Something Swift this way comes…

Okay.

So, those of you who know me really well know that I’m pretty ecclectic in the music I listen to. My tastes range from Led Zeppelin, Procul Harem, The Animals, The Doors and such, all the way up to Billy Joel, Elton John, James Taylor, Tori Amos, Jewel, and others. Tool and Perfect Circle fall somewhere in that list along with other huge whacks of different genres. Tonight I’m stuck on the idea of a comparison between Tori Amos and Jewel.

Tori Amos Albums:

(incomplete list)

Little Earthquakes
Under the Pink
Boys for Pele
From the Choirgirl Hotel
To Venus and Back
Strange Little Girls
Scarlet’s Walk
Welcome to Sunny Florida
Tales of a Librarian
The Beekeeper

Various and sundry bootleg albums, both official and unofficial

Jewel albums:

Pieces of You
Spirit
Joy: A Holiday album
This Way
0304
Goodbye Alice in Wonderland

Now, you’ll note that simply from a basic album listing, Tori is more prolific than Jewel. She produces more music generally than Jewel, though they’re not in competition with one another for listeners (in my opinion). To listen to their music, Jewel’s music tends to be more haunting, more airy, playing around with mostly major keys, though she does spread out in the minors quite well on albums like Pieces of you. Tori on the other hand, is not afraid to play with styles, moving through jazz, gospel, rock, even shades of R&B touch her music. She generally explores the full range of the music and she obviously has fun with it, even when the subject matter she’s singing about makes you wince at the raw power and violence in it.

If I were to simply categorize these two musicians, Jewel would be: Girl with a Guitar, and Tori would be: Girl with a Piano. You can obviously hear their influences in their music, people like paul simon, billy joel, led zeppelin, among others. I would hazard a guess to say they probably share a lot of the same musical influences, however they obviously react to those influences in viscerally different ways, and that’s appreciated by the masses for the most part.

This, like any other musical choice boils down to taste and opinion, but, I think that I can safely say that Tori Amos is the better of the two musicians. Not that I don’t like Jewel, but she simply hasn’t got a groove on life like Tori has…and something about the angst in Tori’s music calls to me on a very basic level. What does a overweight, hippy guy have in common with Tori Amos? Well, in a nutshell, I understand what it is to hurt, and I understand what it is to get angry about it. Her music speaks to me on that level, and speaks louder than Jewels’ music does, even though I like them both, the obvious winner in this matchup, for me, is Tori Amos.

If you haven’t had a chance to listen to any of Tori Amos’ music, I highly suggest you go out to one of your local retailers, or perhaps Amazon.com and pick up some of her albums. You’ll probably end up liking it. And if you don’t? Donate the albums to a good cause and pass them on to someone that’s hurting.

And I think that’s all for now,

S

If you look over in the right hand column at the top, marked ‘pages’, you will see a page titled DISCLAIMER. If you’re here and reading this journal, it means you have accepted the terms and conditions in that page. So, unless you want to sign over your house and all your computer equipment to me, I’d suggest you go and read that page.

S

Well, when I got home from work last night, I had an offline message waiting for me, letting me know that the operation on my friend went well and they spent the afternoon and evening in the hospital, resting, mostly just exhausted from the ordeal.

So…

YAY!!!!

As I’m writing this in TCP/IP class, it is neccessarily a short message.  More later.

S

I have a friend, where do I begin?

Where do I start, where do I begin?  I have a friend that means the world to me, and they are going to be leaving me for some days, to go and have a surgery on their heart, to fix something that should’ve been perfect to begin with.  They are travellig into a place where I can’t follow and because of my obligations I can’t be a shoulder for them to lean on during this time…

I have a friend, where do I begin?

I can tell you the truth, I don’t come by friends easily, and when I make a friend, I treasure them, even if it doesn’t seem like it sometimes.  Sometimes it must seem like I am wholly callous and totally disrespective of their needs…it’s not that, it’s just that I’m built funny…I can’t set myself to do something, I can’t say I’m going to do something, and then not do it.  My responsibilities have always gotten the better of me.  How did I come to this?

When did I become an adult?

Funny that you should ask that, sometimes I wonder myself, what happened to the playfulness that I used to have so much of, I think it all began when I realized that it was go back to school or be stuck in one dead end job after another.  The child is still within, and sometimes he comes to the surface, usually when he’s talking to you, though you don’t like his voice, and that child is simply waiting for the time to be right, for school to be done, to come back to the surface for good.  Fun waits in the wings for the classes to be done, and one day exhaustion will not be a daily helping of gruel on my plate, but an ocassional thing that happens when I am not looking, instead I will be able to smile that sweet smile and do a chair spin…just to freak ‘em out.

I have a friend, where do I begin?

I can’t begin, I can’t, I don’t have the words to let you know how special you are to me, and how much I appreciate you for being there for me on those times when I’ve felt myself bouncing off the walls, or coming down hard in a crash…no, my words fail me.  So, you’ll just have to understand, accept when I say that you are indeed my friend, and that I hope you make it through this okay and come back to me, chair-spinning and bringing light, laughter, and levity to my otherwise trudging days.

May God be with you in your hour of need, and though the valley may be dark, may it be short and may you walk it with your head held high, you are after all, who you are, and you can approach a fight no other way.  So come back my friend, come back to me with that gleam in your eye and that go to hell grin on your face that said ‘damn right I did it! And I’ll do it again!’, come back soon and continue to save me day by day, from my encroaching adulthood.  It’s not all about me, no, it’s just about us, you and I, each of us together, and the ties that bind us, stronger than steel, harder than diamond, and more painful than death when we are parted, my friend, my friends, the people who I would make my family if I could.

I have a friend…where do I begin?

S

Okay, so I spent my weekend pretty uneventfully.  I went to mom and dad’s house and took care of some chores and helped show mom the laptop that dad bought her for their anniversary.  Needless to say, she was less than thrilled with the fact that I put linux on there, but I didn’t have the money to go out and buy a brand new copy of Winblows XP to put on there, and the linux will do what she wants it to.  She kind of got into it at the end there.  Unfortunately, she called last night from G-ville and was fussing up a storm at me.  It seems that she’s unable to use the touchpad quite well on the laptop so it causes the system to open up random windows at the oddest moments.  She was feeling somewhat low and dispirited, I’m sure, and we’ll get her fixed up, but last night it made me angry and left me feeling quite useless….sometimes when you try to do something good for someone, it can go unappreciated.  Enh

Anyways, you’ll note that I have someone else on here posting, her name is Rae and she’s just a little Rae of sunshine.  *smirks*  At least that’s what she says.  I think I’m going to come to like this wordpress a great deal, as it seems simple enough to go through and control the way it works.  I hope that you guys like it too, and I thank you for coming to join me here.

Rae, I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for registering and posting, it means a lot to me that someone else would take enough of an interest in me and my life that they would like to be able to do sort of a collaborative thing with me, and hopefully we can make this fly.

Oh, and if you guys are wondering where I’m at right now, I’m sitting in the classroom where my TCP/IP test will be in an hour and posting this to my home box.  It only took me a couple of hours to set up Apache, MYSQL, Wordpress, and register for a Dynamic Host address…so I think I did alright last night in amongst getting fussed at.  *snickers*  Anyways, as always, more to come.

Swift