Category: Music

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Recently, I was reminded of a conversation about songs with twist endings. Like a Twilight Zone episode, they’ll set up one situation and then in the final verse, switch things around to a completely different perspective.

One example would be Vertical Horizon’s breakthrough hit, “Everything You Want.” The chorus repeats:

He’s everything you want,
He’s everything you need.
He’s everything inside of you that you wish you could be.
He says all the right things at exactly the right times,
But he means nothing to you and you don’t know why.

Most of the song presents this sort of detached, third-party view of someone who perhaps is concerned for a friend, but that’s all. Then the bridge hits, with lines like, “It’s only what you’re asking for,” and the intensity builds, until you get to the final chorus:

I am everything you want,
I am everything you need.
I am everything inside of you that you wish you could be.
I say all the right things at exactly the right times,
But I mean nothing to you and I don’t know why.

It suddenly becomes clear that the speaker is himself right in the middle of things, and the woman’s affections are in fact extremely important to him.

Another one would be the Jim Steinman song “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad,” made famous by Meat Loaf. The speaker keeps pleading with a woman that…

I want you
I need you
But there ain’t no way I’m ever gonna love you
Now don’t be sad
‘Cause two out of three ain’t bad

At the end of the song, he explains “There’s only one girl that I will ever love” and that, when she left him, “She kept on telling me…” at which point he launches into the refrain. Suddenly, this guy who sounded unreasonable throughout the entire song turns out to have been on the receiving end of the same dysfunction in a previous relationship—and he’s still messed up by it.

What other songs can you think of that do this?

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The Value of Space Exploration, via Phil Plait.

Neil Gaiman on The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, a painting by a madman that’s inspired its share of stories.

And from Comics Worth Reading, our WTF entry for the day: Paradise by the GoPhone Light. It’s a commercial done in the style of a music video, featuring Meat Loaf and Tiffany as the parents of a kid who wants a GoPhone. Completely surreal, especially once the random explosions start.

It’s just occurred to me that, aside from it being some sort of cell phone, I have no idea what a GoPhone is. [/me types “gophone” into Google] Ah, OK. Pre-paid cellphone. Meh. (And now I’m imagining how much spam is going to get posted to this thread. *sigh* )

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So, what comic book event of the summer has me the most excited? Is it Marvel’s Secret Invasion?  DC’s Final Crisis? The release of The Flash Companion? Geoff Johns returning to The Flash for Rogues’ Revenge?

Well, that last one is close, but it’s actually Comic Book Tattoo, the upcoming ~500-page anthology of comic book stories inspired by Tori Amos’ music announced last December, and Comic Book Resources has a huge article about the project, including art.

(as last time, via Colleen Doran)

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1. Fountains of Wayne‘s song, “No Better Place,” popped up on the iPod today. There’s a great line that made us both laugh when we heard them at a concert several years ago, opening for some band that one or the other of us wanted to see:

It may be the whiskey talking
But the whiskey says “I miss you” everyday.

2. The “dream control” sequence from Queensryche’s “Silent Lucidity” sounds really weird in headphones.

3. Heard a cover of Aerosmith’s “Dream On” in Red Robin a few nights ago. Sounded like sort of like Amy Lee (Evanescence) if she were a soprano. Googling suggests that it might be Kelly Sweet. (Edit: After grabbing her version of the song—99¢ is a great price for impulse buying—I’m almost certain this was the one we heard.) She was accompanied by our waitress—but not when she was at out table.

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They're Everywhere!I just discovered that They’re Everywhere, the album featuring the Flash-themed song, “The Ballad of Barry Allen,” is now available on Amazon’s MP3 store. The band, Jim’s Big Ego, is headed by the nephew of legendary Flash artist Carmine Infantino, who did the cover artwork on the album.

And yes, the song’s actually good!

It’s been available on iTunes (which is how I originally bought it) and CD before, but it’s worth mentioning since Amazon’s music downloads, like Slabster’s, are just plain MP3s. No DRM, no account activation, no need to authorize computers or stick with one company’s player—hardware or software.

There’s also a fan music video, “Seems so slow,” that uses clips from the Justice League and Teen Titans cartoons:

See also: Flash Music.

