It's all coming back to me now out of nothing at all (but I won't do that)

I have this new playlist in iTunes that carries the rather unsexy title of "Shit I Never Listen To Because I Forgot I Had It." I created it the other day as I am going through my iTunes collection by artist and clearing out the stuff that I do not listen to and will probably never listen to again. I've always been a bit of a pack rat when it comes to music, always afraid to let go of that 4th live version of "Like A Virgin" from the Blond Ambition Tour because it sounds just slightly different at 3:12 and who knows, I may want to listen to it again even though the sound quality is for shit. Well baby, those days are over. I'm being pretty ruthless with what I cut and what I keep, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep the best sounding version of each Madonna tour and archive the rest on DVD-R. They're just taking up space on my hard drive and, as I said, they never get listened to.

BUT one unintended side effect is that I'm discovering songs that I really like that have been lost in the great sea of music that is my iTunes collection. I've chronicled the ultimate inadequacy of a digital music collection before, even though it beats the hell out of having all these CDs all over kingdom come gathering dust. So I created this playlist and have added songs to it that fall into that category - basically stuff that I never listen to because it never (or rarely) bubbles to the surface.

One song that has made that playlist is the 1996 Celine Dion bomabstic drama-fest "It's All Coming Back To Me Now". (watch the video here, I can't embed it to save my life, and believe me, I've tried.)

"It's All Coming Back To Me Now" is cut from the seemingly endless supply of cloth that Jim Steinman has been crafting songs out of for years. Jim Steinman, who wrote pop radio staples like "Total Eclipse of the Heart" for Bonnie Tyler, "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All" for Air Supply and "I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)" (among many many others) for Meatloaf, knows cheese when he hears it and is not afraid to squeeze every last ounce of sturm and drang from every note. But an side effect of this is that they all kind of sound the same. I still think that you can sing "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All" over the top of "It's All Coming Back To Me Now" in much the same way you can sing Rick Astley's "Together Forever" over "Never Gonna Give You Up."

Yes, a little bit goes a long way with Jim Steinman (and Celine for that matter) but as I've said before, there are a handful of good Celine Dion songs and this is another one of them. It was a huge song when Heidi and I were dating - I think it was a single right around the time we got engaged. We loved it as an album track (yes, we bought Falling Into You, but so did 35 million other people in the world so cut me some slack) but we figured it was too long for the radio at 7 minutes and some.

Never underestimate the power of the radio edit. Chop two and half minutes off the song and you have a breakaway pop hit, as Anya would say. At least they didn't cut the faux slamming door at the "and you were history with the slamming of the door" part. I remember liking this song so much that I purchased the CD maxi-single without having heard any of the remixes first, which turned out to be a big mistake. It didn't remix well at all, which kind of surprised me because some of the best club mixes are full of drama and angst which this song had in spades, but it did't translate well. The vocals felt sped up, the production frenetic, and one of them turned the already seeming interminable song into a 14 minute behemoth.

The funny thing is I think those remixes are in my iTunes, but I won't part with those just yet. Just don't expect them to show up on my "Shit I Never Listen To Because I Forgot I Had It" playlist.

Jim Steinman also wrote a song that Barbra Streisand recorded for her Emotion album in the mid-80s. Predictably, it is not short of drama either, but "Left In The Dark" was always a highlight of that album for me. Not surprisingly, you can sing "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All" over the top of that song too. However, I never knew until just recently that it had a video.

5 oldies

I was making a new playlist for my iPod the other day and deliberately did not put some of the more frequently played songs on there. With the help of Genius playlist, I managed to get some oldies in there and consequently, I have been listening to some songs that have not gotten play in a damn long time. Since I'm all about embarrassing myself from the standpoint of what trash I'm listening to at the moment, here is a sampling.

1) The Way I Am / Eminem
Not at all into the new Eminem stuff, but I do have a soft spot for just about everything else. A little Eminem goes such a long way for me, but as I have said before, it is probably as melodic as rap is going to get. I find myself extremely conflicted listening to Eminem as the subject matter of pretty much everything he does seems to be contrary to core values I have, but there it is.

2) Fading Like A Flower (Every Time You Leave) / Roxette
I couldn't believe that this was not in my iTunes. I really disliked the song "Joyride", but I really liked this when it came out. When I first met Heidi, Roxette was pretty much the only pop music she listened to (favoring new-age and instrumental music for lack of a better description.) Upon discovering Sunday that this song was not on my computer, you better believe I remedied that in a big hurry!

