For each letter of the A to Z, I'm going to give you a KEYWORD.
You post in the comments a song with that word in the title. I will
give you one to start (along with a video). If you like, you can go to
YouTube and embed your video in the comments, so that readers can also
listen to your song. No repeats and only post one song so
that everyone can participate. If you're just brimming with songs, come
back in a few days and lay it on me! If you want to see who else is
participating in the A to Z click here.
You guys did great with yesterday's word: Eyes. Here are the songs you thought of with Eyes in the title:
Michele: These Eyes by The Guess Who
Alex J. Cavanaugh: The Camera Eye by Rush
Andrea: Bette Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes
Stephen T. McCarthy: Ebony Eyes by Bob Welch
Ericka: When You Close Your Eyes by Night Ranger
Holli: Blue Eyes Cryin' In The Rain by Willie Nelson
Diane Wolfe: Hungry Eyes by Eric Carmen
Pinku-Sensei: In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel
Robyn: For Your Eyes Only by Sheena Easton
Mary Burris: Sad Eyes by Robert John and Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue by Crystal Gayle
ABFTS: Open Your Eyes by Sum 41
D.G. Hudson: Brown Eyed Handsome Man by Chuck Barry
Debbie the Doglady: Eyes of a Stranger by Queensryche
Sarah Foster: Queenie Eye by Paul McCartney
Rosey: Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison
Jeffrey: Private Eyes by Hall and Oates
Robin (yes, me again): Eye of the Tiger by Survivor
If you posted an Eyes song and don't see it here, it came in after I
called it a night. If you can think of more songs from previous letters and WANT to post
them now, feel free to go back and add them:)
It's a new day and a new letter!
What is the KEYWORD?
You can use variations. In this case, fires, fired, firing, and other reasonable variations... like this one.
I present to you.....The Fireman by George Strait.
I try hard to choose things that I don't think you guys will choose. In this case, I've got something for my non-country fans. I do try and please ya'll as much as possible.
So, I also present to you Third Day with Soul on Fire.
P.S. Stephen T. McCarthy, I think you'll really appreciate this one beginning at the 2 minute mark.
You can comment with a song tile and artist or embed the video by copy/pasting the code from the search bar. Thanks for playing along!
Special thanks to Arlee Bird and
the A to Z team who make this possible!
I don't normally comment on "stat stuff," but I noticed that this is my 800th post on this blog. Can you believe it???
This is still the summer of 1988 and I'm still selling books door-to-door in Colorado. This was a revelatory sort of job for me, though I wouldn't understand the ramifications for years.
So, there were reasons I was successful at this door-to-door sales thing, and they were thus:
I memorized well
and could deliver the presentation
conversationally, AND when I made my pitch I sold the whole set. I never broke
it up because if they were going to buy, they would buy it ALL.
I am not going to bore you with every sale I made ~ heck I can't remember every
sale I made.
I vividly remember going up to this blue house on a cul de sac (would you believe that
I can still picture this house but I can't remember some of the names of my
good friends ~ egads) and the mother of the household answering. It was a
Saturday (prime day). I gave her my get in the door pitch and she responded
like this, "I would love to look at your books but my husband is TOO CHEAP
(this thrown over the shoulder in a very loud voice for the said husband's
benefit)! He is SO CHEAP that he does things like this.." At this precise
moment her two children come out the front door carrying their bikes. "He
makes our children carry their bikes out the door because he doesn't like the
wear and tear on the garage door opener." Again, all of this was not
directed to me, but to the invisible husband.
I backed up fast and said
something like, "Well, this isn't a good time. I will come back
later." I hastily got out of Dodge and made a notation in my notebook.
That isn't the end of this story.
I was
back in this same neighborhood trying to eliminate everyone from my list as
either buyers or not. I found myself
back on that same cul de sac, and that blue house was the only one that hadn't
gone one way or the other. I was having a Terrible Day and decided to nail
the lid on the coffin by going back to that blue house. The husband answered
the door, the wife wasn't home, and I honestly never expected to make it off the porch.
Wonder of wonders.... I got in. Normally, I wouldn't go into a home where just
the husband was there, but the kids were in a room that was visible from the
kitchen, and I felt okay with it. He was nice. However, I was still caught up in the Bike Incident of that Saturday and Intimidated. I was so convinced that he WASN'T GOING TO BUY that I only showed him three books out
of the set. I departed from my usual pitch, because I made the decision for him about what he would and would not buy. I was trying to minimize my
time investment in the call. Big mistake.
Huge.I got done and he never even gave me a closing
argument. All he said was, "Do you
take a credit card?"
Holy crap. Yes, I did. And while he was getting his wallet I was
mentally kicking myself down the street. Never ever assume what your buyer will buy.In fact, go into every sale assuming that they
will buy. You assume it and more often
than not... they do.
Only
later would I look back on this very successful summer at door-to-door sales
and understand that sales is my Ideal Career Path.If you can make money in door-to-door sales,
which is the toughest giggoing,
commission sales on consumable goods is a cakewalk .
