Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Music We Love to Hate - "Our Song" Dept.

One of life's deepest mysteries is why WOMEN always... without fail... get to choose "Our Song."  A secondary but no less profound mystery is why we men go along with this... erm... stuff.  Well, not really.  We ALL know why.  It's coz women have what we WANT and we, all of us guys, will do what's required to ensure we continue to get what it is we want.  And need.  Up to a point.  I've passed that point and am therefore free to poke fun at "Our Song," in two cases and two cases only.  Lord knows there are more, but let's just limit it to The Two Mrs. Penningtons, mm-kay?

First Up... this is the tune The First Mrs. Pennington designated as Our Song:



That would be Len Barry.  I'm surprised this song is available on the Tube of You.  I would have thought it sufficiently obscure as to be relegated to the trash heap of musical history... but no.  Go figure.  I hope the song is complete.  I still can't listen to it.  If I had to choose an "Our Song" for TFMP and I... it would be this:





We got married on a Monday as fate would have it and that song was in the Top Ten the week we married.  I can still listen to this one.  It makes me laugh.

Fast forward ten years or so and we get to 1975, or about the time I was courting The Second Mrs. Pennington.  TSMP decided we should have not one but TWO tunes that would be Our Song(s) forever and ever or until divorce did us part.  The first:



Ah, yes.  The ever-popular-but-oh-so-obscure Golden Earring, with their ONE hit.  I'll give TSMP major points for appropriate association; I was a Team Chief on a traveling USAF radar installations team stationed at Yokota AB in Japan when we met.  There was that.

And then there was this:



Aiiieee.  I cringed whenever I heard this song no more than a year after TSMP and I became One.  Every. Single. Time.  And this time around it remains one of those tunes about which I can only bear the first three bars before copying the embed code.  It happens to be the sappiest goddamned song ever penned by man.  Or woman.  I mean really... "I got a taste of the real world when I went down on you?"  Damn.  Seriously?  Do you REALLY mean that?  Or, more to the point... did you?

I'll be the one to choose the next Our Song, if there ever IS a next time.  I already have it picked out, as a s'matter of fact.  Funny you should ask...


SHE can pick whatever the Hell she wants... whatever floats her boat... but this is mine.  Ours.

7 comments:

  1. It is a tradition at family weddings for the bride to dance with her father while the groom dances with his mother and then switch halfway through the song so that the bride and groom dance together. My dad told the band to play "Faded Love" - it has become our song. Kind of funny!

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  2. Lou: That's also VERY sweet. And it proves that there's always an exception to every rule (I mean the "women choose" rule), eh?

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  3. Heh. EVERYONE "of a certain age" owns "Comes Alive." No exceptions. None. I quote The Wiki:

    Upon its release the album became the best selling live album in America, achieving 6x platinum status, but has since dropped to fourth.

    I'd wager you have lotsa company with this in the Our Song category, Andy.

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  4. True...We just happened to be of that "certain age." Good times...good memories.

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  5. I have EXTREMELY good memories associated with this album, as well. I was smack dab in the middle of my second childhood, aka my plastic hippie period, and life was simply freakin' awesome. There's a pun in there, with the freakin' bit.

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  6. Buck, Re the Len Berry thing. Those lyrics are really creative, not a cliche anywhere:
    "A,B,C," "like taking candy from a baby," "1 and 1 are 2," "1,2,3..." it's like a first grade alphabet and math lesson.

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