That Reena Girl

• Um, who is this again?

12-28-11

Stay True: An Ode to My Favorite Band

I just found out Thursday has broken up. It happened over a month ago? How did I not know? It happened over Thanksgiving, that’s how. Black Friday work had consumed my life.  Maybe it was better I didn’t find out then, when my stress level was at a seasonal high. But here I am, home alone, reflecting. High school me is really upset. Present day me is just so so bummed. I figured the best way to deal is to write an ode to my favorite band.

I first heard Thursday in Ryan O’Malley’s car. It was junior year and the song was “Standing on the Edge of Summer”. He had Full Collapse on mini disc and we were in his Honda Prelude. I didn’t know what band it was, but the words “pull your punches and burn with your cigarettes” and I looked them up online later. Shortly thereafter, a friend of mine, Gregg Poirier made me a mix with “Concealer” on it. Realizing it was the same band – Geoff Rickly’s voice was easy to recognize—I went to Newbury Comics and bought Full Collapse.

Full Collapse is one of the top 5 albums that changed my life.

It had the energy. It had the lyrics. It had the emotion. It was everything I could want in an album. Remember, I was a teenager then. I was struggling; being straightedge, listening to the music I did, dressing how I did (band shirt, jeans, chucks; that was my uniform), having black hair that always covered one eye made me an outsider in my small hometown. Almost every single time I wore my Thursday t-shirt to school (at least once a week), someone would make the stupid joke “Uh, don’t you know it’s <insert any other weekday here>?” Yeah, that never got old.

I even found a way to incorporate Thursday into a piece my theater class did in honor of September 11^th. I used the opening from “Autobiography of a Nation” and the end of “I Am the Killer” as the bookends. I’m not kidding, I really did. It was performed at a school wide assembly when classes resumed.

I saw Thursday every chance I got, despite the fact that I didn’t drive. And every time, they were amazing. I’m still in awe of Geoff Rickly’s microphone swinging skills (“think it’s gonna rain, rain down…”). Thursday is one of the only bands I will still go into the crowd for, pointing at key lines, bouncing off of other fans. I saw them with Thrice. I saw them with Fairweather. I’ve seen them with Underoath, My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday, etc. You better believe I was at the Full Collapse 10 Year Anniversary tour. The only show of theirs I missed was the one with Boy Sets Fire and I still regret it. I saw them in Worcester. I saw them in Boston. I saw them at a skate park in Rye, NH. I’m pretty sure I saw them in Providence, RI too. And I’ve seen them here in San Diego, CA.

This is me 10 years ago. Seriously.

Fun fact: When I started college at Northeastern, people knew me as “The Girl in the Thursday Shirt” before they knew my name.

Sophomore year of college, War All the Time came out. I went to Newbury Comics and bought it alone with Coheed and Cambria’s In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth. This was my go to album for the walk to class for months. I think I only swapped it out for Murder By Death’s Who Will Survive… That album still resonates with me. I still listen to “For the Workforce, Drowning” when I have a bad day at work.

I should also point out that between War All the Time and A City by the Light Divided, my ex-boyfriend stole my Thursday hoodie. I’m still mad about it.

Then Thursday and I parted ways for a while. I didn’t really get into A City by the Light Divided. I started to come around with their split with Envy and Common Existence. But really, No Devolution made me fall in love with them all over again. But I’ll leave it there because – spoiler alert – that’s my top album of 2011 and that post is on the way. So for now…

RIP Thursday.

To see my list/listen to my favorite Thursday songs, check out my playlist on Spotify: http://spoti.fi/w2XApS

08-30-11

The Saddest Song I’ve Ever Heard

The album Hospice by The Antlers has been recommended to me many times over many months for the last couple years. Each person told me how great it is…but warned me of how it is also devastatingly sad.  I heeded the warning and did not listen in mixed company, at work, or any other place I didn’t want to be seen getting teary-eyed.

