Dude! Take Your Turn!
A Gaming Life
Friday Night Shots – Let’s Talk Music
Hi, there!
C’mon in and have a seat at the bar.
I’ll pour you the drink of your choice (something non-alcoholic for Brian).
Some Canadian Club and Diet Pepsi for me (on my second one now).
What’s that?
Yes, that is Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 coming out through the speakers above the bar.
How did you guess?
Let’s talk music while you’re sitting here relaxing.
How did I get started listening to old American Top 40 shows from the 1970s and 80s?
Why am I inflicting it on you?
And what music do I like now?
Hopefully you’ll tell me yours too.
The whole Casey thing started on Twitter over the last couple of years. Sirius XM radio, on the 70s on 7 channel, plays old American Top 40 shows from the 70s from that week. (They also do a random “wheel of Casey” on Thursday nights, which could be anything, but we didn’t listen to that).
So tomorrow morning, they will play one of the 10 American Top 40 shows from the 70s for the week of May 20 (however they calculate it).
A number of people followed along and tweeted their thoughts about it. They have almost become a community on Twitter.
When we finally got Sirius, I started doing the same.
It was very cool when Patrick started following along (even if it was later in the day). It made my day.
We’ve since ditched Sirius (too much repeating for my wife, who listened to it at work for 8 hours a day), but she’s started listening to the Casey shows on iHeartRadio, where they mostly alternate 70s and 80s shows.
These are random shows, so they’re not locked into the “current” week.
I was born in 1970, so I am not intimately familiar with a lot of 70s music. However, my wife loves 70s music so I have a lot of exposure to it.
And so much of it is good!
There are so many great bands and artists.
How about the O’Jays and “I Love Music.” What a great song.
One song that my wife and I both love is Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.
Who Loves You is also a wonderful song. Though the video has a lot of unneeded close-ups.
I have heard so many great 70s songs through my wife’s playlists that I almost feel like I know them. I get confused whether I remember the songs or whether it’s just because I’ve heard them through her.
I do remember a lot about the late 70s, though, like having a couple of Foreigner albums.
Or maybe the Little River Band, who I have a bunch of fond memories of.
A lot of late 70s Disco is burned into my memory.
But it all merges together so I don’t know what is a true memory and what is from listening with my wife.
I’m a child of the 80s, so while my wife is not a big fan of 80s music (though there is some stuff that she really likes), there is a lot that I really love.
Huey Lewis can do no wrong!
So there’s a lot of 70s and 80s music that I really love.
I wasn’t a huge fan of Madonna, though some of her songs were pretty good.
I remember going to Yearbook Camp at the University of Iowa when I was in high school, and the ladies I went with wanted to go see American Anthem (a truly terrible gymnastics movie).
This song from Madonna is one of my favourites.
However, when I’m by myself, and before I got married in the late 1990s, I am huge into Celtic and New Age music.
One of my first New Age CDs that I bought way back in the 1990s was Ray Lynch’s Deep Breakfast. This was introduced to me by a college friend who was a big Lynch fan.
The Deep Breakfast album (which this video is) is just phenomenal if you like peaceful music that lets you just meditate or veg out and relax.
Anything Celtic is always a win for me. I’m a subscriber to the Irish & Celtic Music Podcast which has a daily dose of great Celtic (Irish, Scottish, and any type of Celtic) music.
You know what I’m a huge fan of, though? And I have been from the 90s until today?
Delerium.
No, that’s not me being delerious.
Delerium started out as a techno-music group, but starting in the late 90s, they moved into a different genre.
They actually had a fairly big hit with Sarah MacLachlan and “Silence” on the CD “Karma” (my first CD by them).
This song is fabulous, but that entire CD is amazing.
They’ve continued with that, even having a stable of singers that they work with through the years. Each album is just as good as previous ones.
An amazing song from a more recent (ok, 2011, but still…) CD is Stopwatch Hearts from Chimera, with Emily Haines as the singer.
They just released a new album, Signs, which is always on my Apple Music app.
Falling Back to You is a great song, as well as the rest of the album.
That being said, Karma is still my favourite of theirs, even though it’s over 20 years old.
There are just so many great songs on it.
I’ve also become a huge fan of orchestral music.
We’re even going to a bunch of Vancouver Symphony Orchestra concerts this coming year.
I really love orchestra music. I used to listen to the Stingray Classical channel when I was working from home and when we had cable.
I don’t know a lot about it, but what I do hear, I love.
I would be remiss if, when talking about classical music, especially cello music, I didn’t talk about Hauser.
He is from Croatia and he is amazing.
The track shown above is just a sample of how good he is.
My love of orchestra music extends to movie soundtracks
John Williams is an amazing composer for movie music.
Star Wars and its ilk were some of my favourites growing up, but I’ll listen to almost anything.
It typically has to be an action movie of some kind, just because the music in those films gives more of a rush.
There is a lot of music that I like, and a lot of music that I like depending on whether I’m with somebody.
The 70s music is so amazing!
But I enjoy listening to that with my wife.
I’m not as big of a fan of it if I’m by myself.
I don’t have most of them on my iPhone playlists.
But if we decide to listen to music on our Bose speakers (wow, they make some amazing speakers), I encourage her to put on her 70s playlists.
Steely Dan (wow, so great!), the O’Jays, even some old David Bowie or Queen.
There is so much great music out there.
