Category: Music

This weekend, I finally sprung the 60 bucks for The Magnetic Fields’ 3-CD set, “69 Love Songs.” With tax, it came to $68.99, just shy of $69, as the store clerk so wittily pointed out. My verdict, based only on Vol.1, is good, very good. Stephin Merritt’s voice takes getting used to, and the arrangements are pretty spare, but the guy has a way with words, and some really beautiful music. It’s all about the love, baby!

Ok, you knew I was going to do this. I have to add a few more discs to the “Desert Island Discs” from a few days ago. I said I would, and here I am. At least I didn’t say a hundred discs, but ten is kind of limiting, don’t you think? Here are a few more I couldn’t live without:

• The Smiths-The Queen is Dead
• Jane’s Addiction-Nothing’s Shocking
• The B-52’s-The B-52’s

I also want to tell you about all the shiny new CDs I buy here. Actually, it’s more for me to keep track, but you get to hear about it, too. Not much new that I wanted right now, so I bought a few CDs that I’d previously only had on vinyl. I usually don’t like doing it, but it has to be done. Most of my vinyl is all gone, and I have a huge box of cassette tapes that will also have to go soon. Here’s what I bought last Saturday:

• The Cure-Staring at the Sea: The Singles (usually don’t like “Greatest Hits” type packages, but hey, it will tide me over until I can afford the rest of their CDs)
• The Cure-Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (still mad that they left off the song “Hey You!” to turn a 2 record set into one CD)
• The Cure-Pornography (now watch the hits to my blog go way up!! I love search engines!!)
• Weezer-Weezer (this was 8 bucks, don’t you just love/hate that? happy it’s cheap, sad that it ended up in the “bargain bin.”)

Now, don’t just sit there, buy some T-shirts from Heather!! And if you feel sorry for me, since shipping to Canada costs $20 (and those are U.S. dollars!), send one to me, too!

I was thinking this weekend about the concept of my Desert Island Discs. You know, assuming you had a Discman with a case of batteries or something, which CDs would you take with you to a desert island? And I’m not talking about which discs you “should” take, what other people think are classic records, but which ones you listen to a lot and couldn’t live without. Limit yourself to 10, and no Greatest Hits collections allowed. Here are mine. In no particular order:

• Pixies-Doolittle
• Pixies-Surfer Rosa
• The The-Soul Mining
• Bowie-Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
• Rheostatics-Whale Music
• Spoon-Telephono
• The Wedding Present-George Best
• The Waterboys-This is the Sea
• Stevie Wonder-Songs in the Key of Life (I guess this counts as two because it’s two discs)

What are yours?