Crouse Family Top 10 List of Retro Songs

It didn't work out the way I expected.

I just assumed that the music I remember loving when I was young would be a part of my life forever. When I got my first mp3 player, Duran Duran was one of the first things I downloaded. We don't get in the mood for that as much as I thought we would. And is it possible for anyone to not like End Of The Road by Boyz II Men? My kids don't.

Here is a top 10 list of oldie songs we do love. This list is in a constant state of flux because we keep remembering new ones.

10. Desperado (LP Version) by the Eagles

9. I'm Too Sexy by Right Said Fred

8. Mr. Mom by Lonestar.

7.5  What About Now by Lonestar. My kids love it, but it probably wouldn't have made this list except that it's one of my all time favorite songs.

7. Lucille (2006 Digital Remaster) by Kenny Rogers. And The Gambler, and Coward Of The County (2006 Digital Remaster) This list isn't doing a very good job staying at only 10...

6. Bad, Bad Leroy Brown by Jim Croce

5. It's My Party by Lesley Gore

4. My Boyfriend's Back by the Angels

3. Sweet Child O' Mine by Guns N'Roses (And OK, just about anything by Def Leppard, but I'm running out of space here. And did you see Slash during the halftime show last night??? Good times, good times)

2. Eye Of The Tiger by Survivor (Mainly because of this video...)

This was an outtake--The actor who plays Sam had missed his cue, but no one called "cut!" so

the actor who plays Dean kept going. Isn't he awesome? But I digress...

1.5 I almost forgot!!! My kids adore Elvira by the Oak Ridge Boys.

Drum roll please: The number one oldie song in our family at the moment is:

1. You're So Vain by Carly Simon. You walked into the party, like you were walking onto a yacht... We can't hear it and not sing along. It's impossible.

What are your favorite songs from the "olden days"? 

Cute Video, Creepy Lyrics/Cute Lyrics, Creepy Video

I'm moving away from hip hop this week to talk about some of my favorite country music. I recently discovered Sugarland, the country duo of Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush. Their song, Stuck Like Glue is a bouncy, fun love song. The music video features Captain Awesome from Chuck--what's not to love about that??? (Ryan McPartlin)

Well, for one thing, the music video is actually pretty creepy. My kids don't quite understand why I find it so disturbing--but I'd like to think no one would get away with making a cute music video about a man kidnapping a woman, tying her up, getting her drunk and then punching her in the face. Why should a man be any different?

When I talked to my kids about this, J called the woman a "creeper," which is such a great description that I had to add it.

 

Moving on to The Band Perry. Kimberly Perry is the lead vocalist in a band with her 2 brothers. When I first heard the song "If I Die Young" I liked everything except the lyrics, which seem to celebrate dying--"And maybe then you'll hear the words I've been singing/Funny when you're dead how people start listening." Since The Band Perry appeals to a young audience, I wasn't impressed by such dark lyrics.

But the music video is amazing! It changed the whole song for me. I'm a big Anne of Green Gables fan. Do you remember the scene where Anne is pretending to be the Lady of Shallott, and her boat starts to sink? Welcome to this music video. She's even holding a book of poems by Tennyson. 

We all like this song, but it's my eight year old who sings (all day long!) about how she wants to be buried in satin and sunk in the river at dawn.

Bruno Mars

JUST THE WAY YOU ARE

 

Isn't Bruno Mars a cutie? He kind of reminds me of Michael Jackson in his too-perfect-to-be real phase. Just The Way You Are came on the radio at least a dozen times today. I started loving this song in a strange way. I kept hearing the tail end of it on the radio. The sweet lyrics even brought a tear or two to my eyes. I imagined that he was singing the song to a burn victim.

My oldest daughter and I were talking about the importance of loving someone for who they were on the inside, and I used this song as an example of that. And then I contrasted it to that other song I kept hearing on the radio...the one that started, "Her eyes, her eyes, Make the stars look like they're not shining; Her hair, her hair, Looks beautiful without her trying; She's so beautiful..." I would always get disgusted at that point and turn it off.

