Last night I checked out Christopher Cross's "Greatest Hits" from my library and I shamefully listened to the whole thing with pleasure. I hadn't really thought about his music in years, but I have always been fond of "Sailing" (it's so peaceful and majestic) and "Think of Laura" (a huge sobfest of a song!).

Little did I know he had done more recent stuff (well, recent as in 1998) like the amazing "Walking in Avalon" (which is still bouncing around in my head). "Walking in Avalon" is probably the oddest sweet love song I've ever heard! Cross even suggests a very naughty 4-letter word that he doesn't sound out but makes obvious by rhyme what it would have been (he hums in the word's place...I love it!!!)

Also "new" to me was the song "Back of My Mind" which really got to me when I thought about life and how we reach that age where we can sometimes wonder if we did things wrong...and would a "do over" be a good thing? The part about not marrying and having children hits especially close to home.

The lyrics go like this:



I woke up to my world this morning
Took a long look in the looking glass
Last night I guess I had one or too many
Somebody tried to tell me I had no class

What ever happened to me
Maybe I've been living on lies
Never really had a dream come true
Then again I guess I never really tried


Now the years all slip away
And things are like they're gonna stay
All the roads I didn't take are just
One more thing in the back of my mind
Taking space and time


Wish I'd finished that book I never started
Maybe that's the story of my life
Should've learned to play that saxophone
So I could tell my song to the streetlight


Shouldn't have been so stuck on my own
Could've had a wife and a child
Should've made that house a home
I don't know why my life is so wild


Now the years all slip away
And things are like they're gonna stay
All the chances I didn't take are just
One more thing in the back of my mind
Taking space and time
One more thing in the back of my mind


So I'm thinking about a walk in the sunlight
I've got to get my shadow behind me
Try and make some sense of it all
With my feet on the ground and my heart still free


As the years will slip away
I'll let the cards fall where they may
And all the roads I didn't take will be just
One more thing in the back of my mind


As the years will slip away
And the cards fall as they may
All the chances I didn't take will be just
One more thing in the back of my mind
Taking space and time
One more thing in the back of my mind
One more thing in the back of my mind

I know I have blogged before about the Icelandic song "Svefn-g-Englar" and how powerful it is. But I just can't give it up or give it credit (there are no words to) for the amazing transformation it can have over your mood, over your psyche. NME magazine writes about the group (Sigur Ros) behind the song: "...so quiet, so shakily fragile, it feels criminal to breathe at the same time as jón þór birgisson sings."

The English words go like this:

Im Here Again
Inside You
Its So Good Staying Here
But I Stay A Short While
I Float Around In Underwater Hibernation
In A Hotel Connected To The Electricity Board And Nourishing
Tyoowoohoo
But The Wait Makes Me Uneasy I Kick The Fragility Away
And Shout I Have To Go - Help
Tyoowoohoo
I Explode Out And The Peace Is Gone
Bathed In New Light
I Cry And I Cry - Disconnected
A Ruined Brain Put On Breasts
And Fed By Sleepwalkers

No song has ever so wonderfully matched word with music to make an eerily beautiful echo of just what life feels like sometimes...and if ever a song sounded like it came straight from a dream "Svefn-g-Englar" is the one!

Talk about devastating...boy does this single live up to the name of its group. The download (free!!) is called "Previous Crimes," the group: Devastations.

The song seeps into your soul and suddenly, with no warning at all, you find yourself thinking of all kinds of things you shouldn't if you want to sleep well tonight...

...like the people (for good and bad reasons) who've permanently left their marks on you...maybe something careworn and fragile that only a lover knows how to leave behind or the kind words of a beloved friend who is no longer in your life or the whisper you swear you just heard but is only the sound of cloth brushing against skin...

and there are some devastations we'd never ever want to relive again no matter how beautiful they sound in song...some people we'd cross the widest river to never have to see again...

Okay, whoo...I better skip to the next track....this breathtaking song is playing tricks on me!:)

 

(pictured: Stacy Haiduk posing with the infamous kitty cat made famous by Y and R)

(update to this post: I just read this little snippet and totally agree...what a waste of Stacy Haiduk's talent on Y&R, which I'm shamefully still watching if only for the amazing job she's doing with such a sorry storyline!)

Back in 1983 "Patty Williams (Abbott)" was a character on the soap "The Young and The Restless"...an actress named Andrea Evans (whom I ended up writing a gushing fan letter to and receiving a friendly reply from) played her with all the unhinged madness you'd expect in a woman who (after discovering she's married to a manwhore*) walks into her husband's office one day intending to kill herself only to shoot him instead.

Her passion was the exact opposite of the "on the verge of womanhood" innocence Lilibet Stern (her predecessor) had given the same role just two years earlier when she had yet to marry Jack Abbott and looked like she should be out on a farm somewhere milking cows while also possibly posing for a calendar of some sort...yet both Evans and Stern knew "Patty Williams" was a very unbalanced woman and let that show wonderfully in their performances.

I had completely forgotten about all of this until last Thursday when, sick in bed with a bad cold, I was flipping through the tv and landed on "The Young and The Restless." It had been years since I'd watched the soap. Andrea Evans had long ago gone on to other roles..."Patty" having run away in the wake of her disastrous divorce, never to be heard from again...until, last Thursday, that is.

The actress now playing her (Stacy Haiduk) is to be commended for doing her best with a character that the writers (for unknown reasons? maybe to get creative juices flowing again?) seemed to have randomly pulled out of the water so many years later.

If not for the insanely insipid (and very much 'been there, done that') "plastic surgery double" plot device used to re-introduce Patty's character, there might be some potential in re-exploring a character that was once so vulnerable in misguided love. (But seriously...I love how only on soaps does facial plastic surgery come with a new voice, an extra foot in height and a new body.)

But whatever talent Haiduk has (and she does have it, especially in oddly touching scenes where her character's only confidantes are a small kitty cat and her brother played by a very bewildered and often sobbing Paul Williams, one of the few Y&R originals still left) is lost in a sea of cliched soap opera theatrics and doppelganger impossibilities.



*"manwhore" is a slang word for the male equivalent of well...you can imagine...let's just say Jack was never a man known for keeping his pants on very long!:)

When I was in high school Otra Vez by Miami Sound Machine was one of my favorite albums. I remember finding it in a record store one day and absolutely going crazy (silently, of course, I was always silent when I screamed back then) because it was so hard to find their early 80s Spanish only records anywhere, much less at the local Sam Goody. That album made me so happy and later (way after that year of school was over) I was still dancing away to the sounds on my Sony Cassette Walkman.

I just always wanted to dance like a fool when I heard their upbeat songs. I didn't care that I didn't know one word of Spanish. I knew what the spirit of the songs was and that was all that mattered to me.

I really don't think about Miami Sound Machine that much anymore...but tonight I popped in this album by Los Amigos Invisibles and I felt that same happy goofy way again...I just discovered them, like three hours ago, and all I can is: wow! I want to dance around the living room like crazy, but I live in an apartment and it's getting late and I don't want to disturb my neighbors, but: oh     my     gosh...did I saw wow?

Miami Sound Machine what? This is even better than those bittersweet sounds I can almost hear right now.

If you don't believe me listen to "Mentiras" right now!!