#1 - Dinner Bell

Dinner Bell
by They Might Be Giants
From the Album Apollo 18

So this is #1...why is that? Well, read the about post for one. "Dinner Bell" by They Might Be Giants just happens to be a great song though as well. Like lots of their songs it’s short but good. It will be very tough for me to not put lots of TMBG songs up here but I’ll try to refrain. This song though is very entertaining and I’m sure you can read a lot into it if you want (these are entertaining) but to me it’s just pure fun and I’m not going to try and analyze it beyond the whole Pavlov dog thing. I’m assuming that’s why my friend Katrina liked it (and some of the other songs on the excellent Apollo 18) so much on that trip up to Lincoln a long time ago– she has excellent taste and at the time it made me give the album another listen and made me like it even more. I’m going to do that again tomorrow. The whole album is awesome and I highly recommend it if you like They Might Be Giants at all.

You tube of the song in concert

Fun facts about the song

What's this blog about...

So what’s this blog about huh? Well, yesterday I was sitting at my desk at work and I had my ipod on listening to some tunes and I thought I'd try and do go full random and just have it shuffle all songs. Anyway a song ("Dinner Bell" by They Might Be Giants) popped on. Great song by a great band, cool enough, but really nothing momentous right? I agree, except for the fact that I had just (finally) gotten on Facebook like 6 days before and had just been talking to my friend who I hadn't talked to in waaaay too long. Well, oddly enough, this song, for me, is kind of linked to her... and that's where this blog comes in.

Now, I really don't know if she remembers how or why when I hear that song I usually think "hey, that's that song that she really liked when we were driving up to Lincoln that one time to see a Nebraska game". It was a long time ago and things get kind of fuzzy around the edges, ya know. So I really could be remembering it a bit wrong… What I do know is that none of that really matters. What matters is that when I hear that song, that’s what I think of...and that's cool. The thought then occurred to me, and this happens quite often when listening to music, that next time I saw her I should share that memory with her.

This is the point where I would normally have gotten back to work and next time I saw her I will have forgotten all about it. But... the thought also occurred to me that if I had a blog that would totally be something to post about. In fact, wow, you know that happens to me all the time. Then my brain hopped to the fact that this really kind of dovetails well with another thought I'd been having recently. That being, when I hear a song I often think, "I wonder if my friends have that song?" or "I wonder if so-and-so likes that song as much as I do" or "I should remember to tell what's-her-name about that song".

Well here's my chance. What if I just started a blog, mostly for my friends and family, where each post was about a song I loved (or at least thought was worth owning, hearing or listening to) and why? Free form, could be my story of how I "found" that song for myself, what associations I have with it, who told me to check it out, why I used to hate it, how and why it "grew on me", you name it. Either way, I was getting it out there and not just forgetting about it as so often happens.

Basically I'm thinking about each song on here as a sort of musical (stereo) postcard that I'd want to send to all of my friends. My hope is that they go out and get the song, drop it in their itunes, put it on their ipod (or however they're doing music for themselves nowadays), listen to it, and hopefully find it as entertaining as I do. In addition, if it can expose them all to some music they haven’t heard or get them (and me for that matter) excited about music we already have, then all the better.

Anyway, here’s my music postcards…I hope you like them. But if you don't, I’m fine with that too.

- Joe A. Sands (JAStereo)