She looked at me kind of strangely and said, "You know that's the exact same song, don't you?" Google was called on to settle the matter, and as usual, she won. Still, I like this song, even if it's not quite as "beauty is only skin deep" as I'd originally thought it was.

GRENADE

And speaking of Bruno Mars...I love Grenade even better. What a talented guy. Personally, I think these lyrics shine.

The Club Can't Handle Me, pt. 2

A few days ago I posted about dancing in the church parking lot during a snow storm at nighttime. We were waiting for my friend Renee to pick up her daughters and their friend. After reading my version of events, she sent me a message on facebook with her journal entry about the event. It was so amazing that I asked permission to post it here:

And turning quickly I saw them there, 5 perhaps 6, dancing in the moonbeams on a field of white. Fairies I think they were. Some were linked hand-in-hand as in a childhood game of ring-around-the-rosies. Others were solitary, with arms raised in praise to the heavens. Each head was thrown back in joyous laughter. Almost it seemed, in the same instant that I saw them, they were gone, spirited away to another plane. But their brilliance filled my spirit with happiness all the way home.

Even if the soundtrack was a silly hip hop song, this was the exact feeling of it. It was a magical moment. 

The Club Can't Handle Me

Woo hoo! Such good news in the Crouse world! I LOVE this song. There hasn't been a song this impossible to not dance to since Fire Burning by Sean Kingston. Even my husband has been heard surreptitiously whistling it as he walks down the hall.

Last Saturday I went on a 65 mile (each way) journey with 5 teenagers in the car in a snowstorm at night. We got back to the church to rendezvous with their ride home. We had a few minutes to kill, and Club Can't Handle Me came on the mp3 player. Imagine us with the music up high, dancing around the parking lot with big fluffy snowflakes falling all around us. It was--by far--the best part of the whole night.

But I've been cautious about watching the music video, because I'm leery of anyone who would sing a duet with Ke$ha (They sang Right Round together a couple of years ago.)

But I finally sat down to watch it, and it's the most appropriate clubbing music video I've ever seen. I'm not much of a car girl, but from the start, when Flo Rida is getting out of that AMAZING car and throwing money around, it was just an extravaganza of fun.

Ready, Set

We've been dancing to this song all day.

Knock Three Times

A new year, a new resolution. When I started this blog in 2010, I wasn't sure what I wanted it to be. I think I've figured that out now, thanks to a facebook status update by a friend of mine, Christina Lowe. It said simply, "Because sharing what you love is fun." Such a brilliant A-HA moment for me. I want to share the things I love. 

This will be the place where my values meet up with fun stuff, with a blatant disregard for its age. Did a great song come out in the 1970's? I'm sharing it here. Did I finally read a great book that everyone else was talking about a year ago? I'll tell you all about it.



I promised a friend my first post would be a song called "Knock Three Times" by Tony Orlando and Dawn. This song came out the year I was born (1971), and the hairstyles are guaranteed to make you laugh, but I love this song. One of my earliest memories was of my mom making me my own personal cassette tape--back when that was cutting edge technology. We were all alone in the house, and I remember she was very worried that someone would knock on the door while we were making the tape, so it must have been old technology indeed. I can only remember the first 3 songs on the tape--S-A-T  U R-D-A-Y Night, the Monster Mash, and Knock Three Times. I wore that tape out listening to those 3 songs.

Knock Three Times was one of the first songs I bought when I got an mp3 player, and now I have a whole new set of memories set to this song. My kids thought the part that goes, "When you look out your window tonight/Pull in the string with the note that's attached to my heart" was as overly sentimental as a song could get. Whenever they hear it, J pretends to pull on a string and D gasps, grabs his heart and falls to his knees as though she just ripped out his heart.*

*edited to add: J says D doesn't just fall to the floor, he starts screaming, and knocks into the coffee table.