The Desert Island Discs thread

[Walkie]

An alternative to "What are you listening to" , based on the British radio program. Post tunes that are especially meaningful  to you , along with some relevant biographical info. Do name the tune in the accompanying text, cos the music links often get broken eventually.

I'll kick off with  "Listen"by Tears for Fears.  This used to be on the perennial  play list of my favourite coffee bar, back in the 80's, which i jokingly called "my office ". I spent ridiculous amounts of time there, initially looking for a quiet place to write and escape my disintegrating marriage, but  increasingly to  meet up with the rag-tag assortment of artists , poets, social wrecks  and nutcases who made up my crowd - and the margins thereof- at the time. In most people's  eyes,  I passed for an extrovert, to my astonished amusement, but my profound attachment to  this beautifully spacey song (amonst a zillion other things, if anybody cares to notice)  belies that.  It's utterly useless as "background music"   around me:  to this day, I will zone out to this song, wherever I am and whatever I'm supposed to be doing.

I was a bit disappointed when I eventually found the lyrics, because the repeated refain at the end sounded like "Reality will never look the same" to me. Still does. That's what it's saying in my head, and that observation is always relevant, IMO, not least during that especially turbulent period of my life. 

[sg1008]

Walkie, it does sound like they are saying 'the reality will never look the same'. Maybe the lyrics you looked up were actually wrong...

This song is called "Doctor My Eyes", by Jackson Browne. Its special to me because it reminds me of car rides with my father. It was also one of the first songs that I liked when I was old enough to first start understanding the dept of meaning behind lyrics.

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

Love this song. Love the story behind the distortion effect. Love the lyrics. Love the story behind the lyrics and I can really relate to them.

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

This is a very recent hit. Very emotional. A bit whiney, but I guess a breakup anthem is supposed to be a bit whiney.

[Walkie]

Hey MOSW. I love Creep too but I don't think youve read the OP? This thread is supposed to be a tad different from "What are you listening to..."
  to SG for doing it right!

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

Hey MOSW. I love Creep too but I don't think youve read the OP? This thread is supposed to be a tad different from "What are you listening to..."
  to SG for doing it right!

Bugger. I will add some personal history then to show why they are meaningful to me. Tomorrow.

[sg1008]

Does this mean I win the thread?   

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

Okay. For Creep the lyrics remind me of myself as a younger man:
"When you were here before, couldn't look you in the eye, you're just like an angel, your skin makes me cry, you float like a feather, in a beautiful world...".

To me, he is developing an interest in a girl but doing so in a way that keeps him safe from the idea that he might have to talk to her, get to know her, see if a mutual interest develops. He subconsciously chooses to become deeply infatuated with a girl he has elevated above human in his own mind.

That describes my young adult life to a T. I see it in Gen as well.

The other song, Let Her Go, affects me at an emotional level and I really don't know why because I literally never went through an unpleasant breakup. Only been through one breakup ever and it was over the phone and heartbreaking but nice. No cigarettes on the counter.

It just pulls emotions out of me, tearful goodbyes at airports, stuff like that. Relating back to Creep, at one of those goodbyes my ex handed me a printed copy of "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock", a poem with similar themes to Creep. She thought I would relate to it. Duh!!! I said "I know that poem" and she said "you should read it again and tell me what you think, it's my favourite poem". I replied "no, I KNOW that poem: Let us go then you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table...". I memorised the whole poem when i was in high school and could still remember it.

It was weird and a bit creepy. At a couple of levels at least.

[Walkie]

OK, MOSW, I see your Creep, and i raise you "Karma Police"

But first, gotta say, that was exactly what was called for, and  I'm seriously impressed, not to mention delighted that you know Prufrock by heart.  Soon as I learned about Asperger's (about 25 years after encountering the poem in school) I started calling that poem "'the Aspie Love Song".  I can very much relate to it myself, in my own way, even signed my 200th attempt at writing a sort of  love letter "J Alfreda Prufrock" (and actually sent that one, IIRC).  Most people would never, ever  guess that though cos i tend come across as uninhibited...until I fall in love, which rarely ever happens (like, once when I was about 15, and then once again , about 12 years later, through to present. (Oh! and with a very brief infatuation inbetween the two, which persuaded me that my feelings  are NOT to be taken seriously, just in time to collide with the Big One *wince*, so i behaved at my most ridiculous around him, didn't I? )  Not with either of my one-time live-in partners, I hasten to add, one of whom was a good friend (and reverted to being a good friend after we split up)  and the other the stupidest mistake of my life. Neither party touched me at a deep enough level to make me feel utterly tongue -tied, nor stir up my natural born idiocy, they just looked like half-way good ideas at the time.

