Since my father had the CD, I have heard America songs my entire life. I’m not positive, but he probably had a dozen of their vinyl records. I’ve grown to love the cam folk sound of their songs and through some research, not surprised I love a lot of their songs because of their producer – George Martin.
Collecting the Discography – One Song at a Time
Let me preface by saying this is not the right way to do things in the modern-day. It was also not the right thing to do in the early ‘00s – but tell a minor this! Yes, I used Kazaa and Limewire. By no means did I have enough money to purchase CDs, yet I wanted the entire song collection of all of my favorite bands.
When Napster first came out, I remember downloading songs. I had enough storage to have maybe 50 songs on my computer. Since that time, technology evolved and you could store far more on your hard drive. When I realized I had a powerful enough computer to store an unlimited amount of songs, I created a task.
I went to the Internet and printed out the entire song catalog (discography) for my favorite bands. This would give me every song, to sample, and to burn a CD with my favorites. I started with groups in alphabetical order. Guess what? America was on that list.
This was not an easy process. Finding some obscure songs shared by other users was a task. I ended up doing several artists at once and hoped the one user that had the file I wanted wouldn’t stop that download.
This process didn’t last long. I did, in fact, get all of America, but the headache wasn’t worth the end result. Turns out most songs on albums are not worth listening to – let alone giving a spot on your 20-song CD-mix.
Disclaimer for any legal entity out there: I no longer have any of these songs or downloads. My hard drive crashed many, many years ago and all of my songs are acquired through legal sources.
Taking Songs Literal
I’ve loved parody videos (see Weird Al) since I was a kid. I love sketch comedies that do parodies and even music videos that are complete parodies. Of course, I had an idea that involved making parody music videos.
The little known song “99” by Toto inspired me. I always envisioned a man singing to the number 99 – as done in classic Sesame Street letter/number form. You know, on a stick with some eyes… If you took the long literally, you had a ridiculous video. I ended up having over a dozen of these ideas, but maybe an America song was the most obscure.
During the several weeks that I thought this was a viable idea, “Sister Golden Hair” played on my shuffle. I listened to the lyrics closely and didn’t have much of an idea…until I thought about the lyrics – ‘well I tried to make it Sunday’. This was not a love story, it was a story about a failed-name of the week. Let me explain.
There obviously was a council of people in charge of giving names to the days of the week. Every member of the council was in charge of coming up with a list of names. Names that were approved were Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc… The song is being told by the man that suggested a day of the week be called Sister-Golden Hair Surprise.
Unfortunately for him, it was too radical of a name for the council and was shot down for Wednesday. He still dreams about his failed attempt to make history and how he should have played it safe or compromised.
Yes, this is the dumbest thing you have might have ever read….but imagine if we had Sister-Golden Hair Surprise instead of Wednesday.
