Joanie asked if I’d play a song at her daughter Natasha’s baby-warming party.  That sounds weird.  It was actually a 3-month birthday, I think.

Anyway, I decided I shouldn’t just play any old song, I should write one for Natasha.  And now, for her second birthday, I finally got around to recording it.  

Recording music for kids is the best.  You can put whatever you want in there.  Banjo?  Sure!  Whistling?  Definitely!  Sasquatch growl?  Do you even have to ask?  I wanted to put a gong at the end, but Aric wasn’t around and I couldn’t figure out how to use his soft-synth-sampler-deluxe.  Maybe next time.  Until then, here’s “Natasha”:

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Natasha – 2:54

Thanks to Renee for the whistling.  I’m a lousy whistler.
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Lately I’ve had the Limbo Rock song in my head. I think they were playing it on the radio, which is kind of weird. I never thought of it as a song that could stand alone, you know, without an actual limbo, but it’s got a lot of things I like in songs: hand claps, whistling, and Chubby Checker doing a bad accent.

I do take issue with one line, however: “Jack be limble Jack be quick/ Jack go under limbo stick.” The word “limbo” is used about 25 times per second. I think we get the point. The song is about the limbo. Was it really necessary to mutate “nimble” into “limble?” Bruce Willis doesn’t think so.

Meanwhile, it looks like David Hasselhoff was (at some point in his career) out to dislodge Chubby Checker’s monopoly on limbo accompaniment. Is there anything The Hoff can’t ruin?

Last week at the Double Door I played all breakup songs. I like writing breakup songs. I like playing them. I like hearing them. I just wrote a new one over the weekend. A breakup (of sorts) is the reason I started writing songs.

There’s something about them that just about everyone can relate to. I was in my car yesterday and heard the Tom Petty song “You Don’t Know How It Feels” and was all, “Yeah, you said it, Tom.” And I don’t even smoke pot.

I think it’s possible that half of all songs are about breakups. So I’m going to do a scientific experiment here: I put iTunes on shuffle and will list the next 25 songs that come up. The ones in red I’ve categorized as breakup songs. Before I get to the list, some ground rules:

1. Don’t judge my crappy taste in music. This is for science!
2. I have a couple Lucinda Williams albums in there and that might throw off the sample set since I’m pretty sure all of her songs are about a guy what done her wrong.
3. I was going to count songs about jilted romance as well, but after receiving this argument from resident music expert Kurt Hirsch, I changed my tune: “I think at least a semblance of a relationship is necessary in order for a song to be a ‘breakup song.’ I understand your ‘turned down’ = ‘break up’ hypothesis, but, at first blush, I do not think I can subscribe to it. It is a slippery slope, my friend.” So to be considered a break up song, there must be evidence of an actual relationship.
4. I’m skipping instrumentals, sound effects, anything under 30 seconds long, podcasts, jazz, classical music, Andrew Bird songs and other misc. crap in my iTunes library. I’m also skipping my songs if they happen to come up.

Here are the results:

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