Grooveshark

So, there was a day when Jenn was a young Napstershark and followed the bouncing ball through Web 1.0 to find new music. Mixtapes recorded from radio, Donnie Fandango on prime time evenings playing Soul Coughing and Smashing Pumpkins and Candlebox on The Point, The Pit on the weekends..sounds pulled from TV shows, soundtracks and references from favourite fanfiction writers and boys I was trying to impress. (Try as I might, Usher and Nelly just never caught on and thus prevented me from wooing my red-headed sixth grade crush. /sigh) At some point, a personality was born, and it has pretty much been in a holding pattern since about..1997.

Give me grunge, or give me death.

Ashamedly, I went through a phase in my little Christian high school where a posse of us deemed “secular” music as a tool of the devil and, yes, actually disposed of most or all of our non-Christian CDs and digital files.

…That was a dark time. And unfortunately, a time that seems to have stunted exploration from being reborn for a long while. Now, my husband is an avid musician and music fanatic so I haven’t had to put much brain power into experiencing new music for almost 8 years, which is sort of becoming an imposition as I don’t know song names or lyrics or backgrounds because they float through my atmosphere like streaming audio, and I’m lucky if the man even tells me the band’s name!

It’s time to start the adventuring, again.

The desire came back to life when I became preoccupied with the song on the Vampire Diaries commercial they play every 3 seconds on the CW’s website’s full episodes. I took traditional measures and navigated to their “music” page to see if I could sleuth it out. Alas, only songs from within the episodes were listed, not the commercial song.

So I moped. What do I do next?

I would love to answer that question and at some point in my exploration I should be able to, because what HAPPENED was, lo and behold Donnie Fandango, God love him, played it on the Point the other day. I was typing a sentence in Gchat to the beloved husband about whatever when I suddenly became possessed and started typing ZOMG VAMPIRE DIARIES SONG ON TEH POINT! and then had to explain.

Turns out the song is “Hang You from the Heavens” by The Dead Weather. I told Cloud that the vocalist sounded like the female version of our favourite frontman from the band Operator 303 and I immediately realized that I might have, yet again, misdiagnosed a male singer for a female a la Weedis and Silversun Pickups..(a trend that has taken me a bit to warm up to, I generally gravitate to angry, masculine voices) but as it turns out, The Dead Weather is actually Jack White’s new band and the singer is indeed female: Alison Mosshart of The Kills and Discount.

Boy, this is weird territory for me..where’s all the flannel and koolaid dyed hair..?

Anyway, Cloud also introduced me to listen.grooveshark.com which is currently rocking my world a little bit..Silversun Pickups, Coheed & Cambria, The Raconteurs..I spliced in A Perfect Circle for a sense of familiarity in the same moody vein since I have a hard time just diving into a bunch of new sounds without reference points..everything we learn is through the filter of everything we know, right?

But srsly..Hang You from the Heavens = hotter than HELL, go get up in it right now!

Ja ne!