‘Til this one ends, then it begins.

 Day 18 – A song that you wish you heard on the radio.

The Consequence of Sounds.

Here’s one of my absolute favourites from one of my favourite artists. It’s not on any of her international albums and I’ve never heard it on the radio, which is a shame because the lyrics are spectacular.

Furthermore, my sneaky way of getting out of writing on this song, despite its awesomeness and all I could say about it, is to link you back to a piece of writing I posted on my blog from first year uni.

http://blackingoutthefiction.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/if-i-hear-another-song-about-angels/

I first heard Regina about six years ago, and she’s still one of the artists that gets her entire discography on my ipod. I saw her in concert about a year ago and might in fact have cried at seeing her in the flesh and hearing her amazingness live with my own ears.

My rhyme ain’t good just yet,
My brain and tongue just met,
And they ain’t friends, so far,
My words don’t travel far,
They tangle in my hair,
And tend to go nowhere,
They grow right back inside,
Right past my brain and eyes
Into my stomach juice
Where they don’t serve much use,
No healthy calories,
Nutrition values.
And I absorb back in
The words right through my skin
They sit there festering inside my bowels

The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds
The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds

Got a soundtrack in my mind,
All the time. Kids-
Screamin’ from too much beat up
And they don’t even rhyme,
They just stand there, on a street corner,
Skin tucked in
And meat side out and shot,
And I’d like to turn them down
But there ain’t no knob.
Run into picket fences
Not into picket lines.
All this hippie-shit for the 60′s
And another cliche` for our time. But,
But a one of these days your heart
Will just stop ticking,
And they sorta just don’t find you till your cubicle is reeking.

The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds
The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds
Ahh ah ah ah ahh ah ah ah

Did you know that the gravedigger’s still
Gettin’ stuck in the machine
Even tough it’s a whole other daydream.
It’s another town it’s another world,
Where the kids are asleep, where the loans are paid
And the lawns are mowed.
Whad’ya think?
All the gravediggers were gone?
Just cause one song is done
There’s always another one,
Waiting right around the bend,
Till this one ends,
Then it begins
Squeaky clean, then it starts all over again.

The weather report keeps on
Tossing and turning,
Predicting and warning,
And warning and warning of,
Possible leakage from news publications and,
Possible leakage from news TV stations.
That very same morning right next to her coffee
She noticed some bleeding and heard hollow coughing and
National Geographic was being too graphic,
When all she had wanted to know was the traffic
“The worlds got a nosebleed” it said
“And we’re flooding but we keep on cutting
The trees and the forests!”
And we keep on paying those freaks on the TV,
Who claim they will save us but want to enslave us.
And sweating like demons they scream through our speakers
But we leave the sound on ’cause silence is harder.
And no one’s the killer and no one’s the martyr
The world that has made us can no longer contain us
And profits are silent then rotting away ’cause

If I hear another song about angels

Regina Spektor’s new album is coming out in six days – yep, that’s right, six days! I’m not sure if it’ll be in Australia then too, but I hope so! Otherwise a download will have to suffice until I can get my hands on the real thing.

I love introducing people to Regina when I get the chance. The first time I heard her was at Emily’s place and I remember being struck by how beautiful and unusual her voice was. In first year I wrote a ‘music memoir’ piece for creative writing. Even though I don’t really like it, I’ll paste a paragraph or two in since it explains my Regina obsession:

” The Consequence of Sounds.

October, 2006.
Six weeks of high school left, and my favourite time of day is the walk home from the bus stop. Juliet, my thirteen year old sister and I, share the earphones of my ipod between us and dawdle on our way; stopping to get hot chips at the milk bar, skirting around the footy oval and weaving our way through the naked trees by the tennis courts. We are listening to Regina Spektor’s Soviet Kitsch album. On it’s cover, Regina is surrounded by Russian Babushka dolls, swigging from a bottle of vodka and looking mischeviously back at the camera. She is Russian/American, growing up in Moscow and now living in New York. Her lyrics are a minefield of pop-culture and literature references; she sings about everything from Hemingway to Oedipus to Samson and Delilah. Her songs are thoughtful and intelligent, and she is the first artist introducted to my insular musical world that makes me want to scream ‘oh my God, this is music!’ everytime I listen to her. I am an immediate convert only seconds after hearing her mix of classical piano and ecclectic punk at a friends place. Unexpectedly, Juliet my jumps on my bandwagon. When we get home, we grab out the bongo drums, instil ourselves in the lounge room by the piano and begin rapping out to one of Regina’s crazy songs, ‘Pavlov’s Daughter’ or ‘Consequence of sounds‘.

March, 2007.
I am at university and fast becoming, in the words of Regina an ‘incurable humanist’. I feel liberated from the suffocating environment of my small Christian high school. Although i had a great group of friends there, I always felt like a square peg in a round hole. At uni, everyone is different -there is no ‘right’ way to be. I no longer feel that I have to fit into a mould. I am starting to think for myself, really think, for the first time. I can behave how I want, wear what I want. Uni is a forum for self discovery. I am overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge in the world and how little of it I posess myself. But the prospect of how much there is to learn thrills me. I find myself with a ridiculous grin on my face just by being among people who are, although all so different to me, so like me. I want to jump up and down in my tutes with sheer joy at the discovery that other people think in the same way as me, have the same questions as me, appreciated the same things. I sit there and listen to people describe and bring to life thoughts and feelings that I share. I want to shout ‘Yes! I feel that too!’ It’s like someone has written‘You are not alone!’ across the sky. “

In retrospect it’s somewhat dramatic, and I think that piece was a lot more about me than the music (probably why I didn’t get the best mark for it). It’s interesting how music becomes the background of life though. Looking back, you can connect a song or artist with a certain part of your life, and all the associated feelings or emotions that were present at that time. My music taste seems to be constantly evolving. There’s some CD’s that I don’t really like to listen to anymore because they remind me of low times in life. But Regina has been one artists who has had a big effect on me in both happy and sad times. I think it comes down to the fact that she embodies the different = beautiful ideal. And I like that alot.

This is the music video for Laughing With.