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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!  |
"Barrel of Monkeys" Day 10 "Bulletproof" by Nate Smith feat. Avril Lavigne from California Gold (unreleased) For my last "Barrel of Monkeys" entry this month, I'm actually choosing a song that features Avril Lavigne, rather than a song from one of her albums. Nate Smith is a country artist I just discovered this year when his song "World of Fire" popped up in my Spotify recommendations playlist. That song was the second single off his self-titled debut album and his first with a major label. This song is the first single off his forthcoming second studio album, California Gold (release date TBD) and I included it because I was blown away with how well Avril Lavigne's voice seems to fit with this style of country song.After two decades of listening to her power ballads and pop-punk-rock anthems, I'm convinced that we need a country album from Avril Lavigne. This collaboration with Nate Smith is great, and I think it would be a fun side project for her to tackle that would surprise people. This is definitely one of my favorite country music discoveries this year (along with Nate Smith in general). This has been a really fun blogging challenge this year, and it's gotten me excited about "The Soundtrackers Group" Fall/Winter setlist with "Resurrection Jukebox" coming up in October and "12 Days of "Christmas"" following not far behind once December rolls around. See you all then!(220 words) |
This is probably my favorite song off Avril's Love Sux album. It's not the one I've listened to the most at this point, but it's the one that most consistently puts a smile on my face and that I think is a perfect mix that captures her evolution as an artist. It's upbeat, a little punk rock, and has that positive message that I've mentioned in a few other posts that I think is missing from a lot of songs in this genre. It's a hopeful and energetic song that is oddly romantic given that it's a pop-punk anthem. I'm seriously considering writing a short story inspired by this song (or maybe I'll attempt yet another ill-fated "Musicology Anthology" entry based on this album next year; it's a challenge that I always start with the best intentions and rarely seem to ever get started on in earnest. But it's not since "Damage" (the song I wrote inspired by The Band CAMINO's song of the same name) that I've had such a fully-formed vision of what kind of a story a song can tell based on my interpretation of the lyrics.After having spent the ten days of this challenge revisiting Avril Lavigne's entire catalogue, I'm super-bummed that I've missed a couple opportunities to see her in concert. I wasn't even aware of this album around the time she was doing the Love Sux Tour, and I can't say I would have gone even if I had because the closest venues to me were Las Vegas (and Winchester, NV) in September and October 2022 when there were still COVID concerns at big public events (like concerts!), and I literally just missed her Greatest Hits Tour earlier this year by a couple of months. She was in Los Angeles (and Las Vegas, again) in May and June, and the tour literally had its last stop less than two weeks ago.  I would have loved to have gone to a show on the Greatest Hits Tour since she played so many songs from so many different eras. Hopefully she'll have a new album and a new tour soon. Based on her album releases to-date, I wouldn't be surprised if she dropped a new album sometime in 2025. Her average (mean) time between albums is roughly three years, and if Love Sux released in February 2022, it's probably a good bet that she's finishing up whatever she's currently working on and angling for a release sometime soon, now that her Greatest Hits album and the accompanying tour has wrapped up. Whatever she does next, I'm definitely here for it! BTW, if this entry sounds a little like a wrap-up of a ten day event on Day 9... it kind of is. That's because my pick for Day 10 is something a bit different and isn't necessarily an "Avril Lavigne song" per se.  I hope that you've enjoyed this brief journey through Avril's discography and come back to visit during "The Soundtrack of Your Life" when I'll have another of her songs (or maybe a couple!) to share from my listening over the past year. Like I've mentioned, this album featured prominently in my listening this year. Multiple tracks will probably show up on my Spotify year-end summary.  (546 words) |
I could have probably picked any of the tracks off this album to feature in this challenge, because I think the whole thing is great. Love Sux was released in 2022 and is Avril's seventh studio album. I've been listening to it a lot lately, because it sounds to me like she's really refined her sound over the past twenty years. The rock-inspired tracks are heavy and hard-hitting; the pop-inspired tracks are fun and light. And the more serious power ballad type songs are really resonant. This song is the one I've listened to third-most on the album (the second-most will be the next entry, and I'm saving the most-listened-to song off the album for next February's "The Soundtrack of Your Life" so you all have something to look forward to. This is one of the few songs where I actually don't think her voice (especially during the verses) is particularly great compared to some of her other songs, but the chorus is really poignant and resonant.Like I mentioned in the previous entry ("Keep Holding On" ), I think there need to be more songs in the world that are a little more hopeful. That might sound a little weird to say about a song that talks about being overwhelmed by your life, but for some reason I interpret this song as being about someone persevering in the face of adversity rather than letting it consume them. Maybe I have that wrong, but I actually find this song kind of inspiring and encouraging.(250 words) |
