I haven’t listened to the radio in about 6 years now. I would rather listen to my own selection of music, and do away with announcers and songs I don’t want to hear. I still find out about new music from friends and from this thing called the internet and I just don’t ever have a need to listen to the radio. It’s the same with TV – I haven’t watched broadcast TV for about three years now and have not missed it at all. I get to watch what I want, when I want – and never get stuck watching any old trash, just because it is on.

So how did I come up with a song for this? Well the closest thing I have to listening to the radio is the soundtrack we have at work, and even then I very rarely get to hear any of that either. But I do poke my ear out for a listen at around 2.30 every afternoon… and this song comes on and makes my whole world happy! Any day can be improved with Journey, and whenever I am without motivation… 2.30 will bring with it a productive afternoon.

You know what they need at the start of high school? They need to get a bunch of 24 year olds to go into the school and find the poor teenager who looks most like they looked at the same age. They need to sit down with the kid for… I want to say day but I think it would need to be a week… and set out a 5-year plan for them. For many kids, this would include things like “whatever you do, do not ever… EVER drink from the drink fountains in the upper quad” or “don’t eat so many pies, eating pies every day will not only make you a fatty but it will also cause severe bowel concerns at an age that may be embarrassing” and that would be terribly helpful information. You could have a conversation about bullying, about which kids to hang out with and that it doesn’t really matter what group you are in… AS LONG AS YOU HAVE FRIENDS. But whatever, none of that mattered for me. I got through high school just fine, made some good friends and enjoyed myself. But I tend to forget a lot of the early years…

If I could wish to have been told one thing by a 24 year old messenger it would be this:

“Do not ever in your entire life, listen to 28 Days.”

And I wouldn’t have to forget year 8. My life would be pretty much complete… but now I have this hole inside me – it’s contained now. I have some kind of Iron Man-style contraption that keeps the 28 Days shrapnel away from my vital organs, but one day it will fail, and that day… I don’t even want to know what is going to happen on that day. I may as well go ride a horse home to Perth and sob into my Holden bedspread while getting stabbed in the face with a knife by some dude with a dirty mullet while he raps to me some beautiful rhymes about checkin’ his style.

In all fairness, I was 13 and trying to make it as a cool dude in high school. I even had a skateboard. After remembering the music I listened to in my early high school years, I really wish that I had been an emo or a punk or ANYTHING other than a gross bogan douche. Because that’s exactly what this music makes me out to be AND THAT IS NOT WHO I AM. And, as much as my girlfriend will tell you otherwise, I wasn’t a gross bogan, I was just trying to fit in.

By song 15, I have discovered the reason why they call this a challenge. It’s really quite difficult to find the right song for some of these categories, and none harder than this one – a song that describes me. I spent a good hour trying to find the perfect song, and I just couldn’t get anything suitable. I guess I was looking for something that was so perfect to who I am, how I think, how I act and how my mind works but that song isn’t out there. So I started to think about things I loved, things important to me and characteristics that can be used to describe me.

I love and cherish my friend, and I would never want to lose my closest friends.

I love Pixar.

I’m a fairly laid back individual, calm, steady.

My voice is monotone.

I’m a bit goofy.

I’m kinda cute sometimes.

I’m a bit of a grandpa sometimes and just love to stay in and play scrabble.

Sure I can think of a lot more ways to describe myself, but it’s easier if I just list those few… because if you add all those things together and turn them into a song… you get You’ve Got a Friend in Me by Randy Newman! This really is one of my favourite songs, and I’m really annoyed that I didn’t think of it for my song that I know all the words to – I don’t think I enjoy singing any song as much as this one.

A lot of people like to joke about Randy Newman, but I think he is great. He has written great pieces of music for some of my favourite films, and I still cannot believe that he didn’t win an Oscar for this song – although to be fair he did lose to Alan Menkin and Stephen Schwartz for Color of the Wind from Pocahontas!

I love Katy Perry. I considered putting this in yesterday’s post, but this is a pleasure with which I feel absolutely no guilt. Her songs are catchy and fun and she is a bit of a babe, and I’ll happily dance and sing along to Katy any day of the week.

