Lemme Hold Your Crown, Babe

My favorite singer...and I do mean my FAVORITE singer...is Sara Bareilles. Don't get me wrong, I love all kinds of music and like all kinds of singers but I don't have the entire repertoire of anyone else completely memorized, backwards and forwards. Objectively speaking, I think that qualifies as "favorite."

I suppose what's cool about singers who "click" is that you feel like they're reading your mind, then you find out about all these other people who feel exactly the same way. Seems to me it's proof that the human experience is pretty universal. In other words, I'm not as big of a freak as I originally thought.

Maybe it's the fact that so many of her songs have the perfect combination of anger and angst, and she directs them at someone. So...all you have to do is picture your personal nemesis and sing "Who died and made you king of anything?"

Plus, she throws in just enough cuss words to make me LOVE it. They're like seasoning, in my opinion....too many of them can ruin the dish but you've got to have a few in life or...really...what's the *^%*-ing point?

I still think she's got some secret hidden camera pointed at me so I'll go hunt for it. In the meantime, click below to enjoy her latest video...King of Anything. No cussing in this one, but you've gotta love the funky fashion evolution which illustrates (I can only assume) a transition from weak pushover to strong, happy, dancing woman. 

Artists Who Read My Mind (to an arguably freaky degree...)

[Yeah, I know - I'm clearly a newbie blogger since this is my second post in one day. Oh, well. It's the cheapest and most effective therapy I've found so far.]

I'm sitting here, listening to an album I just bought off of iTunes today - by Lenka. This tends to happen to me, I run into a song (usually it's a free iTunes song - something I just happen across) which totally resonates with me and I end up buying the whole album. At that point, I start to wonder if the artist was stalking me or something because of how much she (not always, but usually, the artist is a she) sounds like me. My latest "mini-theme-song" which I'm playing approximately 800 times a day is "The Show" by Lenka (check it out -- one of my favorites on the right hand side of this blog). So - of course I had to get the rest of her album and all I can say is that I really need to have a heart-to-heart with my mom to find out if maybe I had a twin sister (or baby sister...ok...no need to rub it in) from whom I was separated.

This happened a while back with Sara Bareilles and me (don't you just love the way I write as if we have some mutual artistic connection?) - I got Love Song free from iTunes, then shortly thereafter bought her entire album (Little Voice). It's actually pretty cool because what ended up happening for me was that different songs took my heart and twisted it into origami at different periods of my life.

Sara's cool because she's pretty angsty but fun. And she cusses some in her songs. That works for me. Lenka's different in a lot of ways. Her songs are fun and seem perky but when you really listen to the words, you realize there's tons of angst there too - it's right up my alley in terms of Sesame Street-sounding angsty-ness. (I need to hit the thesaurus - I use angst often - but cynicism isn't the right word for me and I'm not exactly goth...I'll get back to you on that one.)

It's primarily music that does this to me. Although, for the most part, I completely get any character Drew Barrymore plays (no matter how silly) and Emily Dickinson and I are pretty simpatico (or would be if she hadn't, you know, died before I was born).

I'll leave you with just a few words from Lenka's "The Show":
"I'm just a little bit caught in the middle, life is a maze and love is a riddle..."

That's the stuff...