Crash Test Dummies, "On and On"

A lot of people only know the Crash Test Dummies for their breakout second album God Shuffled His Feet and the accompanying single, "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm." That makes me sad. They've put out a few albums after that one, without much success unfortunately except in the band's home country of Canada. Brad Roberts, the lead singer, has such a deep mesmerizing voice which at the same time excites and relaxes me. I could listen to him sing for hours.

"On and On," from the Dummies fifth album I Don't Care That You Don't Mind (2001), is a great example of both his singing style and his song-writing ability. The chorus of the song, "The little bird can sing and sing/The little bird knows everything/But the little bird don't bother with song/He knows that it just goes on and on and on and on," is the part that's really important to me. In my view, it kind of tells me that no matter what I'm going through in life, life keeps moving anyway, so there is no sense dwelling in the past. I need to focus on my future.

If you want to check out the song for yourself, or see the rest of the Crash Test Dummies' work, look them up on iTunes.

The Beginning

There always has to be a beginning to everything. This is mine.

Call me Matt. I am a lover of music. Always have been. I have no musical talents whatsoever, aside from being able to belt out some karaoke when needed, but music has always been very special to me.

Music is a very powerful thing. It can change your mood. It can bring up memories. Back in 1697, an English playwright by the name of William Congreve led off his play The Mourning Bride with this line:

"Music has charms to soothe a savage breast...."

I became a big fan of music and song back when I was young. I'm in my mid-30s now, so I got to experience the end of the 80s and the early-to-mid 90s as a teenager, and a lot of great things were happening in music then. Of great importance to me was the dawn of grunge and alt-rock as a whole. These songs spoke to me in a way I had never felt before. They seemed to match how I felt as a geeky, unpopular person in high school. In a way, music lifted me up and helped me deal with what was an awkward time for me. It still helps me deal with what is a complicated life to this day.

Let me tell you a story. The other night I was listening to my iPod on shuffle, like I always do (rarely do I ever go to a specific album or artist when I'm listening to music), when the MTV Unplugged version of Alice in Chains' "Down in a Hole" popped up. At that particular moment when I heard it, it nearly drove me to tears. There was no real particular reason why, but it just did. And that led to an idea.

I've been blogging on and off for a number of years. Never really amounted to anything, but I had been thinking about starting a new one for a little while. I just couldn't think of something to base it around. The experience I had with "Down in a Hole" set off a bomb in my mind, and I finally had a topic I could sink my teeth into. I decided right there that I was going to write about how songs affected me and what they mean to me.

So that's how this is going to be. Every couple of days, I'll post whatever song I just listened to and discuss what it meant to me. I doubt that more than only a few people will ever read what I have written, but who knows? It's bound to be an interesting personal journey to say the least. I hope you enjoy observing it....