#I think Death and The Spell are my favorite songs off this album | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mlobsters · 2 months

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supernatural s15e3 the rupture (w. robert berens)

can't believe we're still doing this dumbass hell ghost plotline.

this music is awful. is generic and nonsensical to the vibe of the show. it's giving like. in line for space mountain plus 20 year old video game? sigh! (jay gruska, to no one's surprise)

very pretty shot. painting-like

DEAN I mean, this whole mess, you know? This – This sloppy-ass ghostpocalypse – that's Chuck's ending? No. No, I don't think so. After everything that he has put us through? I'll be damned if I'm gonna let some glorified fanboy get the last word.

sloppy-ass indeed

BELPHEGOR It's just a nickname. Doesn't matter. Thing's actually more of a horn. Anyways, when Lilith began sending demons off to Earth to do her bidding, there was a little problem. I mean, yeah, she commended absolute loyalty in Hell, but there was no guarantee that once her minions were topside, that they wouldn't just take advantage of the situation. She needed to control her flock. So —

sure, why not! make up some extra lilith lore

ROWENA A few ingredients, nothing too exotic – lavender, myrrh, the skull of an owl, quiet to perform the spell, and an assistant. Dibs on Samuel. SAM Er, what? ROWENA You're as close to a seasoned witch as we've got in this lot.

team witch!sam

BELPHEGOR I want protection. Muscle. DEAN Yeah, Cas'll go. DEAN You've been to Hell before. CASTIEL Well, it sounds like I don't have a choice. DEAN Good. Great. Go team.

way to be an ass, dean. but also, who else is gonna do it? they're out of people? so we're just gonna make up some hurt/drama.

LOL ripped out ketch's heart? okay. i was never engaged with his little character rehab project so, whatever.

BELPHEGOR You know, your part in all this is, uh, pretty dangerous. I mean, you could die, get trapped in Hell. Your friends might never see you again. Funny, 'cause, uh, they didn't seem to think twice about it.

don't worry, cas. this is all fucking nonsense

BELPHEGOR Okay, you got me. I wanted company. I wanted your company. What? Shouldn't we at least try and be friends? Sam and Dean, they seem to be coming around. I think I'm, uh, growing on them. You know, like a cancer. CASTIEL You are not growing on anyone. Sam and Dean are just using you. Don't mistake that for caring about you, because I can assure you they don't. BELPHEGOR Wow. You learn that the hard way?

really going for the jugular of insecurities here

BELPHEGOR What is it, Cas, really? This, uh, seething animosity.

LOL it's like the nin lyrics to terrible lie!! (pretty hate machine is one of my all-time favorite albums, all bangers no skips)

(Hey God!) Why are you doing this to me? Am I not living up to what I'm supposed to be? Why am I seething with this animosity? (Hey God!) I think you owe me a great big apology

very plotline appropriate too haha

so is this when we find out what angle this demon is working or? LOL sucking up the hell souls with his little horn so he can become god. just like cas and the purgatory souls! like father, like son. dropping characters like flies, this episode

so rowena is going to sacrifice herself like crowley did? i like rowena, but i never was on board with her sudden character flip flop, same with crowley or ketch. gonna take dark to gray characters and oh yeah, we love the good guys now too and we're willing to die for the cause. i think we've had more time to attach to rowena post-flipflop at least? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i was getting this clip for the bad music but dean's increasingly confused and stunned what??s made me laugh

i mean, whatever, man. this doesn't seem like the clearest case of prophecy but whatever, it works, sure. god, the music for this is AWFUL. i usually laugh off jay's bad music but this is insulting to rowena. she deserves better death music :p

well. rowena also got a little swan song diving into the pit moment.

dean asks how he's doing, deflect deflect. the winchester way

DEAN We did it, though, man. It's over. God threw one last apocalypse at us, and we beat it. SAM Yeah. DEAN What you did… Rowena… You didn't have a choice. SAM I know.

how very madison

CASTIEL The plan changed, Dean. Something went wrong. You know this. Something always goes wrong. DEAN Yeah, why does that something always seem to be you?

jesus, dean. that's way nastier than necessary. he can get so mean when he's upset

CASTIEL You used to trust me, give me the benefit of the doubt. Now you can barely look at me. My powers are failing, and – and I've tried to talk to you, over and over, and you just don't want to hear it. You don't care. I'm… dead to you. You still blame me for Mary.

powers failing? wha? ok. when sam and dean talked, they were taking some of the responsibility for not dealing with soulless!jack better, not just only blaming cas? this is a very dramatic breakup situation that i was not expecting

CASTIEL Well, I don't think there's anything left to say. DEAN Where you going? CASTIEL Jack's dead. Chuck's gone. You and Sam have each other. I think it's time for me to move on.

death of a child messes everything up, i get that. but this conflict between dean and cas about mary feels artificially amplified. forever my beef with how they did the friendship between cas and dean

on the wiki:

Part of the music known as "Americana" or the Winchester Family Theme by Jay Gruska, plays as Castiel tells Dean he is leaving.

LOL oh my god the mushy music (see my extensive tag entries 🥴) has a name! i mean, duh, of course it has a name. but i never have bothered to look into the original score soundtracks. and the original score basically never got talked about on the wiki in the episode pages until maybe the last season or so would mention the composer. i just think it's hilarious. i kind of, true to my desire to consume this show semi-in a bubble, have avoided looking into the music too much because i'm just absorbing and observing as i go (and bitching, so much bitching)

first time i noticed it was 8x16, when dean was praying to cas to look out for sam because he was clearly getting hurt in the trials

#supernatural #spnwatch #spn 15x03 #spn clip #robert berens #spn musical score #spn mushy music #jay gruska

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dreamland-ivy-reads · 7 months

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spell out your username with songs

I got tagged by the loveliest @multiimoments and @emjayeingray to spell out my URL with song titles. It took me forever because it's so long

I'm supposed to tag people but really consider yourself tagged if you see this because tagging gives me social anxiety lol

D - Don't Blame Me by Taylor Swift, this song live is basically like an out of body experience, and I can't wait for Rep (TV) This is me asking, begging, for the live version to drop

R - Rhiannon by Fleetwood Mac, the live 1966 version from the deluxe version. I have grown to reallly really like and listen to Fleetwood Mac andd this song was the first that I hadn't heard in other places

E - Evermore by Taylor Swift, the piano part towards the end of the song makes me think of sunlight and all things light, and I'm an Evermore girlie I wasn't sure about the piano picking up at first but then it just clicked in my brain and I'm obsessed

A - A&W by Lana Del Rey, Am I super late to the Lana train? Absolutely. But I have finally seen the error of my ways. Mainly I stopped judging her music on the one single I heard, Summer Time Sadness which I HATED, also I stopped avoiding things because other people liked them This was the first album that came out since I've begun to listen to her, and this is my favorite song off of it

M - Mermaids by Florence and The Machine, this song is EVERYTHING, I'm absolutely obsessed with it and have been since it released. It's like my little hyper fixation. Florence can do no wrong.

L - Little Freak by Harry Styles, I loved this song the moment I heard it, and I actually realy relate to the idea of the song. It was a crime this song didn't make the set list

A - Another Brick in the Wall pt 2 by Pink Floyd, I had a whole classic rock stage where I went back to listen to all the classic songs and this one was arguably my favorite of them all (and it still is if i'm honest)

N - No Light, No Light by Florence and The Machine, This song is literally Feyre in ACOTAR and I love a good book to music connection If I can't relate to it then I can find someone I've read about

D - Difficult by Gracie Abrams, this song has been so important in my self-healing journey Ironic in a way with the lyrics I know I was very lucky that Gracie opened at my Eras concert

I - I Want You (She's So Heavy) by The Beatles, favorite Beatles song ever! This song can come up on shuffle with any vibe and it will always become the vibe. I am literally incapable of skipping this song

V - Voulez Vous by Abba, is Mamma Mia one of my favorite comfort movies? Yes. Did they get me to listen to Abba? Absolutely. Do I also listen to the movie soundtrack? 100%

Y - Year In Review by The Black Keys, I'd say the Black Keys are one of my now core bands that I know I'll always like amd listen to, and they have quite a few songs that I relate to personally or just absolutely love the sound of this one is kinda both

R - Regret Me by Daisy Jones and The Six, I totally did include a fake band from a show based on a book. Sorry, not sorry because they're going to be in my top played this year for my wrapped. I literally can't bring myself to stop listening to them though

E - everything I wanted by Billie Eilish, probably one of my favorite Billie songs

A - Angel Of Small Death & The Codeine Scene by Hozier, I'll be honest and say that I had been meaning to listen to Hozier for YEARS but somehow I always forgot or didn't get to it. BUT now that I have thx Daylist I am kicking myself for not doing it sooner because the hype was real and warranted

D - Do I Wanna Know by Arctic Monkeys, it was my first introduction to them as a band so this song has a special place as does the peak 2014 Tumblr era but you know without the toxicity

S - Supermassive Black Hole by Muse, the Twilight scene with this song is ICONIC for a reason, also I used to have the DVD as a kid and it has the Wembley performance of this song and another Muse song, and when I tell you I had them on repeat, I mean it Siriusly hehe I'm sure I saw it a 17377274793 times

Did I have to be this thorough? Probably not, oops

#usernamegame?#usernames #music

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nerdy-alto · 9 months

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Curse you, AC/DC, Mormonism, and/or Laziness

(In honor of Twitter's continued death throes, I figured why not repost one of the favorite long-form things I've written.)

I listened to a lot of music growing up. As the oldest kid, most of what I listened to in my very early childhood was my parent’s music; Linda Ronstadt, Doobie Brothers, Barry Manilow and various classical composers. It was a mark of my growing independence when I got my parents cast-off hi fi systems and was able to find my own radio station to listen to. And boy, did I listen to it. When we ran out of Star Wars topics to cover during recess we talked music. My big favorites were Duran Duran, or at least any band that wore make-up and had keyboards. Beyond the obvious and well-documented prepubescent attraction to non-masculine dudes, what totally attracted me to certain songs was their utter incomprehensability.

Telegram force and ready I knew this was a big mistake There’s a fine line drawing my senses together And I think it’s about to break If I listen close I can hear them singers oh-oh-oh Voices in your body coming through on the radio-oh-oh The union of the snake is on the climb Moving up it’s gonna race it’s gonna break through the borderline

Seriously, wtf does this even mean? But it didn’t matter to me, because this wasn’t your ordinary, Barry Manilow type song about some girl named Mandy, or dead showgirls (1) – this was deep. And maybe I didn’t understand it now, but when I got older – maybe mature enough to have a boyfriend, or wear makeup, or have a boyfriend who wore makeup it would all become clear to me, and I would listen to these songs with a profound understanding. Yes, I’d surely cogitate, this is the Union of the Snake breaking through borderlines. Good thing I got that telegram force!

I can hear your cries of protest now – But surely you weren’t an idiot, nerdycellist, why did you just accept that kind of nonsense? To which I reply, Why thank you, no, I was of course a very smart child (2) but those crucial years of cerebral cortex development were marred by Mormonism. (3) Among Mormonism’s many fine doctrines and articles and rules and crap is the concept of “the milk before the meat”. Both the History and Theology of Mormonism is sometimes less than salubrious (mountain meadows massacre), and frequently insanely wacky (Adam-God doctrine). Since Mormonism’s also big on converting people, they try and keep the crazy shit from the new recruits until they’re far enough entrenched in the cult that they’re willing to suspend disbelief. The official party-line is the analogy that a baby must first learn to drink milk before it can eat meat – too much too soon and you’ll puke, I guess. So I figured that I can’t smile without you was like how Jesus Loved You and the reflex being a lonely child waiting by the door was the idea that my husband would have lots of other wives with me in heaven.

So I had a certain comfort level with not understanding stuff – hell, it may have been a superiority complex – and I listened to a lot of radio. Also kiddies, in those days there was no internet to look up song lyrics, so if you didn’t have the album, you didn’t have the liner notes which only sometimes had lyrics printing in them. I was quite willing to settle for my ear’s first guess when it came to songs.

The last piece of the puzzle here is my laziness; this has always been the bane of my existence. I learned to read very early and with that came a certain amount of knowledge in other school-related pursuits.(4) One of those was spelling, which is a terrible subject for english speakers and learners – it doesn’t make any sense! They only way you can learn how to spell is to be exposed frequently to the word. The other is just by rote repetition. My 5th grade teacher, Mr. Coombs, a favorite mostly because he tried to keep up with important pop cultural references (5), had developed a great strategy for lazy smarty-pantses like myself, who would normally get incomplete marks on take-home spelling homework that I deemed pointless busywork – he gave us 10 minutes on Monday morning to review our list of 20 words, then gave us a pre-test. You only had to do your spelling homework on the words that you missed and then you had the real test on Friday. I hardly ever missed any words on the pre-test, and so was able to skip the bogus busywork. I also pretty much aced the Friday tests. (6)

So let us combine these points into a final scenario: A Friday spelling test was always a nice way for me to usher in the weekend. I had aced the monday pre-test and not had to waste any time copying words out or using them in sentences. Mr. Coombs would always use them in a sentence anyway when calling out the test, which was good in this case, because I had been zoning out when he first pronounced the second to last word, but he used a song lyric to illustrate it! Rad!

I put my pencil to paper…

“… dirty deeds and their Dunderchief.”

huh.

