10. Slipknot, “Solway Firth”

Posted on April 28, 2023 by WilliamWhy
“You want the real smile?/Or the one I used to practice, not to feel like a failure?”

Who Am I Here?

I’m nearly 29 years old. I’m in a full-time dead-end job, working Monday to Friday at a parking garage downtown. I pretty much hate the job; it’s customer-facing, so I feel like I’m constantly on display (more so than I do in my private life), and nothing I do seems good enough. It’s a grind that never ends. The only solace at the job (besides the cute deli worker who brings us food on Fridays in exchange for free parking) is a supervisor who hates the job as much as I do (likely even more, as he had been with the company for over a decade by that point), and encourages me to do enough to get by most times. He and I will end up quitting on the same day in 2020, and he’ll go on to become one of my closest friends. I discovered this song on a Friday, as I was surfing YouTube on my work computer (shhh) and found the music video for this song, which doubled as a promotional tie-in to the first season of Amazon’s The Boys. The video became my hyper-focus for the weekend and got me more excited for a show I was generally reticent towards at the time (“No way they could do better than the comic,” said I. Yes, in fact, way).

The Song

This was part of an album that served as something of a reminder of what Slipknot was, or what it felt like it was always supposed to be. This was their first album release in 5 years; I’m no ‘Knot historian or even that great of a fan, but the album “.5: The Gray Chapter” feels even more forgettable now than when it came out. I still had a toe dipped into the heavy metal world by October 2014, having only recently shuttered my metal radio show on my college radio station, and even I didn’t really care about it. Slipknot felt like a relic of the 2000’s, a sometimes-regrettable reminder of what dumb white preteens (like me) used to think were unquestionably cool. Conversely, the singles from “We Are Not Your Kind” felt like they commanded attention in much the same way their biggest songs did when you were in junior high. Songs like this and “Unsainted” felt like the walls of sound that you first encountered when a friend played you a wrestling music video with “Wait and Bleed” as the backing track (you could tell it was from KaZaa because the final 30 seconds played twice, for some reason).

Songs like this one felt particularly refreshing for someone like me who, although generally liking Slipknot, kind of can’t stand Corey Taylor. Whether speaking on his own, or fronting his other band Stone Sour, he comes across very poorly, like a dilettante who found a way to say the most basic, dumbass phrases in a way that made him sound smart and surrounded himself with better musicians to make up for that. One time on my show, having tried to read his intolerable autobiography and getting hardly 50 pages in, threw the book in the garbage can on-air (it was an empty can, as it was a library book and I had to return it). The guy rubs me the wrong way, because he often seems like a parody of the teenager who reads Nietzsche and whose past girlfriends were all “psycho.”

Thankfully, surrounded by a bevy of other dudes in Slipknot, Taylor’s presence is made more palatable by how much everybody else tends to kick ass. Unlike the songs of Stone Sour, there’s less of an explicit spotlight for Taylor’s overwrought, often-adolescent lyrics, and you can more easily lose yourself in the soundscape of overwhelming destruction. Taylor’s voice sounds more like a harried street preacher speaking in fraught and cyclical idioms, the portent of doom for the Great Beast that clanks noisily all around him. It all comes together in these singles as both a return to form for the band and an evolution of the Slipknot sound. The earlier sound that resembles an audio version of a Jackson Pollack painting now seems more like a confident and composed portrait of all the elements that made them good to begin with.

What Now?

I think in music videos. TV was my third parent as a child, and from the years of watching MuchMusic at home, absorbing all the cool camera tricks, color filters, and transitions from the artists of the late-90s to the 2000s, I have something of a “talent” for creating music videos in my head that no one will ever see, because I am deeply untalented (unkind*). Sometimes, these music videos are pretty intense, and I can really only afford to think about them when I’m alone. They either involve an emotional performance from yours truly that I can’t help but act out, or the matter of it is intense to the point of hurting my own feelings. “Solway Firth” is one of those videos.

The pitch for the video is that, in a post-apocalypse wasteland, zombies have taken over and the last vestiges of humanity live in walled-off mini-towns. One night, for whatever reason, zombies overrun one of these outposts, so in order to give the survivors a chance to flee from the oncoming horde, my band and I perform one last musical number to draw their attention. The kicker is that we have set up a makeshift stage surrounded by chain-link walls, and have also outfitted the stage with a sizable payload of explosives. Once we arm them, the charges will blow once I press the button; naturally, that will happen when I hit Taylor’s final note in the song. The explosion will hopefully take a big chunk out of the horde, and signal the survivors and other nearby settlements that this one has been lost. My band and I perform like our lives depend on it, and we give each other long looks at various points that fall short of everything we feel for each other.

