Hello you fool, I love you

When I was taking Anna to school this morning, Roxette's "Fading Like A Flower (Every Time You Leave)" came on. (An aside: any song with a parenthetical portion is automatically better than it should be. It sure helped out a boatload of Samantha Fox songs.) I hadn't heard this song in forever and I had forgotten how much I really like it. It's kind of tied to a road trip I made to Kansas City in 1991 with a group of friends. It was all over the radio at the time, riding the wave of "Joyride" which had been a pretty big success despite the fact that I was always a bit lukewarm to it.

But more than that, everything Roxette will always remind me of the woman with whom I've shared my life for the last 15 years. Now that I think about it, today is probably 15 years ago to the day that we met. Heidi and I met in early November 1995 at Jeff Tadsen's housewarming party - a party that both of us almost missed for various reasons and had that happened, who knows WHAT the world would look like now. But the reason that Roxette and all their Swedish cheese will have the Heidi connection is because Roxette was pretty much the ONLY pop music that Heidi listened to when I met her. Was Roxette even having hits in 1995? I can't remember. In a sea of Deep Forest and Clannad and Enya and other what we refer to as "woo-woo" music, there was Roxette. Clearly, I had work to do.

It wasn't because I thought her choice of Roxette was a bad one. I always liked Roxette enough, but never enough to actually purchase any of their albums. They were a staple of my senior year of high school, with hits like "The Look"(Mary, I owned the cassingle of that song!), "Dangerous", and "Dressed for Success" which my friend Holly always referred to as "Undressed for Some Sex." I was less impressed with the song "Joyride" as I found it rather annoying but all the other singles from the album Joyride were pleasant, especially the previously mentioned "Fading Like A Flower."

Within the first couple months of dating (which commenced after the three weeks it took me to call her after our initial meeting - YES, SHE STILL MARRIED ME. It's amazing.) I had made for her a mix tape of the definitive Madonna songs. Now, that tape would be woefully incomplete. Within a few days, she had responded in kind with a corresponding mix tape of the definitive Roxette. It was with that tape that I was exposed to some of Roxette's deeper album cuts and how I discovered what would become my favorite Roxette songs. They were all dubbed from the tapes of Roxette's albums which blew me away because I thought that dubbing from a tape had gone the way of the dodo bird by that time. I wasted no time in going out to the now-defunct BJ's Records in Iowa City and I picked up every last one of Roxette's albums for her on CD. If I recall correctly, it was part of a Valentine's Day present. And as a bonus, inside the copy of Crash! Boom! Bang! was a live bootleg album. This excited me more than anything else and Heidi had a good poker face and put up with my excitement because she has never really been a fan of concert recordings and really couldn't have possibly cared less.

But on that tape was the Roxette song "Run To You" which, at that point in my life, spoke very strongly to me and really summed up how I felt about the fledgling relationship we had at the time. I didn't know there was a video for it until just this morning. Naturally all Roxette videos on YouTube have embedding disabled (seriously?) but I did find it elsewhere.


Roxette - Run To You

I don't know what happened to "The Definitive Roxette" mix tape. I know I wouldn't have consciously gotten rid of it. It's probably around here somewhere just waiting for me to find it.

It's pretty safe to say that had I not met Heidi, I wouldn't have spent the last hour listening to Roxette. And honestly, I can't imagine this morning without it.

Hello you fool. I still love you. Happy 15th anniversary of meeting. Ish.

Ripping out the root of love

When you talk about big female voices, one that never seems to get mentioned is Toni Childs. And this is truly a shame, because she has a voice as big as...well, just about anything. The only song of hers that made any kind of waves at all (and by waves I mean ripples) is 1988's "Don't Walk Away."



During the late fall/early winter of my junior year of high school, I was OBSESSED with Toni Childs' "Don't Walk Away." And how could I not be? A powerful female voice, what sounds like a minor key (although I can't independently prove that) and a great GREAT hook in "ripping out the root of love." I can't imagine this song in anyone else's hands. No one, but NO ONE could do that "Don't walk awaaaaaeeeeee" like she does. Despite my love for it (or perhaps because of it), it barely made a dent on the U.S. charts, peaking in the 70s or something like that, although it did have a nice run on the Modern Rock chart. This song deserved so much more exposure than it got which really is sad.

I discovered this song when I was in the midst of completely eschewing pop radio (mostly in vain) for what I had determined was more "artistic" fare. This was the fall that I discovered 10,000 Maniacs, Tracy Chapman, Edie Brickell and other artists that don't fit in very well with the expected Dan mold of cheesy dance pop. It was, as I have detailed in the past, partially the influence of and partially an attempt to impress one of my best high school friends, Kelly. I've talked about Kelly before in my Tracy Chapman post I did a few years back. At the time I wrote the post, I had really lost track of her. In the time that's elapsed since that post, we've reconnected on Facebook and she also paid a visit to Ames this summer during which we went to the always fantastic Great Plains Pizza and got all caught up on the last umpteen years.

