stats here. (Please ignore the Bieber. I was just experimenting. I didn’t inhale.)

Ok, back to where I was. If you click on the “Your Library Radio” link in the sidebar of the Radio page a widget loads that starts playing songs that you’ve scrobbled. It’s like having your MP3 collection with you anywhere, which is handy for me because I keep all my music on an external hard drive that I don’t like to lug to coffeeshops. It doesn’t play your whole library because they are limited to songs they have the rights to play, and I assume the artists all get royalties, but it’s still pretty damn cool. I was listening to it at a coffee shop this week and forgot I was listening to a stream and not my hard drive until an ad came on.

This is so awesome that I cannot believe someone hadn’t told me about it before. If you’re not a Last.fm user, it’s probably significantly less awesome since you don’t have any tracks scrobbled to your library. There is also room for hilarity because the widget shows pictures of the artists while it plays their songs. When I listened to a Kylie Minogue track I felt like I was watching soft porn.

If you do use Last.fm, I hope I’ve enlightened you a bit today!

Speaking of radio, I will be on it (the old school version) a couple times in the upcoming weeks, assuming that my cell phone signal doesn’t drop out mid-sentence. Here is a post with the details. I had a great interview on KERA in Dallas yesterday, but OMG it is quite a mental marathon to talk about yourself for a whole hour, particularly when a side effect of the headache medication you’re on is dry mouth. I drank a whole glass of water and wanted another one. Sometimes I wish I could send in a stunt double to do this stuff for me, hopefully with cuter hair.

There is no doubt a good playlist can help you keep moving. When I ran a half-marathon, it was only a dance remix of Bryan Adams singing “Run to You” that got me through mile 10. Here are some of the songs I’ve been listening to on my walks recently. Links go to YouTube or iLike, and occasionally feature an anime fan video:

Catie Curtis – You Can Always Be Gone
Justice – D.A.N.C.E. (Not only a catchy song, but a good review of spelling.)
Seasun – Delorean
The Veils – Sit Down by the Fire
Carbon Leaf – The Boxer
Ahmet and Dweezil Zappa – Hit Me Baby One More Time
Glasvegas – Geraldine (Best song about a social worker that I’ve ever heard.)
Shout Out Louds – Tonight I Have to Leave it
Florence + the Machine – Dog Days are Over

This giveaway is open to residents of the United States only. To enter, leave a comment below listing one of your favorite songs to work out to. Contest closes at 11:59pm EST on Sunday, October 24, 2010. Winner will be chosen randomly. For more information about the Commit to Fit program and for a chance to win up to $26,200, visit the Subway Facebook page.

Disclosure: The prizes listed in this post were provided for free.

I am always struggling to give new music a chance versus snuggling in the sonic warmth of those comfortable, well-worn, songs. I can be impatient listening to new music. I don’t know if I will like the song or the singer or the instrumentation when I play the MP3 or watch the video on YouTube. When a new song comes on the radio, if it doesn’t grab me within 10 or 20 seconds, I find myself hopping stations looking for songs I know I like.

But I know I have to give new music a chance. I never know when I could discover my new favorite band. I might hear a song that I will want to hear again and again until I want to know everything about the members of the band that created it. How old are they? Where are they from? Who are their musical influences? Do they have a cool web site? Do they blog? It is so exciting to blast new music alone in my car, feeling such joy at discovering something so beautiful and sparkly and new. I want to tell everyone about this pretty thing I have discovered.

I didn’t expect to win because I don’t know any much Journey trivia, but after about 10 minutes I hit refresh and was startled to see the question appear, “Which current reality show judge was a member of Journey from 1986-87?” I haven’t watched American Idol since season two, unless you count the weekend I watched every Adam Lambert video online (OMG, Adam I luv u!!!!). However, when I did watch it, I remember judge Randy Jackson mentioning once or twice that he had worked with Journey. I typed the answer as quickly as my fingers let me and hit send, fairly certain someone had refreshed the page and answered the question before me.

Then this popped up, “WE HAVE A WINNER! Congrats @pastaqueen!” And that’s how I ended up going to the Journey/Heart concert with my mom.

I asked a few of my friends if they wanted to come along, but they were all either busy or not interested. I mentioned this to my mother, who surprisingly said she’d like to come. My mom didn’t know who Journey or Heart was (and probably still doesn’t), but she was game for a rock concert, so off we went. As we walked through the state fair on the way to the grandstand, Mom pointed out the building without air conditioning she’d lived in for two weeks in the 60′s when she got to do 4H camp at the fair. All the girls in 4H camp wore white dresses and walked in two lines like in the book Madeleine. I am not making this up.