The music feels appropriately frantic and final for a fantasy as out-there as that one. The music is even punctuated by sirens at points, which feels like it sets the stage for the story in my head. For as much as I’ve ragged on him, Taylor has always known how to get emotion across through his singing voice, even his throated screams. I particularly like the way he performs the line, “I know I’ll never get home,” as though he realized halfway through saying it just what that meant to him, and had to stifle a sob. He didn’t get where he is because he’s not talented.

A lot of my fantasies, musical or not, are power fantasies, but maybe not always the typical masculine one. I’ve come to realize over the past decade or so that I’m not the sort of person who likely becomes a better person when given more power, so as someone who fancies himself to be “the good guy,” a common way this manifests is in scenarios of great loss. This mind-video answers the question, how can I make a self-sacrificial act as much about me as possible? I’ve been absorbed in imagination and dreams my whole life; sometimes, the me in my head has been my only friend.

I believe that, in the end, I’m all that I’ve got. My thoughts and ideas and, yes, fake music videos will all be gone someday. I wish and hope and pray that I can make them real; until then, posts like this could be as close as I’ll ever get.

(*The love of friends has encouraged me to not let unkind thoughts toward myself or others go unchecked)

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09. Ramones, “Poison Heart” (1992)

Posted on September 4, 2022 by WilliamWhy
“I just wanna walk/Right out of this world/Cuz everybody has a poison heart”

Who Am I Here?

I was too young to hear this at the time it came out, or even to really understand what music is, conceptually. I first heard this song while watching Pet Sematary 2 in December 2020 (according to the date of my Letterboxd review), itself a soundtrack shout-out to the previous Pet Sematary film, which featured a Ramones song tailored to it. At the end of 2020, I’d already started working with the closed captioning company I am still with today. I think writing opportunities had started to pick up again, or was at least promising to, after a dramatic dip during the first waves of the pandemic. However, Nova Scotia entered a second wave in the Fall of 2020, meaning that my wife, Jenna, and I had to spend Christmas apart from both of our families. A dismal end to a hard year for everyone.

The Song

I can’t claim to have been a Ramones fan at any point in my life; truth be told, I only found out last night that the band was made up of people using the name “Ramone” as a pseudonym, and not comprised of a group of brothers. I got into a couple of their songs when I was a teenager, your Blitkrieg Bops and your I Wanna Be Sedated‘s, real entry-level shit. I never went far beyond that, because I just don’t really like Joey Ramone’s voice. It’s not that I hate it or think it’s terrible, it has just always sounded like a put-on in a weird way. Joey Ramone has always sounded like a Muppet, a guy putting on a fake voice, and so the music of the Ramones hasn’t had much of a chance to resonate with me.

All of that is set-up to say that I love this song, and it’s far and away my favorite Ramones song I’ve heard yet. Some of that is probably because it doesn’t sound like a lot of their other songs, as it’s slower and more moody than what I’m used to hearing. The guitar work is so fun to listen to, and the main riff carries me through the whole thing. Although Joey still sounds like Joey, the vocals he does with Flo & Eddie during the chorus are fabulous. Understated, almost matter-of-factly stating the crux of the song, but in a way that is utterly repeatable (I’ve been doing so all week since I came across it again).

The lyrics are also really tremendous. Forgive my rock ignorance here but, from the few Ramones songs I’ve heard, they never struck me as a band you’d listen to for the words. That said, I keep turning over the lyrics in my head, especially those of the chorus, which I’ll get into now.

What Now?

It’s been rolling around my head all week:

“I just wanna walk right out of this world

Cuz everybody has a poison heart”

Really, it’s nothing you haven’t heard before in some form; hell, you and I probably wrote something to this effect when we were teenagers. It’s a moody and almost juvenile sentiment – and yet, it’s such a tight and evocative way to express something that a lot of people have felt and still feel. If those in power, who routinely subjugate and outright murder the most vulnerable people among us for profit, even have a heart, then surely it’s not a beating one.

