So, one of the downsides to having a blog is feeling like you have to stay up-to-the-minute. But one of the joys of having my blog is that I can write about whatever whenever. And one of the joys of being an adult (according to Jerry Seinfeld) is eating whatever dessert whenever. I am eating cookies at the moment. Before dinner.
Anyway, I didn’t have this blog when singer/guitarist Marnie Stern’s This Is It and You Are It and So Is That came out, but it was one of my favorites from last year. I was extra-happy that my neighbor-friend David (quite the guitar geek/metal aficianado) recommended her and said something to the effect of “she’s not ‘good for a girl’; she’s really good.” Fabulous!
A lot has been said about her sound, which I think of as lady-Viking music. All shreddy and clangy and fast. This is my go-to bad-ass music. If I were ever on a softball team, any of these songs could be my theme music (I think I’d go with “The Crippled Jazzer,” personally). Hell, she even makes me wanna join a softball team, and thus set aside memories of my fat, “indoor kid” childhood. And I can’t get enough of her guitar-playing against her sugary, girly voice.
A 2007 New York Times article about Stern, Carrie Brownstein, and Kaki King awaits you if you click on this image
But for all that’s been said about her sound, I’d like to draw attention to her lyrics, which are awesome and I think of the tribe. So, today, I will list a favorite lyric from each song on This Is It, in the hopes that one of them will appear on a bumper sticker or a t-shirt. Or that I find the time to make one for myself.
1. “I made a start, looked back just once” (“Prime”)
2. “I turn this moment into something new” (“Transformer”)
3. “Center, we enter” (“Shea Stadium”)
4. “Chaos is a friend of mine” (“Ruler”)
5. “Grabbing minutes. Stuck in composing. Finding an angle.” (“The Crippled Jazzer”)
6. “It’s the search that I crave. I always hear that song at the right time.” (“Steely” — may as well be my mission statement for this blog/life)
7. “There are dimensions I must enter to see what I am made of” (“The Package Is Wrapped”)
8. “Bigger without boundaries big enough to try bigger than the whole world” (“Simon Says”)
9. “Movement is the sign” (“Vault”)
10. “Holding back will be forgotten” (“Clone Cycle”)
11. “I present two sides: my hopelessness and my faith, my ego and my heart, my feelings and my brain” (“Roads? Where We’re Going We Don’t Need Roads”)
12. “But this thing we’ve started it’s rare and new” (“The Devil is in the Details”)