Anyway, so here I am, just escaping  the Stupidest Mistake of my Life, along with the six-year-old progeny of the same, when one of those arty-types  from post #1 drifts back into my life and unhinges me.  And one way in which this guy unhinges is by recording "OK Computer" for me, and copying  all of the lyrics out for me in his beautiful hand writing.  And I want to think that this means something, don't i? But hey! the guy is a heartbreaker, a sexual and emotional magnet, and even if I looked like one of his string of beautiful girlfriends (which i didn't) I'd be mad to think I meant that much to him, The odds were dead against it.  That didn't stop me loving him though. Actually,   I'd just spent seven  years or so, trying very,  very hard not to look out for  him drifting  back into my life

Anyway, Karma Police is the track that leaps out at me. The first verse even soun'ds very much  like him...or is it  it a description of me?  In any case, i do not have a "Hitler hairdo ", and we cant both be the guy in the first verse, can we? That wouldn't work.  Still.  it strikes a shedload of chords.



PS. He also tacked "Creep""  on the end of the tape, which emboldened me to affectionately call him ""Creep" for a time. But then he started to think I was overconfident or something, which i decidedly wasn't, and his  thinking this was bound to end in tears for...one of us.  So i shut up ..in a sense (I can talk a storm whilst shutting up)

Mostly we talked about love , in the abstract, or metaphysics, which is always abstract, or maths, or poetry,  or art (mostly abstract or surreal, of course)   or our endless store of  fucked-up past relationships, which were all-too- concrete in the main.  We spent an awful lot of time doing all  this, and i felt blessed, because the last time i'd fallen in love with anyone (at 15) well, we'd spent two years having an almost non-existent relationship, before the guy in question  finished with  me (which was the first time it ever came clear to me there was something to  actually finish. Heck, that relationship was so thin, i didn't even have to try not to make any assumptions about it)

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

Thanks Walkie, I will listen to Karma Police later. I have heard it before but it didn't grab me right away.

My almost-eidetic memory set me up for failure at higher study. I drifted through high school doing almost zero study but I got decent marks anyway because I remembered a lot of stuff without trying. In the final year of high school we were studying Prufrock and a few other TS Elliot poems, but primarily Prufrock, and I remember other kids would walk around for months with these lists of 3 or 4 short quotes that they were memorising to drop into their essays in the final exams and hopefully impress the marker. We got to a few weeks out from final exams and thought I'd better memorise some quotes as well, so over the course of a couple of days I memorised Prufrock end-to-end as well as a few tracts of Shakespeare and Emily Bronte and whatever else we were studying. It just seemed easier at the time than actually choosing which quotes to memorise. I guess over the years of having those words etched into my memory they came to be more meaningful to me as I found my life drifting inexorably in the same direction as Prufrock's.

These days Prufrock seems even more relevant in light of movements like the Incels. I have even heard it described as an Incel anthem.

Now I could not recite the poem word-perfect, it's been nearly 40 years and anyone who reads my posts here could tell you that my grey matter has gone more than a bit spongy. But give me 2 days to read it through a few times and I am sure that I could recite it again.

It's a bit like the time I started a job and I needed to look busy for a couple of weeks with nothing really to do. I memorised Pi to 120 decimal places just for something to do.

[Pyraxis]

Enigma - Return to Innocence

This was the first track on the first "grown-up" CD that I had access to as a kid. In our house, the computer was in the basement in a room directly below the living room where the stereo was. At some point my dad drilled a hole in the floor and ran a wire through, so that there were speakers in the computer room controlled by the stereo above. My brother and I would run up and down the stairs to put on music, and we played this CD a lot while we were playing whatever computer game we were really into at the time. It brings me to a place of joy and discovery and productivity like you feel as a little kid exploring the computer.

In seventh grade we had to bring in our favorite song and play it for the class for some project. I brought this CD and was thoroughly mortified when I played it and the teacher said she owned the CD too and had a favorite track on it. Most of the kids had brought popular music. I remember the popular girls had all brought the same song, and then we had to keep listening to it when each of them presented their projects. My song, which sounded so grown-up and cool at home, sounded horribly weird in the class environment with the chanting sound, and I turned it off halfway through.

Young me thought the lyrics were really meaningful, all about being your natural emotional self, which was not a thing that was encouraged in my life at the time.

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

I like that song Py. I was 28 years old when it was released. I never really listened to the lyrics until now and I agree that they are good.

Did you ever listen to Deep Forest? Their most well-known song would be Sweet Lullaby. Enigma reminds me a little of that style of music. Similar era, early 90s.

[odeon]

I remember the Enigma CD well. I have it here somewhere.

[renaeden]

A good friend of mine committed suicide when we were 17. Return to Innocence by Enigma was played at his funeral along with his much-loved song Great Southern Land by Icehouse.

[odeon]

I'm sorry for your loss, Ren.