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The Capital Choir’s website boasts:

The world-renowned Capital Children’s Choir can frequently be seen performing alongside pop and classical superstars and is in constant demand for charity galas and other important events.

Here’s a video of the Choir performing the song “Chinese” by Lily Allen, which might be the cutest four minutes and forty-eight seconds on the internet right now.

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3 July 2009 • video lily allen

While poking around on YouTube, I found a whole bunch of Beatles Cartoons, which I didn’t even know existed. This video to “Drive My Car” is so campy that it’s also a lot of fun.

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22 June 2009 • video the beatles

The Saturday Knights - Count it Off.

I really love the video to this song, which was from one of my favorite albums from last year. I only wish there was a censored and uncensored version of it. Still, the Sesame Street-inspired theme reveals just how much fun this record is as a whole.

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18 April 2009 • video the saturday knights

The Bird and the Bee performing “Witch” last October.

The album this is from, Ray Guns are Not Just the Future, is the first 2009 album I really enjoy (no, I wasn’t going to say Animal Collective). This song sounds like it could be a really sexy theme song to a pre-Daniel Craig James Bond film (although I think that because it sounds remarkably similar to Tina Turner’s “Goldeneye”).

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25 January 2009 • video the bird and the bee

In the Fountains of Wayne song “Traffic and Weather” there’s a lyric in the bridge where Chris Collingwood sings, “Chuck Scarborough turns to Sue Simmons, says ‘sugar you don’t know what you’re missing’”.

I know this has made its way across the internet months ago, but I just can’t help think that this is Simmons’ response:

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25 January 2009 • video fountains of wayne

My favorite album of 2008 was Be Your Own Pet’s Get Awkward.

I can’t argue it is the best record of the year - the album is a juvenile, high school rock record and you won’t really hear anything that approaches a melody but damn is this record fun to listen to.

What made BYOP so fun to listen to is the sense from singer Jemina Pearl that she was both apart of high school, teenage drama and completely aware of its ridiculousness. The video above is for the song “Becky”, which was the first song I heard from Get Awkward (although Universal Records removed the song from its US release along with the songs “Black Hole” and “Blow Yr Mind”) - because it was posted to Fluxblog. It is currently the most played song on my iTunes, with “The Kelly Affair” at number two and “You’re a Waste” at five.

Conversely, my favorite record of 2007 was “The Hair the TV the Baby and the Band” by Imperial Teen - which was a pop record for adults. The songs were catchy but dealt with adult issues (like being in a band although you may have outgrown your rock star ambitions and the rock and/or roll lifestyle.

Get Awkward wasn’t that at all. It was an immature record that was catchy and fun to jump around to (even if I can’t remember one instance where I did). I relived my high school days and issues through this record and made me wish I was back in high school but relieved I’m not. Whether or not Get Awkward was the best record of 2008 is a question I can’t answer but it is the one I wanted to hear for nearly every day of the year. It still is and I still haven’t grown tired of it.

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20 December 2008 • video be your own pet

Last week I interviewed Adam Schlesinger from Fountains of Wayne. Friends know that FOW is one of my very favorite bands but I was originally not sold on this song (“All Kinds of Time”) the first half dozen times I heard it or so but when I began to realize how much the melody impacts the song, I started to appreciate it more. Having realized that, I started to enjoy it more. It was especially gratifying to hear Schlesinger tell me:

For me, the most satisfying part of writing a song is if you have an off-beat idea and you struggle with it for a while and ultimately it comes together. There are some songs for me like “All Kinds of Time”, from Welcome Interstate Managers, that we don’t play it live much but I’m really proud of it because I think it’s a really strange idea for a song and somehow it ends up being kind of moving in the end. You never know when that’s going to happen. It’s a terrible idea on paper – it’s about a football player and there’s no particular reason why this song should have come out. It didn’t have any emotional resonance but when all the music came together, it gave the song much more weight than I expected.

That’s another thing with songwriting. I often start off with a lyrical idea first then take musical ideas with it; but it really is interesting how words and music interact. A song may look a certain way on paper but when you hear it on top of a certain melody, it has a whole new meaning than what you might expect. I think that is what happened with that song.

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14 December 2008 • video fountains of wayne

With General Motors, Ford and Chrysler’s prospects for surviving this bear economy looking dimmer and dimmer each day, I’ve been listening to this song, “The Big Three Killed My Baby” by The White Stripes, obsessively over the past few days.

It was on the band’s debut, self-titled 1999 album. With lyrics like “better ideas are stuck in the mud, their engines are running on (Preston) Tucker’s blood” and “don’t let them tell you the future’s electric because gasoline’s not measured in metric”, Jack White kind of foretold Detroit’s future by failing to offer much innovation (“creative minds are lazy”), corruption (“everything involved is shady”) and being in bed with the oil companies (“30,000 wheels are spinning and oil companies’ faces are grinning”).

This video I found on YouTube shows the band performing the song back in 1999, not too long after it was released for the first time.

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14 December 2008 • video white stripes

This is the video for Squeeze’s song “Black Coffee in Bed”. It is the band’s most well-known song (probably) and my favorite (definitely). As a writer, I had always been struck by this opening verse:

There’s a stain on my notebook
Where your coffee cup was
And there’s ash in the pages
Now I’ve got myself lost
I was writing to tell you
That my feelings tonight
Are a stain on my notebook
That rings your goodbye
With the way that you left me
I can hardly contain
The hurt and the anger
And the joy of the pain
Now knowing I am single
They’ll be fire in my eyes
And a stain on my notebook
For a new love tonight

I had interviewed Chris Difford, the lyricist from Squeeze, a little over a week ago and I asked him about that particular song:

One of the signature Squeeze songs is “Black Coffee in Bed”, where did the inspiration for those lyrics come from?

Basically, my notepad had a coffee stain on it and when I went to write that song, I looked down and there was this coffee stain. It conjured up the image that became that lyric. All of the lyrics I wrote come from something similar. When I sit down to write, I focus on whatever is happening at that particular time.

The rest of my interview with Chris Difford is here.

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14 September 2008 • video squeeze

Depeche Mode - Get The Balance Right

From Wikipedia: “The video for “Get the Balance Right!” has one of the most famous blunders among Depeche Mode fans. At the beginning of the video, Alan lip-syncs to the first two lines of the song. The director, Kevin Hewitt, did not know the band and simply assumed Alan was the singer. The band were too scared to point out that David Gahan was the singer.”

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8 September 2008 • video depeche mode