I knitted my eyebrows. That was one of those words, like wah-lah, that I had only heard but never seen written down. And that was from a part of the song that I wouldn’t understand until I was emotionally prepared to deal with the consequences of the full knowledge of that song. I was just going to have to use the context clues of the lyrics to figure out how to spell it. Dirty deeds and their Dunderchief… like an Indian Chief, only because they were Dirty deeds (and not Indian Deeds), they had a Dunderchief. You know, like a dunderhead. Yes! Now “i” before “e”…

This made sense to me. Or at least enough that I scribbled it out in enough time to catch the last word on the quiz. It is to his credit that when Robbie Elmer passed back my corrected spelling test that he didn’t circle the word and write “stupid” or “what is this supposed to mean, idiot?”, but the big red (X) next to #19 was enough to shame me into blushing furiously while considering not turning in the paper at all so Mr. Coombs would never know that I mistook “Cheap” for a made up concept of a Leader of Dirty People.

Also, please note that any spelling mistakes in this essay were left in deliberately, as an excercise for the reader.

*******************************

Footnotes:

1. Holy crap, do I love this song. Also Manilow, but had to be closeted about that back in the day.

2. So smart in fact that I was used as a lab rat for some UofU grad students for their dissertation of kids who can pronounce all the words in Tolstoy but don’t really understand it, or doing stuff with mealworms or something. All I know is I got out of class for like an hour on the days I didn’t get out for orchestra practice! Score!

3. Man, is there anything that can’t be blamed on Mormons?

4. Manifested itself in Kindergarten, when I zoned out during reading because I was already done with Dick and Jane, and then zoned back in during math with the shock that I couldn’t make a 5.

5. He also brought his guitar sometimes and taught us Ghost Riders In The Sky – or was it Ghost Riders in Disguise? Also he demonstrated important scientific concepts by taking us out in his cessna two at a time to do barrel rolls and shit.

6. OK, I think I’m done bragging about my own clerverness now. But I will leave you with one final piece of evidence to my own brilliance – I was so smart I repeated 8th grade!

#way too long #exmormon #spelling #gen x #neurospicy #so many words #maybe some adhd?#dork shit

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15ktherapy · 10 months

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song time ig

OKAY ONE. I recommend los campesinos they’re like my favorite band. here’s some songs actually— allez les blues, the sea is a good place to think of the future, I just sighed. I just sighed just so you know, broken heartbeats sound like breakbeats, for flotsam, avocado baby, selling rope (swan dive to estuary), death to los campesinos, this is how you spell “haha, we destroyed the hopes and dreams of a generation of faux-romantics”, you me dancing, romance is boring, we are beautiful we are doomed.

that was a lot. oops.

TWO. I recommend how to be a human being glass animals if you’ve never listened to it. it slays

THREE. ummmm. paramore this is why, new album, it slays. oh and also hawaii part two miracle musical. ALSO. peach pit’s album being so normal. ALSO ALSO. the oh hellos. also also also punisher phoebe bridgers.

list of random songs I’ve gotten obsessed with for like a week or two over the past few months. dirty summer mother falcon, sweet tangerine the hush sound, kingslayer baby metal/bring the horizon, gnaw alex g, san fransisco the mowglis.

songs I’ve been less obsessed with but still good. we don’t want your body stars, unraveling crane wives, wake me up foals, when I was done dying dan deacon, cannibal tally hall, burden in my hand soundgarden, pomegranate seeds julian moon, you are the moon the hush sound, she doesn’t sleep anthony amorim, the horror and the wild the amazing devil, we will commit wolf murder of Montreal, stranger you me everybody, April to death flower face, digital silence peter mcpoland, dream song lala lala, skipping tiles Julie, drop it doe eyes los campesinos, acetone vundavar, (plan a) los campesinos, little mouth los campesinos, promiseland MIKA (^-^), never let me down again depachemode, white room cream, spike pardoner, speeding 72 momma, by your hand los campesinos, dear arkansas daughter lady lamb, accelerate susanne sundfør, renato dall’ara los campesinos, rockstar momma, rip off momma.

okay now things I just. think of. the detail delta sleep, the killing kind marianas trench, let’s go to bed the cure, poor george James supercave, fear of dying poppy, pepper the butthole surfers(🙄), beachboy mccafferty, you’re on fire they might be giants (that’s an angry song I’ve been thinking about today a little. aha….), gold guns girls metric, hero badassjackson, cannibal queen miniature tigers, motion sickness phoebe bridgers, monster starset, you’re all scotch no soda sarah and the safe word, honey whiskey nothing but thieves, apollo momma, to my enemies saint motel, dear dictator saint motel, wonderland natalia kills, carrion comfort aeseaes, wine red the hush sound, castle of glass linkin park, end of an empire celldweller, pieces red, make a move icon for hire, lost kitten metric, modern day cain IDKHOW, roundtable rival Lindsey stirling, use somebody kings of leon, be somebody kings of leon, king Florence + the machine, checkmate conan gray, dead girl in the pool girl in red, crybaby destroy boys, say it right Nelly furtado, brave as a noun AJJ, my heart is an apple arcade fire, funeral gray waterparks, one for the money escape the fate, hella good no doubt, lowlife poppy, a good song never dies saint motel, shampoo bottles peach pit,

I just realized I should just made Spotify playlists. what is. Wrong with me. okay tahts it I’m stopppng now cries

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thatsmybreadandbutter · 2 years

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How I personally interpret "Nightmare," from Galaktikon II, for @bluethepearldiver!

Verse by verse,

I don't think you know who I am

But I have a tale to tell

Born from a wicked spell

Mephistopheles isn't me

But they see what they want to see

Blinded by everything

The narrator is either new to us, or new to us seeing their perspective/truth. He became what he is now through a spell, whether a literal curse or the cruel hand of fate. He is seen as a servant of the Devil, most likely not literally, but still as supernatural, horrible, and of ill intent, even though he does not see himself that way. He's seen as both hero and villain, both sides too caught up in their own agendas to see how much power he holds back, and how his only intervention is to further the prophecy he calls home.

I remember lying in my bed

I remember dirt above my head

Never ever wanted this to be

I am half of what I used to be

Going back to his "birth" from the first verse, through his eyes. I visualize his death, peaceful even, but to be awoken from a sleep, forever feeling out of place and wrong. Brought back to life against his will, perhaps part of him was sold, perhaps the people around him were doing the bidding of a higher power, or religiously fulfilling the prophecy.

The last two lines here I think are the cue for the who, when, and why. "I am half of what I used to be," is my clue-in that this could be sung by The Half Man, aka Mr. Salacia. He could be saying, yes, he WAS once a man, in the past, before his birth, and that he never asked to be whatever he is now.

He connects to his prior humanity, and while long accepted his fate and role, grieves his past self and the unfairness of his demise. In turn, we empathize, and realize he is another gear in the klok, playing his part in all this, and possibly not the highest power involved here.

I do not want to let it go

This has been all but foreseen

Star will shine bright in the sky tonight

Magnetized planets sing

I don't have any strong feelings or visuals on this verse, simply the same as I was saying, with him knowing what comes next and resigning himself to guide it all to fruition. Giving us hints to the climax of the albums action.

As far as "letting it go?" Possibly the last amount of humanity he's held on to, which could mirror what Dethklok themselves may have to give up in the end.

This cold heart keeps on beating

I'm the darkness you're feeling

Okay, first off, this moment musically and vocally... So emotional, so stunning, just overwhelms me. One of my favorites moments out of all of Brendon's work.

Anyway, two meaningful lines here. Salacia confirming he is reanimated, but still here and active, followed by his presence being felt. This could be in an overarching sense of terror, but I like the idea that he's speaking to Murderface. Murderface feeling the possession overtake him, and being flooded with Salacia, his power, his goals and words, but possibly some of his feelings and memories.

I visualize the shot of Murderface at the end of Doomstar; we've seen some of the bizarre and prophetic nightmares of the band, and this may be Murderface's turn. As the possession pulses through his veins, into his heart, mind, eyes, Murderface is awash with visions of the past. He feels a chill and slow beating pulse in tandem with his. The rage of Salacia's body being betrayed, and the internalized resentment of Murderface towards all who have cast him aside, melt together and rise up within him. Salacia and Murderface become one, and the built up anger hiding behind them following the rules and working behind the scenes is too much to bear. There is much less of a plan now, and the rampage ("My Name Is Murder") begins.

I still wait

Time will tell

Falcon flies

Magnetize

Backing up a bit, there is room between this song and "My Name is Murder." Salacia may be in him, and this Nightmare may happen, but he bides his time as always, waiting to strike, following the movements of each chess piece (Falconback, Doomstar, Dethklok, etc.). The prophecy may not be in stone.

──────────────────

Also self-indulgent addition: I'm working on a crossover between Fear Street Part One and "Galaktikon II." That's a touch of my visual inspiration for the Nightmare itself:

(slight spoilers for Fear Street following)

A character touches an area that she was unaware to be the burial site of a witch. She is knocked back, nose bloodied, and shows a visceral slideshow of images from the past, out of context and in first-person. These images haunt her, both figuratively and literally, but we later see that it wasn't the intention; the body needed it's story to be heard. The unfairness of how it became something horrible against it's will. This would be Murderface being flooded with the eyes of The Half-Man.

Anyway, thank you for showing interest and reading this! This is probably my favorite track on the album; I think it's just so hauntingly beautiful.

#This is mommagranate btw! Im expanding on what I said in your replies ^_^#Metalocalypse #galaktikon2 #theories #analysis #bandmeeting.txt #salacia #Murderface #fearstreetau #lyrics

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violetwolfraven · 3 years

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Ray Molina: Best Dad Ever

For the March 11th explosion of content thing. Just Violet being a fantom and doing my part for this!

Tw: mentioned death, mentioned abusive parents, mentioned panic attack.

So the boys can be seen and heard when directly touching Julie after the whole post-Orpheum glowy hug thing but Ray doesn’t know that just yet.

What he does know is that Julie’s mental health took a rapid turn for the better for seemingly no reason and then a couple weeks later he found out she joined a band without telling him.

He’s not stupid. He knows that’s probably because of the band, though he is a bit confused as to how she even met them.

He kinda figures it’s a kids and your internet tricks thing but there’s some flaws to this theory.

1) He asks Flynn what she knows about the boys only... it seems like she doesn’t know much of anything. That’s weird because he knows Julie tells her practically everything.

2) The boys have American accents despite Julie claiming they’re from Sweden.

3) Carlos is a terrible liar and on the rare occasion Julie actually talks about the boys he gets this weirdly conspiratorial look.

So anyway Ray doesn’t really believe it’s as simple as ‘I met these 3 Swedish boys on the internet’ but he trusts his daughter’s judgement and he leaves it alone.

Anyway he has other things to focus on.

Such as how Ray has literally never been able to keep track of his keys/phone/hats/camera parts/stuff and now it seems to just pop up whenever he’s looking for it.

Also he keeps feeling like there’s someone with him around the house more and more.

Like not a malicious presence like Victoria fears, and definitely not like Rose is around watching him, but like someone is there.

Sometimes it feels like there’s more than one presence around. None of them familiar but all of them friendly.

Oddly enough, whatever or whoever it is feels almost like Julie or Carlos. Young and excitable and like a verse of a happy song. He’s not sure why they’re around, but they definitely don’t feel dangerous, so Ray doesn’t feel threatened.

But some days a better comparison might be to Trevor back when Rose first introduced him. Raw and fragile and very, very sad.

Ray tries to put on happy music or a Disney cartoon or something on those days and he doesn’t quite know why or how but the energy usually gets more positive when he does that.

Anyway after a while of this (after the Orpheum performance) he starts noticing weird things that Carlos and Julie do now.

Carlos will just carry around a small whiteboard and a couple pens and he erases it whenever Ray comes into the room but before he does it almost looks like there’s two, three, or even four sets of handwriting on there.

And he walks in on Julie talking to herself like. All the time.

Carlos doesn’t ask for help on his math homework anymore. Julie makes this insanely good chicken recipe for dinner once and then clearly panics and lies when asked where she got it. Flynn makes a set of rainbow friendship bracelets one day while she’s hanging out at the Molina house but he doesn’t see Julie wearing the match to the one she keeps.

Plus Carrie starts hanging out at their house again?? Out of the blue?? And none of the girls have a good explanation for how they made up??

Then later Nick Danforth-Evans (who Julie used to talk about having a crush on but hasn’t in a while) starts hanging around too and the kid seems... well, Ray doesn’t want to throw the word ‘traumatized’ around, but he’s jumpy and guarded in a way that can only be described as a little bit traumatized.

So all 5 kids are clearly keeping some secret and Ray’s getting suspicious and worried.

He sits them down and asks what’s going on. Like is one of them having problems at home, or..?

The kids, simultaneously:

Julie: no, we’re just all in a play together!

Carlos: we’re fine we’re just ghost hunting!

Flynn: we’re exhibiting bisexual-pansexual-lesbian solidarity!

Carrie: Julie and the Phantoms and Dirty Candi are doing a collaboration album!

Nick: we all joined jazz band??

Ray’s calling bullshit at this point.

Then Julie and Nick both look up directly at the same spot, somewhere a couple feet above the arm of the couch, which is seemingly just empty air.

Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem like the other kids can see it but they all seem to be waiting for something and Ray is wondering if they’re sharing a hallucination??? Are they all on drugs??? Should he be worried???

Then Julie says to meet them in the studio in 30 minutes. Flynn, Carrie, and Nick go home to give the Molina family some alone time.

