"hedonism (just because you feel good)" - skunk anansie

"how do you remember me, the one that made you laugh until you cried. i hope you're feeling happy now"



stuck in a traffic jam on the south circular and this came on xfm. i had no choice but to crank it up and sing along (though i have to drop out the really high bits). hours later i was still singing it. it probably only just scrapes into my top 10 tracks of theirs but its great. the band is great. the songs are great. if you don't own either of their first two albums then shame on you.

i used to be really bothered about how people remembered me. surprisingly much more so than what people thought of me in the moment - which i never really cared about. i remember writing long quasi-deep meanderings in the school leaving books of people i had barely given a second thought to most of the years we had coexisted. it always meant more to me if someone mentioned a long time later that they enjoyed one of my gigs, rather than straight after which meant quite little. being memorable was its own way of ensuring i was being significant. being memorable is a far greater aspiration than being popular, or even than being liked.

go out there and be memorable, readers, go.

"saints and sailors" - dashboard confessional

"this is about as social as i get now"



i like the first two dashboard albums. theres an undercurrent of something smug about the band i dont really like, and the over-reliance on open tunings feels weird on my ears after a while, and the songwriting is occasionally mawkish or linguistically awkward, but there are just some lines that leap out at you from the middle of songs. lines you feel a real empathy for. lines that sum up a moment so well that all similar moments from then on seem to be soundtracked by it.


i cant remember when i last did something properly social with a real friend


i do want to kick in the head all of the muppets singing along on the dashboard confessional mtv unplugged album. but something of the band's sound has coloured or informed my acoustic playing since i heard them.

"waiting" - the rentals

"i'm waiting with nothing to do. i'm waiting, just waiting on you"


a loser named greg sold me return of the rentals on cassette one lunchtime for 50p and a packet of nerds. fond as i am of nerds, with their ability to seem cool despite just being small oddly-shaped lumps of sugar, he clearly got the poor end of that deal because, whilst i would have had a total of maybe 15 minutes of pleasure from that pack of sweets and whatever i would have blown the 50p on, i have whiled away many many happy hours listening to this lo-fi newwave classic. i almost always sing along, usually with petra for some reason.


like most british people, there are some things about the way americans misuse the english language that annoy me more than others. one thats right up there on my list is using the verb-phrase "waiting on" to mean "waiting for". all right-thinking people know that waiting on someone means serving them food in a restaurant whilst waiting for someone means being in a place until they are also in that same place.

sometimes you wait for something in vain - but if it was truly worth waiting for it was worth the risk that in might never happen.
you have to know whether to give up and go home though

"i begin to wonder" - danii minogue

"and i-i-i begin to wonder"


2 girls on my train were listening, at a volume that seriously distorted on their mobile phone's tiny speakers with every pounding bass note, to some androgynous-voiced r'n'b singer's pseudo-romantic whinings and singing along in between their equally loud conversation. i think between them they totalled about 40% of the notes in tune and the guy's [i think] top range was well beyond them, but there was something about their enthusiasm for this aural drivel that was infectious and a tiny snatch of it stayed with me.

as is so often the case with things you really dont know and didnt hear well enough to have any grasp on becoming earworms, it quickly mutated into something vaguely similar that i did know better, though not really in this case because it is significantly better.