It’s also a very simple way of expressing that same feeling that often accompanies the harsh realities of the world. I’ll speak for myself here, as I know a lot of people (many of them far better humans than me) use the reality of these injustices to rally, to fight, to organize, and to work for change. Me, I unfortunately prescribe to the oft-ignored third option in the fight-flight dichotomy, which is freeze. When faced with a big problem, whether societal or just in my own life, I shut down. The enormity of the trouble overwhelms me and I find myself almost physically overwhelmed and brought into a ball, curled up and petrified. In my own head, that’s my equivalent of walking out of this world; if not physically, then absolutely mentally and spiritually. I suppose I feel this sentiment a lot lately, in the wake of my fellow human beings facing waves of hardship that are too much for me to comprehend, even as an outside participant. In a way, the chorus seems to be my refrain for the hard times we suffer as a global species right now, and it’s hardly ever been summed up so well than here, nor more relevant than now.

I do love to wallow, at least when it feels like there’s nothing that can be done.

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08. Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Someday Never Comes” (1972)

Posted on September 3, 2022 by WilliamWhy
“When Daddy went away/He said, “Try to be a man/And someday you’ll understand”

Who Am I Here?

Not alive. I first encountered this song through the 2018 Todd In The Shadows video about CCR’s last studio album, Mardi Gras. In September 2018 when the video was released, I would have been a year into living with my then-fiancée, and less than a year working for the parking company at the hospital downtown. I also recently began working with the magazine company that I am still writing for as of this post publishing, a break into freelance writing that was thoroughly unexpected.

The Song

In his video on the Mardi Gras album, Todd describes this song as the out-and-out best one of the bunch, a meditation by lead singer John Fogerty on a seemingly-impending divorce and how it reminds him of his own parents splitting up. Although this did come around the end of CCR’s lifecycle, I agree with Todd that it hits the same notes that a lot of the best of their songs do. Although the subject matter and the lyrics evoke a kind of melancholy, the band is able to inject it with enough energy to save it from feeling like a dirge. I find myself singing this one a fair amount, as Fogerty’s vocal style is fun to imitate and it is just a genuinely good song in the way that CCR were able to provide so readily back then.

What Now?

I already did the big “My parents are divorced and it makes me sad” post so I don’t want to tread on well-worn territory with this one. Obviously, divorce and the father-son relationship are themes at play here, and I do think about that when I listen to it. What does strike me, maybe even more than those things, is the cyclicality of the song’s story. Just as the singer’s father left him as a young boy, telling him that he’d understand why, so does the singer find himself in the same position, leaving his son and saying the same. The singer says this despite the fact that the song’s chorus proclaims that, despite everything that a father will tell a child, the mythical day when all will be understood “never comes,” there will never be a time when it all makes sense and selfish actions are justified. The cycle continues unless it is to be broken.

I hope to break a cycle in my own life, so that I don’t feel prescribed to end up as a person I don’t like. I’m sure, in one way or another, we each want to break out of a cycle in our lives or ancestry that threatens to make us into something we don’t want to be. A cycle is not inevitable and it can be broken, but action needs to be taken as soon as possible or, much like the singer, the day where everything changes is only a fantasy.

I had a different paragraph there, but I don’t want to always be talking about my trauma or guilt or bad feelings, nor do I want to seem like I know what I’m talking about. I have so much more learning to do and, if this song is proof, people have gotten to where I am now for a long, long time, so better not to waste effort on proselytizing to someone who may already know what I’m talking about.

See you tomorrow.

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07. High Holy Days, “All My Real Friends” (2004)

Posted on September 2, 2022 by WilliamWhy

“Please, hiding thoughts
Life is lost
My turn at hope transpires“

Who Am I Here?

I’m 13 going on 14; for the sake of narrowing the focus, let’s say that I would have seen the music video for this song when its album was released by Roadrunner Records around March 2004, so I’m 13 and in Grade 8. My music taste is branching out as I’m going through puberty and doing what you expect a teenage boy to be doing. A big way that I’m able to continue picking up new artists and sounds is through a television program called The MuchMusic Countdown, a weekly program which counted down the top-selling singles of that particular week and their accompanying music videos. Yes, this used to be on television. This is likely where I heard this song for the first time.

The Song

It’s hard to imagine now but, back in 2004, it was very easy to hear songs like this either on the radio or on TV with regularity. There was a time when alternative rock and/or “nu-metal” would routinely be near the top of the charts, with bands like Nickelback, Theory of a Deadman, Sum 41, and others having popular singles that people talked about with the same familiarity as the latest pop hit. That’s essentially what these types of songs were: Pop music in rock clothing. The songs were short and snappy, had uncomplicated hooks, and featured a type of singing that was likely popularized by the likes of Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, what has become known as “yarling.”