I don’t really have that much I can say about Katy and this song. I definitely love her singles more than her albums, but in the world of pop music I think that’s probably how it was always going to be. This song was one of her first hits, and the video was made before the time when she started firing various things out of her breasts, it’s still a good video. Not as much dancing as I would prefer, but you get what you are given I guess.

The reason I love this song more than others is because of this cover:

I don’t like the idea of guilty pleasures, admitting to one is basically saying that you are embarrassed about something you love. Never be embarrassed! I am generally happy to admit to any of my loves that could fall into this basket, I don’t see any point in hiding!

But here we are, and these questions need to be answered, so… a guilty pleasure? I trawled through my iTunes library and didn’t come across anything that I might not want to admit to. Then I scrolled up a little bit and came back to my Weezer library which consists of Pinkerton, Blue and Green.

Weezer has been behind some excellent music – Pinkerton is one of my all-time favourite albums – but I think it’s quite fair to say that most of the band’s quality output was earlier in their career. I just don’t like thinking about what has become of this great band. At times it makes me angry, at others sad, but I still have some love there because of the good music they have been responsible for.

As cool as it is these days to hate on Weezer, and I’ve done my fair share of hating, I do like this song. It feels as though it could fit on one of the early albums – it’s catchy but dry – the kind of anti-pop that I love them for. Strangely enough the song is about growing old, doing whatever the hell you want and not caring about what people say. So obviously Rivers Cuomo isn’t really bothered with the things being said about the band by people like myself, but it’s funny that this is one of the better songs they have recorded in recent years.

I like the video too, it’s fun!

I have stressed over this post more than any other so far. It’s just so hard to think of a band that I really, truly hate. I’m not a hater, yet I really enjoy writing about awful things. I find it much easier to write about a terrible movie than a good one… the vitriol just bursts out of me and into the computer.

But I just couldn’t do it… I couldn’t think of a band I hate that I could write something interesting about. I didn’t want to pick an easy option, but I don’t think I have any other option.

So here we go.

Sit down, story time.

My parents are both teachers in Perth, Western Australia. There is this really great exchange program between education departments in different countries. When I was nine, my family switched lives with a family in Hanna, a town in Alberta, Canada. This little country town had a population of 2,847 in 2006 but had a large school that I am guessing serviced neighbouring communities.

My family loved our time in Hanna. It was damn cold most the time (walking to school in -40 is quite an experience) and the houses were very different to the brick houses common in Australia. I loved the fact that we had a basement… but the basements were generally quite cold because the internal heating system was in the basement and the outlets were at the top of the rooms to be close to the upper floors. I remember watching Twister and being scared. I played ice hockey. Against teams that were much younger than I as I received some kind of handicap for being Australian.

During the summer we went on an adventure through Canada and around the USA. There is nothing like experiencing Disneyland as a 10 year-old. Around Canada there are many places that I remember. Even when I was young I could recognise the natural beauty of Banff and Lake Louise, places relatively close to where we lived. I also remember going to West Edmonton Mall, at the time the largest shopping centre in the world. It had an ice rink, a hotel, a water park and a theme park including possibly the greatest attraction EVER – laser tag inside an inflatable arena. I don’t know if I dreamed that, but I am almost certain it is true.

What does all of this have to do with awful bands? Well a lot of men in Hanna had beards. Great, great beards. In some ways I think that the beards of the town sucked all of the musical creativity out of the citizens – which is kind of strange because beards and rock and roll often go hand in hand. Not in little old Hanna though. What did Hanna do to this world? What kind of awful escaped from the quiet garages of this tiny town?

Nickelback.

When I discovered this, I didn’t quite know how to feel. I try to forget it most days, I don’t want my memories of my time in Canada to be fractured by something so horrendous and offensive.

One day I mentioned to my girlfriend that I wasn’t sure what my favourite band was. She said I was crazy.

“But I love Belle & Sebastian! I love them so much!”

“Petey, you followed Blur around Europe. You saw them in a record store with 170 people. I can’t believe you are even trying to say that they aren’t your favourite band.”

And she was right. I do love love love many bands. Belle & Sebastian, Talking Heads, The Bad Seeds, The Flaming Lips, but there is one band that I can listen to anywhere, anytime and at feeling any type of emotion. Blur has been with me for the last decade of my life, and brought more happiness into my world than any other band has been able to.

