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May032020

A Song You Like with a Color in the Title

30-Day Song Challenge, Day 1: A Song You Like with a Color in the Title

Right off the bat, I have a problem meeting this challenge. Not because I can’t think of a song with a color in the title — there’s lots of those, if you just look around — but because I can’t decide on one!

“Purple Haze” leapt immediately to mind… but perhaps that means it’s too obvious. “Little Red Corvette”? Same thought. “Blue Bayou,” “Paint It Black,” “Green Tambourine”? Nah, none of those quite fit my mood.

I really like Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue,” but I featured that as a Friday Evening Video a while back, and I’d kind of like to come up with some original choices for this challenge.

And then a lighbulb went on. Ah, yes. That one.

I’ve told the story before of how I discovered one of my all-time favorite songs, “Walking in Memphis” by Marc Cohn, but as a brief refresher, I spent a week in Reno with my dad way back in 1991, and I heard that song everywhere I went in that dusty, half gambling mecca, half Old West frontier town. I didn’t identify it until months later when I finally happened to catch it on the radio back home in Salt Lake, and I promptly ran out and bought the CD it came from. As it turned out, that entire album was terrific. There wasn’t a bad cut on it. But as so often happens, it didn’t get quite the level of attention it should have. “Walking in Memphis,” Cohn’s biggest hit, rose to only number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the follow-up single from the album — which is my selection for the 30-Day Song Challenge, Day 1 — reached only 63. Even so, “Silver Thunderbird” is a nifty piece of heartfelt storytelling, and considering that my dad has owned a number of T-Birds over the years, I can relate to it.

Here’s the video, which weirdly enough for a song about a Ford Thunderbird, features Cohn driving a Chevy Corvette. Go figure.

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May022020

30-Day Song Challenge

So, I’ve been seeing this chart or whatever you want to call it floating around social media and what remains of the blogosphere for a couple years: the 30-Day Song Challenge. It certainly sounds like the sort of silliness we used to thrive on back in the heyday of blogging, and I’ve thought about doing it more than once but obviously I’ve never gotten around to it. It is, after all, a big commitment to do 30 blog entries across 30 days, consecutive or otherwise, and life these days is so very full of distractions. (Supporting evidence: I believe Jaquandor started this challenge but I don’t think he finished, and he’s the only one from my old blogging circle who still posts with any regularity at all.)

The infamous Scalzi recently found a way around the commitment issue by just dropping all 30 songs into a single massive post with minimal commentary, just a long string of video clips. I don’t think that’s the right path for me — I like to blather too much, and really who wants to scroll for an hour (says a guy who did, in fact, scroll through Scalzi’s entire post)? However, his example started me thinking about the Challenge again, and considering that about the only thing I ever manage to post these days is the occasional Friday Evening Video, I think maybe it’s time I give this a try. It’s functionally no different than the video posts I’m already doing, and if I can stick with it through all 30 days, it will generate more content than this blog has seen in a year. I’d really like to feel like my personal blogspace is a living, breathing thing again, if only for a few weeks.

And so, without further ado, I present… the Simple Tricks and Nonsense 30-Day Song Challenge!

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