Just as weirdly/wildly popular American rock band Creed rode this style of vocal affectation to big success, so did other rock bands close in tune to them try to do the same; however, I feel like by 2004, the tide was turning in mainstream rock music toward more indie sensibilities, leaving this style of rock feeling a bit passé. The song itself doesn’t do much to distinguish itself from its contemporaries, but is pleasant enough to listen to, if you’re into that sort of thing (which I am). The lyrics, however, have always struck me as word-salad and shooting above its station as a 4-minute radio-friendly alt-rock song. As inane and, frankly, misogynistic as bands like Nickelback can be in their lyrics, it sounds off-putting in a different way to have someone in the style of Kroeger or Stapp sing the word “transpire” or “contrive,” as if he understood what they meant. The guitar is nice, it moves at a decent clip, and isn’t terribly complex beyond the lyrics.

What Now?

I decided to eschew this blog’s loose format today as I had been thinking of this song recently, and also found myself asking the question, “Why in the hell are they called High Holy Days?” Today’s post involved more research than I figured I’d ever get up to for this blog, as I tried to track down exactly why they decided on that name, as well as other details I could find out about the band and the song itself.

Tracking down information about an obscure Canadian post-grunge band from the early 2000s is a process intended to disappoint; before the advent of the internet we have now, digital record-keeping ranged from spotty to surprisingly detailed, but for subjects like today’s, I was not able to track down a lovingly-kept Geocities fan page for the four-piece from North Bay. The band’s sparse Wikipedia page notes that they were called The Arcand Band at first (named after vocalist Marc Arcand) before switching to High Holy Days and releasing their debut album, which produced the only two singles I recall seeing on TV. The name itself, as Google told me several times as I plugged it in to find out more about the band, refers to the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, as well as many days surrounding those two occurrences. As similar searches for the band members themselves proved fruitless, I have only two conclusions to work with: The name is a shout-out to Jewish heritage shared by one or some band members, or they just thought it sounded cool. I won’t speculate as to which is more likely to be true.

In my research, I found something else out that left me with a more positive feeling: High Holy Days are still playing shows and making music. Their main hubs online are Instagram and, yes, a Facebook page, which was updated only a couple of months ago, which I’d count as being “recent.” The group were the opening act in Timmins, Ontario for a show featuring other Canadian 90’s stalwarts as Econoline Crush, The Tea Party, and headlined by Our Lady Peace. Honestly, that’s a pretty cool bill to be on. HHD’s new stuff, released this year, sounds fundamentally the same as it did 20 years ago, but now with culture having looped back around on that era of music (especially as people like me get older), it actually sounds kind of refreshing compared to what the music landscape offers today. Overall, the band seems like they’re enjoying plugging along and doing their thing.

I was ready to completely dismiss HHD when I set out to do cursory research on them, but I find that I’m actually quite happy for them. As much as “All My Real Friends” wasn’t the next “How You Remind Me” and the band itself remains largely forgotten (outside of die-hard 30-somethings who still remember when MuchMusic had its own spin-off channels), it’s really nice to know that they weren’t content to fade away. It shows me that they really were about the music itself above all else, a fact that two of the band’s members echoed on a podcast interview from July of this year. I enjoyed being able to look back at something from so long ago and follow up on these people like they were human beings with goals and desires, because they are. It’s easy to forget that when mining the past but, as is so easy to forget, everybody is somebody, even High Holy Days.

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06. Marshmello & Bastille, “Happier” (8/16/18)

Posted on September 1, 2022 by WilliamWhy

Who Am I Here?

In the summer of 2018, I’ve been back in Halifax for a year. I’ve already secured work at the parking company and am being used at pretty much every hospital location that needs it right now, including the soon-to-be-closed City Centre downtown underground parking lot (Saturday night shifts from 3 PM to midnight). I’ve been tuned out of popular music since leaving the radio station, so I’m pretty sure I first heard this song from watching the Todd In The Shadows review of it on YouTube.

