Thursday, 7 September 06

Only two students again today, Grace and Pei Hsuan :-( . I taught those two the word "slacker".

But we were dealt a poor hand of cards today: the computer in the room we were in didn't have speakers attached! So we couldn't use the classroom computer. But my laptop, which *does* have speakers, doesn't connect to the Seattle Pacific University network, so I couldn't use their internet access on my laptop. Fortunately I have about 47GB of music on my laptop, so we had a pretty good choice of music to listen to...

We started with listening to a couple of songs by a Seattle singer named Carrie Akre (bio, website). I had been listening to one of her albums the previous evenings so it was loaded up in my mp3 player on my computer. The songs we listened to were "The River" (lyrics) and "Humdrum" (lyrics). Sorry, I can only find links to some samples of her songs on Amazon.

I mentioned that I like the melodies of these songs a lot, but the subjects are very sad. This is typical Seattle, in my view. I can't think of a single light-hearted Seattle band; they do aggression and depression best.

We moved on to a random list of mp3's on my hard drive. One is "Wash" (lyrics), which is one of my favorite Pearl Jam songs and one I had talked previously in the last session.

But I don't think the style of this song appealed to my students much, as they prefer much mellower songs. So I looked for something mellower in my collection and came up with "Andromeda & The Milky Way" (lyrics) by Me'Shell Ndegeocello (bio, website). This is one of my favorite songs, such passion!