*cue music performance where Ray is introduced to the boys*

So anyway Julie and Carlos (with the help of the ghosts whenever one of them has something to say and grabs Julie’s hand) give him a clearly-sugarcoated version of the last few months.

Ghosts of Trevor’s dead bandmates help Julie reconnect with music, they form a band, they meet another ghost, other ghost accidentally gets them involved with evil magician ghost, Nick got possessed, Carrie figured it out and helped plot to get him un-possessed, evil magician ghost is still out there and they’re sticking together so he can’t get any of them in the future.

Despite how they say it like it’s no big deal, Ray now understands why the kids have been acting so weird because all these things sound scary and painful.

Also the more he thinks about it, the more he worries about the fact that he has three 17-year-old boys sleeping in his garage who died terribly of food poisoning.

They are children and they died incredibly painfully and then almost got enslaved and/or erased from existence.

Then one day Ray’s feeling one of those presences around the house again and he realizes it’s probably one of Julie’s ghost boys.

Ray: who’s there?

Whoever it is freaks out and leaves, and Ray takes notes for next time.

The next time he feels someone in the room, he has a notepad ready and he writes down “Luke, Alex, or Reggie?” from what he remembers from Julie’s introductions.

Immediately, there’s a spike of anxiety in the room.

Ray: it’s okay. You can stay and we don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. I’d like to know who it is I’m not talking to though.

There’s a few seconds of hesitation, and then the pen picks itself up and the name “Reggie” gets circled.

Ray: the bassist with the flannels, right?

Yeah, written in a teenage boy’s messy scrawl.

Ray: okay, do you want to watch a movie?

More hesitation, and Ray’s not sure what that’s about but he’s starting to suspect with the amount of fear still in the room, and there’s a good 20 seconds where Reggie doesn’t respond before I don’t know.

Ray: Moana or Tangled? Moana.

After that, he takes a page out of Carlos’s book and gets a small whiteboard with 3 pens that stick to it magnetically. Red for Reggie, blue for Luke, and pink for Alex.

Reggie has written conversations with him most, but Luke does sometimes too and Alex does least often but he’ll still request a movie occasionally.

All of them are wary around him and Ray doesn’t quite know what to do to earn their trust. But he asks questions about their preferences on things. He says they did good on their latest show. He remembers which movies are their favorites and introduces them to music he thinks are their styles.

Luke is a big fan of Fall Out Boy and Reggie fucking loves Taylor Swift.

Alex is less consistent but occasionally Ray will play a song and he’ll write something like This is a cool song.

He starts to be able to tell which energy is which even before they write who it is right around the time the boys start to be visible for longer and longer after playing.

They play a really good show and stay visible for like 2 full days and that’s the first (but not the last) time Ray really gets to get to know them.

He starts noticing after really good shows like that one how even more now that they can be seen, they’re all a little... off from how Nick and Carrie and Flynn act around him.

With Luke it’s mostly because he’s trying so hard to impress because *gasp* he and Julie are a thing but there’s still a little bit of tension that seems like it comes from something deeper than just being nervous around his girlfriend’s dad.

With Reggie it’s subtle caution. Like he’s happy to be hanging out with Ray but he’s constantly ready for something to go wrong. There’s a catch in his smile, a hesitation before he states an opinion, a practiced carefulness where he changes the subject at any sign of even mild frustration.

But with Alex... it’s mostly just avoidance. Like if he poofs in while visible and it just so happens that no one else is there, he’ll find an excuse to leave.

And Ray lets him, of course. He doesn’t want the kid to feel trapped. But all of the boys’ behavior bothers him.

On the rare occasion they spend more than 2 seconds together Alex is really quiet. He won’t admit if Ray guessed wrong about a song and he doesn’t like it even though his body language makes it clear he’s not vibing with it. Actually, his body language pretty much just spells I am very uncomfortable in every situation where Julie or Carlos went to the bathroom or someone went to grab a snack and they’re alone even for 5 minutes while he’s visible.

Ray’s not stupid. He knows three 17-year-olds don’t end up getting their instruments left to their only living bandmate’s new best friend’s family by having good relationships with their own families.

He doesn’t exactly want to bring it up, but he kind of knows.

Then one day he’s sitting with all 3 boys watching a movie while he fixes something on his camera and Julie and Carlos are at school and he messes up a little part that means he has to start over (don’t @ me I know nothing about cameras) and swears out of frustration louder than he meant to.

He reaches for the screwdriver on the coffee table and

And Reggie and Alex both flinch.

Ray hadn’t even noticed they were tracking his movements, but while Luke seems to just have moved his focus from the TV to his friends in concern, Alex and Reggie both look too tense to play it off.

He figures its as good a time as any to have a chat cause these boys aren’t his sons but they don’t have anyone else acting as a parent figure to them and he feels the need to take care of them. He pauses the movie.

Ray: Can we have a talk? About you boy’s families?

Naturally Luke jumps in to try to distract him immediately, telling a story about his dad taking him fishing once, but he stops when Ray asks him to stop.

Ray: That’s not what I’m talking about and I think you all know it.

The boys are all still silent. Luke looks 500% ready to deflect again. Reggie and Alex look more like they’re expecting to get yelled at or worse.

Ray: I just want to help. I’ll drop it if you want me to but I want you to know that I would never do something to hurt any of you intentionally. You can talk to me about anything if you need to.

He means to make it an option of ‘you can talk but you don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ but the boys clearly don’t take it as such with how Luke starts talking immediately.

Luke: I ran away when I was 17. My mom and dad didn’t want me to stay in Sunset Curve, I think they thought it was going to get me into drugs or something.

They have a short talk about parents having good intentions not equalling them being right to push Luke so hard they pushed him away and it’s okay to feel hurt by that and then press play on the movie again and Ray thinks he sees all 3 boys relax somewhat during that.

A couple weeks later Reggie comes in visible and hesitantly asks about watching this series he saw when Carlos was scrolling through Netflix once.

Mid-episode he blurts out

Reggie: I don’t want to look for my parents and I feel weird about that.

He rambles for a while about knowing he was lucky that his family had money and his mom and dad told him they loved him and stuff but also he remembers so many fights between them where he felt caught in the middle and it never ended well if he chose a side but there was no way to win because they’d both turn on him if he didn’t so it was just this constant balancing act to try to prevent fights in the first place.

Reggie: I felt like I was walking on a tightrope. Like, all the time. I tried so hard to keep them from getting mad at each other or at me. Only it never worked and it was always a question of when they were going to snap next and it was confusing cause one day we’d go to the zoo and everything would be fine and the next they’d yell at me and send me to bed without food.

He feels guilty for not wanting to put in the effort to find them because he’s pretty sure on some level they did love him but he doesn’t want to see them again.

And he doesn’t want to know if they even miss him at all because when he got older and the fighting got too intense he would sneak off to Luke’s or Bobby’s and no matter if he stayed away for an hour or a couple days they never seemed to notice he was gone.

Ray listens and a lot of things about Reggie start to make sense. How he’s so careful not to catch him in a bad mood. How he shuts down whenever anyone raises their voice. How he helps out so much in an effort to stay on Ray’s good side.

It’s a day and a half after the latest show so they can’t really hug but Ray does what he can to provide comfort and validate his feelings anyway because damn Reggie is a good kid and he didn’t deserve that.

Reggie and Luke get more comfortable with coming to him for meaningful chats, or even just to vent about whatever’s going on lately.

Eventually they seem to feel almost as comfortable with him as Julie and Carlos do so it kinda becomes a routine.

Like Julie will ask for cuddles when she’s sad about missing Rose or she’ll walk in and vent about Carrie and Flynn being so obvious about liking each other but somehow not realizing it’s mutual and she and Nick are 3rd wheeling and going insane.

Carlos will excitedly ramble about his latest baseball practice shenanigans for an hour but also sometimes ask for someone to watch old home movies or listen to old CDs from Rose and the Petal Pushers with him.

And that’s normal. That’s been Ray’s life since his kids started talking. But the thing is that it’s just as normal when

When Luke tells how he’s still angry about his music getting stolen because it feels like a part of him was taken away and he worked hard on those songs. Also one day he very shyly admits

Luke: I like Julie a lot.

Ray: I know, kiddo.

Luke: You’re not mad?

Ray: As long as you two make each other happy, no. I’m happy for you.

And it’s just as normal when Reggie talks about missing his little cousin Kelsi and wondering where she ended up only for them to look her up and find out she’s a major Broadway writer/director now oh my god— and also

Reggie: I think I like boys. Like boys are cute. But I know I’m not gay because girls are cute too and ugh it’s confusing it’s probably nothing I guess everybody goes through this.

Ray: Have you ever thought you might be bisexual?

Reggie: Bi-what-now?

Ray, already digging out his old flannels that he would have passed down to Julie except they’re too big for her: It’s okay to like both, kiddo.

All this is great of course. It’s great how Reggie and Luke aren’t afraid anymore and they feel validated and seen and listened to.

But months have passed and Ray notices how Alex remains separate. He still avoids Ray when he can and stays quiet and cautious when he can’t.

Like Ray still senses Alex around him sometimes but never right after a show when he’s visible. He doesn’t come to him with problems. He’ll stay and listen when Ray plays a song he thinks he’d like, but he still seems so cautious and Ray doesn’t know how to help.

He asks Luke one day while he’s introducing him to a Wicked bootleg if he’s done something specific to scare Alex away.

Luke gets this really dark look on his face and he just

Luke: Let’s just say that my parents didn’t do everything perfectly, but they’re saints compared to Alex’s.

Ray decides to drop it, but Luke wants to reassure him.

Luke: You haven’t done anything wrong. He’s just not very comfortable around most adults in general. It’s one thing when we’re invisible, but...

Ray: I just wish I could help.

Luke: You do help. But it took a while for Alex to trust me.

The conversation ends there because Luke starts getting really into Defying Gravity.

But then that night Julie comes in with a kind of out of character movie request so Ray thinks Luke talked to her.

Because Julie does not like most romcoms that aren’t musicals. She gets bored. But she requests Love, Simon anyway.

Ray kind of sees what she’s trying to do there because now that he’s thinking about it the boys haven’t really seen many things with queer rep. Especially not queer main characters.

And nobody’s really told him that Alex is gay but cmon he’s an elder bi. He has accurate gaydar so he can support his queer ducklings.

Despite how the boys all know being gay is more socially acceptable now (they found out about Nick’s dads and the girls gave them the ‘gay marriage is legal now’ talk) they still seem kind of baffled by how there’s an entire romcom centered around a gay boy and it did well.

From there Ray tries to find more movies and tv shows with canon queer representation.

And he keeps giving Alex space but also trying his best to show him that he’s not like his parents.

For a long time nothing changes beyond Luke and Reggie getting increasingly comfortable with him.

Well that’s not completely true actually cause Reggie starts tagging along to photo shoots and becomes Ray’s unofficial mostly invisible assistant.

Then the band plays an amazing show and the boys stay visible for a full week.

Around the middle of that week, Ray goes out to the garage to find Reggie and see if he wants to come on a photo shoot.

Reggie isn’t out there but Alex is.

And he’s crying. Hard.

He looks like he’s going to poof out when he sees Ray there but Ray’s already 100% ready to do exactly what he always does when he walks in on Julie or Carlos crying.

Ray: Alex. Hey, buddy, it’s okay. I’m here. It’s going to be okay.

Alex freezes and it breaks Ray’s heart how that kind of concern is clearly not what he’s expecting.

Ray: Are you okay with being touched?

Alex looks kind of like he’s in shock but he nods.

He clearly doesn’t really know what to do with it but he kind of melts into it when Ray hugs him and he just sobs on his shoulder.

When he’s stopped crying enough he starts rambling about how he’s been looking everywhere but he can’t find Willie.

At that point he’s basically having a panic attack so finding out what’s wrong takes a backseat compared to calming him down and Ray knows how to do that because he and Rose used to do that for Trevor all the time.

Ray: Alex, breathe. In for 4 counts, hold for 7, out for 8. Breathe with me.

It takes a couple minutes until Alex has calmed down enough, but once he does, Ray asks what’s wrong and what’s happening with Willie.

He only vaguely knows who Willie is from what he’s been told by the other kids but he knows he’s important to Alex.

So Alex takes a deep breath and explains that Caleb confronted him and basically said the boys had to join his house band or he would make sure he’d never see Willie again. And he doesn’t want to ask his family to sacrifice themselves for him but he doesn’t want to lose the boy he loves either.

Ray wants to throw hands but from what the kids have told him about Caleb, he has a better idea.

Ray: Here’s what we’re gonna do, buddy. Reggie said Caleb has this super catchy number, The Other Side of Hollywood?

Alex: Yeah?

Ray: How quickly do you think Luke and Julie could come up with an arrangement for you four to cover that and how desperate do you think Covington would be to make sure a video of that never gets published without crediting him?

Alex: :o

Spoiler alert: Julie and Luke, in collaboration with Carrie, can come up with an arrangement very quickly.

They do a private performance of it and film it and basically blackmail Caleb into letting Willie go.

Willie has an empty house that used to be his parents’ that he still considers his so he mostly crashes there if he needs to. Also he loves skating around so much that he never stays in one place for very long.

Julie can see him but she can’t make him visible so it’s a little odd but Ray gets an orange pen for him for the whiteboard and he finds skateboarding videos and stuff for when he visits.

They eventually figure out that he can be part of the magic by adding him to the band so they give him a tambourine and yay now Willie can be seen but that’s later.

The biggest immediate change to come out of all this is Alex.