I was never into them during the britpop times, and while they are always included within any sentence about the era, they are much bigger than that, more-so than any of their contemporaries. Britpop isn’t a genre, it was a time, a scene – and while Blur played a big part defining what britpop became, I don’t think they cared for it much at all, and they definitely didn’t struggle to release themselves from the shackles that tied most other britpop alumni to the sounds and songs of the time.

Blur seemed to do the impossible by consistently releasing better music with every album. As I have mentioned previously, Think Tank is my favourite album, and the best piece of music that Damon Albarn has ever written. Blur’s 1997 self titled was one big FU to britpop, and a brave departure for the band and proved that these four guys had a lot more to give to this world. It seems strange now thinking that there was a time when Blur was criticised for being complacent when they released The Great Escape, but it seems that that criticism sparked some great desire within the members to prove their worth.

All of my birthdays seemed to come at once when Blur decided that the summer that I was living in the UK would be the summer that they reunite and go crazy touring around Europe. I was extremely fortunate to see them in some very unique locations: with 170 people at Rough Trade East; at Goldsmiths Academy; two nights in Hyde Park; and at the most beautiful venue in Lyon, France. I still can’t believe the experience I was able to have with a band I have loved for so long, in the country and city that is so tied to the music they have written.

Trouble in the Message Centre is the best track from Parklife. Unfortunately coming from an album where almost every song could be a single, this song is often forgotten. Listen to this song and then go back to day one of this challenge and listen to Battery in Your Leg and it is hard to believe that this is the same band.

And just because I can, here is my other favourite Blur song, from the first Hyde Park gig:

I very rarely listen to music when I’m going to sleep, I need no distractions or I’ll be awake for hours… and music can be quite the distraction. There have been times though when something is on my mind that just won’t go away, so listening to some nice calm music can actually help, and the band I always go to at times like these is Air.

Talkie Walkie is my number one sleepy-time album, and I think it is primarily because of Venus, which opens up with a slow, plodding piano and soothing vocal that puts my head in a nice pattern for sleep. Heading off into space.

Speaking of sleep, that is something that I must do. Air on the radio, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

I could dance to about 50% of my iTunes library.. or all of it if I had it turned down to 0. Unfortunately I don’t want to put a band in here twice, as I could very easily put something by Talking Heads or Of Montreal here… both bands that I freely dance to every time I listen to them. Fortunately I still have the New Pornographers up my sleeve. When I think of Canadians, I can’t really imagine them really being into dancing. But they do like beards, and wearing warm clothes – both things that I also enjoy – so I guess they do.

Jackie, Dressed in Cobras is one of my favourite New Pornographers songs, and it is from what I think is their best album, Twin Cinema. I have seen them live a couple of times, and I think it’s pretty cool that I can say I have danced to this song as they have performed it in front of me! Although even their less-danceable songs come to life with the full band behind them.

The other great thing about this song is that I found this video above. It is a potato. Just one little potato.

Dance you little potato!

Everyone had that one band in their late teen years that they were in love with. This song triggered my insane fandom of The Sleepy Jackson, and although my love for the band is not quite so strong these days, this is still a great song and they have produced a catalogue of great music.

But you know how it is, you find a band, most likely they are either a newish local band that has become just popular enough that they have one song on light rotation on alternative radio. Or maybe they are an international band that is quite popular overseas but you are certain that none of your friends know them here and you steal them and cherish them and only mention them briefly and without detail so everyone knows that you are into cool bands that they have never heard of but they won’t be able to go hunting themselves. Sometimes these bands become big and famous and you discard them, call them a guilty pleasure, or be the good person that you are and go on loving them no matter what.

The Sleepy Jackson is one of the former types of bands, and I still love them. They have never become as popular as I think they probably should have, but Luke Steele has great songwriting ability and has written some perfect hooks in his time.

I don’t really know all the words to many songs, but I think I know more complete Sleepy Jackson songs than any other band. That period of life between the ages of 15-18 seems to be the ideal time for learning song lyrics. I was having a shower just before and thought I would test myself and got through this entire song without missing a beat.

Now all I want is some new Sleepy Jackson tracks. Where you at, Mr Steele?