May 19, 2000

I have been thinking about music a lot lately. Not that thinking about music is a strange occurrence for me; on the contrary. For a while I was only listening to music in the car. Truth be told, the car is still my primary place to listen to music, but I have been listening at home more often. Now if I could only get more than halfway through making a mix tape. Hmmm. It's not easy for me to put aside time to do it, and I start to get bored after the first 30-45 minutes, or Liam needs something, or I decide that playing with him is far more interesting than trying to keep him away from the stereo's various shiny buttons.
Most of what I've been listening to lately is what I have affectionately dubbed "Millenium Metal". Stuff like System of A Down, Slipknot, Static-X, Powerman 5000, Kittie... that kinda thing. Strangely enough, however, I'm finding it true that you always wind up going back to the basics. While I'm listening to a lot of harder stuff, I'm finding I need to balance it all out with something girly and melodic. My current CD of choice? Jewel's Pieces Of You. I have been letting this CD sit around collecting dust for well over a year now, and I pulled it out recently because I started going to karaoke again, and, for the most part, I do her songs fairly well. I forgot how good this album was. Her newer effort is decent, but not nearly as good. Yes, it's more mature, and it's not just the whole folksingergrrl and her guitar kinda stuff, but I'm finding that with her new material, she's not storytelling so much anymore. Songs that are not the run-of-the-mill verse-chorus-verse are rare, and Jewel brought it back to my attention. The two songs that she does it most specifically with are "Painters" and "Adrian", the latter being a decent song, but too depressing and whiny for my taste. "Painters" has a beautiful story told with gorgeous lyrics, and despite having heard it some hundreds of times since the album came out in 1995, it still makes my eyes tear a little.
My new favorite song from this album (and I don't know why, but I often skipped past it when I used to listen to the CD a lot) is "Near You Always." I *love* to sing this song. So much so that I often rewind it and sing it again four or five times before I quit and let the tape run past it. You can listen to it here, and if you have no idea what a really great love song consists of, you should also read the lyrics. I can relate to this song, and I really like it a lot.
::DISCLAIMER:: I'm not sure how long that track will remain at the link I gave, so if you tried to download it too long after the date of this journal and it's not there, don't say I didn't warn you.
Okay, enough of this sharing crap. :)
I don't have much to talk about aside from the music stuff, and I've now spent so much time trying to locate a link to that song that now the last thing I want to talk about is music. BLEH!
So I guess that's my cue to end this before I go off on a blabbering tangent. Notice below, the nice Jewel designs I made. Those were entries in a Jewel art contest that ended up not being a contest because the guy got so many entries that he decided to just create a gallery for them. Go figure.

that's it. I'm convinced. This chick is nuts! get me the heck out of here!