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49 posts with category “Music”

“The Moon” Is Wrong

Three years ago, in December 2019, a tweet went viral posting a link to a YouTube video in which all the lyrics to Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” had been changed to “The moon is right.”

Two days later, another, far more viral tweet joked that the lyrics can be read as the interruption of an act of witchcraft. (This joke has been cribbed in countless subsequent social media posts.)

I was immediately skeptical at the hearing of the lyric as “moon” rather than “mood,” but it was helpfully pointed out to me that the official @PaulMcCartney Twitter account had indeed posted the lyrics as “moon.” (Original tweet link, Wayback archive)

Last year, in December 2021, @PaulMcCartney again tweeted the opening lyrics (backup link), but this time with “mood” rather than “moon.”

I began to hunt more seriously for answers.

That same winter I bought both physical and digital copies of the expanded edition of McCartney II. This album does include the song, but turns out not to have the song’s lyrics in its liner notes.

Unhelpfully, the song was originally released as a 45RPM single, with no printed lyrics.

I discovered that the official Paul McCartney YouTube channel had posted the music video in 2019, and its captions read “The mood is right.”

Liveright published “Paul McCartney: The Lyrics,” a massive two-volume box set of printed lyrics for “154 of his most meaningful songs.” Evidently “Wonderful Christmastime” is not meaningful, as it is not included in this set.

Nevertheless, due to its making much more sense, I had personally concluded that it is, in fact, “mood” (though I never seriously doubted it).

Then, earlier this week, the author of the witchcraft tweet followed up with a notice that @PaulMcCartney has since deleted its 2019 “moon” tweet, and that McCartney himself has addressed the controversy in a recent interview:

No, it’s ‘the mood’. And you know what, I’m thinking about Liverpool Christmas parties, that’s really all I’m doing with that song. “The mood is right, let’s raise a glass, the spirit’s up” – you know, all the stuff you do at Christmas.

Thanks, Paul.

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Sacred Bones “Reissuing” the “full” “LP” from “Jeremiah Sand”

Last Spring I got a flyer included with an order from Sacred Bones advertising a “Gathering of the Children”:

Today I got an email from them with the subject line “Uncovering a maniacal cult leader’s lost psych folk gem!,” which got me really excited. But it turns out to be a full album of music from the fictional Jeremiah Sand from Mandy.

It’s even available as an 8-track!

The Children of the New Dawn have also created a website, “last updated September 21, 1999” (the autumnal equinox, I assume?)

Also check out this sweet Boris Vallejo-like painting of Jeremiah Sand from the Bandcamp page:

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Fancey in “The Office”

Yesterday I learned that (Todd) Fancey of Fancey (and of The New Pornographers) did a song for an episode of “The Office.” Here’s a quick video:

I can’t tell if that’s him on the album cover but man I hope it is. From Fancey’s MySpace blog:

If you have a chance to check out the hilarious and Emmy nominated “Dinner Party” episode of NBC’s “The Office” (Aired a couple days ago April 10, 2008), you will hear a song called “That One Night”. The lyrics are by the brilliant writers Gene Stupinsky and Lee Eisenberg. I did the music and made the recording. I was thrilled to be asked because I truly love that show, it’s the BEST. Special thanks to Alicen Schneider and Dave Madden of NBC.

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Video: That MTV “Vertebrae” Commercial

Hey, I didn’t say it was good.

I guess what I find so fascinating about it is: When did MTV ever condone being unpopular? Between the Spring Break programming and drunk girls crying on The Real World, it was an odd change of pace, but one that reminded me of the attitude MTV used to have, in the ’80s, before they became shameless culture-mongers. Still, it’s important not to ignore that this guy actually is attractive, and dressed fashionably, and — at least at my school — probably would have been popular. I guess it would have turned too many viewers off to have presented him as acne-ridden, overweight, without any sense of style, and listening to black metal?

Something I forgot to mention last time is that this was part of a series of commercials, if I remember correctly, that played on the “V” in “MTV,” although I forget the titles of the other installments.

Thanks to La fille des montagnes (“The girl mountain”?) for sending me the video.

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Alphabetization: Part III

In what I think may be the first truly novel browsing environment developed for Songbird, ♪Photo displays your library as a pile of artist photos pulled from Last.fm. They can be dragged around and rearranged, and their orientation is remembered between Songbird sessions. In my testing it is unusably slow, however it is remarkably exciting to see innovation like this before Songbird is even out of beta. It would be an easy matter to implement a “snap” feature that would cluster similar artists together based on Last.fm data, or to provide an alternate view by album cover rather than artist photo — honestly, who can recognize some of these artist photos?

Anyway, as it’s only a couple weeks old I’m sure it will improve, and it demonstrates just what amazing things can be done with the Songbird platform. Hopefully we’ll see more daring and clever extensions like this when Songbird hits 1.0 next month. I’m considering making it my full-time player in order to collect more statistics (play dates, play counts, added dates, etc.).

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