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About This Author
I am SoCalScribe. This is my InkSpot.
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Blogocentric Formulations
Logocentric (adj). Regarding words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality (especially applied as a negative term to traditional Western thought by postmodernist critics).
Sometimes I just write whatever I feel like. Other times I respond to prompts, many taken from the following places:
 "The Soundtrackers Group" 
"Blogging Circle of Friends "
"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
"JAFBG"
"Take up Your Cross"
Thanks for stopping by! 
February 27, 2015 at 12:34pm February 27, 2015 at 12:34pm
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** Image ID #2026596 Unavailable **
Song: "I Lived"
Artist: OneRepublic
Album: Native
And this would be the entry where I seriously question my blog titling scheme of taking a lyric fragment and adding "with [artist]" at the end of it... 
I had a really hard time picking which OneRepublic song to feature for today's entry. They have so many good songs! And you might think they have more than just the three studio albums they actually have, but that's because each album has had between four and six singles, most of which have charted. They've also recorded a number of non-album and promotional singles, guest spots on other artists' songs, not to mention lead man Ryan Tedder's prolific output as a songwriter and producer. You've probably heard his sound/stylings on a variety of albums including those from Madonna, U2, Adele, Beyonce, Maroon 5, Ariana Grande, Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Lopez, Leona Lewis, One Direction, Taylor Swift, and Gwen Stefani, among many, many others. Three of his songs (OneRepublic's "Apologize," Beyonce's "Halo," and Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love") are on the list of the most popular songs of all time with more than seven million downloads each. During the last quarter of 2013 and first quarter of 2014, he charted four Top 40 hits. "Apologize" actually set a U.S. Top 40 Radio Airplay Record by being played 10,331 times in a single week. He later broke his own record when "Bleeding Love" was played 10,665 times in a single week.
Ryan Tedder is easily one of my favorite record producers, and I really like a lot of his OneRepublic songs. He's got a great sound and a wonderful way with lyrics.
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February 27, 2015 at 12:11pm February 27, 2015 at 12:11pm
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** Image ID #2026596 Unavailable **
Song: "Call Me Maybe"
Artist: Carly Rae Jepsen
Album: Curiosity (EP)
It doesn't seem like that long ago the U.S. Olympic Swimming Team was helping this video go viral with their rendition of the song during the 2012 Summer Games in London. It was a #1 hit in fifteen countries, and a top three hit in another eight. It's been covered by over a dozen different artists, with diversity ranging from Lil' Wayne to Miranda Cosgrove to Cookie Monster. It was nominated for two Grammys (but lost both), and was the bestselling single of 2012 with over 10 million sold/downloaded that year alone. A number of groups besides the U.S. Olympic Swimming Team have recorded lip sync videos to the song, including the Harvard University baseball team, Miami Dolphins cheerleaders, and even the United States Armed Forces.
A few entries ago, I mentioned Jimmy Fallon's "Lip Sync Battles" in connection with "Boom! Shaking the room with DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince" . While those are far and away my favorite sketches he does on The Tonight Show, a very close second are when he and his house band The Roots team up with a musical guest and perform a song using elementary school classroom instruments like the kazoo, recorder, xylophone, cowbells, and maracas (among many others).
Here's a bonus video of them performing "Call Me Maybe":
If you liked that, I also highly recommend checking out his cover of "Blurred Lines" with Robin Thicke , which is just as amazing.
I really enjoy this Carly Rae Jepsen song, though. It's fun, easy to sing along with, and whether from the song itself or the fact that so many people have had fun recording versions of it, clearly a song that makes people smile. I know a lot of people are sick of hearing the song since it was so overplayed a couple years ago, but I'll listen to it every time my iTunes shuffles it onto my playlist.
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February 27, 2015 at 4:44am February 27, 2015 at 4:44am
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** Image ID #2026596 Unavailable **
Song: "Girls Chase Boys"
Artist: Ingrid Michaelson
Album: Lights Out
Okay, this is going to be my last catch-up entry tonight, and my last foray into indie musicians for a little while. Ingrid Michaelson is another MySpace find courtesy of my wife, and I totally dug her song "The Chain" (originally performed live on her third album Be OK), and her song "Soldier" (as well as the studio version of "The Chain") on her fourth album Everybody. Like many artists at the time, Michaelson was producing her music independently and putting it out on MySpace. In her case, a music producer for the show Grey's Anatomy found her music and that interest resulted in interest by many music labels. She insisted on retaining the rights to her music, though, and ended up carving out a less lucrative music contract that let her do her own music her own way rather than taking a bigger payment and having to hand over control to the label. It ended up being a smart move; her song "The Way I Am" was featured in an Old Navy commercial in 2007 which catapulted her into the spotlight, eventually leading to the song making 65 media appearances over the course of the next three weeks, including on the soundtrack to seventeen separate television show season premieres! 
She's been making music ever since, doing her own songs her own way and creating what I think is a great, unique voice that isn't forced into the same conforming boxes that so many artists are pressured into.
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February 27, 2015 at 4:25am February 27, 2015 at 4:25am
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** Image ID #2026596 Unavailable **
Song: "Running Away"
Artist: Midnight Hour
Album: Midnight Hour
While we're on the topic of indie musicians, let me tell you a little story about how not to market yourself. On the one hand, this was back in 2006 when streaming music wasn't quite as prevalent as it is now, but I originally heard this song on an episode of The Ghost Whisperer. Now, whereas my previous entry "You can start all over again with Dana Glover and Dave Koz" talked about an artist who appeared on Desperate Housewives to promote her music, these guys actually did the same thing with Ghost Whisperer, but then proceeded to pull all their music off MySpace and their personal website and announce that they were going through a period of readjustment. So instead of having tens of thousands of potential customers going, "Oh, I loved that song! I want to download/buy it!", they got a big fat, "Sorry, you can't buy that awesome song (or anything else) by that band you noticed on that TV appearance last night."