This is one of the few Avril Lavigne songs that I'm aware of which was released on a soundtrack before she released it on an album. It was the lead single off the Eragon movie soundtrack in 2006, and then later included on her third studio album The Best Damn Thing which was released the following year. I've always liked this song because I think there are a lot of songs about breakup and hurt and relationships ending and stuff along those lines, but there are much fewer songs about persevering and continuing to stick together through hard times, and I think we need more of those songs in the world. (113 words) |
This second single off Avril's second album was basically the breakup anthem for my generation for several years. Anytime someone in a relationship broke up, had a bad fight, etc. it was pretty much guaranteed that they were blasting this song in their car or their room for several weeks afterward. For me, this song is reminiscent of the early 2000s emo/pop punk phase in music where a lot of the love songs were angsty and bittersweet, and this song (and the whole album, in fact) have often been compared to musical artists who have the same general style like Paramore, Evanescence, etc. Like her song "I'm With You" from her first album, this was the album from her second that convinced me she was a really, really talented musical artist. She has the pop-punk hits, of course, which are extremely popular and probably what sell most of her albums, but each album also has one of these more thoughtful, contemplative songs on each of her albums too, which show a real depth and sophistication and maturity to her songwriting. And the combination of the two types of songs have been a real recipe for her success over the past twenty years, I think. Because each album contains multitudes, rather than the same flavor of song over and over again.(220 words) |
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) |
For this challenge, I wanted to pick an artist that I haven't often featured in my Soundtrackers entries, which meant that a lot of my go-to favorite artists with a discography large enough to support ten song picks (Taylor Swift, The Band CAMINO, etc.) were off the table. I almost went with Linkin Park because I had picked them for my ill-fated "Musicology Anthology" entry this year that never got off the ground, but then I really thought about artists that I've been listening to a lot recently and for some reason Avril Lavigne popped into my head.I used to listen to her music a lot in college (Let Go, Under My Skin, and The Best Damn Thing were all released either during my college years or in my early-to-mid twenties shortly after), and then I kind of lost track of her until a song from a 2019 album caught my attention a few years ago. Then I didn't think much about her again until earlier this year when a song from her 2022 album found its way onto my Spotify playlist and I decided to take a trip back through her discography. I was really surprised to find that she's now released seven studio albums in the past twenty years. This was the song I wanted to pick first for the "Barrel of Monkeys" challenge because it perfectly encapsulates what I really love about her as an artist, which is that she's unapologetically pop-punk and doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon. The whole "I'll never grow up" vibe is something that's easy to claim and sing about in your twenties, but when you're still doing it twenty years later, it has a bit more cache to it. I like the fact that, while she has evolved as an artist, it doesn't matter if you're listening to a song off her 2002 album or her 2022 album; the sound is the same and she knows who she is as an artist.I think I have a particular affinity for this song right now, too, because I'm in the middle of one of those adulting seasons where there's so much to do, so many responsibilities to fulfill, and where life just doesn't seem like much more than repetitive not-very-fun tasks that you have to do because you, you know, an adult with tiny humans that rely on you to provide for them. There's something I deeply empathize with about looking back on your earlier years when your biggest priority in the world was having carefree fun with your friends. I'm really excited for this Barrel of Monkeys challenge this year, and especially to a deeper dive on Avril Lavigne's discography. I plan to take a look at songs both old and new, ones that I listened to on repeat between classes in college two decades ago, and ones that I've discovered and been listening to a lot this year after a period of rediscovery. Thanks for joining me. (501 words) |
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