Some gets you grooving, almost dancing in your chair (or maybe you’re brave enough to get up and dance).
Some just gets you nodding your head along with the beat.
And some, if you do the stuff that I like, will relax you and maybe just put you in a better mood.
What kind of music do you like?
Let me know in the comments.
And let’s get our groove on!!!
Dude! Take Your Turn! 
I miss the Noon replay of AT40 on 70s on 7!
Friday nights were the nights in the 70s when my mom would turn off all the TV and turn on the FM stereo until bedtime. That’s how I got familiar with everything from earliest memories (about ’75) till the end of the 70s.
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It’s been a few months since we’ve listened to Sirius. You mean they’re not doing the Noon Saturdays anymore? I know they stopped for a week or two, but I thought they had brought it back after popular outcry.
I thought from Twitter that they have brought it back.
My mom and dad were into country for the most part, so I didn’t hear a lot of AM radio until I started listening for myself, maybe in 1977 or 1978.
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Maybe they have! I just hadn’t been listening since I changed my Saturday routine and just figured it was gone for good. Plus, I didn’t see and Dave Tweets… 😛
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Ha! Yeah, we had Sirius mainly for the wife to listen to at work. After multiple complaints about them playing the same songs over and over, we decided to drop it.
Especially after we found out that iHeartRadio has an actual Casey Kasem channel
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My taste in music is pretty varied – from punk rock over folk songs to electronic music and hip-hop.
I’m not a person to need a lot of background music, but I sometimes like a nice playlist with a board game – I’ve made a few (with period pieces) for historical board games myself. The best one I ever saw (somewhere in the depths of the internet) was one for Twilight Struggle. You could set the current turn and it would play music from the right time (so, late 1940s for the first turn and so on) and the current VP standings and it would play more music from the side currently in the lead! Makes you feel suitably stressed as the US player if you’re down by 15 points and the Soviet anthem is blaring out of the speakers 😀
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That playlist sounds amazing! I don’t need music when I’m gaming (though most of my gaming is done at a restaurant where there is music already), but when I’m writing or doing other things, I like some kind of music going.
Thanks, Clio!
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Ah, found it again: http://coldwarsoundtrack.com/
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Sadly, I don’t listen to real radio much; I don’t know where most of my “Miami stuff” is stored here except for what I have on hand, and I can’t afford to sign up for satellite radio; heck, I don’t own a satellite radio! So, I either listen to YouTube videos (many of them official, many not), Amazon Music on my PC’s eponymous app, or from CDs.
As for my tastes: Well, I tend to prefer classical music, light classical, Boston Pops (Fiedler, Williams, and Lockhart), and film soundtracks. I do like some pop/rock acts from the ’50s (before my time), and my growing up years (’60s, ’70s, and ’80s), but as far as “popular music” I tend to favor either Big Band/swing era and standards over what “most people like.” I was like that as a kid, I’m like that at 60. (Basically, I tend to prefer melody over rhythm.)
Favorite (or, for you, “favourite”) singers/groups I learned to love even though they’re not from my preferred classical music/original soundtrack genres:
1. The Beatles
2. Billy Joel (seen him “live” twice, so yay!)
3. Carly Simon
4. The Beach Boys
5. The Platters
6. Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons
7. John Denver
I
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No bad choices in that bunch! I do like Big Band/Swing, though I don’t listen to it much. Oh, and I forgot to mention Surf music! I do like that, though again I don’t listen to a lot of it.
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Music is in the air. Keep going and enjoy. Have a great day.
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You too! Thank you for following
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You’re welcome. You can visit my blog too if you have extra time. I hope you will like and follow it.
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Done!
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Thank you so much. Keep coming back!
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Thanks for the drink; I am not a total teetotal but fell out of the habit many years ago.
I was born in 1964 so I remember a lot of that 1970s music from the radio because my mom was one of those people who always had it on during the day (whether it was for company or to drown out my incessant questions, I have never asked).
I remember being annoyed at some of it and not being able to parse the meaning… Why did it matter that your horse had no name when you were in the desert? So what if you never did give nothin’ to the TinMan? Who was the TinMan anyway?
I was young, whuddya whuddya.
I got into music in the 1980s and it’s still largely my favourite… I liked the unusual stuff like Kraftwerk, Devo, the Residents and Pere Ubu. Later I got more into Goth and “industrial” stuff that could get pretty challenging to some peoples’ ideas of what constituted music.
I continue to discover new groups and genres I like (I even used to DJ a monthly event) but usually discover them only after they’ve been out for a while.
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Thanks, Brian! I always appreciate you stopping by, so I want to take care of you. 🙂
That is an interesting story about your childhood. I do remember being stuck in the back of the car and listening to country music with my parents because that’s what they were into.
And I never would have thought of you as a fan of industrial type music. You might actually like a lot of the early Delerium, before Symantec Spaces. They sounded very industrial, at least to my ears.
I think the rule of thumb with the 70s (at least some of the “regular” music) is that if you don’t really understand what they are talking about, it’s probably drugs or sex. 🙂
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I was far more into Bill Leeb’s earlier projects Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly and still am.
My parents got an 8-track player but they had only a few tapes. So I can still replay most of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Waylon and Willie’s duet album, and Arlo Guthrie’s Hobo’s Lullaby in my head.
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I love most of the Fleetwood Mac album
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