13 November 2013 (Wednesday)

9 students today.

As usual I started by asking if anyone had any music-related adventures this past week. One student had gone to a used CD store and bought a lot of CDs, but no one had seen any live music.

Speaking of live music I mentioned that on Saturday I was going to see a concert by Andy Allo (website), who has played with Prince (info). I actually don't know her music and played the first clip of her I could find: "People Pleaser" (video). That's a cool song, but the concert I was going to was just Andy playing solo with an acoustic guitar, more like this: "Yellow Gold" (video).

One student said he is really excited that Paul Simon (info) will play a concert, opening for Sting (info) in Seattle on 19 February 2014.

I can't remember why we played a Sting song at this point rather than a Paul Simon song, but we listened to "Shape Of My Heart" (video, lyrics, song info).

The next song chosen was along the theme of the day: "One hit wonders".  The song was "Look At You Girl" (video, lyrics, song info) by Chris Ledoux (info). I think it's cool that international students can hear American music with fresh ears and without any judgement. Many Americans tend to have a love-or-hate relationship with country music. Many Americans just don't like country music. It's hard to explain why; here's a blog post which tries to explain it. It's very common in Seattle for a person to say "I like every kind of music except country and opera." Sounds like a quote from me...

The next song chosen was "Have A Nice Day" (video, lyrics, song info) by Bon Jovi (info). The student who chose it likes it because it's about loving life.

The next song was another one-hit-wonder: "There She Goes" (video, lyrics, song info) by The La's (info). The student who chose this song likes it because The La's influenced many of his current favorite bands. The La's only released one album, but he (and many music fans and critics) feel it's a great album.

The next song was "Enter Sandman" (video, lyrics, song info) by Metallica (info). Most people in the class already know this song so I asked why it's a "one hit wonder" for her and she said she doesn't know any other Metallica songs, she only knows this one. Which is fair enough -- for her it's a one hit wonder!

Because "Enter Sandman" is about nightmares I asked around the class if anyone has dreamt in English. Some have, some have not. I asked what the situation in the dreams were where they were dreaming in English. Very interesting answers!

The next song was "Bad Day" (video, lyrics, song info) by Daniel Powter (info). The student who picked this song said the song and the lyrics pick him up. He mentioned it was used in a Japanese commercial.

Speaking of commercials, that reminded me that Sting had a hit with the song "We'll Be Together" (video, lyrics, song info) but he had originally written the song as a "job" for Kirin beer: the company paid him a ton of money to write a song that included the lyric "together", so he wrote the song, made a lot of cash from Kirin *plus* had a hit single in the charts. That Sting sure knows how to maximize his writing talent! Here's the Kirin beer commercial that was shown in Japan for the song. 

The next one hit wonder was "What's Up" (video, lyrics, song info) by 4 Non Blondes (info). That's a perfect choice for the theme! I mentioned that the singer for 4 Non Blondes, Linda Perry (info) is now very influential from producing hit records by Christina Aguilera and Pink among many other female artists.

If you've been reading this blog for the past weeks you are asking yourself "Why wasn't there a Wiz Khalifa song this week?" Well, there was: "Roll Up" (video, lyrics, song info). This was the first Wiz Khalifa (info) song our friend ever heard by his favorite rapper.


With that we ran out of time for the day. I like the theme of "songs used in commercials or on tv" so that is the theme for next class.