Been listening to a fair bit of music the last couple of week because the weather is just not nice enough to go out walking, especially when I’m trying to get rid of the last traces of a cold.
So while listening to music, I came up with some Random Ramblings about music.
I heard the Bangles’ ‘Manic Monday’ and started thinking about what other days of the week have song titles that mention them. Just off the top of my head I came up with ‘Friday’ (by Rebecca Black), ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’, ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’, the aforementioned ‘Manic Monday’, and (stretching a bit) ‘Ruby Tuesday’.
I could not come up with any titles for Wednesday or Thursday off the top of my head. I could cheat and say the Canadian group ‘Wednesday’ qualifies, but I won’t.
Listening to ‘Friday’, which a lot of people say is a bad song (I disagree), got me thinking about long song titles, so I did some checking on the Internet.
The longest song title I found which actually charted was written by Hoagy Carmichael. The title was (deep breath) ‘I’m A Cranky Old Yank In A Clanky Old Tank On The Streets Of Yokohama With My Honolulu Mama Doin’ Those Beat-O, Beat-O, Flat-On-My-Seat-O, Hirohito Blues’.
However, it should be noted there is some controversy about the title. When Bing Crosby recorded it, he called it ‘I’m a Cranky Old Yank in a Clanky Old Tank’, and Carmichael himself supposedly said that is the actual title, and he just tacked the rest on as a joke.
Even if that’s true (and I’m not going to call Hoagy Carmichael a liar), the song title is too good not to use.
I also spent a fair bit of time listening to lyrics from songs. Some of them are quite funny, but some of them also do a great job of summing up the idea of the song in a few words.
One I keep coming back to is from the Taylor Swift song, ‘Mine’. She’s talking about why she loves the boy she’s with, and one line sums everything up: “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter”.
Do you need to know anything more about her family, how she’s held herself in growing up, and how she feels now?
The only problem I find these days when I’m listening to music is that I’m usually doing something else, like reading, while I’m doing it, so some of the great musical moments slip by me.
What do you think about this story?