A Fuck for a Dollar

I love being able to find lyrics on the internet at a moment's notice. It used to be that you had to own the liner notes, which meant buying the album, and I remember being disappointed whenever I'd get a new record and the sleeve was blank. How were we to know what Queen was singing in Bohemian Rhapsody?

Later, we all found that most CDs had the lyrics printed inside the cover of the disk, but then came the days of Napster and, eventually, iTunes. Gone were the days of liner notes, records, or even disks, and gone, therefore, were the printed lyrics. How were we supposed to know what Whitney Houston was singing in "I Will Always Love You"? So I was thrilled to learn that there are plenty of websites devoted to distributing lyrics (for free!) -- tho many of them contain errors, as I have noted in a previous blog entry.

Last month I was listening to some of my daughter's favorite tunes by a group called My Chemical Romance. In "Mama," an antiwar ditty, I couldn't make out some of the words, so I looked them up. I came across an F-bomb that I hadn't recalled hearing in all the times I'd heard the song:

"But there's shit that I've done with this fuck of a gun. / You would cry out your eyes all along."

I listened to the tune on my iPhone. The word was definitely missing; in its place was a lengthy pause. I mentioned this to Fiona, and we both agreed about how annoying it is that we'd accidentally downloaded the expurgated version. A few days later, while we listened to the song as I drove her to school, I noticed that this time, the 'fuck' was loud and clear.

Me: "You paid the extra dollar so that you could hear the word 'fuck' in the song?"
Fi: "Yeah."
Me: "Good for you, Fiona. I would have done the same thing."

I love the fact that she just had to have the correct version. It wasn't that she needed to hear the word. We are totally open about language in our house. It's that she couldn't bear having a version of the song that the artist hadn't intended.

Sometimes, a 'fuck' is worth a dollar.

Mini-Update

1. We still don't have a generator.

2. After this afternoon, we won't have chicks (or chickens) either. We decided to hold off for a year, so we're giving the adolescent birds to a friend. We didn't quite realize all of the start-up costs involved in having chickens. Even after we got the free coop, there was still a lot of fencing and other material to purchase and set up. I think we just saved ourselves hundreds of dollars and man-hours in costs and labor.

3. Girlyman is coming to play chez Stone in late June. Woo hoo!

How Much Do I Love Girlyman?

Girlyman is a folk-pop group hailing from Atlanta. I first came across their tight, three-part harmonies thanks to my 14yo Fiona. The group has been around for nearly a decade, but we missed them all the years they were performing in Manhattan and Brooklyn (where they had their 2nd and 3rd shows, ever). We missed them even when they performed in New Paltz three years ago at Unison. Darn. I think part of my love for them is the way it connects me to my a capella days at Vassar (1985-8) and Columbia (1990-5). Those were some good times.

But now I'm catching up, with a vengeance.

I've played and re-played some of the songs several dozen times in the past ten days, as this iTunes chart (from my iPhone) shows.

I have a crush on them. I checked out their website, read their blog, and have followed them on facebook and twitter. I've read articles about and watched them interviewed in Slate.

So ... I decided that we need to do our best to support them. I offered to host them at a show here in New Paltz during one of their off days. Amazingly, they accepted!

More details to follow.