Not everyone in our group, but some... (click to enlarge)
Now, I don't have a song to go with this story, though it's a darn good story. However, I do have one more song that I think of when I think of that summer. My father said that the song Baby Blue came out that summer I was in Colorado, and whenever he heard it he thought of me. The way he said it I think it was kind of sad for him. That was not so long after he and my mom divorced, and instead of coming home I opted out entirely to move across the country to sell books. And then it was pretty much straight back to college. I spent very little time "at home," and he probably thought I was pretty much all but gone.
This one's for you, Dad!
Did you have a job that you thought
was just a summer job or short-term job, but ending up pointing you
towards your ultimate Career Path? Or a job that you learned a lot
of Life Lessons from even if you didn't stay in it forever? Is there a song that one of your parents thought of as "your song?"
If you're enjoying these posts, feel free to share your own
Soundtrack. This isn't a hop. No requirements at all, but a suggestion
to do it one song at a time. (If you participated in the hop several
years ago, you can still do this. Just post them one song at a time,
with the freedom to add more songs if you'd like.) I'll link to all
participants at the bottom of each of these posts:
Well, it is Saturday, and that means on this blog that we get to have a music appreciation day. Once again, the 80s pick wasn't all that difficult. It seems like my own inspirational choice of the day seems to be the toughie. However, once I do find the right thing, there is a click of satisfaction, and all is well.
I think that I kept getting hung up, because I really wanted to pick a George Strait song for this day. For those of you who follow country music at all, George Strait is the icing on the cake. He has a voice that I call a "cool drink of water." It is just smooth as can be. I suppose if I were actually drinking it would be the finest whiskey money could buy. In other terms, George crossed the Great Divide. He started singing in the 70s, when artists like George Jones were still the Big Names in country, and survived what I call the Great Shift in country. All of the old greats went down and the new kids took over. George Strait didn't go down; he survived the Shift. He survived and is still at the top of his game. The other thing that fascinates me about George Strait is this: he won't tour above the Mason Dixon line. Well, that bit of news was terrible when I was living in Ohio and Michigan. When I moved to Georgia, it got a lot better.
He's a family man. His family comes first, and they live in Texas, and he never wants to be too far from them, so that he can't get back if needs to, in case of emergency. He also wanted to be there for his son's life growing up. He is that guy who managed to have a career as a country singer, made a movie, has I don't know how many #1 hits, and still managed to be there for the big events, and some less big events, in his son's life. He and his wife are still happily married. He arranged his life so that he managed to have it all. He wouldn't tour anywhere north of the Mason Dixon line and he still is considered one of the best in country music. He never caved on that, not even when he was just starting out. When it is important, you make a stand and stick. I guess you can tell that I admire not just the songs, but the man. It was an honor just to see him and hear him sing. However, George is not big on making videos. I guess it is just not his thing. He has some, but not for my favorite songs. So...
Let's talk about Reba. Reba understands the power of the video. Actually, country singers still have their version of MTV, by way of CMT and AMC. Those are two country music video channels that mostly play country music video like MTV did back in the 80s. So, it is in the best interests of today's country music stars to make good videos and THEY ARE. Actually, CMT has been around for quite a while. I know this because my dad and I got pulled into its lure back in the mid 90s when I was living with him. At night we would watch it, and it would get later and later, and we would both say, alternately, "Just one more and then we're going to bed," or "This is the last one and then we're calling it a night." It really got to be ridiculous. That made me smile. Silly great memories of my dad.
Anyway, Reba knows how to rock a video. I was so impressed with her in concert. She has a full voice. Powerful. I felt the same way about Natalie Merchant when I saw her in concert. What a powerful voice. You just know that in a smaller forum (like a bar) they would blow it out because they wouldn't hardly need a microphone. Reba has also been around for a long time in country music. She may have been around as long as George Strait. There are so few that crossed the bridge of the 70s to the 80s. Or she may have arrived in the early 80s. I don't know. I wasn't a big fan then. Anyway, she has so many hits now that there is no way to get them all into a concert. However, this was her encore performance, and I think it might have been the song that rocketed her into superstardom. Don't quote me on that because it is me speculating.
Don't forget to turn off my music player at the bottom of the page.
Why is that inspirational? I think it's inspirational, because it is saying that you can take a bad situation and turn it around. If you're smart, you can move beyond where you started and into another, better place. That is what she did. She then came back to turn that property into something that could help other people ~ in this case runaways. Life is what you make it.
Okay, let's move on to the 80s, and our ongoing look at artists in that time period. I have been focusing on those who had two things: successful songs and interesting videos to go with them. I am trying to keep boring concert vids out, because all that does is shine a light on singers or bands that didn't really know how to work MTV. Although, there might be a lesson there. The better the video was, the higher it rose in the ratings on the radio. The two walked hand in hand with each other. It is a shame that it took so many artists so long to figure that one out.
Today we are looking at Tears For Fears. They actually had quite a few videos to choose from, so it was difficult to narrow the field on this one. I didn't come across any footage that was strictly concert footage. They did like to mix it up a bit. Just listening to their songs was a very pleasant step back in time for me. Same goes with the video footage. I confess I was watching some of it thinking I was going to know what would happen next, and I would get a surprise. Yeah, after twenty years, a person forgets stuff. Who knew? I am going to post several of their videos and you let me know which one YOU think is best. I just can't decide!