Kelly and I never saw eye to eye on Toni Childs. She always likened her voice to a sharp knife cutting through bread. I guess I can see that. It's certainly an acquired taste and not everyone's cup of tea. She did, however, help me to acquire the Toni Childs CD Union which was never in a million years going to be at K-Mart in Carroll, IA. She picked it up for me on a trip to Omaha and then navigated the icy streets of Carroll to deliver it to my house. Union is one of those albums that I always forget about. I remember being less than impressed with it - nothing was as good as "Don't Walk Away" and even after only 9 songs, her voice started to grate. But when I do rediscover it, I always like it more than I remember. But "Don't Walk Away" is still the standout. It was even nominated for a Grammy that year for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance amidst four other standout nominees (Tina Turner for Tina: Live In Europe, Pat Benatar for "All Fired Up", Melissa Etheridge for "Bring Me Some Water" and Sinead O'Connor for The Lion & The Cobra.) Tina ended up winning it like she did every year during that time period.

I've mentioned before that during our junior year of high school, Kelly and I kept a journal together. It was a Mead notebook that we passed back and forth and we took turns writing in it. There were two volumes total and somehow I ended up in possession of both volumes. It's been 22 years since we initially wrote them and some of the pencil is starting to fade. It makes me think that I need to scan the pages into the computer so that they are preserved for posterity. Not that anyone would want to read them but us, but they do represent a fragment of time - an early version of this very blog, if you will - that is now passed. It was a time that I tried without much success to escape the grips of cheesy pop. At 38, I'm still in cheesy pop's clutches and I know better than to try to get away now. However, while looking through those journals, I did find this, and considering my comment about knives and bread, I thought was appropriate for this post.

That's Kelly adding "the edge serrate" as she was the biggest INXS fan I have ever known. I love how Union was "my next tape need." Little did I know that the CD player was about to arrive at Christmas that year.

And really, to be totally honest, if Jason and I ever get our respective acts together, this could be the first entry in our It Should Have Been A Hit! blog.

The clock is another demon

I haven't listened to 10,000 Maniacs' Our Time In Eden in full since 1994. Ever since then, I haven't been able to stomach it. But tonight, I have listened to it in its entirety and I must say that I quite enjoyed it.

The reasons for its "persona non grata role" in my life are, as most things seem to be, complicated. It has a lot to do with my oft-told story about how my college roommate overplayed 10,000 Maniacs Unplugged CD. Many songs from Our Time In Eden were featured on that CD, and it kind of suffered by association. By the time he was done with it, I never wanted to hear most of those songs again, at least not in the unplugged format. As I have detailed before, we shared a close but antagonistic relationship, and even as recently as a couple years ago, whenever I tried to listen to the album, especially those tracks that crossed over to the Unplugged album, I had an overwhelming urge to turn it off. I also supremely hated how everyone declared themselves 10,000 Maniacs "fans" based on their love of "These Are Days" - which is admittedly a good song, but I have to wonder how many of those people bothered with the back catalog.

Our Time In Eden also never resonated with me like In My Tribe did, or even Blind Man's Zoo (which I liked significantly less than In My Tribe). In My Tribe made my top 5 favorite albums of all time list when I did that a couple years back, and honestly, it's still in there. As albums go, it is still one that I can listen to start-to-finish. It's more than a collection of songs, it's a cohesive whole, one that they tried to replicate to lesser success, in my opinion, with Blind Man's Zoo. In My Tribe, like so much of the music that has held on for me, came at a critical juncture in my life that I think even back then I recognized. It is an album that is like the closest of friends - you know just what it's going to elicit in you and you know exactly how to interact with it. Our Time In Eden, which came at no less critical of a juncture in my life, really failed to capture that feeling like In My Tribe did. For the longest time, whenever I would listen to it, I would cringe about bad decisions and failed relationships, which led to its decade and a half banishment.

But listening to Our Time In Eden tonight reminded me of the great songs on it - it goes so far beyond "These Are Days." Even "Candy Everybody Wants" which was horrendously overplayed and the chorus of which I can still hear my roommate singing, ("hey...hey...give 'em what they want") holds up. But songs like "Noah's Dove", "Eden" and "Circle Dream"? Gorgeous. It's hard to believe that they used to elicit such strong negative responses in me. It just goes to show that sometimes even after you think you've lost the music to a bad experience, it can come back around. Maybe there's hope for Girls Aloud yet.

It makes me want to head to the library before work tomorrow and pick up the Unplugged CD. But I don't know that I'm quite ready for that yet. I will never forgive the arrangement of "Eat For Two." A driving song about teenage pregnancy became a dirge on the Unplugged album, and when I played the original for my roommate after hearing the Unplugged version, he disliked it intensely and preferred the hideous Unplugged version. There's just no accounting for taste.

10,000 Maniacs |MTV Music

I wish Natalie's voice hadn't completely gone in the crapper. I could use a good 10,000 Maniacs reunion right about now.