The Song

I remember not exactly feeling this song at first; at the time, it was one among several pop songs that had an EDM artist working on it and that featured a beat drop instead of a chorus. It’s a song written in a major key and titled “Happier,” but the lyrical content is about the point-of-view character feeling that, to make their partner happier (“I want to see you smile”), they must leave the other’s life decisively and of their own accord. The POV character has regrets about this and wonders if they’ve done the right thing (“Only for a minute, I want to change my mind/Cuz this just don’t feel right to me”), but the repetition of the chorus implies that this is an action that will be taken at some point in the future. Bastille had previously had a global hit with “Pompeii,” a song that I felt kind of washes over you as soon as you’ve heard it. I also keep thinking they’re a man instead of a band.

I like this song. I’m a big fan of conflating and twisting happy and sad feelings together to make bittersweet, and this is definitely that, at least on the first few listens. The beat is lively and you can nod your head to it. When you listen and think about the lyrics, it’s a very familiar situation to some of us where a loved one feels the best thing they can do for us is to excise themselves from our life, rather than stick around and hurt us in whatever way they perceive to be doing. My wife finds this song very depressing, always did from the start, but it took me a while before I realized that that’s the very reason I like it. It’s depression painted with bright colors and a dead-eyed smiley face, which is one of the truest things you come across these days.

Why Write About It?

My parents divorced when I was in high school. I always think that it happened when I was in grade 9 (still junior high in Nova Scotia) but I think that’s revisionism to account for the fact that my grade 9 year was terrible. I’ve asked my mother a couple of times the year that she and my father divorced but it just doesn’t cling in my head. I’m pretty sure it was either in grade 11 or grade 12, the mid-2000’s. Although the facts and dates are muddled and often switched around, I do remember the day that my dad left.

He left in the morning. He was going to Cape Breton and wanted to get on the road early, as he usually liked to when driving a long distance. He packed up his Jeep Grand Cherokee, hugged both myself and my mom (I think), and backed out of the driveway. I remember being in the kitchen near the back door with my mother, still in her pink housecoat that she’d had forever. I hugged her and said, “It’ll be okay.”

She cried and said through tears, “Will it?”

My parents’ divorce was, from what I gather, not acrimonious. There were no screaming fights, neither hatred nor custody battles or anything like that. It was a lot of quiet conversations in darkened rooms while I went upstairs. It was a lot of my dad sleeping on the couch, a pile of tissues on the coffee table from his nightly allergies. It was me restraining every sad feeling and angry thought that passed through me, because my parents already had it hard enough and didn’t need me making it worse. I didn’t even cry when they told us they were getting divorced; my older sister did, but I just held it in and said, “Okay.” I had converted to Catholicism at that point, too, so I’m sure I felt like I was the perfect little martyr, shouldering my burden like Christ Himself and walking forward with it. I’m fine.

My dad has depression. The severity of it is unknown probably even to him but, suffice to say, it’s pretty damn bad. I think he deals with a lot of feelings that I deal with today, because I think I also have depression in some way. When I spend days wallowing in self-hatred or thinking the world would be better off without me, I wonder if he thought the same way too at some point. Depression makes me feel close to my dad, in a weird way, because after the divorce, our relationship was never the same. I see him very sparingly now, maybe once a year, and our conversations scratch at depth, but the gulf between us and the growing we’ve done away from each other make us feel like old friends more than father and son. It sucks, I hate it, and I feel like there isn’t much I can do to change it.

I was playing this song on an iOS rhythm game called BeatStar in 2022 when I found myself near to the point of crying. Like, one of those cries that you know is gonna be bad. The next day, I closed the door to my office, put on the song, listened to the lyrics again, and sobbed deeply in my chair. The words that singer Dan Smith put to Marshmello’s beat may as well have been the reason my dad felt he couldn’t fight for his marriage anymore, the reason why he had to fuck off and never return. My dad, I think, saw himself as someone that was bringing down his family. He spent my life trying to fit in at jobs that didn’t suit him, trying to be the provider of the family that I’m sure he wanted to be, but the pressure and the depression was too much for him, so he decided to cut bait and leave us. We’d be fine without him; hell, we’d probably be better off without him.

But it wasn’t so much these lyrics that got me, it was this:

“Then only for a minute

I want to change my mind

‘Cause this just don’t feel right to me”

In the song, the narrator has a feeling through all the misery and sadness that maybe, just maybe, this isn’t the right thing to do. My wife told me once that that’s why she finds the song so depressing: It’s the logic of a deeply depressed person who is acting selfishly and without considering the feelings of their loved one. Very rarely is a situation truly fixed, amended, restored between two parties when one decides to essentially not exist in the other’s company. But it’s a tempting thought, a thought brought on by a chemical imbalance and the death drive we all share toward oblivion. My dad thought, as I still think sometimes as well, that we’d be better off without him.