Hospice is a concept album; it tells the story of a caretaker and a terminally ill patient. You don’t get much more depressing than that right?But finally, curiosity got the better of me and I listened to the song “Kettering” and felt my chest cave in. Heartbreaking. My only hope is that this is truly just a concept album and not a depiction of a time in singer Peter Silberman‘s life.

Prior to listening to this, all my sad song choices were your typical you-don’t-love-me-anymore/we-broke-up type songs. But as sad as those are, breaking up is not the same as well, DYING. For reference, here are my top 5 favorite sad songs, in no particular order:

1. Everything I Once Had- The Honorary Title

2. Ambulance- Eisley

3. In the Arms of Sleep- Smashing Pumpkins

4. Delicate- Damien Rice

5. After the Movies- Cursive

Honorary mention: It’s Cool, We Can Be Still Be Friends/Haligh Haligh A Lie Haligh- Bright Eyes, Everything’s Too Cold…- The Early November, This Bitter Pill- Dashboard Confessional

But seriously, none of those even compare to this. I decided that the song “Kettering” would be the easiest to start with since it was used on an HBO trailer so I had briefly heard it before. Um, nope. I listened to this yesterday and half hour later in my car I was choking back tears just THINKING about the song, thinking about if I were in that position, thinking about losing people I love… just listen.

Because you’d been abused
By the bone that refused you
And you hired me
To make up for that

And walking in that room
When you had tubes in your arms
Those singing morphine alarms
Out of tune

They had you sleeping and eating
And I didn’t believe them
When they called you
A hurricane thundercloud

When I was checking vitals
I suggested a smile
You didn’t talk for a while
You were freezing

You said you hated my tone
It made you feel so alone
So you told me
I had to be leaving

But something kept me standing
By that hospital bed
I should have quit but instead
I took care of you

You made me sleep all uneven
And I didn’t believe them
When they told me that there
Was no saving you

###

So tell me, what’s the saddest song you’ve ever heard?

06-22-11

Midweek Awesomeness

I think I’m going to keep this was a weekly entry moving forward…

Have you ever noticed how some pop songs sound so similar? That’s because they are. No really, there are countless pop songs that use the same chords. Don’t believe me? Allow me to introduce you to The Axis of Awesome. They will prove it to you:

From pop songs to personal spacecraft, this video is pretty ridiculous. I was shown this in a meeting yesterday. What a cool, inventive use of a pocket camcorder! Not sure what brand they sent up there, probably a Flip, but holy science project Batman! It actually made it to outer space! Can you imagine if this is what you entered in your school science fair as a kid? Talk about instant notoriety…mixed with some mega nerd points for all the precise calculations involved.

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

The sci-fi geek in me can’t help but wonder…what if they weren’t the only ones looking down on earth? I distantly remember another story about a weather balloon crashing down in New Mexico about 60 years ago…

Dun dun duhhhhhhh!

UPDATE: Just came across this: Muppet Game of Thrones!

Very well done. Love this. See the rest at the link above. Who else from Game of Thrones would you like to see as a Muppet and which one would they be?

03-23-11

Midweek Awesomeness

Taking a break from my not-so-short articles on SXSW, zombies, and puppets, I wanted to share a couple things I came across this week. Both are amazing to me in totally different ways.

Yesterday, thanks to Mashable, I discovered the following video. The incredibly talented Nick Pitera is not only a YouTube singing sensation but also a Pixar animator. This dude is LEGIT.

From the lighthearted to the heavyhearted. Out the tragedy and devastation in Japan, comes the story of Hideaki Akaiwa (pictured below). Akaiwa, a resident of Ishinomaki in Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture, was one of the thousands of people who lost everything in the earthquake-tsunami one-two punch Japan was dealt a couple weeks ago. But that didn’t stop this man from throwing on SCUBA gear and searching his submerged home for his missing wife. I’m completely serious. Keep in mind, the water is still rushing in. There parts of houses and cars being dragged by the surge, and there is pretty much no visibility and this guy is swimming through it to find his wife of 20 years.

That wasn’t even the end of the story. Badass of the Week does a pretty epic job of retelling this tale of heroism so for the rest of it, click here.