3) Total Eclipse of the Heart / Nikki French
I remember when this remake came out roughly 1994ish. I was in college and completely opposed to it just on principle. How dare they take a classic 80s song and bastardize it with a techno beat and some no-name singer singing a monotone through the whole song? I resisted it for a terribly long time, but eventually was won over. What was I thinking? This song rules!



4) Spice Up Your Life / Spice Girls
Honestly, there really are better Spice Girls songs out there. "Stop" being one of them (which was played ad nauseum at a pharmacy where I worked in the late 90s). But this one is really hitting the spot. One of two Spice Girls songs on the playlist ("Say You'll Be There") being the other, it has made me think that it was a good thing that they milked the Spice Girls for all they were worth back in the late 90s/early 00s because looking at them now, it's clear their shelf life was limited.



5) Family Man / Fleetwood Mac
My favorite track off of Tango In The Night - this should make Matt happy because of his love of Lindsey Buckingham. But what I really love about this song is the breakdown right around 2:24 with Stevie warbling "am what I am what I am what I am what I am." Why is it not surprising that my favorite part of a Lindsey song would be Stevie's appearance? Anyway, cool guitar playing and an underrated song.

Honorable Mention: Celine Dion / When The Wrong One Loves You Right
An album track from A New Day Has Come, Heidi summed it up best: "Ah Celine, making adultery cool." As Paul said a while back, there are a handful of really good Celine Dion songs and I would submit that this is one of them. Here she is singing it with Destiny's Child.



I may do five more - we'll see.

I can run but I can't hide

There is NOTHING less cool than admitting to liking a Celine Dion song. Yes, the woman can sing, but I think that most guys would rather put rusty nails into their eyes than admit to having any kind of fondness for anything that French-Canadian chanteuse produces.

Well, I'm not most guys.

I love this song and I am not ashamed to admit it! (OK, maybe just a little bit.) It is from Celine Dion's last album Taking Chances so it's a couple years old now and it is called "Shadow of Love."



I can't figure out what it is about the song that I like. I think part of it is the chorus which just has a great hook. It's very high on the melodrama and it's also a bit unexpected from Celine Dion in that it is not a ballad. It is also uncharacteristic for Celine Dion in that it kind of crept up on me rather than hitting me over the head with a hammer. I listened to it a few times, then put it away for a year, and then it resurfaced and I am listening to it like it's the biggest hit ever.

Don't get me wrong, I am not a huge closet Celine Dion fan. Although I don't really harbor her any ill will, so much of her music is so same-y that I feel like a little bit goes a long way. But really, who else has done Meatloaf better than Mr. Loaf himself? ("It's All Coming Back To Me Now") And everybody says that they hate "My Heart Will Go On" but come on, you know you love it.

And then there's this. It defies description.

On and on and on and on and on

So yesterday I was at work and we were listening to Lite 104 point something or another (the "feel good at work station!" Whatever.) We have this incredibly cheap Targhetto CD player/radio at work and we can only periodically pick up stations, so we usually just take what we can get. Anyway, we were kind of mocking the songs that were being played (even though it seemed like I had an anecdote for just about every single song.) Suddenly, one of my co-workers exclaimed.

"Oh no! It's the Titanic!"

Yep, it was Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." I can't say that I have heard this song (in it's original incarnation) more than a handful of times since 1998 when you literally could not escape the song. I remember Titanic fever so well. I remember my sister working at the Carroll theater during Titanic's release and it stayed there for some ungodly long time and some lady asked my sister when they were going to stop showing Titanic. Her response? When it stops selling out every night.

A friend of mine once shared with me that he feels that Titanic is unfairly maligned these days, suffering from the inevitable backlash that accompanies uber successful films. I do agree with this statement. I think some of that is people wishing that they hadn't gotten so caught up in it, almost as if they are now embarrassed by what they felt. But there is no denying it is a powerful film. I remember when Heidi and I saw it for the first time, on a cold winter's night in Cedar Rapids. We were very affected by it. The scene that always gets me is when the Titanic has sunk and the camera pans back, revealing all the people just flailing around in the ocean. And then, several scenes later, nearly all of them are dead.

Yes, it is a bit overacted and the dialogue is very corny at times (although I don't think it even approaches the awfulness of the Star Wars prequels as far as dialogue goes.) But I think it was really the last movie that got EVERYONE into the movie theater. And it was certainly the last movie that I can think of that had legs, that had a slow(ish) build rather than completely blowing its wad on the opening weekend and then sinking like a stone after that.

