Passenger: Fear of Fear

Fill my belly full of beer
Fill my nights with bad jokes
told by folks full of fear
Fill my eyes with a stinging
Fill my time with wishing she was here…
Fill my belly full of beer
Fill my nights with bad jokes
told by folks full of fear
Fill my eyes with a stinging
Fill my time with wishing she was here…
“I like my love with a budget, I like my hugs with a scent
You smell like light, gas, water, electricity, rent”
I kind of hate the video. But it’s the best version of the song online, so there you go. I’m not overly proud of the fact that I’m listening to these songs, because they’re just so damn exuberant and happy. And the type of music I gravitate towards is typically much more mellow and slower.
Partly, it’s the banjo. But I’ve had this looping a fair amount in the background, off and on this week. The lyric “Every morning you wake up alone, just the same. / Who’d want to live longer, anyway?” kind of got stuck in my head, this past week.
I have been playing this song into the ground lately. There are a few tracks by The Lone Bellow that have really caught my ear, and this one so far is my favorite.
It’s been a long while since I’ve encountered a song that uses the word “fire” as its main rhyme. Veirs pulls it off well, where you don’t really fixate a lot on the word – and it comes up both naturally and quickly in the song.
I’ve been a little behind on the new music that came out this week on Rdio, but happened across a group called The Lone Bellow. Still checking out the songs on the album, but I immediately got hooked on Watch Over Us.
Eventually, I realized that this had turned into one of those songs that I would just repeat endlessly, and found myself coding to it. It’s not really something I would normally latch onto, but it turned into a pattern – and became a soundtrack I’d work to, for several nights thereafter.
It’s surprising, as this song is not really not normally my thing, and very different from most everything else in my collection. But since I’ve listening to this track so much lately… felt like it was worth sharing.
I normally hear notes before lyrics, and what really catches my ear is the way the melody hops around so much. But with the video showing the lyrics in sync with the notes moving around, it’s a really great effect.
Sadly, I don’t think I have the same affection for the other songs in the album. But it’s possible that I haven’t really given those songs much of a chance either, as I’ve been looping the first two songs so much. Maybe in another month or two, I’ll have moved on a little more.
But the moment I heard Angel of Small Death & the Codeine Scene, I got hooked! I knew right off the bat that this would be a song that I’d end up looping nonstop. If you’re reading this and it’s Friday (10/10/2006), there’s a high probability I’ve got this song playing right now.
The weird thing is I never really listened to them, back when they were more popular. I know a few of their more famous songs – but for some reason, this one song got its hooks into me. And every time I sit down to my computer to code, I have this song running on a constant loop.
This pretty much does what it says on the tin. For those not familiar with the song, here’s the original. This was a cartoon that I never got that much into, but my sister loved it and watched it often. I think we may have argued a lot about the show, as whenever she was watching it I probably wanted to watch something else.
Chase Holfelder has an ongoing series entitled Major to Minor where he takes well-known songs in major keys and shifts them into minor. Above is his version of Girls Just Want to Have Fun. For comparison, here’s the original.