We've had songs that remind me of someone, songs for somewhere and today's theme is songs that remind you of somewhen, although the actual term is "a certain event". I want to avoid going for obvious events, weddings and the like, so let's go.
Track 1 - "I of the Mourning" by Smashing Pumpkins
OK not exactly a specific event but rather a ten day marathon of losing myself in someone else's mind, missing many a stop on the metro in Prague and hoping my students would cancel late so I would get paid anyway and not have to stop reading. I was bored one Friday afternoon. Waiting for a friend to finish teaching his lessons before we went to the pub, I picked up an old battered copy of The Lord of the Rings and started to read. I had intended just to fill some time, and ended up absorbed by the story. I would read on the metro, on trams, on buses, in cafes between lessons, and while reading I would listen to my walkman, and for the entire time it took to read the book, I was listening to Machina/The Machines of God by Smashing Pumpkins. This track always reminds me of the charge of the Riders of Rohan.
Track 2 - "Ruby over Diamonds" by Kashmir
If you are of a certain vintage, the term "walkman" is more than just a brand of MP3 player from Sony, it is the beginning of your journey with portable music. The original Walkman was a portable cassette player, which morphed into the Discman portable CD player and then back to Walkman for MP3. I got my first walkman as a kid, living in Germany, and had one well into the 21st century. I also had a discman, but I had a bigger collection of cassettes than CDs until about 2005. Overtime I have traded up from cassettes to CDs - I am not the kind of person to go crazy for the latest whizz bang gizmo and spend buckets of cash on getting my favourite music in the right format. Yes, I have a good laugh at all the people that went nuts over minidisc when it was locked in a battle for the future of music with MP3. Anyway, in 2007 I finally laid my Walkman cassette player to rest, and bought a Walkman MP3 player and the first album to go said player was Zitilites by Danish band Kashmir (thanks to my friend in Astrid for introducing me to them, and Mew). Ruby over Diamonds is my favourite song from that album.
Track 3 - "Uprising" by Muse
In July 2009 Mrs Velkyal and I left Prague and moved to the US, spending a month in South Carolina before coming up the road to Charlottesville, Virginia. A couple of months after we arrived, we got tickets to see U2 in concert at the University of Virginia's Scott Stadium, which I wrote about on one of my other blogs. Supporting U2 that night were Muse, who were a new band to Mrs V and I, and we thought their set was the highlight of the night, as excellent as U2 were as well. I think that concert was our first taste of culture shock. Going to a gig, I assumed there would be a bar in the venue and that it would be an adult event. How naive of me, no bar, kids wandering around and an all round family friendly atmosphere, I gringed more than once that night, it was as if rock music had got all comfortable with Walt Disney.
Of the three track there, I think my favourite is the Smashing Pumpkins, I still see Theoden leading the charge of Rohirrim against the walls of Minas Tirith every time I listen to that track.
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