He’s not afraid of Ray anymore for the most part (healing isn’t linear and he can’t help a few bad days) and he starts actually talking to him. Not about serious stuff but he’s talking. Mostly just rambling about how Willie makes him feel or how Luke and Reggie have been being annoying lately.

Then one day he comes in really nervous and says something about Reggie saying he talked to Ray about his parents.

And Ray confirms it and asks if there’s anything Alex needs to tell him.

Alex sits down and clearly he’s been holding this in for a long time and he just unloads how he came out to his parents because his youngest sister found his diary and he was scared she’d tell them. They didn’t react well and when he cried out of fear and frustration his father... gave him something to cry about.

His father did that a few more times, trying to ‘make him man up,’ and Alex never told his bandmates but he always knew they could see the bruises and that was why Bobby made it so clear his garage was open and his house was a safe place to run.

But Alex didn’t no matter how bad things got because he guessed some small part of him thought he deserved it but mostly it was about how his oldest sister dropped out of college and ghosted the family and Alex was the next-oldest so he felt responsible for protecting his younger sisters even if they both had learned behaviors from their parents and hated him.

Then that summer he found out his parents were planning on sending him away to some Christian camp where they’d ‘fix’ him.

Alex made it clear that he wouldn’t go and if they tried to make him he’d run away, but their ultimatum was that he couldn’t live under their roof if he was gay.

So he didn’t. And it was a situation somewhere between getting kicked out and running away, but he packed a bag and never went back.

He ran to Bobby’s house, he wrote a whole bunch of angry songs, and he tried not to think too much about how he understood why his older sister left and how he was doing the exact same thing to his younger sisters.

By the time he’s done explaining everything Ray’s trying not to cry but Alex is definitely already crying mostly out of anger.

Alex: I hated them all. I hated Molly for leaving me and I hated my mom for turning my little sisters against me and I hated my dad for hurting me and I even hated Anna and Josie for not standing by me and I just hated them all so much. I still do. And it is so stupid that I feel guilty for that because they were terrible to me and I was 16 and I didn’t deserve that but I do feel guilty for it because they’re my family and I hate them.

Ray doesn’t have much to say because damn this is heavy stuff but he assures him that after what he went through he has a right to hate his blood family.

Alex tells him awkwardly when he’s calmed down a bit that Luke is the only other person he’s ever told about all this, because after he ran away they dated for a few months before figuring out that they were better as friends.

Reggie and Bobby guessed parts of it and Julie probably has too but none of them have asked and Alex thinks he might tell Reggie and Julie someday if it ever comes up but he never did end up telling Bobby.

Ray assures him that he won’t tell anyone and also that he would never do that. He would never do anything to hurt Alex or the others on purpose.

He makes a silent promise that no one will ever hurt one of his kids like that again and if Caleb or anyone else ever tries, they will regret it.

But anyway on to happier matters.

Willie visits a lot and he’s a little skittish around Ray but he loosens up after he jokingly mentions one time that Willie and Alex are like the beginning of the Sk8ter Boy song.

Alex and Ray might be Denim Jacket Buddies but once Ray digs his old leather jacket out of the closet he becomes Leather Jacket Buddies with Reggie.

You’d think he has to tell Carlos and Reggie off the most for breaking things but he doesn’t. It’s Carlos and Luke.

Also Ray doesn’t consider himself an overprotective dad but Julie and Luke are not allowed to be alone in a room with the door closed.

Neither are Alex and Willie technically but it’s harder to enforce it when they’re both ghosts.

Lmao all the kids follow the rules anyway because they love Ray and he’s not being unreasonable.

He helps Julie in her plot to get Carrie and Flynn together and also he helps Nick plan how to make a move on that cute boy on his lacrosse team.

Because Nick loves his dads but they’re disaster gays. Neither of those men can properly flirt. They fell in love because of a baseball rivalry and Nick doesn’t trust their advice.

Pride month rolls around and Julie makes sure to book a big gig the day before the parade so the boys will be visible and tangible.

Trevor’s on tour and can’t get away and Flynn’s parents are working and Nick’s are busy too so Ray finds himself escorting this whole little gaggle of various queer ducklings to pride.

Carlos isn’t quite sure what he is yet so he’s just got a rainbow flag painted on his cheek and a shirt that says I love my bi sister on it.

Julie’s all decked out in the bi colors, complete with ribbons braided into her hair and a flag to use as a cape. She made the tutu herself and it took her hours but it turned out really good.

Luke’s got a tank top with the pan colors and a trans flag as a cape and also yknow face paint of course.

Reggie browsed thrift shops everywhere until he found a flannel in the bi colors and he’s got that along with pink purple and blue laces in his combat boots and what Ray is really hoping is temporary dye and not spray paint in his hair.

Alex has a rainbow shirt that matches Willie’s and matching bracelets with Flynn. Also he painted rainbow hearts on his cheeks and put a lot of effort into them and they look really symmetrical.

Willie’s of course matching shirts with Alex and also he has sparkly rainbow socks and a flag to use as a cape.

Carrie’s got a whole ensemble in the lesbian colors complete with a pride wig and also matching necklaces with Flynn.

Flynn’s matching colors with Carrie but more in her style with of course matching jewelry with the people closest to her. She’s got friendship bracelets corresponding to Alex and Julie.

Nick’s got a pan tshirt and a fedora with a ribbon in pink yellow and blue plus face paint cause all of them have face paint. Nothing too crazy.

Meanwhile Ray’s got a bi bandanna and one of those shirts that’s like Free Dad Hugs.

Plus everyone did each other’s nails with varying degrees of success the night before and Julie did Ray’s so they turned out good.

Nick’s lacrosse buddies and the rest of Dirty Candi are around somewhere but they didn’t ride in the same car so they’re not that relevant.

They party. Celebrate being alive. Idk I’ve never gotten to go to pride.

And afterwards they all go back to the Molina house and the couch isn’t really big enough for all of them but it’s okay it’s not like they know how to sit correctly anyway.

They all kind of pile together and cuddle and watch movies until Flynn and Nick’s parents can come pick them up.

And Ray just looks around and realizes that

Sure only 2 of them are his biologically

And 3 of the others have good parent(s) who are actively a part of their lives

The remaining 4 are technically dead

But he has 9 children and he’s totally fine with that.

Cause he’s Ray Molina: best dad ever.

Victoria’s head is going to explode when she finds out that not only is the Molina house really haunted, but he’s adopted the ghosts.

37 notes · View notes

gaylorlyrics · 4 years

Text

Folklore Songs - what are they about??

This is a developing thread, but I’ve been listening all day so I’m taking a stab at it.

1."The 1"

Common consensus is that this is about Dianna Agron and what they could have been. Telling lyrics are the general idea that the relationship wasn’t truly given a chance (”it would've been sweet, If it could've been me”) and “Roaring Twenties”, referring to the below circus themed party pics with Diana dressed like a flapper

tbh im not totally sold on this - most because it seems more recent with lyrics like, “In my defense, I have none for never leaving well enough alone” sounds like a reference to ME! and “Roaring twenties” sounds like a reference to something that happened this year (2020). Also “throwing pennies in the pool” could be a reference to throwing Penni (Karlie’s agent) in the pool. Finally, Route 1 is the road along California’s coast, where Tay & Karlie drove on their legendary road trip...this makes my lil Kaylor heart worry.

2. Cardigan

This is the first installment in the Teenage Trio, which also includes August and Betty, and is told from the perspective of Betty. It’s about feeling so loved by someone but then being betrayed by them (”Chase two girls [Betty + August’s narrator] lose one”). The line ”And you'd be standin' in my front porch light” foreshadows to James professing love in “Betty”. Potentially Taylor is Betty - but I’m still thinking about that theory.

3."The Last Great American Dynasty"

We <3 a Rhode Island throwback. Here Taylor tells the story of her house in Rhode Island that Rebekah “Betty” (??!?!??!! more on that later) Harkness used to live in. Rebekah married an heir to Standard Oil which made her one of the wealthiest women in the USA at the time. She was also known for making a scene (”She had a marvelous time ruining everything”). Additionally, she founded the Harkness Ballet (”And blew through the money on the boys and the ballet”). After Rebekah’s death Taylor purchased the house and it is now best known as the place of many epic 4th of July parties.

4. Exile

Such a sad song! This is a duet between Taylor and Bon Iver, telling the story of a failed relationship that they have tried to mend many many times. Interestingly, this is also about a love triangle (like the teenage trio) - "I can see you starin' honey/Like he's just your understudy." This line specifically feels like it could be about bearding, and seeing someone else with the person you love, but feeling like - or knowing - it’s fake. “You were my town Now I'm in exile seein' you out” references and end to the relationship Taylor discussed in False God “Staring out the window like I'm not your favorite town I'm New York City”. To me this indicates that it is about Karlie and them breaking up or going through a rough patch - continually trying to fix things - and eventually being unsure that it could ever be repaired.

5."My Tears Ricochet"

This is pretty clearly about Scott & Scooter - “And if I'm dead to you, why are you at the wake? Cursing my name, wishing I stayed” and “You had to kill me, but it killed you just the same” seem to be a reference to them trying to exploit her work and how her leaving Big Machine really ruined the business - plus there’s some LWYMMD imagery. “You wear the same jewels that I gave you as you bury me” also seems to be a clear reference for trying to use Taylor’s own work against her, taking the profits, and pushing her out of the deal. As if we needed more evidence “You hear my stolen lullabies” clearly references her stolen masters.

6."Mirrorball"

Big 80s prom vibes from this song. Mirrorball is about being famous and all of her work - her most personal thoughts and dreams - just becoming different ways for other people to see themselves once she releases her music into the world. Part of being an artist is knowing that your work will reflect more of who the viewer is than who you are yourself. Here she uses the metaphor of a disco ball to explore that idea, and worries that she is losing her own identity through it “I'm still trying everything to keep you looking at me”. She also alludes to her fears that she will age out of relevancy “I know they said the end is near”, something she discussed in her documentary Miss Americana. Obviously this is internalized misogyny because we love Taylor and will listen to her music always and do not subscribe to the belief that women need to be young to be relevant because if they were a man then they'd be the man, and tay’s the man <3

7. “Seven”

Personally, this is one of my favorite songs on the album. It’s so sweet and pure and lovely. This is about young love, with imagery of summer, toys, and child’s dreams to runaway together. Many people have speculated that it is about the same girl that the two unreleased Taylor songs “Sweet Tea and Gods Graces” and “Me & Britney” are about.

[Side note: initially I wondered if Me & Britney was about Britany Maack, Taylor’s long time friend who recently got married, but the names are spelled differently. Also the line in Seven “I can’t recall your face” indicates that this is about someone who Taylor is not currently in touch with.]

Both M&B and STAAG seem to be about the Seven relationship because there are general parallels with outdoor scenery, childlike wonder, and ( in the case of STAGG) sweet tea. Also all three songs indicate a gay relationship: STAGG - “And you can love like a sinner and lose like a winner”, M&B - “That boy she went ran off with, well, I thought he was crazy. Maybe I was just jealous that he'd come between me and Britney”, and Seven - “You won't have to cry or hide in the closet And just like a folk song our love will be passed on”.

8. “August”

This is the second installment in the Teenage Trio, told from the perspective of the “other woman” who James meets while on summer vacation. The other woman (she doesn’t seem to have a name...unless it is August...which it could be? idk) is in love, but realizes that James isn’t in love with her - “Will you call when you're back at school? I remember thinkin' I had you”. The line “Remember when I pulled up and said "Get in the car" references the same incident which is retold in Betty, but this time with James telling Betty it was just a summer fling that didn’t mean anything.

9. This Is Me Trying

Here we have a break up song, about Taylor trying to win her lover back and feeling completely lost without them, unable to concentrate or be around people, and turning to self sabotage. It’s about the general loneliness that one feels when they’ve lost someone they truly love, and the miscommunication that can happen in a relationship when you’re not understanding each other or receiving love in the same way (hence the song’s title). I think this could be about Karlie, it seems clear that their relationship has not been smooth and that they have had many on-and-off times. It could also be serving a purpose of building the Joe break up narrative, but only time will tell for that.

10. “Illicit Affairs”

Taylor loves her secret love - this song reads like a sad version of “I Know Places”. It seems clear that this is about Karlie Kloss. “Tell your friends you're out for a run” is one of my favorite lines because Karlie started Klossy run club, where you commit to running a certain distance in a month - and she posts about it on instagram CONSTANTLY. But overall, the song details a relationship of a woman being with someone she doesn’t love (kushnerd) and sneaking around to meet up with the person she does love (tay!). The line “Tell yourself you can always stop” is so sad to me, the idea that Karlie got into this and keeps telling herself that it will only be a little longer and she can leave when she wants, but staying in her fake marriage anyway.

11. Invisible String

This is pretty much the only pure love song on the album - about feeling connected to someone throughout your whole life, knowing that that somebody is out there, and then finally finding them. Taylor talks about being in Centennial Park in Nashville as a teen, and then eventually showing her lover around. The song is really self referential, with lots of easter eggs for her past work, including Bad Blood and Delicate. She also references Joe Jonas with the line “Cold was the steel of my axe to grind For the boys who broke my heart Now I send their babies presents”.

Some people have pointed out that there is a similar idea presented in Jane Eyre - when the protagonist says to her love interest “I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you."

12."Mad Woman"

Another Scooter one - “It's obvious that wanting me dead has really brought you two together”. “The master of spin” is word play referencing the masters records scandal. “Watching you climb over people like me” points out that agents and labels are making money off the performers they find and pushing them around. There’s also a reference to Scooter’s wife Yael and how he cheats all the time, but she doesn’t do anything likely because of her own internalized misogyny - “has a couple side flings. Good wives always know. She should be mad, should be scathing like me”.