The concert started about 15 minutes late, but everyone got excited when the Wilson sisters of Heart took the stage. Here they are in my artistic homage to Impressionist painters:

They opened with “Barracuda” and then went straight into “Never.” By the time they played “These Dreams,” I thought they’d played all the songs I knew, but evidently I know a lot of Heart songs and didn’t know it. When the guitar started playing the opening of “Magic Man” I thought, oh yeah, that’s a Heart song too. Same thing when they sang “What About Love.” By the time they sang “Crazy On You” I was wondering why I’d never bought a Heart greatest hits album because I knew over half the songs in their set.

When Ann Wilson broke out “Alone” the crowd went crazy hooting and hollering and a guy started waving around his big banana. That’s not a metaphor.

I suspect bands must have mixed feelings about their megahits. Sure, it must be awesome to go around the country and have people literally jump up and down and scream in excitement about something you wrote. But I can’t imagine singing the same song at state fairs for the past 20 years. Wouldn’t you want to murder that song eventually? I looked up Ann Wilson on Wikipedia, and she’s about the same age as my mom. I’m trying to imagine my mom touring the country in a rock band right now and coffee almost snorted out my nose. (No offense, Mom. I’m sure you could rock it out if you wanted to.) So mad props to Ann Wilson.

I felt complicit in the act too, because even though the other songs were fine and all, I really just want to hear the megahits I know. That’s why I wasn’t as excited during the Journey portion of the concert, despite the new front man, who was fairly awesome. I’m certain he got more of a workout leaping around the stage and jumping off of the stairs and tossing his microphone and catching it one-handed than I did through my entire 5K last Saturday. (They were kind enough to provide him with water though.) I only recognized about 4 or 5 songs. One of them was, “Open Arms,” where I discovered people no longer hold up lighters, they hold up the glowing LED screens of their cameras. How 21st century of us. I’m sure the fire marshal approves.

My mom and I left before the encore and screamed our order for deep-fried zeppoles at the vendor because we couldn’t hear. Then we rode the tractor train back to the parking lot by the flashing lights of the Midway. I love the fair!

Well I heard mister Young sing about her

Well, I heard ole Neil put her down

Well, I hope Neil Young will remember

A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow

I don’t always pay attention to song lyrics. It can take me 4 or 5 listens before I start to decode what a song is really about. It was only when I took a History of Rock n’ Roll class that I heard the Neil Young song, “Southern Man,” which is critical of the south and is what Lynard Skynard is referring to.

As I continued driving along, I tried to think of more songs that make reference to other songs. It sounds like a good idea for a mixed tape. I could only think of two pairs, the first being Camera Obscura’s song “Lloyd, I’m Ready to be Heartbroken” which is a response to Lloyd Cole’s, “Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken.” Then there is Tori Amos’ “In The Springtime of His Voodoo” which quotes The Eagles song, “Take it Easy” when she sings about standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona and being in the wrong song.

Can you guys think of any more songs that reference other songs? Help make my mixed tape idea a reality!

I was listening to Pandora the other day which is a free web service which plays songs that are similar to an artist or song you suggest. I entered “Maria McKee” and was listening to several folk/rock chicks when suddenly a cover of “A Good Heart” by Maria McKee came on.

“What a funny song to cover!” I thought as I looked up from the bills I was sorting. “I thought I was the only one who had ever heard this song.” So I searched for Maria McKee on Wikipedia, and what do you know, Maria McKee wrote “A Good Heart” at the age of 19. Feargal Sharkey recorded it and it went to #1 on the UK charts in 1985.

Suddenly, I was no longer embarrassed that I liked this cheesy 80′s song. I was proud I liked it despite itself. I didn’t have questionable taste after all, I simply liked a song by one of my favorite songwriters even when I didn’t know she had written it. It proved that I truly do like Maria McKee even when she’s all synth-ed up.

I also looked up Feargal Sharkey and while I didn’t find out what his momma was thinking when she named him, I learned he was the lead singer of The Undertones. They are known for the song Teenage Kicks, which has been covered by lots of people, so it must be rather popular. I bet there are those of you out there lamenting my ignorance and will undoubtedly berate me for now knowing this band’s important place in rock history. Sorry, y’all. I was born in 1980.