But back to Celine. I am not ashamed to say that I kind of like the song. It's not my favorite song in the world or anything, but I can appreciate it because it is dramatic and bombastic and very diva-ish and yes, it reminds me of that time. However, I can see why people would hate it. Where the original version of the song really lost me was when they started playing a version of the song on the radio with snippets of dialogue from the movie dubbed into it.

The song, however, is completely redeemed by its dance remix. I am always bit dubious of dance remixes of ballads. Too often, a generic drum beat is thrown behind the original mix and nothing memorable happens. Not so with "My Heart Will Go On." I REALLY like this version of the song, and truly, it's about the only one that gets any play with me these days. But don't take my word for it - try for yourself (and enjoy the movie in 4:35 as well.)



OK, not the brilliance that was the Miami Mix of "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" (for which Madonna resang the vocals) but still, not bad.

So yeah, I kind of enjoyed hearing "My Heart Will Go On" again yesterday. But oddly enough, I saved these stories for the blog.

Just a page in my his-tor-y

Over the weekend, when I was cleaning out after the deluge of the Nerdery, I found a tape that I made eons ago. The title of said tape was "Late Spring 1994 Mix." It had the track listing all tidily written on the outside of the case and, not being one to miss an opportunity like this, I immediately made it into an iTunes playlist. Seriously, I'm all about iTunes playlists, it's one way to combat the choice fatigue that is part and parcel to having a 160GB iPod.

Last night, on my walk home from work, I decided to put that playlist on random and see how it sounds 14 years later. I only heard four of the songs, but I must say it holds up well. I can see that I needed a little bit of help on my mixing skills (two Madonna songs split up by only one song? The tragedy!), but still. Here's the four songs I heard last night.

Misled - Celine Dion
Oh Celine. I have such a love-hate relationship with this diva. When she's good, (the debut album, "Nothing Broken But My Heart", the Titanic song dance remix) she's very good, but when she is bad (most of that Let's Talk About Love album, "The Power Of Love") she's horrid. But I love "Misled." Heidi and I always used to laugh uproariously at the line "but when I've been dissed, I don't spend much time on what might have been." It has that great syncopated chorus and well, Celine with attitude is always fun (although that short cropped hairstyle was one of the WORST ideas ever.) I had no idea there was a video for it though!



Supermodel (You Better Work) - RuPaul
My college roommate Rick turned me on to this song and let me tell you, he is decidedly NOT the type to be into a RuPaul song (or perhaps he is, one never knows.) Anyway, we always got an inordinately large charge out of "Supermodel," that whole "Sashay! Shantay!" was great! I bought the remix single of it and there's a couple of remixes that up the camp ante just a bit (which I didn't think possible) by turning the demand "You better work!" into "You better work, bitch!" Sadly, this is not my favorite RuPaul moment, that would have to fall the the cameos in The Brady Bunch Movie and A Very Brady Sequel. Although I bet those would be trumped if I could see Zombie Prom in which Ru plays Miss Strict.



An Innocent Man - Billy Joel
I am not what you would categorize as a huge Billy Joel fan. I knew plenty of them in college and I, of course, went along with all of them to his 1990 concert at Hilton. But I really like the An Innocent Man album. I have no idea how this would fly with Billy Joel diehards, but you know what? Who cares? There is some great songwriting and production on this record, but none are as subtle and classy as the title track. I love his soaring vocals on the chorus, hitting a note that he just can't do these days.

And let me tell you, after looking for a companion video for this, I am SO glad that I have not been moved to see him in concert recently. Eek. So we'll just let this one go without one.

Queen of the Night - Whitney Houston
This is probably the only song from The Bodyguard that did not get played into the ground back in 1993. And consequently, it's the only one I can still listen to with any regularity. Despite the fact that it was not played mercilessly until our ears bled back then, it still takes me back to that spring instantly. If there's any diva that I wish could have a big Mimi-style comeback, it's Whitney. I just hate how she has descended into this circle of drug abuse and unhealthy living. She has a knockout voice, and it's sad to see it going to waste. Hopefully she'll be back with something fantastic soon.

The video quality is poor, but here it is. Only in an alternate universe could Whitney Houston win the Best Actress Oscar.



That's it. What a trip back in time. I must get ready for work.