13. “Epiphany”

The first verse of this touching ballad is about Taylor’s grandfather in WW2, storming the beaches at Normandy - “Crawling up the beaches now "Sir, I think he's bleeding out"”. The second verse is about a nurse helping patients with Covid-19 - “Holds your hand through plastic now "Doc, I think she's crashing out"”. The bridge here talks about wishing there was some great epiphany, some magical solution for the suffering in the world. The chorus refers to experiencing trauma with others and staying loyal even in the hardest times, even if it means literally dying. Although this seems like a departure from the themes of rest of the album, the whole album examines loyalty and considering what you would do for the people you love - so I really don’t think it’s a departure at all.

14. “Betty”

Obviously this is the gayest song on the album and an early fan favorite. It is the final song in the teenage trio, told from the point of view of James, going to win Betty back after betraying her and sleeping with someone else (August!?) over the summer. The line "Will you kiss me on the porch in front of all your stupid friends?”, a line that is very clearly about wanting to kiss a woman, is especially striking (& gay!) when sung by Taylor. The clearest version of this plot is someone begging for forgiveness after betraying the person they love.

There is also a bit of a nod to a line in “Picture to Burn”, a break up song off Taylor’s first album. In PTB Taylor says “So go and tell your friends that I'm obsessive and crazy that's fine, I’ll tell mine you’re gay”. This lyric has since been changed in versions available online, but on the original album that's what it was. This is interesting because she’s calling attention to knowing that someone is gay and hasn’t told their friends...which you would definitely know if you had dated them.

The names “James” and “Inez” are both mentioned in the song, which are the names of Blake Lively and Ryan Reynold’s daughters. James was already featured on a Taylor Swift album, as the lil baby voice at the beginning of “Gorgeous”. Worth noting that “James” is traditional a male name, but that this character is named after a female.

ALSO I have this theory I’m working on that Taylor is Betty and this whole album is in the same world with the same people, but WILL POST MORE ON THIS LATER.

15."Peace"

Ok - this is Archer 2.0 for me, about how she is worried about how no one will ever love her or stay with her because its too much work - “the rain is always gonna come if you're standin' with me” and “No, I could never give you peace” are pretty telling lines about her concerns that people will think it is not worth it to be friends with or in a relationship with her due to all of the baggage that comes with it.

The opening lines - “Our coming-of-age has come and gone Suddenly this summer, it's clear” feed into my emerging theory that all of these songs exist in the same universe and are about the same three characters...but I’m still figuring that one out. The line “And you know that I'd swing with you for the fences Sit with you in the trenches” reference Seven and Epiphany, respectively - further supporting that all of these songs are in the same world.

16. “Hoax”

Out of all of the songs that make my little Kaylor heart ache - this is the most heartbreaking. Specifically the line “My eclipsed sun” refers to Karlie, who Taylor has called “sunshine” on multiple occasions, and her light being covered up by her contract with Kushnerd and Scooter. The line “Don't want no other shade of blue But you” makes it clear that this song is in reference to the muse for the album “Lover” - aka Karlie.

However, this is a song about betrayal and completely trusting someone, only to find that they stabbed you in the back, as is clear by the line ”Your faithless love's the only hoax I believe in”.

Additionally, the line“You knew it still hurts underneath my scars” seems to again feed into the idea that all of the songs on the album involve the same characters. This one is a bit more clear, it seems that - if this theory is correct - Betty is the narrator of this song, as she referenced her scars before “Drew stars around my scars” in Cardigan.

OK- I'm going to go deep into song by song later, but I just wanted to get something out there!!! Also def interested in hearing what everyone else thinks!

EDIT: I just found some lyrics from The Lakes in an article from Billboard. I wanted to add them in even though we don’t have the full song because I felt like we really ended on a sad note with hoax and then when I saw these I was like there is hope!!

SO the lyric Billboard included in their review was “A red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground / With no one around to tweet it” which is a continuation from the line from “Hoax” - “ This has frozen my ground”. What I’m taking from this is that in the final song Taylor finds hope <3

#folklore #kaylor #Taylor swift #Karlie kloss #betty

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sinceileftyoublog · 3 years

Text

Philippe Cohen Solal & Mike Lindsay: A Pop Tribute to Outsider Art

From Left: Mike Linsday, Hannah Peel, Philippe Cohen Solal, Adam Glover; Artwork by Gabriel Jacquel

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Outsider visual artist and writer Henry Darger’s fame was essentially happenstance, so it’s fitting that Philippe Cohen Solal’s decades-long obsession with Darger is chock full of coincidence. In 2003, the member of longtime neotango group Gotan Project found himself with a day off on tour in New York City and decided to venture over to the American Folk Art Museum, a choice that would change his life and culminate in Outsider (¡Ya Basta!), April’s collaborative album with Tunng’s Mike Linsday, the first adaptation of Darger’s words in music.

At the museum, Solal, unaware not only of Darger but of outsider art in general, saw a Darger work, and, as he told me over the phone earlier this year, “fell in love.” Looking closer at the details of the work, he saw something he recognized: the name Kiyoko Lerner, who had lent the work to the museum. The very same name of a woman he was set to meet the next day in Chicago as recommended by a mutual friend back in Paris. The friend suggested they meet due to their love of tango. “We met and talked a bit about tango,” he said, “but quickly, I asked her about Henry Darger.” She began to tell him exactly who she was, the story that’s become increasingly well-known in the annals of Chicago cultural history.

Lerner and her late husband Nathan (himself a prominent Chicago photographer) were Darger’s landlords; Nathan discovered Darger’s work in his “very messy room” shortly before Darger’s death in 1973, most notably his 15,000+ page novel In The Realms of the Unreal as well as his magazine-traced illustrations and watercolors accompanying the book. (The book, a fantastical epic about child slave rebellions, would go on to inspire visual artists and musicians for decades; indie rock band Vivian Girls took their name from characters in the book, and Darger would even be referenced in The Venture Bros.) Nathan immediately knew he had something special, and he and his wife took control of Darger’s estate. Darger would start to become formally recognized by the art world, his work prominently featured in museums and documentaries. Nathan died in 1997, and Kiyoko would continue to operate as head of the estate and donate her collection to various museums across the world.

In 2006, Kiyoko flew to Paris and met up with Solal at the first Darger exhibition in the city, at La Maison Rouge. It was immediately when he left the show that Solal had the idea to make music inspired by Darger’s art. “At the time, I didn’t [even] know that [Darger] wrote lyrics,” Solal said. “I had no clue.” In reference to Darger’s war between children and adults, Solal had the idea to write “adult music for children,” or vice versa, and wrote a track that wouldn’t even end up 15 years later on Outsider. He visited Kiyoko at her Chicago apartment. “I spent a few days immersed in his art. I didn’t know precisely what I wanted to do, and then I discovered he wrote lyrics. It very much changed the project.” Nobody had thought to put Darger’s lyrics to music, and Solal wanted to put his stamp on the increasingly large pool of reinterpretations of or references to Darger in the arts and culture world at large. Kiyoko put him in touch with art historian Michael Bonesteel, who led Solal to more lyrics.

Not wanting to go at it alone, Solal got the idea to do a collective project adapting Darger’s lyrics to music with various friends. He reached out to the likes of Calexico’s Joey Burns and Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, but Lindsay was the one who really stuck. Solal and Lindsay were fans of each other’s bands, and the latter visited the American Folk Art Museum while on tour at Solal’s recommendation, he himself rediscovering Darger’s work. In 2015, there was another Darger retrospective at the Paris Museum of Modern Art, and Kiyoko, who attended, suggested to Solal that he reveal his song adaptations of Darger. “I didn’t tell her I only had one song at the time,” he laughed. That was his inspiration to reach out to Lindsay. “I thought maybe I’d do a 5-track EP. I called Mike and reminded him of my project and asked him, ‘Are you ready to work on that with me?’”

Solal and Lindsay separately wrote the melodies and basic arrangements of the songs that would end up on Outsider, and they recorded and produced the record together. Lindsay introduced Solal to Northern Irish musician/singer/multi-instrumentalist Hannah Peel, who would voice the Vivian Girls. Solal asked Adam Glover, a singer he knew through his manager, to be the voice of Darger himself. (“He was very young...but he can sing like Sinatra or Dean Martin,” Solal said.) The four created an album with Darger’s words using traditional pop instrumentation and song structures but also children’s instruments; Peel even created her own music box to play some of the melodies. Sometimes, the words were spoken, as on “Hark Hark, My Friend, Cannon Thunders Are Swelling”, while other times the vocals are isolated in harmony, as on “We Sigh For The Child Slaves”. “We know more about Darger as a painter and visual artist, so it was important to have Darger as a storyteller,” Solal said. Furthermore, the group wanted to capture the raw spirit of Darger’s art by rendering the voices distorted, shifting their pitch to make them sound almost out of tune. The instrumentation, meanwhile, ranges from slinky electric guitars to strings, and even barroom-style piano on the penultimate “We’ll Never Say Goodby” [sic]. “With our small team, it was lean and simple to do this music,” said Solal. While most of the titles and words were taken directly from Darger, down to the spelling of “Goodby”, the album touches on Solal’s story, too. Instrumental interlude “851 Webster Avenue” is named after the address of Lerner’s apartment Solal visited for the first time, when his fascination with Darger really took off.

Solal can’t exactly pinpoint what ever fascinated him about Darger, both in general and as the world changes, but he has some clues. “At the time, what was interesting to me was it was clear [Darger] was a self-taught artist, and maybe I felt a bit moved by that because I’m a self-taught musician,” Solal said. “I never went to music school, but I understood that without any specific art education or practice at an art school, you can create something...Henry Darger is an amazing example of someone who created his own world.” Darger’s style of illustration, his drawings traced from magazines, made up for the fact that he wasn’t a technically great drawer, and it complemented his heightened sense of color. Moreover, Solal feels kinship with some aspects of Darger’s childhood. Part of the inspiration for In The Realms of the Unreal was that Darger himself was sent to an asylum that put children to work. “When he was a kid, everybody called him crazy,” said Solal, “But I’m sure he didn’t think he was crazy. I remember when I was 9 or 10, I thought I was crazy. Nobody called me crazy, but I thought I was.” He found commonalities in, simply, being misunderstood.

Solal also questions what it means to be an “outsider” artist; in reality, Darger spent most of his time inside, confined in a room creating fictional worlds. Funny enough, according to his diaries, he was fascinated with the weather, tracking the accuracy of the predicted versus actual weather, but that’s about all for the outside world. On the day JFK was killed, for instance, Darger had nothing about it in his diary entry. He chose to interact with the world through the magazines he would trace, and through collections of items like Pepto Bismol bottles, National Geographic issues, and broken glasses. He wasn’t much for interpersonal relationships. Not only was Nathan Lerner unaware of Darger’s artistic enterprises, but neither were the young artist couple with whom Darger actually shared his apartment. Solal thinks that Darger’s resistance to presenting himself as an artist was as a result of his childhood experiences. “If the outside world was not so mean to him, maybe he’d be less scared to show who he was to the rest of the world, even just to his neighbors,” he said. “It’s funny that we call him an outsider. He was more an insider but was protecting himself from the outside world.”

Perhaps, subconsciously, the more that creative folks learn to look through Darger’s eyes, the less likely his, or any genius goes unnoticed. Solal remarked that many of the folks involved in Outsider almost had to “unlearn” their craft. Andrew Scheps, who mixed the album, at first didn’t know the context and gave Solal and Lindsay a product that was “too clean;” Lindsay explained Darger’s story and the importance of having strange-sounding narrative effects in the records. “When he worked [after that] on the mix, we found Henry was back in our songs,” said Solal. The individuals involved in coming up with animated videos for each of these songs, French animator Gabriel Jacquel with art direction by Pascal Gary (aka Phormazero), also had to abandon their fundamentals and learn to draw like Darger. Overall, exploring his work provides admirers like Solal the opportunity to dig deeper, from figuring out how to bring Outsider on stage to “finding new ways to tell the story,” like podcasts, interactive maps, short films, and Spotify playlists of Darger’s favorite music. “This man is full of mysteries,” he said. “I hope my future is Outsider for a while.”

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ohimtherebabey · 3 years

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[insert your fave album off any frank’s projects except mcr here for the album question thingy] 🖤

AHHHHH BEST ASK EVER IM GOING TO DO ALL OF FIATX, DS, AND LM THANK YOU!!!!!