While a good heart might be hard to find, thanks to the Internet information isn’t.

The Last.fm plug-in I have installed in WinAmp and iTunes counts every MP3 I play on my computer and calculates these embarrassing statistics for me. It almost seems like an invasion of privacy putting my actual musical preferences out there, instead of just what I tell people I like. It’s like the difference between all the healthy stuff in your food diary and the Oreos you’re actually stuffing in your mouth and “forgetting” to write down. We tend to judge people by what they do and don’t like. Whenever I have friends or family over for the first time, they go right for my bookcase, trying to glean insight into my personality by what’s on my bookshelves. I don’t know what people will think of the fact that I listened to “Umbrella” by Rihanna 67 times.

Sometimes I just get obsessed with a song and have to play it over and over and over and over and over, making me grateful I live alone and only annoy my cats with the repetition. (I doubt their brains can interpret musical patterns anyway.) In college, my roommate was obsessed with “Magic” by Ben Folds Five and would shut the CD off in embarrassment every time I entered the room. At least that’s a good song. Sometimes I get obsessed with mediocre songs which I know are mediocre, but I can’t take off of repeat.

The first song I remember obsessing over was “I Love You Always Forever” by Donna Lewis. This was in 1996 before MP3s or Google, when music was sold on cassette tapes. I would leave a blank tape in my boombox by my bed and when a song I liked came on the radio I’d smack my hand on the record button like I was swatting a fly. Sometimes the DJ would ruin it by talking over the song or the tape would run out halfway through the song, so I’d have to try again for an even better recording. You had to really work to pirate music back then.

If the DJ didn’t say the name of the song, you were pretty much screwed. You couldn’t search for the lyrics. You couldn’t hold your phone up to the radio and have it magically figure out what song was playing like one service lets you do now. Sometimes I’d hear a really pretty song and have no clue what it was called or who sang it. It was at least a month after I heard “Building a Mystery” that I discovered Sarah McLachlan sang it or that the mystery song was called “Building a Mystery.” And now I just Google.

Since then I’ve obsessed over other songs, like “Somewhere Only We Know” by Keane which is so gorgeous that I saw the movie The Lake House mostly because they used this song in the trailer. There have been others too, which I can look up in my Last.fm profile now and realize exactly how obsessed I have been with them.

Ten years ago I was lying in bed at summer camp when a floormate walked into the room. This wasn’t unusual because my roommate and I kept the door open and somehow a spontaneous bubble of popularity had formed over our room, a bubble I would never have been able to create if I tried.

“Do you have any CDs?” she asked.

“Yeah, over there,” I replied. “Why?”

“I need to find my theme song.” Her group had been assigned a task to pick a song that represented who they were. This was 1997 and MP3s hadn’t even been invented yet, so she was limited to the handful of CDs and cassettes (I’m so old) her peers had brought with them. I don’t know what song she ultimately picked, but the idea of a personal theme song has stuck with me over the years.

If you’d asked me 5 or 6 years ago what my theme song was, I’d have said “In Hiding” by Happy Rhodes. Here are the rather brief lyrics:

You’ll find me

forever in hiding

and only time will tell

what it’s done to me

I’ve tried to show

god only knows to grow

but music hides me so well

and reveals me

Oh well

You can find me in hiding

I spent a lot of my life in hiding, hiding behind my hair, hiding behind my fat. I’ve always been introverted (and I still am), and it’s still hard for me to strike up conversations with strangers, but I don’t feel like I’m in hiding anymore. The blog has helped a lot with that.

These days I’d say my theme song is “Come A Long Way” by Michelle Shocked from the album Arkansas Traveler. The full lyrics are here, but I really love the refrain:

I’ve come a long way

I’ve come a long way

I’ve gone 500 miles today

I’ve come a long way

I’ve come a long way

And never even left L.A.

The song is about someone who steals back her motorcycle from a repo man and goes driving around LA all day. Eventually she trashes it and says:

Now you tow it to the repo man’s front door,

And you give him these keys, I don’t need them no more

Granted, I’ve never even been to L.A., so I’ve never driven around it or left it or trashed a motorcycle there. But I think the song is really about self discovery and how you can travel very far without ever leaving yourself. I’m also plenty sure I’ve gone more than 500 miles in the past several years.

So that’s my theme song. What’s yours?