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 |    My primary Writing.com blog. |
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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!  |
Until Love Sux was released in 2022, this album - The Best Damn Thing - was hands-down my favorite. It had the most songs on it that I really liked, and it was one of the few albums that I constantly listened to straight through. With most musical artists, I'll listen to specific songs, or put together specific playlists of multiple songs from multiple albums; it's rare for me to love an album so much that I'll just listen to every track without skipping around, but this is definitely one of them. And this song is probably the best known of all the songs on the album. It was also the first single released off the album. This music video is also one of those classics mid-1990s to early-2000s genre of videos where the artist plays multiple characters in the narrative by dressing up differently. In this one she plays both the girlfriend and the girl who wanted to steal the guy, which is both kind of a fun premise and potentially a real psychological issue that's probably best explored in therapy.  I used to listen to this song a lot when I was commuting to and from work, and working late. During the time this album was out, I was working for a small production company that didn't have a lot of staff, so I'd have to handle a lot of different tasks and usually ended up working really late. That place also ended up laying me off, and you can read more about that experience and my current views on company loyalty in a prior entry: "What The Hell" . Anyway, I would often blast this song when I was alone in the office, or when I was driving home late at night because I needed high-energy music to keep me awake. So this song definitely brings back mixed memories of producing a game show pilot and all those late nights spent in the office to make it happen.(331 words) |
Head Above Water was Avril's sixth album, and it came after a five-year hiatus during which she was diagnosed and was struggling with Lyme disease. The album was a bit of a departure from her other albums, but a lot of critics praised the fact that it felt more emotionally raw and vulnerable than her prior works. This song is particularly meaningful to me because the last time I was laid off, one of my wife's coworkers made me a playlist burned onto a CD (those were the days!) of music meant to cheer me up and encourage me, and this was the very first track on that playlist. I actually hadn't even realized that Avril Lavigne had released this album (nor was I familiar with her health struggles at the time), but this song was on repeat in my car for a really, really long time (even long after that stint of unemployment was over). The song now, for me, is a bit of an anthem for anyone who seems overwhelmed with whatever life is throwing at them. I've recommended it to a few other friends over the years, when it seemed like they needed a little something to get them through a tough spot or help them feel seen in their struggles. (215 words) |
Of all the songs on her discography (not including Love Sux, which I've been listening to a lot this year), this is probably the song of Avril's that I listen to the most. Every time it pops up on the radio or a playlist, I listen to it for an extended period of time. It was the lead single off this fourth album of hers, and even though this is ostensibly a love song (or at least a song about relationships), the chorus/refrain is something that I identify with more and more as I get older: All my life I've been good But now I'm thinking, "What the hell" All I want is to mess around And I don't really care about If you love me, if you hate me You can't save me, baby, baby All my life I've been good But, now what the hell What? What? What? What the hell? To me, this song has been more applicable to my job than my personal relationships lately. Disney just laid off another few hundred employees this week; it's the third quarter in a row they've suddenly laid people off with no warning, and it's now been almost two years of constant uncertainty and rolling layoffs as they've sought to streamline the organization. It used to be a company that people felt seen and valued at, and now we all feel like numbers on a balance sheet who are one quarterly earnings call away from getting abruptly called onto a Zoom video call with our boss and HR to be told that the company has eliminated our position to save overhead. Sadly, that makes them just like almost every other company I've worked for in my career. And I've spent my entire professional life working hard, over-delivering, and making a lot of sacrifices for the company's benefit. As have my coworkers, some of which had been at the company twenty-two, twenty-five, in some cases thirty-five years and now suddenly find themselves looking for new jobs at the tail end of their careers without much more than a perfunctory conversation with studio leadership. It definitely gets me into "now I'm thinking 'what the hell'" territory and wondering whether my work is worth the priority I give it in my life. Which is not to say that I'm planning on quitting or completely checking out; but I think the days of not taking my vacations and putting in tons of overtime might be coming to a close in favor of, you know, just putting in my hours and then going home at the end of the day. Anyway, I really enjoy this song because it's often a reminder to take ourselves a little less seriously. Sometimes you really do just have to say "what the hell" and have other people accept you for who you are, for better or worse. That's probably why this song finds its way onto my playlist rotation more often than most songs. (500 words) |
This was the first Avril Lavigne song that really convinced me that she was more than a pop artist. "Complicated" (the first single off her debut album) was obviously a huge hit, and the follow-up single ("Sk8er Boi") was really catchy and a massive hit of course, but this was the song that seemed to have some real emotional resonance behind it. 2002 is also the year when I first started dating my wife and this bittersweet but somewhat optimistic ballad was one that I listened to a lot in those early years when we were navigating our relationship. I'm clearly not the only one for whom this song resonated, because it also gained popularity by being featured on an episode of Scrubs, an episode of Smallville, and in the movie Bruce Almighty. It was also used for a handful of commercials, video games, and other uses... and was included in a movie soundtrack as recently as this year, when it was featured in Deadpool & Wolverine over twenty years later. Apparently I'm not the only one for whom this song really resonated! By the way, if you want to hear a really cool mashup, Yungblud (an artist Avril Lavigne subsequently featured on a future album, presumably at least in part because she discovered this mashup) did a crossover song between this one and Taylor Swift's "Cardigan" for BBC Radio 1 which you can watch here . Both Lavigne and Swift were fans of the mashup.(253 words) |
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