STOMACHACHES/CELLABRATION

the first song from this album I heard: all i want is nothing (i listened to it in order the day it came out. at marching band practice. two weeks after i started high school. i cant recover from that)

do I own the album?: yes!! i have the black vinyl, the grey vinyl, the blue vinyl, the half clear/half silver vinyl, and the cd, as well as the black maida vale vinyl

my favorite song: JOYRIDING

my least favorite song: neverenders (but like. i still love it)

a song I didn’t like at first, but now do: joyriding actually lol

a song I used to like, but now don’t: .tragician.

my favorite lyric: I HOPE I DIE BEFORE THEY SAVE MY SOUL!

overall rating out of 10: 8

PARACHUTES (best fiatx album)/PATIENCE

the first song from this album I heard: dear percocet <3

do I own the album?: yes!!! i have both the white and blue vinyl and the cd, as well as keep the coffins coming

my favorite song: 9-6-15

my least favorite song: probably remedy but like. i love this album so much

a song I didn’t like at first, but now do: BFF

a song I used to like, but now don’t: dear percocet (ive listened to it soooooo many times)

my favorite lyric: the past don’t mean shit to me (that’s a lie)

overall rating out of 10: 10000

BARRIERS/FUTURE VIOLENTS (im gonna be honest ive listened to it maybe twice)

the first song from this album I heard: medicine square garden? i think? maybe great party

do I own the album?: yes!!! i have every vinyl variant, the cd, and the this is a place EP

my favorite song: moto pop <3

my least favorite song: young and doomed

a song I didn’t like at first, but now do: fever dream

a song I used to like, but now don’t: police police

my favorite lyric: the outside world will only cut your throat/ and your hometown is just hoping you’ll implode

overall rating out of 10: 5

DEATH SPELLS

the first song from this album I heard: fantastic bastards

do I own the album?: yes! i have both vinyl

my favorite song: HYPNOTIC SPELLS

my least favorite song: why is love so disastrous?

a song I didn’t like at first, but now do: quaainterlude

a song I used to like, but now don’t: diluted (i always start the album in order but rarely ever listen the whole way through so ive just heard diluted so many fucking times)

my favorite lyric: all of franks spoken part in hypnotic spellsi

overall rating out of 10: 10

LEATHERMOUTH

the first song from this album I heard: i am going to [redacted]

do I own the album?: yes!! i have both the black vinyl and the red/white/blue (pink) vinyl and the cd

my favorite song: 5th period massacre

my least favorite song: leviathan

a song I didn’t like at first, but now do: murder was the case they gave me

a song I used to like, but now don’t: i am going to [redacted]

my favorite lyric: i finally found my smile, it’s a pure blood stain

overall rating out of 10: 9

#isaac.txt #answered #ask games

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ourimpavidheroine · 3 years

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You always post your writing soundtracks. Mind sharing your top ten albums with us?

I actually laughed when I read this because I’m thinking of the Anon who complained that all of my music was OLD. I mean. I’m old! What did you expect?

Never mind me, I’m easily amused. Thank you for using the word album so I would not feel like Lady Danbury with my lethal cane.

Yes, sure I can do that! I don’t know that these are my forever and ever amen top ten, but they are the ones that are coming to mind right now. So.

Under a cut, it’s long.

In no particular order.

Brutal Youth - Elvis Costello

My ex-husband was in love with Elvis Costello and who could blame him? The man is a genius lyricist. This is not one of his more commercially popular albums but I love every single track. (I also lined up at Ticketmaster in Oakland, CA when the man was touring in order to get tickets for my ex. I got there at midnight and spent the night, meeting a group of drag queens who were getting tickets to see Barbara Streisand. God, that was a fun night, we ate donuts one of them went on a donut run for and sang showtunes for hours. One of my favorite memories.) This verse, from Clown Strike, is one that has resonated with me since I first heard it.

Tell me what you want of me Or are you terrified of failure? You put on a superstitious face Behind all this paraphernalia We're not living in a masquerade Where you only have three wishes It isn't easy to see In a lifetime of mistaken kisses

Unrepentant Geraldines - Tori Amos

I remember the first time I heard a Tori Amos song. It was the summer directly after I’d graduated from college, I was driving my ex-husband’s car and Silent All These Years came on the radio and I was just fucking gobsmacked. I bought Little Earthquakes that day and haven’t looked back. I have all her albums. I am a big, big fan.

Unrepentant Geraldines, though. God. It came out the year before my wife died and it got me through her death. The song Weatherman is about a man losing his wife, and how he sees her in the nature surrounding him.

And.

No, sorry, I can’t write more about this, not right now. But I sing it to her sometimes.

He is not a weatherman But his bride lies with the land And she will whisper to him I'll be dressing up in snow Cloaked in echo it's almost As if only Nature knows How to paint his wife to life With every season's tone "One more look from her eyes One more look can you paint her back to life"

Ray of Light - Madonna

This album got me through my divorce from my ex-husband. I’d go out every single day during my lunch hour, this on my walkman, and walk and walk and walk until I got myself in enough control to go back and finish my work day. It’s a great album and I still listen to it a lot. It empowers me. And then my daughter was born and Ray of Light has always been her song to me, even though that wasn’t the song on the album that Madonna herself wrote for her daughter.

Faster than the speeding light she's flying Trying to remember where it all began She's got herself a little piece of heaven Waiting for the time when Earth shall be as one And I feel like I just got home And I feel And I feel like I just got home And I feel

Seven and the Ragged Tiger - Duran Duran

This one was a difficult choice. For one thing, I really love their album Big Thing, which almost nobody’s heard about but one I love deeply. This one though...I think it’s the memories, including going to see them at the Oakland Coliseum with my cousin during their tour for this album and finding out they were partially filming the video for The Reflex that night. I like to think of us as being one of those girls in the audience. (Although I wasn’t screaming. I am a Capricorn. Have some dignity.) Duran Duran were responsible for my first fanfic and I’ve had a love for them since my Dad bought me their first album for my 13th birthday. I am nothing if not loyal. I have all of their early albums, all of their 12″ singles, too, including Secret Oktober, which I have always loved with a passion.

Also, Roger Taylor can still get it.

Freefall on a windy morning shore nothing but a fading track of footsteps Could prove that you never been there Spoken on a cotton cloud like the sound of gunshot taken by the wind And lost in distant thunder racing on a shining plain And tomorrow you'll be content to watch as the lightning plays along the wires and you'll wonder

Touch - Eurythmics

Another band I still love and listen to on the regular. Annie Lennox could sing me the telephone book and I’d be thrilled. Seeing her at age 14 in the Sweet Dreams video for the first time in my Grandmother’s living room quite literally woke something in me that led to moving across the world for a woman years later. (GOD.) I have all of their albums and choosing a favorite is difficult but this one won by a narrow margin, if only for the song Regrets, which is one of the songs that describes me until I became a mother, really. Like I RESONATED with that song. Still does in certain ways, if I am being truthful to myself.

I've got a delicate mind I've got a dangerous nature And my fist collides With your furniture I've got a delicate mind I've got a dangerous nature And my fist collides With your furniture I'm an electric wire And I'm stuck inside your head

Combat Rock - The Clash

Ah, teenage Impavid first understanding that music can also be political. Listen, I didn’t know much about what was going on outside of my own miniscule sphere - I was young and the internet didn’t exist yet. We got what news we got from our local paper and TV stations and they weren’t really reporting on what was happening in the world, not in 1982, let me fucking assure you. I got this album because my Dad was a part time DJ at a radio station that played mostly country music and the general manager of the station would just toss the rest of the non-country albums they’d get as promotions. My Dad would bring them home to me to listen to. You can imagine thirteen year old me listening to this album that opened with “This is a public service announcement - with guitars!” going WHAT THE FUCK? Let me just say there were a lot of trips to the library to read various newspapers after that.

Not to mention Rock the Casbah. What was a muezzin? I had no idea. I spent half a year reading books about Islam, about the Middle East and Northern Africa, which led to a curiosity about other religions beyond the Roman Catholicism in which I’d been raised, about other cultures as well. This album and The Color Purple by Alice Walker were the two things in my teen years that woke me the fuck up.

Now the king told the boogie men You have to let that raga drop The oil down the desert way Has been shakin' to the top The sheik he drove his Cadillac He went a' cruisin' down the ville The muezzin was a' standing On the radiator grille

Synchronicity - The Police

This fucking album. This fucking album. This album reached deep down into me and pulled out my soul and kicked it around for awhile. Every single song on this album hit me like a brick wall. Still does. Most likely always will.

Listen, you either like King of Pain or you live it. There’s no in between.

There's a little black spot on the sun today It's the same old thing as yesterday There's a black hat caught in a high tree top There's a flag pole rag and the wind won't stop I have stood here before inside the pouring rain With the world turning circles running 'round my brain. I guess I'm always hoping that you'll end this reign, But it's my destiny to be the king of pain...

Sign O’ The Times - Prince

The soundtrack to my University days. Jesus, it starts out with “In France a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name,” and it just keeps going. Pain, sex, wonder, glory, politics, love. It’s all there. I wore the vinyl out on this one. Amazing, amazing album. In fact, I still play it so often my kids practically know it by heart, and they don’t even like Prince!

To this day I think If I Was Your Girlfriend is the sexiest song ever written.

I will tell you this much: Sayuri’s main writing soundtrack song is Starfish and Coffee off the album, the same song I used to sing my kids as a lullaby. This should tell you a lot about her.

Cynthia wore the prettiest dress With different color socks Sometimes I wondered if the mates where in her lunchbox Me and Lucy opened it when Cynthia wasn't around Lucy cried, I almost died, U know what we found? Starfish and coffee Maple syrup and jam Butterscotch clouds, a tangerine And a side order of ham If U set your mind free, honey Maybe you'd understand Starfish and coffee Maple syrup and jam

Nina Simone Sings The Blues - Nina Simone

This was one of my Daddy’s albums. He loved it and so did I. As a child I just loved the sound of her voice - something in it both soothed me and pulled at me, made me want to run and just keep running. She still makes me feel like that. If you don’t know Nina Simone I urge you to change that, right now. There’s nobody at all like her. She’s irreplaceable. All of her material is good, not just her blues songs. Not to mention, she was an absolute brilliant genius at the piano, never mind the strength she had as a Black woman in a time when doors were shut in her face on a daily basis. Seriously. Read about her.

When I became a woman, of course, her songs took on a much deeper meaning for me, one that I could relate to. Isn’t that the hallmark of a good album, though? One that stays with you and changes with you? I think so.

If you’ve never heard her cover of I Put A Spell On You then do yourself a favor and go right now and listen. You’re welcome.

Oh and Buck from this album? Nuo to Wing, right there.

Also one of the sexiest songs ever written, this one. Especially how she sings it. The Hot Frenchman (have I ever told you about The Hot Frenchman? no? OH BOY THERE’S A STORY) told me he thought it was about drugs and I was like, honey, this tells me a whole lot about you, more than you probably wanted it to.

I want a little sugar In my bowl I want a little sweetness Down in my soul I could stand some lovin' Oh so bad I feel so funny and I feel so sad I want a little steam On my clothes Maybe I can fix things up So they'll go Whatsa matter Daddy Come on, save my soul I need some sugar in my bowl I ain't foolin' I want some sugar in my bowl

I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got - Sinéad O’Connor

This is a beautiful album, full of pain and joy, her hallmark. She sings every single word with everything in her; she’s far too intense for many, many people (and while she’s been open with her mental health struggles I’ve often wondered if she isn’t somewhere on the spectrum as well) but never for me. Her raw honesty has always appealed to me. She’s political, she’s a lover, a mother, a survivor of horrific abuse, someone who keeps reinventing herself as a way to find her way through pain. I always feel, when I am listening to her music, that I am bearing witness. I’m not afraid of pain; I’ve survived it as well. This album, one of her oldest, is still my favorite.

The line “You used to hold my hand when the plane took off” is the most evocative lyric I have ever heard with regards to the ending of love. It’s a punch to the heart - she felt it and she shared it with us, her fragile heart in her palms. Oh, Sinéad.

This is the last day of our acquaintance I will meet you later in somebody's office I'll talk but you won't listen to me I know what your answer will be I know you don't love me anymore You used to hold my hand when the plane took off Two years ago there just seemed so much more And I don't know what happened to our love

#personal #favorite albums #long post #Anonymous

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johns-diqi · 3 years

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Almost forgot about this thing I promised @themostdivinetrash I would make so imma do it now.

This is also for anyone else who wants to join the queen fandom you can look through this series in starting about it, this being part 1. I’ll tag them all the same.

So first we are gonna talk about my favorite band member, John Richard deacon. I’ll show you some photos and then we can talk about him.

