changing all my strings, I’m gonna write another traveling song…

I’m going on a road trip next week. I’m going to drive down 8 hours to visit Fae, and I’m making a playlist. A eight hour playlist, for my iPod (yay Aux input!). So I thought this a really good time to write about my love for Traveling Songs. Which I promised when I wrote about Old Soul Songs. This is going to be hard because I always want to spell it “travelling,” so I’m going to have to spell check the hell out of this…

The above quoted is one of my all time favourite songs, Cathedrals by Jump Little Children. It’s so beautiful, and completely describes how I feel in my life right now, why I can’t stay in one place.

From I Will Follow You Into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie. There are so many Death Cab songs about traveling that I adore. Okay, I adore most Death Cab songs. I think they’re so sexy. Yes, sexy music. It’s true. Anyone who wants to make out with me need only play me Death Cab.

No music post would be complete without a little Something Corporate, the band that inhabits every atom of my soul. Another line of this song says “I met a girl who kept tattoos for homes that she had loved.” I’ve always wanted to be that girl. Because I believe you can call a lot of places home. I also love tattoos and have two. Another Something Corporate song is where the url for this blog came from

Globes and Maps, by Something Corporate. Because even if the songs are about how sad and lonely traveling is, I love them. Because it makes me think of airplanes and bus rides and new things and going places. Anywhere but here.

Like a lot of twenty-somethings I’m just looking for the next place to call home.

It’s not enough, I’m sorry….

Old soul songs

I was at my favourite local band’s EP release concert on Friday night. Captain Firebutton is Kaitlyn’s brother Cody’s band. I’ve known Cody since I was two, and so I’ve seen pretty much every band he’s ever been in. Finally, about two years ago, he joined an awesome one. I’m one of their biggest fans and I’ve been to almost every show.

One of their new songs is called Old World, and I loved it right away. Why?

The word “Babylon.”

I have this love for what I call old soul songs* - songs that reference history at all, but especially in reference to love as old as time.

Holy Roman, by the Get Up Kids. One of my favourite Get Up Kids songs.

Thick as Thieves by Natalie Merchant is probably one of my favourite songs by her, but Ophelia is another great example.

And to sum it up, It’s All Been Done by the Barenaked Ladies. There are a hundred more I could quote, but I think you’ve got the point. I have no idea why I feel this way. It could be my love for history. It could be that at heart I’m a hopeless romantic who believes in the notion of the Origin of Love and that we have soulmates, stretching past through time. Maybe it’s just that all of these songs are beautiful.

Soon, I’ll tell you about my similar love for Leaving Songs.

*Yes, that’s a reference to Bright Eyes

sometimes you just need to keep driving

It’s snowing on the west side
Let me take you for a ride
I’ll be Bonnie and you’ll be Clyde
See if we can get ourselves killed
Before we die

And we will drive like bandits
On the Queensway
We’ll hold hands like in the movies
I’ll say ‘oh Clyde you drive me crazy
And you’ll just capture me like it was
Armed robbery.

Not looking for a miracle, just a reason to believe…

I spent a little time today with my first love, Savage Garden. And I think I’ve rekindled the flame.

Is there any thing that can ever compare to the first song you fall in love with? That’s what music has always been for me - falling in love. And Savage Garden.. there’s this melodramatic pop music 13-year-old-girl part of me that aches every time I hear Hold Me, Crash and Burn, Affirmation, Tears of Pearls, Moon and Back… all of them. There is not a single song on those two CDs that I don’t love, don’t know every single word to. When I was younger, I went to North Carolina with my family. Fifteen hour drive. The only CD I listened to was Affirmation. And I never once got tired of it. To this day, those songs have never gotten old for me. I’ve given a total of 7 Savage Garden CDs as presents. The only close runner up is Something Corporate, I’ve given four copies of Leaving Through the Window.

Savage Garden holds a place in my heart that no other band or song ever could. Honestly, like a first love. It was the music I loved when I was hopeful and 13, when I was hopeless and 16. I firmly believe that you never love music more than the music you loved when you were young. I’m still young; I’m still falling in love with new songs all the time. But there are few that compare to the songs of my most fragile teenage years: Savage Garden, Something Corporate, Brand New, Sugarcult, Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes.

Savage Garden has always reminded me that you can learn from pain. Start Static by Sugarcult always made me start off angry, and end up crying. Still does. Brand New was one of the only tapes I had in Blanche, in the last year of high school, that I played really loud when I was pissed off. I used to listen to Something Corporate’s Leaving Through the Window for hours. I would just lie on my bed, stare at the ceiling and listen. To every line, every bar… I could isolate each instrument on that CD. And I would dream and think and just… feel. Bright Eyes is the most hopeless times in my life, so potent that just listening to a favourite Bright Eyes song can make me cry. Death Cab for Cutie was about hope and love and hope for love and, for me, is the sexiest music I’ve ever heard, it seduces me every time.

I have new loves in my life; Regina Spektor, Ingrid Michaelson, Gregory and the Hawk, Jack Johnson… But nothing ever feels the same as Savage Garden.