Sometimes a song doesn’t have to necessarily evoke a particular, specific reaction in its playing or construction. It doesn’t have to speak to the situation in its words or style. It just has to be at the right place and the right time, and enhance what is already there. The album Reach the Beach by […]
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Random thoughts, settings, characters, situations, perhaps leading somewhere
File: Snapsongs
Summer of 1996. I was living with two roommates in a funky little house in central Austin, where the floor in the living room had an odd wobble near the kitchen and you couldn’t run the air conditioning and dryer at the same time or else you’d blow a breaker. Besides that, it was a […]
How do I put this kindly? Well, there’s no way to do it. I am probably, as one of my high school friends told me, one of the whitest people in the world. I am a technical guy, a computer geek, a space nut, fascinated with processes and cerebral complications. I can’t dance, I can’t […]
It’s a pretty singular image in my mind: I am hurtling through the High Plains dark on Route 2, the scenic route across Nebraska that evidently includes the pathway of Col. Wm Custer on his rendezvous with destiny. I am driving an elderly black BMW 528e and there’s not much rain hitting the windshield because […]
The first impression that comes to me is heat. Heat and the sound of a Diesel engine. This was the soundtrack of a late summer, a summer in the cusp of the 90s, an era I spent quite a bit of time driving around in a ’81 Diesel VW Rabbit. That particular model of automobile […]
Perhaps it is a truism, but people tend to forget: children remember things. They also understand more than you expect. Perhaps their understanding has gaps or naivetes, but the basics are usually there. I say this because of my memory of one of my favorite songs from the early 1980s. I was all of eight […]
2013-01-05 ::
Edward Semblance //
Snapsongs
Snapsongs: “Spirits in the Material World” by the Police
Snapsongs: “Spirits in the Material World” by the Police
The word that comes to mind when I think of my first reaction to this song is: unearthly. Why? I’m not sure. I was in fifth grade. On first thought one could say, What would a fifth-grader know about unearthly? But it’s not like nine-year-olds never hear music. By that age I’d had a long […]
So a new concept here is something I’m calling “snapsongs”, in which I do a quick sketch of the scene a particular song evokes in my head when I hear it. These songs may not be my favorite, or even ones I like terribly much, but for some reason they evoke a specific time, place […]