So this was his early to mid 70s look which remained pretty much the same until about 1977

He cut his hair shorter like roger and Freddie which is probably one of my least favorite John hairstyles but it’s still absolutely adorable. And then he like buzzed it all off which brought up this

Which is late 78 and till 1980. Then in 1981 brought up my absolute favorite hairstyle of his because it also goes along with his absolutely fabulous outfits (and yes I do have to add more than one picture it’s just to beautiful)

Gorgeous. Anyways, after this the perm just g r e w like in 83 he looked like this

And by 1985 it was like full bloom perm which is also magnificent

And then his hair grayed gradually like 1988

Pretty gray. And then his hair shortened and got grayer over the years and I can only add one more picture cause I don’t know how to add more than 10 photos (but if any of y’all do know how to do that, help a girl out that would be epic) so I found a photo with pictures of him from 1981 to 1994

He went away from the public in 1997, being severely affected by freddies death in 91 so he retired and now he still does financial things for the band. People have gotten photos of him after 1997 which was very disrespectful since he had told the people he didn’t want the fame and attention anymore and no photos or anything like that but people still took them anyways. Before I knew about that I made the mistake of looking up the most recent photo of him which was around 2018 I think so now I know to not look them up or search for them and whenever I see one I scroll past it because it’s disrespectful to his wishes. Anyways he is my favorite bass player ever (sry Paul) and my favorite queen member because he’s extremely sweet and adorable and relatable and amazing. He seems very innocent but once when asked what his dream was he said “wet” (he sounds like John Lennon tbh-) once someone said he reads prono magazines and he has like six kids (which we call the deaklings). His nickname is either deaky or deacy. People debate over how it’s spelt but in my opinion I like deaky more because deacy looks like if I said it out loud I would be saying DC. Some people spell it other ways (the other ways are usually jokes tbh) like diqi, deacky, deky, etc. He wrote another one bites the dust, I want to break free, you’re my best friend, the bass line for under pressure and some less well known songs like spread your wings, you and I, only seven days, back chat, who needs you, need your loving tonight, misfire (aka another reason why he’s not innocent homie literally wrote a song about premature ejaculation, one year of love, and he also wrote songs with Freddie like cool cat, and pain is so close to pleasure. He also played piano for you’re my best friend and on one song he wrote he plays every instrument for the song. There’s only like two clips of him singing one is when preforming radio Gaga his mic was louder than the others and you can perfectly hear his voice, and for a song called liar him a Freddie sing “all day long” with each other which sparks a lot of deacury fan arts and gifs. (Deacury is the ship name for Freddie and John which I ship). I’ll talk about ships in a different part of this thing and that’s all I got for now. If you look at queen posts or memes and you don’t understand them you can just send them to me or another queen fan in my inbox and I can explain them further since I probably didn’t include everything about him. His birthday is against 19th 1951 which he loves to remind people about constantly. He also has the best bass riff ever in Liar and some other really good bass line songs are dragon attack live, don’t try suicide, millionaires Waltz, under pressure, another one bites the dust and a lot of others I can’t think of rn. Also queen wrote a song on their album Hot space called Life is real (song for lennon) which is a song they wrote in tribute to John Lennon’s death which is something I thought I should share. They all idolize the Beatles which I think is amazing and they played imagine a few days after John died in tribute. I think it was mainly just Freddie and Brian playing and not roger and deaky. Anyways that’s it for now

#queen #queen facts #queen fandom facts #queen fandom #John deacon #deaky #John Richard deacon

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x--daughters-of-darkness--x · 4 years

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I TALKED TO AMY LEE OF EVANESCENCE ABOUT INSPIRING THE WORLD’S WORST FANFICTION

The singer of My Immortal (the song) has now read My Immortal (the fanfic)

If you mention the name “My Immortal,” you may mean one of two things. The first is the 2003 hit song from rock band Evanescence. The second is a Harry Potter fanfic so transcendentally, mysteriously bad that it’s transfixed the internet for years.

The fanfic My Immortal is about a time-traveling mall-goth teenage vampire wizard (named “Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way”) who is obsessed with Evanescence and a variety of goth-inflected rock bands. She’s supposed to look like Amy Lee, Evanescence’s lead vocalist, pianist, and songwriter. And to this day, nobody is sure who wrote the story or whether they were serious.

Back in the real world, Lee and the rest of Evanescence have spent months under stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus pandemic. They’ve used that time to film two music videos in collaboration with director P.R. Brown, each shot by band members and their families. The latest is a surreal video for “The Game Is Over,” a song from their upcoming album The Bitter Truth. In Lee’s words, it’s shot as a “psychological thriller,” full of imagery based on a specific fear or inner demon from each member.

These videos — filmed in living rooms, cars, and other personal spaces — give fans a new kind of look into the band members’ lives. But I was curious about a different kind of fan relationship: did the creators of “My Immortal” know about My Immortal? I spoke to Lee, and the answer is yes; in fact, it’s part of a long-running family joke. She’d never actually read it, however, until last week.

You’ve made two videos under quarantine, and they’ve taken very different approaches. What was the process behind each of them?

We really had to just think kind of quickly. We were working on another video treatment that would have been full-production, this whole deal with a big crew and things we could no longer have because of the pandemic — including the fact that we couldn’t even physically get together because we live all over the world.

We recognized that “Wasted on You” had a bunch of lyrical content that felt like all of a sudden where we were. So we went for that. I really wanted it to be real on a level like people hadn’t seen us before: in our own homes, in our real lives, not dressed up, not in makeup, just the real, raw us.

For the second one, it’s like “Okay, how do we take what we’ve learned and amp it up even more to make it look like a real video more than just us being ourselves?” We have all been very serious about the lockdown, so we have been completely alone for the most part during this time — and that is cool in some ways as a creator. But you really have to live with yourself all the time.

A few of us have gone through some difficult things in the past few years. [Bassist Tim McCord] and I both experienced losses in our immediate family. There’s just been a lot of hard. So you know when you’re finally forced to stop being distracted by all the things that keep us happy, there’s silence — and that stuff comes out. So each of us had a private kind of gut-spilling confession with [P.R. Brown] about what we’re struggling with.

We were just sharing deeply in a way that we don’t normally go all the way with when it comes to at least our visuals. When I pour my lyrics into my music, it’s always really raw. But in this, it’s like, we’re not going to hold back on the video side and just make it beautiful — we’re going to go for it and let it be ugly and share the dark parts of ourselves.

I think of a lot of your music as being open and vulnerable, and you interact with fans online. What does filming a video at home like this communicate that your normal social media presence and music don’t?

I hope it just shows more and more of that willingness to be vulnerable because as hard as it is, it always leaves me feeling more satisfied than just putting on a pretty face.

Social media’s such a weird world for me. I love it — I’m grateful for the idea that we can have a direct relationship with our fans. But it’s kind of a double-edged sword. It’s such an open platform for everybody to criticize everything about you. And when you go there, you’re going to see that. I think that’s true for everybody. It doesn’t matter if you’re a celebrity or not. It’s just a place where people don’t have to show their face to say things, and there’s a lot of ugly out there.

What’s your relationship specifically with fanworks? Do people send you things that were inspired by you?

Oh my god, it’s so wonderful. We’ve got so much art. I’ve got this huge collection of stuff that I’ve been hanging on to just from the beginning. There are so many talented people out there that pour their efforts into making a piece of visual art that is either of something in the Evanescence world or just something else that came out of them while they were listening to our music.

Then there are other things that you have to keep because they’re so hilariously funny. People will make a crazy poem that makes totally no sense but I’m a character within it, which is awesome. It’s like, I know this person’s like 12 years old and totally sincere, but this is so funny. I have a little studio, and I dedicated a little bit of time during our unexpected free time to cover it wall-to-wall in the bathroom with all the fan stuff.

Which brings me to my next question: had you ever heard of My Immortal?

I think for quite a while I was just unaware of it. And then my cynical, Reddit-loving younger sister who’s also an English teacher, somewhere during the holiday every year when the family’s all together, it’ll come up for some reason. And she’s like, “Wait — you still haven’t read My Immortal?” And I’m like, “No, what do you mean?” She’s like, “You have to. Okay, hold on. Let me read you an excerpt.” And then she’ll pull up her phone and read some awesome paragraph from the craziest, funniest thing ever that makes no sense.

It’s one of her favorite things that she thinks is the most hilarious thing in the world, and I still just kept not reading it. It’s been kind of this ongoing joke with us. And then I got a call a few days ago that you wanted to talk about it, so I was like, “Oh, crap. I have to read a little bit of it.”

I read I think not quite half of it, but it did have me in tears. I was laughing really, really hard at one point, just because of the nonsense. And then I started asking myself, is this real? I can’t quite tell. I’m totally undecided. Is it sincere? I feel like it started maybe as sincere, but they got in on it and started playing it up for the haters. I can’t tell! What do you think?

It would have to be so elaborate, but there are a bunch of cases that really make it seem like this person knows much, much more than the character they’re putting on.

I noticed a misspelling that was like, instead of triumphantly, it was “triumelephantly.” And I was like, come on, you don’t think “elephant” is inside “triumphant.” There’s no way.

At one point, the main character’s name is spelled two different ways within three words of each other.

I totally saw that, too! I’m torn because I want it to be sincere, kind of... but I don’t know.

There are things about it that aren’t cool to talk about. Like it’s not funny to talk about slitting your wrists. So it takes me a second to get past that joke, which is so recurring.

Yeah, if you go back to old internet culture, a lot of it is really ugly. And it’s weird trying to separate that stuff out.

Is it better now?

I don’t know because now I’m too old to know what’s going on. But kids do seem nicer. They often seem nicer.

I would like to believe we’ve grown up a little bit as a society from that. Maybe everybody having a little bit more of a microphone has taught us some things that we need to be aware of that are outside of our perception and our personal experiences. There are other people that are seeing that in a different way. I think it would be cool if that’s true.

I was a teenager around when My Immortal came out, and it feels like it describes a very recognizable “goths versus preps” rivalry. Did you feel that?

I think this thing is poking fun at that world — I mean it would have to be, come on — and that part of it really resonates with me in a real way. But I didn’t consider myself goth! Part of what’s weird and funny is like okay, this is describing hating the preps, and you’re the cool one, you’re the underground, you understand real life and the gravity of death, and I get it. But if you’re so depressed and everything’s so hard and you’re so real and they’re so fake, why do you put so much effort into your look?

That was what always turned me off about the word “goth” when that started being assigned to me in our early days. If I was 15 years old and you’d asked me what I was, I’m grunge. I buy all my clothes at garage sales, I don’t do crap to my look, I get ready two seconds before school, and all the preps are the ones who put all their focus on their looks and what party they’re going to go to.

But yeah, that part was funny to me. That part existed.

I love the idea of you knowing about this thing for years without having read it.

I kind of want to thank you because I did get a really good laugh out of it last night. It’s not like, when I have free time, I’m motivated to go read some horribly bad thing. But it’s actually pretty interesting.

And you’ve gotta love all the characters breaking into song to sing My Chemical Romance songs. It’s pretty great.

#Amy Lee #Evanescence #2020 interviews

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potatoesandsunshine · 3 years

Text

Campaign 2 Wrap Up: Anna Potatoesandsunshine Edition

Seemed like it would be fun to go through all the fan content I made for this campaign and try to find at least one thing I like about each thing! Kind of like looking back through a photo album. Under the cut because as it turns out, I wrote kind of a lot! (As in, 21 fics and 3 playlists kind of a lot!)

the sea, once it casts its spell (fjord speculation, what’s up with all this ocean stuff?? the fic)

The first thing I wrote for c2, wayyy in the beginning of things. We had no idea about Uk’otoa or Avantika or anyone at this point, it was pure ocean vibes for my favorite warlock. I really like how hard I leaned in on the “the ocean follows Fjord to land” idea.

so many things will fill my life (but only one will do) (post-campaign cali/jester fluff, written the night of the cali episode and so sweet it could rot your teeth)

This one is just good. I just did good with this one. I’m one of those people who hates their own work the night of posting and then when looking back at it goes, “Wow, this is great.” My favorite thing is the little gifts sent along with the letters! Cali was so fun and cute :)

when the dust does roam (Beau study up to Episode 42, 2k words of Beau poking at the idea of grief)

Best thing I did in this fic was have Caleb-through-Frumpkin bugging Beau about getting some sleep. They really... they’re siblings, your honor.

“ “Fuck off, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Beau picks the bird up and sets him in the hood of her own cloak, out of reach of any weasels or startled monks in the morning. It’d suck to have to tell Caleb that his Frumpkin got eaten by Sprinkle.” C’mon guys, let’s do the sibling dance.

keep your swords out by your sides (the idea for this was, What If Fjord Has Nightmares From Uk’otoa Every Night and just doesn’t remember them)

Assigning everybody a word Uk’otoa had said for each nightmare in this was a challenge; I went into it knowing I wanted Caleb for Learn and Caduceus for Consume and had to guess the rest - for an angry eye snake Uk’otoa didn’t give us a ton of quotes.

“ He reaches over and runs a hand along the wall of the ship. From his touch, mushrooms begin sprouting.” Caduceus starting to decompose the Mistake in the middle of cooking was maybe the best moment in this story for me. Like, yeah. Yeah. Ok you funky little grave cleric.

strange but not a stranger (Caleb & Jester, in the immediate aftermath of Caleb’s charm in Episode 55)

the first of my “the Mighty Nein won’t have these conversations with each other in canon so they have to be had in fic” ideas that turned into a full-fledged story. I still had not discovered the em dash at this point, so the formatting of this makes me cringe a little bit, but this fic was really about The Emotions Of Being Out Of Control which turned out to be a very big Thing for the Mighty Nein.

now this story was when swords were humble (fake academia mixed with a Yasha study)

Honestly I’m still obsessed with the AU I made here where Yasha was just awakening every sword she used without knowing it?? Why did I use that here only?? That might come back. But the best part about this fic is the citations; me at my most in-joke and ridiculous.

through the teeth of this tempest (Written in the immediate aftermath of Episode 69, Yasha internally trying to break Obann’s control over the course of a month.)

The most “I wrote this to cope with canon” fic out of all of them. I was crying writing this, I was so upset that Yasha was gone ugh just remembering it. Still waiting for past me to discover the em dash, I genuinely don’t know why I didn’t know how to do it and I’ve thought about going back and editing all of these but I’m just Not Gonna Do All That. Anyway, I really like how Yasha catches lightning with her sword in this. We all really manifested that happening.

nothing more than what the losers settle for (Time travel, a series of oneshots where each member of the m9 sans Caduceus went back to a different point in the timeline and murdered Trent Ikithon)

This was my longest fic for c2, so I’m mostly just glad it got finished. This happened somewhere around the time Matt released that set of notes that mentioned Trent in more detail and I hated him so much I just had to write him dying six times. That speaks for itself.

Revolutionary!Fjord was also a good turn. He could pull it off, I think.

we’re gonna show ‘em a thing, or two, or three (Jester growing up fluff!)