It took them three years to get through that "readjustment" period. They didn't release their first album until 2009, long after pretty much everybody except me and what I can only assume are a scant few dedicated fans lost interest. I can't help but think this band could have been way more successful if they had handled the marketing of their music better around the time they made their TV appearance.
Still, regardless of my opinions of their self-promotional sensibilities, I do really like this band and this song continues to be one of my favorites.
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February 27, 2015 at 4:01am February 27, 2015 at 4:01am
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** Image ID #2026596 Unavailable **
Song: "The Enemy"
Artist: of Verona
Album: The White Apple
I can't take credit for finding this artist on my own... my wife has been a fan of Mandi Perkins way back when she was a solo artist trying to get noticed on the MySpace music scene. I always thought her music was okay; she's got a great voice, but none of her songs really jumped out at me. Then she teamed up with Dillon Pace and Jeff Sojka, and things just clicked for me with their new sound. I really like their combination of elegant lyrics and industrial sound in this song. Their tracks have been featured in a variety of television shows, this one as well as "Castles" and "Dark in My Imagination."
I'm not usually a fan of indie artists; it's not that I can't appreciate their music, it's just that an awful lot of them seem whiny and brooding and I never have the patience to wander through three dozen new artists just to find one song I kind of like. But this is one band that I'll follow, and every time I listen to their music it reminds me that I really should be trying indie musicians more often because they can have really unique, interesting sounds that you don't get with just another Taylor Swift or Katy Perry or Maroon 5 album.
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February 27, 2015 at 3:35am February 27, 2015 at 3:35am
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** Image ID #2026596 Unavailable **
Song: "Boom! Shake the Room"
Artist: DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince
Album: Code Red
Once upon a time, before he was busy trying to make his kids into celebrities... before he was the movie star from Men in Black and Independence Day... before he gave us Big Willie Style... and even back before he moved in with Uncle Phil and Aunt Viv in Beverly Hills, Will Smith and his Fresh Prince persona were rapping along with DJ Jazzy Jeff for much of the mid-eighties through mid-nineties. They recorded five albums together, won two Grammys (including the first ever Best Rap Performance award in 1989), and sold a combined 5.5 million albums.
This song was off their fifth and last album. They were never quite able to duplicate the success of their early hits "Parents Just Don't Understand" and "Summertime," although Stephen Merchant did his best to bring it back into style during his lip-sync battle with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show.  That's a hilarious clip that also features JGL singing "Super Bass," another of my musical choices this month. And if you haven't seen these rap battles yet, check them all out on YouTube. This was one of my favorites, but the one with Paul Rudd, the one with John Krasinski, and especially the one with Emma Stone were also amazing.
I've always liked the fact that Will Smith has been a "clean" rapper and doesn't get into a lot of the cussing, misogyny, exorbitant lifestyles, and violence that a lot of rap music tends to utilize. It's nice to have someone who can respect the musical form without all that stuff. Now if only we could get him to do more rap and less After Earth... 
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February 27, 2015 at 2:49am February 27, 2015 at 2:49am
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** Image ID #2026596 Unavailable **
Song: "Life for Rent"
Artist: Dido
Album: Life for Rent
Are you one of those people with four or more names? Every once in a while, I'll run into someone with four or, even more rarely, five separate components to their name, like if they're married and kept their original first, middle, and last names... or if they're inheriting some complicated family naming scheme. But I think Dido might take the cake with six names. Her full name is Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong, which makes me feel incredibly sorry for her anytime she's filling out one of those forms where they have the little boxes for each letter. I bet she runs out of space every single time.
Most people are probably fans of Dido through the hits on her previous album No Angel, which featured "Here With Me" and "Thank You." I'm more of a fan of her follow-up album which has this song, though. It also has "White Flag" which is probably her biggest international hit. I think she has a wonderful voice that really conveys a lot of emotion. Her songs seem both hopeful and sad at the same time, which is a really hard thing to do, I think. Her voice has an almost haunting quality to it, and her original songs have made her one of my favorite British female musical artists. She also teamed up with an artist I blogged about just a few days ago, lending featured vocals to Eminem's song "Stan," and co-wrote Britney Spears' mega-hit, "I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman."
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February 27, 2015 at 2:34am February 27, 2015 at 2:34am
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** Image ID #2026596 Unavailable **
Song: "Super Bass"
Artist: Nicki Minaj
Album: Pink Friday
I'm not sure whether I'm proud or embarrassed by this fact, but I can sing the first part of this song (through about 1:15 or so) word-for-word. Whenever I listen to a catchy song like this, I usually go overboard and listen to it dozens and dozens of times, until part - if not all - of a song has been burned into my memory. I usually don't do well with fast-paced rap lyrics, but these ones stuck for some reason. Hey, if the adorable Sophia Grace and Rosie can sing it (song starts at 3:30 if you don't want to see the whole interview), why can't I?
"Super Bass" is the fifth single from Minaj's debut album, Pink Friday. The album was quite successful, and she actually became the first female solo artist to have seven songs simultaneously on the Billboard Hot 100. This particular track debuted at #98 then jumped a staggering fifty spots the following week. It spent a total of 39 weeks on the Top 100, with 38 of those weeks inside the Top 50 with a peak position of #3. The single has been certified 8x platinum and has sold over five million digital downloads, the first for a female rapper.
I still listen to this song from time to time; it's so upbeat and fun it's sure to cheer me up on a down day.
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