Well the mob’s getting angry, and the torches alight…

Here’s the thing about music.  I can be split into two different categories:  Famous songs and not.  This is not to say that there are not a million was to split all the music in the world into a million different categories, but for the purpose of this blog, I’m splitting it into two:  Famous songs and Not Famous songs.  

Famous songs are the songs that most everyone knows, and even if they’ve forgotten, can remember by hearing the slightest clip of it.  Obviously not famous songs are the opposite.  Where am i going with this?  Well you’ll see, just be patient.  I was in the mall the other day and the local farm team for a professional MLB team was holding tryouts for anthem singers.  Our mall is like a misshapen t-square, the auditions were right in the large center courtyard of a middle, so any where you were in the mall, you can here the auditions.  These auditions were set up like American Idol, with three judges, a stage, and a group of people waiting.  

 

Here’s where the famous song thing comes in.  They are usually the only songs used for contests.  If your trying to motivate the crowd, your going to use a song people know and can get into, also using a song that is well known doesn’t make it look like your hiding your errors behind the fact that the judges may not no the correct way to sing the song, therefore they wouldn’t know that your singing it wrong.  Anyway… all the contestants were singing either God Bless America or the more popular choice, Star Spangled Banner.  Now the key to winning a competition with a famous song is all about identifying the “power lines.”  There are, in every famous song, lines that are key to the song, you sing them well, your golden, if you don’t, your bronze.  To sing them correctly involves belting them out.  I mean really really giving everything you got into those few lines, the power statement, added to the crescendo that comes with it, can really put you over the edge.  In the Star Spangled Banner, for example, the key line is “And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air…”  Pretty much the entire performance of that song comes down to how well you do those two lines.  Don’t believe me?  Listen really closely to a performance of the national anthem next time you watch a sporting event.  

So now that I’ve established that, I’m getting to the whole point of this entry:  Jason Mraz.  (I know who saw that coming?)  He does a cover of the song “Rocket Man.”  A song that falls under the category of “Famous Songs”  there are two versions.  One is a bonus track on itunes of him doing the song acoustically.  It’s pretty good.  The other is  some recording, in some cafe or bar at sometime when some guy clearly had a recorder at his table, you can hear the audience, glasses clinking and at some point you hear some guy say “See that one?  The blonde, That’s her birthday”  I don’t know where this came from, and I don’t know how old this is, But It really impresses me.  I’ll tell you why.  

The “Power Line” in Rocket Man is “All of this science I don’t understand, It’s just my job five days a week.”  It’s the most important line of the song, and while handled well on the itunes version, the recorded version is amazing.  You can hear him throw every bit of soul into that one line that he possibly has in him.  It’s a sound to hear I tell you.  It leads me to believe that the recording is from before he really hit it big.  I have a theory that you, not through anything you can control, lose an innocence when you become famous.  This is especially true of recording artists, earlier not studio stuff has a sense of desperation in their voice that can’t be copied when you have a comfortable, famous life.  Not that you stop trying, its just that you shed it for something greater.  But that’s just the world though my ears.  

Big surprise here:  My song recommendation for the week  Jason Mraz, Rocket Man (this isn’t the version I speak of (you’ll have to do the completely wrong thing that I am not telling anyone to do of looking on limewire to find that)

 

The Post Title comes from the David Ford Song “Requiem”