I really like how I did Jester & Artagan in this, even though he barely appears. Someone better at songwriting than me please write the Dragon Song. Em dash makes an appearance here but the formatting is still wrong. I Am Once Again Asking For Proper Use Of The Em Dash.

the best things (happen while you’re dancing) (Mid-Episode 97 Divergence, Jester taking the reins at the party + hints of jester/beau/yasha bc i still love my girls so much)

Jester’s a little out of character in this, but not wildly so, and it was for the purposes of a Trapped By Societal Convention plot that I wanted her to mastermind so I think it was fine in the end. I’m still fascinated by the way she unbalanced Ludinus Da’leth in basically every interaction they had, and while their scene feels pretty cliche in this... the cliches are there for a reason. They’re so fun to write.

Em dash my beloved, there you are.

plus thirty-one varieties of sacramental wine (The Galavant crossover that truly nobody asked for, Beau + the monks)

Yeah, this one’s just fun. Not much more to say about it. Critical Role and Galavant are both fantasy, but they’re honestly pretty different in tone, and it was fun to write Beau dropped into a comedy musical.

oh we were sea-bound and aimless at best (Purely angst, a What If The Fjord & Orly Resurrections Didn’t Work fic)

Made myself care about Marius with this one, y’all. What more can I say? Beau having to go from first mate to captain was just... deliciously painful, because she would.

lost my shape trying to act casual (Beau & Yasha during travelercon, another mid-episode fic, this time of 104)

Yasha comforting Beau, who feels guilty for not feeling guilty... That Mighty Nein wasn’t lying, Mind Control and Autonomy can be themes. Another in the “the Mighty Nein won’t have these conversations with each other in canon so they have to be had in fic” tank. They really just... didn’t open up to each other for a long time, which made sense, but I wanted them to.

so long as you don’t mind a little dying (Beau & Caduceus, sometime in the peace talks arc)

Keeping with the Mighty Nein Please Talk To Each Other theme, I feel like I did a pretty good job with the late-night conversation energy of this fic. This was at a time when I was looking at Caduceus, can opener in hand, ready to make this firbolg open up about his feelings. Beau in this is prickly and confrontational but only in service of her friend’s well-being.

amber light, bending (Eiselcross speculation, Widofjord and all the messiness therein)

THE widofjord fic of my two widofjord fics. The blueprint. The better one. Finally I got the dynamic figured out. I maintain that the tower is an absolute expression of Caleb’s love for his friends. The way that neither of them have the braincell in this fic... yeah this one is just good.

and a blade between them (Widofjord happening... sometime.)

Okay so this is not as good as amber light and I will never be able to look at it and like it as much, but it was still fun to write. Anyway, the intimacy of shaving someone else. That is good. The tag “if they didn’t want me to think about the blood pact they shouldn’t have made the blood pact” is the most useful takeaway from this fic and is the driving force behind the Fjord/Jester/Caleb fic I’m working on now, so it wasn’t a waste of time or anything.

feel the ground beneath my feet turn into the sky (Post-Campaign Astrid-retires-to-Nicodranas, Astrid/Jester)

This is another one where I’m like “Yeah, this is just good.” Packed full of Wizard Fashion, Artagan making an appearance to rope Astrid into having a happier future, and the power of Going To The Seaside. Good for you, fic-Astrid.

spend your days biting your own neck (Role-reversal where Beau is the one mind-controlled this time and Yasha is the one chasing after her, set very early in the Tomb Takers arc)

So much of this fic is about not saying things aloud - Beau’s POV spends a good chunk on body language and Yasha writes multiple letters on paper and in her own head - but devotion bleeding through anyway because there’s nowhere else for it to go. The two of them go tumbling over a cliff together at the end but Yasha has wings, ugh. Yeah this was a good one.

and blow the dry leaves from the tree (Somewhere before the beauyasha date but otherwise timeline-nonspecific Nicodranas, Yasha & Yeza become friends)

Yasha & Yeza making pancakes together when neither of them know how to do so... is good. This fic is very much about grief sneaking in, but it’s even more about finding someone to share the moment with you. I think these two have more in common than we think.

oh, lend a mending hand (Caleb & Caduceus during Beau’s tombstone meditation in Episode 130)

I wrote this entire fic as an excuse for Caleb and Caduceus to hug and it does what it says on the tin. Got em.

it’s about the passing of measures (Beauyasha at the end of Episode 134, Aeor speculation)

This fic got extremely sidetracked because I rediscovered the marble machine during it and I do not apologize for that. I still really like the idea that Aeor as a whole, not just the Cognouza, is somewhat-alive. Too much magic and too much death for it to be anything else, in my mind. And I’m a sap for hurt/comfort.

the blumentrio playlist nobody asked for

If I think too much about how deep in each other these three people are I will cry. Made myself a soundtrack for those tears.

the caleb playlist nobody asked for

what if this angsty wizard had a playlist of songs that mostly just... make me want to dance? that question was answered here.

the caduceus playlist nobody asked for

songs about home, leaving home, dying, changing, becoming someone new, coming home and finding it’s changed... this to me is caduceus.

yeah... this campaign has been fun!! I probably won’t stop making things about it; I still write about Vox Machina, for crying out loud, but... it feels good to lay it all out like this. It’s been a long few years, and it’s wild to be seeing the end of it now.

#yes tumblr hates links yes here is an overlong post with 24 links #now THIS is why you make a blog. to look at your own work and say yeah several times.#critical role #i have some stuff i've been working on but i don't see any of it getting finished before the epilogue #looking back at everything is like... yeah! i had a lot of fun here!#anna's fic notes

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angrypedestrian · 3 years

Note

3, 9, 13, 21, 25

3. What is/are your favorite song(s) atm? I’ve been putting Radioland by Ashley McBryde and Chinese Satellite by Phoebe Bridgers on A LOT recently (that part where she sing “swore i could hear you through the walls/but that’s impossible” and the programmed drums kick in? CHILLS MY DUDE, every time).

9. Favorite concert you’ve attended? God, this is legit like picking a favorite child, except harder, because shows rule and children are, predominantly, annoying. Alright, I’m gonna cheat and pick 2:

June 2007 at the Polish Club in Syracuse seeing the last show of a local ska band (Razbari Sumthing yes it really was spelled that way yes they were bad no that does not fucking matter) where we all got up on stage and sang dumb as fuck lyrics and danced and there were like 6 openers and my buddies bought my ticket as my birthday present AND ALSO flaming tsunamis opened and i got punched in the throat in a wall of death and it ruled

New Year’s Eve 2014 at Bowery Ballroom seeing Rainer Maria’s first reunion show. They played Planetary like 4 songs in and it was the first time I had cried in probably 5+ years

13. Name four or more flawless albums? Fuuuuccccccckkkkkkk there are so many okay these are in no order and off the top of my head:

Murder By Death - Good Morning Magpie

Fireworks - Gospel

RVIVR - The Beauty Between

Polar Bear Club - Clash. Battle. Guilt. Pride.

Team Dresch - Personal Best

I could name 50 more. So many albums are so good!!!

21. A song that needs to play loud? There are many choices that could be made here as well, but for my money, nothing beats Came Out Swinging babyyyyyyy

25. A song that relaxes you? My cop out answer is probably like, something from the Night in the Woods soundtrack, but I think my better answer is She Knows Her Way from Big D and the Kids Table

#thank u bri #explosionshark

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markcampbells · 3 years

Text

thirty questions

@the-blind-assassin-12 tagged me; thanks, Alyssa :) and tagging @malionnes because she’s one of the only ones who reads these all the way through.

Name/nickname: Tracy. I go by Trai because I always went by it in the Internet stranger-danger days (more adrogynous) and because I went through a period of being ~~unique~~ where I wanted to spell my name with an i instead. I dropped that, but Trai stuck with my middle and high school friends, though there’s only one of those left who calls me that regularly. I never insisted on it to my college friends so they all call me Tracy, though one of them and I call each other “twin” as a mutual endearment since our interests are extremely similar. If I’m introducing myself or referring to myself in an online context, like here on Tumblr, it’s pretty much always by Trai.

Gender: Female

Star sign: Capricorn. Which gets left out of astrology memes a lot, I feel like? Anyway.

Height: Uh, I always say 5′3″ and just assume that’s true, so... that.

Time: 1:55 PM

Birthday: January 3rd. So my 30th is coming up in 2021, aka Plague Year Part II.

Favorite bands: The Killers and Florence + the Machine. I should listen to more Tegan and Sara and Of Monsters and Men because I like particular albums of theirs but haven’t gone into their wider discographies.

Favorite solo artists: I’m regrettably not current on all these, but present and past favorites include Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton, Ingrid Michaelson, KT Tunstall, Jason Mraz, Alanis Morissette, Nelly Furtado, and Anna Nalick.

Song stuck in my head: Earlier I read a book title that had the word Yellow in it and ended up with “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” so that’s... not particularly helpful.

Last movie: The Prom. My movie watching has been extremely thin on the ground last year since my attention hasn’t been up for it. In recent months (going back to August) a handful of others I watched were Water Lilies, Kajillionaire, The Boys in the Band, and Howard.

Last show: Six Feet Under, which I’m watching for the first time. I’m almost at the end of Season 1 and I honestly love it. It isn’t really a surprise to me that I do--I like black comedy, I unfortunately had a lot of death in my family in my formative years so my mom and I have always had a sense of humor about that kind of thing (plus she grew up over a funeral home herself), and I was always interested in it knowing Michael C. Hall’s character and his partner were significant for gay representation on TV--but it is always a pleasant find to find a TV show you genuinely enjoy watching.

When did I create this blog: April 2nd, 2010. Back in my day we got the damn Tumbeasts error message AND WE HATED IT.

What do I post: Well, it used to be more consistent when I had more consistent interests, but now it’s kind of a mess. I used to love posting more about what I was reading, but haven’t done that much lately. Period drama/Jane Austen can be a strong presence, and in recent years my attachment to Star Trek has grown. Doom Patrol and Legends of Tomorrow during their seasons tend to be strong fixtures. Matt Bomer and Chris Pine show up when they’ve got projects going (David Tennant used to feature more in the old days but I’ve strayed from his fandom). Queer art and queer culture.

Last thing googled: “will ferrell owen wilson.” I went into the break room to wash my hands after the end of my shift and a movie was playing on MTV that I didn’t recognize from the off. I think it was Wedding Crashers, which I saw back when it came out and then never again, so I’m not sure. I tend to be curious about what movie is playing on TV if I don’t recognize it.

Other blogs: @pinesexualmckirk is where I’m attempting to put my more niche Star Trek posting (and is acting as a repository for the McKirk fanfics I want to read eventually). I have started literally two writing sideblogs that I convinced myself I was going to use someday (@ashes-and-silverware for original and @intellect-and-romance for fanfic) but never have because I keep being annoying on main, I guess? I don’t write fanfic anymore so the second one is probably a dead fish, but I always tell myself maybe someday I’ll get the original one going.

Do I get asks: Mostly from Cait, but I will always welcome more. Back in the old days I actually used to get an impressive amount of asks about Doctor Who and One Tree Hill.

Why I chose my url: Mark is my original character created in conjunction with Cait, and for a while we had our URLs paired as the couple. I kept mine because I like it sort of being a reference for just us, LOL. I used to be tutorgirlx3 and haley--james after Haley of One Tree Hill, but over time I felt as I drifted away from the show/fandom it wasn’t a great fit.

Following: 721. I try to cull occasionally, but haven’t in a while.

Followers: 1,927, and to be quite honest I do not deserve that many and I’m almost certain the vast majority of those are dead blogs. Those old days of Doctor Who and One Tree Hill built up my follower base in a way I never really deserved (I never posted all that much original content). A lot of people from those days aren’t around anymore, so that’s why I think a lot of the blogs are dead, but I appreciate the number regardless; thank you all.

Average hours of sleep: Probably around seven or eight. I really try to get that much when I can, partly because being a 4 AM shift worker means my sleep is weirder than everyone else’s and I feel like I need more of it.

Lucky number: 3

Instruments: I tried learning guitar for a while but to be honest I never had the discipline to practice it.

What am I wearing: Old Navy pajama shorts with cats playing with Christmas lights, and I’m trying to decide if I’m going to change my top. I have either a black Doom Patrol t-shirt or a purple tank top that says Reality Is For People Who Can’t Handle Victorian Feminist Literature that I wear around the house a lot.

Dream job: It used to be editor, but I no longer want to use my degree in that way because I’ve heard too many horror stories from people about working in publishing killing their desire to read for pleasure. At this point, with as many years in retail behind me as I have, literally anything with a desk would be fine with me.

Dream trip: England. I want to see all the literary houses and bookstores I didn’t get to see the first time around.

Favorite food: Sweet, brownies. Other than that, dill pickles, probably chicken tenders, and honestly I love steak and cheese chimichangas.

Nationality: American

Favorite song (at the moment): Some of the last few I’ve liked enough to buy have been “Someone You Loved” and “Before You Go” by Lewis Capaldi and “Diamonds” by Sam Smith. Eternally, it’s “The Chain” by Ingrid Michaelson.

Last book read: I reread Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, which is one of my favorites. My concentration has been really fucking suffering this year so me finishing anything is monumental, but currently I’m trying to get through (prepare yourselves): Who is Vera Kelly? by Rosalie Knecht, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. (Yes, I’m a disaster pan and every book on that list is queer.)

Top three fictional universes I’d like to live in: .Um, Star Trek if I could just be in the fun part and not the dangerous part. Something lowkey and queer and with a bookstore like Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For. Night Vale if I didn’t have to be an intern at the radio station.

#about me #thanks alyssa!

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