P.S. Would you believe this is the first time I’ve actually embedded a YouTube video in this blog? I’m so behind the times, I know…

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Now this is cool: Image Comics will be releasing a graphic novel anthology with stories based on Tori Amos songs next summer! And Colleen Doran is illustrating one of the stories! (Her blog is where I heard about it.)

We went to Tori’s concert on Saturday at the Grove of Anaheim. The standing-room show was good, though there were some snafus getting to it, made worse by the fact that they opened the doors about 45 minutes late. So late, in fact, that they gave up on security checks and just started letting people in. By the time it started moving, the line snaked all the way along the side of the theater and down at least one side of the (rather spacious) parking lot.

Her current album, American Doll Posse, is based around a fictional quintet of singer/songwriters, each based on a different facet of her personality, and she performed as three different personas: Pip, Santa (no relation), and Tori. Which should have been more fun, but there was just a bit too much self-parody in the performance.

She brought a band again, which I think helps keep her from the slow-everything-down tendency she showed on the Originial Sinsuality tour (Katie calls it “elf disease,” after the way the elves of Lothlorien speak in the Lord of the Rings movies). Except for an endless vamp at the end of “Waitress,” this concert moved much more than the last two we’d seen.

It was good to hear stuff from Choirgirl Hotel again. It’s been notably missing from the last few concerts we’ve been to. And there was a surprising amount of stuff from her first two albums as well. (Full set list at Undented.)

I’ve seen Tori in concert 6 times: Once in 1999 at Irvine Meadows, when she toured on a double bill with Alanis Morissette, twice on the Scarlet’s Walk tour from 2002-2003 (Universal Amphitheater & the Pond), twice on the Original Sinsuality tour in 2005 (Royce Hall & the Greek), and this show at the Grove. My favorite was the Scarlet’s Walk tour. I reviewed the Universal show during the first few months of this blog, though I don’t seem to have written anything about the one at the Pond.

Update: The Beat has more on the comic project, including a title, Comic Book Tattoo and additional contributors.

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Phantom of the Paradise (album art)Watched Phantom of the Paradise this weekend. It’s a bizarre 1974 mash-up between The Phantom of the Opera and Faust set in a satire of the 1970s music industry.

The movie casts Paul Williams (who wrote all the music for the film) as a reclusive recording mogul, Swan, who steals a struggling songwriter’s pop cantata based on Faust to open his new music palace, the Paradise. The songwriter tries to correct the “misunderstanding,” ends up beaten, jailed, and ultimately scarred when he gets caught in a record press trying to destroy it. He sneaks into the newly-opened club, dons a mask, and alternately pursues revenge on the man who stole his music, and his obsession with launching the career of a young singer he befriended earlier in the film (bringing in the Phantom/Christine dynamic).

Believe me, it’s stranger than it sounds.

Anyway, afterward, I went looking on IMDB (as I often do) to see what else the various actors had been in. Somehow I ended up on a horror movie review site, 1000 Misspent Hours, which gave the movie 3½ stars and basically considered the music to be the main failing (though, since it’s a satire, that’s largely intentional. There’s a reason I only have about 3 of the film’s songs on my iPod).

Phantom of the Opera (1943 movie poster)Something interesting I learned was that the Phantom’s origin is actually derived from the 1943 Phantom of the Opera movie with Claude Raines, which, judging by its review, has about as much to do with the original novel as, well, Phantom of the Paradise does. I’m mainly familiar with the original silent version and the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, both of which track the Gaston Leroux novel fairly well. (Edit: Now that I think about it, the 1943 origin also explains the “Acid: Do not throw in face!” gag from Gremlins 2.)

Rocky Horror Picture ShowI do have to take issue with some of his criticisms of Rocky Horror. Not that they aren’t valid, but that several things he finds inexplicable—the thin plot, nonsensical showstoppers, and how the cult following could possibly have started—are easily explained by the fact that it’s based on a stage play, The Rocky Horror Show (also explaining why the movie is The Rocky Horror Picture Show), which sets up a completely different dynamic and expectations. Interesting that the main venue for the film seems to be the midnight showings, which seek to recapture the experience of live theater.

I found the site’s rating system interesting: not only does he have a 1–5 star scale, but he also assigns negative stars for movies that are “so bad, they’re good.” So of course I had to see which films he gave -5 stars, meaning “So bad, it’s genius.” I ended up reading around 10 or so reviews on Sunday night, some of them for movies I will probably never, ever see.