But we weren’t. We aren’t. When the narrator thinks that maybe they shouldn’t leave to make their loved one happier, I picture my dad turning his head back toward our house, stopping the car, and realizing the mistake he’s making. But much like the ship in The Perfect Storm, he never turns around to come back home, and he never will.

I’ve had a very fortunate life that has not yet been inundated by tragedy, and I recognize that privilege as constantly as I can. This has meant that the saddest moments of my life are, certainly to a lot of other people, drops in the bucket on a grand scale. But shit, they hurt me bad and they still hurt, just as this one still hurts and always will. That day in 2022, I felt my dad’s feelings toward himself echoed back to me in a silly pop song that hit #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and it broke me, even half a life removed from the day he left.

In 3:34, Marshmello & Bastille so accurately capture the inner logic of the depressed person in their words, while also putting up the outward mask of fun and bounciness that is the EDM bleeps and bloops. There are a lot of songs that get depression spot-on, whether in mood or in lyricism or in pure feel, and I believe this is one of them.

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05. “Facial Reconstruction”

Posted on March 23, 2016 by WilliamWhy

A smaller corner of my music library is music collected from video games. Just like a film soundtrack, a video game’s score or music helps to make an interactive medium into potential for an unforgettable experience, especially when the music has to do with the sprawling space epic that is the Mass Effect series.

This particular piece of music is actually the only one from any Mass Effect game I have in my personal library, which is not to say it is an unremarkable soundtrack. I personally found the respective scores for each game good, if not particularly memorable (but hey, it’s me, nothing is particularly memorable in my brain), save for a few pieces like the iconic music from the end of ME 3. This one, however, was one I kept coming back to.

This is played during ME 2 (my personal favorite of the three games), when you are creating your version of the main character, Shepard. Being a character selection screen, it is a screen you will be at for at least a moderate length of time, depending on your personal fastidiousness toward your in-game appearance. I find Facial Reconstruction to be worth re-visiting in terms of its length and its simplicity: It’s a brief musical interlude that seems to bounce along, but with an underlying intermittent tone almost similar to the noise of the villainous Reapers. It’s futuristic in a way that seems natural, and to me is a great piece for thinking to; it really engages my mind, in an odd way.

This will probably be the only time I come across something Mass Effect-related in my library, so I’ll simply end with a thumbs up to an awesome video game series. I dunno, not much to say here, so….g’bye!

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04. Fleetwood Mac, “Little Lies”

Posted on January 30, 2016 by WilliamWhy

“But I couldn’t find a way
So I’ll settle for one day to believe in you”

Now, this one is interesting. I’m not immediately sure what personal feelings are tied to this one.

I bought this song sometime last year, and I think the prevailing thought I had was, “Why DON’T I have this song in my library?” I’m not a person who necessarily bends the knee to classic bands; truth be told, I find sometimes that classic rock or pop can sometimes bore me, depending on who you’re talking about. A lot of my friends and family members have a lot of love for Fleetwood Mac, and I can’t say I know too much about them, save for a couple of their biggest hits, an anecdote or two about the band courtesy of my knowledgeable friend Adam B, and this song.

When I listened to it again, purely on a whim, it reminded me of growing up, in a vague way. My mom and dad had different yet similar tastes in music; my dad had a sillier taste in music than you’d expect, liking bands like Toto and Collective Soul, while my mom was a big fan of heavy hitters like Celine Dion and the Women & Songs collections. They both appreciated their 70’s and 80’s cheese, and were unabashedly into the old stuff (my Mom, a bit more accepting of some newer pop). “Little Lies”, though I may have only heard it once or twice as a boy, reminds me of the type of music I’d hear on long car trips, or around the house, or my mother humming from time to time.

I guess it’s a general feeling of nostalgia, a frisson in my brain, that activates when I hear the chorus, and I’m in the back of a Jeep Grand Cherokee, half-asleep, passing the Canso Causeway. Maybe the memory exists, and maybe it doesn’t. I don’t think it matters.

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03. Priestess, “Lay Down”

Posted on October 17, 2015 by WilliamWhy

“So I’ll leave you in a coffin for God
And I’ll leave you in the dirt”

Ahhh, now here is the beginning of another common theme among much of my music collection: Rhythm games!

Specifically, the video game that introduced me to more music than I knew how to handle, the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series; specifically, Guitar Hero III. This song was one of the many songs featured in the game, and among other favorites like “Cliffs of Dover” and “Mississippi Queen”, was one I discovered by furiously hamming on my plastic guitar toy. As I recall, this particular song was in the section of the game that introduced either the blue or orange button, and required the greater use of the pinky finger; I remember distinctly the opening notes of this song being ones that really flowed together with the drumming of the fingers.

I recall the graphics for this game on the PS2 being fairly close to ass (though that’s not really the point of the game)

I was all about Guitar Hero when it came out; I got it as a Christmas present, and hardly put it down. Being that I have no musical skill, this was (and likely is) the closest I’ll be to playing a real musical instrument in front of people, virtual or otherwise. I played again and again, slowly getting better as my eyes got used to the unnatural scrolling of the guitar notes. By the time III came out, I was an old hand at it, and loved the chance to discover and play more great songs.

This song is one that I don’t believe is terribly special, but it has what you need for a fake baby guitar: Catchy rhythm, driving feel, and singable lyrics. It’s not one I revisit often, but it’s one that my buddy Sheamus and I really loved to play. The guitar/band rhythm games gave me a great deal of good memories, which I will expound upon in future entries.

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02. U2, “Pride (In The Name of Love)”

Posted on October 16, 2015 by WilliamWhy

“One man caught on a barbed wire fence
One man he resist
One man washed on an empty beach.
One man betrayed with a kiss”

My God, people love to shit on U2, don’t they?

I kind of don’t get why. I can understand any amount of extreme dislike in their music, different strokes for different folks. I know a lot of people find Bono insufferable and all that; I don’t really pay attention to U2 or Bono’s actions outside of the band, so it doesn’t really matter to me. I’m slightly aware of his and the band’s charitable actions, and I think that’s cool. People helping people! U2 is just one of those bands it’s Cool To Hate, and I don’t say that with a sneer or eye-roll, it just is and has been and shall be.

This song is one of a few that I heard on the radio or on music television as a kid, and I had no idea of who it was, but the iconic chorus was one I always recognized. For the longest time, I assumed it was “One more in the name of love”, not “One man” as the lyric actually is, to go along with the symbolic message I definitely would not have grasped as a half-listening child. This one is just one of those big-time classics that you’ll hear on any rock (or even pop) stations that I’m sure still gets radio play, and was just part of the backing track to my life as a kid, those songs heard and even felt but never understood. Now that I’m in the radio industry, there’s still those “Aha!” moments when I discover a song that I’ve known for so long but never properly identified.

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01. Trust Company, “Downfall”

Posted on October 15, 2015 by WilliamWhy

“Fear in me, so deep, it gets the best of me”

Ha! We start off today with a great example of the real crap that makes its way into my life through the oddest of circumstances.

This is a early/mid-2000s nu-metal outfit named Trust Company, who is probably still going in some form or fashion to this day. They’re one of a litany of bands that tried to make their name on the weird, fluid genre definition that rock and heavy metal were going through in the mainstream during that time. Nu-metal and it’s ilk were a strange, easily mocked, and ultimately vaporous trend in mainstream heavy music that is best remembered as a kitschy 00’s punchline, and it’s hard to disagree; but much like the cheesy bombast of 80’s hair metal, or the self-indulgent grunge of the 90’s, 00’s hard music remains for some as a guilty (or guilt-free) pleasure, and it makes up more than a little of my personal library.

This particular track was one I found through wrestling (and brother, get ready for that trend in the future), because it was the main theme of a WWE pay-per-view event in 2002, Vengeance. I became a wrestling fan in 2003 at the tender age of 13, the perfect time for a confused and angsty young teen to discover the confused and angsty art form that is pro wrestling. At the time, the only wrestling content was on TV, in the form of Monday Night RAW, WWE Velocity, and Sunday Night Heat; the former RAW was past my bed time on Monday, so I had to stick with the “D-shows” Velocity & Heat, which did little beyond recapping the “A-shows” of the week and hyping up the PPV (no way were my parents shelling out for that bullshit). This being the case, I devoured the minimal wrestling selection found at Blockbuster Video and Roger’s Video in town, Vengeance being Roger’s only variant on the Blockbuster selection. I rented those DVDs over and over again, not caring that they were at least a year out of date, and most of them pretty damn bad; I was hooked, and I needed it.