Mysterious Ways

Wow, I should write more pieces about U2, given how popular it was.  Anyway, here’s the rest of it. To my friends in New Zealand seeing U2 this week, drop me a line, let me know how it was.

When I walked into the record store, the owner was playing what I would later learn was “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” but I was all eyes at that point, and not ears.  I looked for the new release rack and finally found what I was looking for.  It took me a minute, because the first thing you notice about Achtung Baby is its cover.

It was off-putting, coming from a band who had up to that point selected a single image for their cover art:

So right away it didn’t look like U2, but that didn’t discourage me, obviously, because I threw down for the cassette copy, as I didn’t own a CD player at this point, yet had a Walkman, a boom box and a car stereo with tape deck.  I paid for it, declined the bag, and ripped the cellophane off the case on the way back to my car.  I slid behind the wheel, fired it up and popped in Achtung Baby.  The test signal rolled first and I set levels, and then, music …

ZOO STATION

When it started, it sounded like my stereo speakers were broken, and it wasn’t until Bono started singing that I realized that was the entire point.  Given the last U2 song released was the melodic All I Want Is You (well, technically a cover of Cole Porter’s Night and Day” from the Red Hot + Blue compilation followed that), it was music from a different planet, but still very much U2.  I really wasn’t crazy about it to be honest, but now I can’t imagine the album without it.

EVEN BETTER THAN THE REAL THING

Now this was more like the U2 I knew – a sweeping rock anthem, blending the old and the new.  The “rhythm and blues” influence of The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum was gone, and it harkened back to The Unforgettable Fire in its “European feel” but by this point it was clear that AB was a totally different beast.

ONE

Some songs take several listens to “get” but “One” was one I got the moment I heard it, and is probably their best known, best loved song.  It’s apparently a popular song at weddings too, which blows my mind because if you listen to the lyrics, you realize pretty damn quickly it’s not a love song.  With lyrics like “You ask me to enter/ but then you make me crawl/ and I can’t keep holding on / when all you got is hurt,” it is ironic their most popular song is also their most misunderstood.  It’s hard to think of this era in music and with U2 to be “Classic Rock” but One is a classic.

UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD

It’s about Judas, and his betrayal of Jesus, told from Iscariot’s perspective, but for me, it seemed to speak to what I was going through at that time in my life; an on-again-off-again relationship with a girl who was much more into me than I was into her, being stupidly into someone else who I had no chance with.  And by the time I realized I had made a big mistake it was too late.  She’d moved on, and told me it would be the end of the world before she reconsidered.

WHO’S GONNA RIDE YOUR WILD HORSES

A nice salve after the bitterness of the previous tunes, it’s one of the lesser tunes on the album, at least for me.  I think it is for U2 also, given how the fact it was a single, it really isn’t remembered.  It’s the closest to a Joshua Tree-era tune on the album and stands out for it.

SO CRUEL

For some strange reason, the song that becomes before the side break on pretty much every U2 album becomes my favorite on that album, and So Cruel fits that bill.  It’s simple and melodic, and sets up the two songs that follow.  One of the things we lost with the rise of the CD is that “act break,” the song that holds its spell on you as you flip the cassette or album over; something to linger while you wait for the next track.  So Cruel still does that.

THE FLY

I already went in-depth on The Fly and its video last installment, but I didn’t realize at the time how this song and that video would be the blueprint for what was to follow shortly.  U2 had long wanted to “redefine” the concert experience and what the subsequently pulled off did just that – and that influence can be seen and felt to this very day.

MYSTERIOUS WAYS

The first time I listened to Mysterious Ways, I didn’t like it.  It was too “dance” too “House”, and as a self-import and, self-involved 18 year old, those things were just wrong.  Now, it’s my favorite song on the album after So Cruel, and best played loud.  Go figure.

TRYING TO THROW YOUR ARMS AROUND THE WORLD

To this day, every time I hear it, I think of a very particular scene; me, driving the streets of my town after dark.  It’s winter, the ground is covered with snow and every street feels abandoned.  There are no people out and fewer cars, but the music coming from the stereo is warm and soothing.

ULTRAVIOLET (LIGHT MY WAY)

There’s a scene in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly where Jean-Dominique Bauby, paralyzed by a stroke, is remembering a trip he took with a mistress, and as we segue into the flashback, the first strings of Ultraviolet can be heard, before BLASTING into the big intro.  The image, of the mistress from behind as she sits in the passenger seat of a convertible, her hair whipping in the wind, is now forever associated with this song, but it remains one of my favorite tracks on the album.  U2 resurrected it from limbo for their current U2 360 tour as an encore, as a throw to their fans, who by all accounts are thriled to see lss known songs make the playlist.

ACROBAT

Its refrain of “don’t let the bastards grind you down” has become my personal mantra.  They try their best, and sometimes it looks like they’ll win, but I always bounce back and am still here when so many of them have gone.

LOVE IS BLINDNESS

The somber closing to a joyous and yet bitter collection of songs.  A downbeat song they closed shows on their tour with and didn’t diminish the high everyone felt coming out of it.

So yeah, despite Nirvana and Pearl Jam, RHCP, Ministry, Soundgarden and countless others occupying the sonic landscape, AB remained lodged in my tape deck for months, it seems, and remains my favorite “winter album” — yes Achtung Baby makes me think of snow and chilly air.  A lot of stuff happened in those remaining weeks of 1991 and AB was the soundtrack to it.  Hell, when I started college the following fall it was still out there, still playing in record stores, still blasting from dorm rooms – albums had a longevity then that they don’t have now.  In fact, in the 19 years since then I don’t think I ever stopped listening to it.

In March 1992 I got to realize a dream of the previous 5 years and saw them on their Zoo TV tour.  I cut afternoon classes and drove the three hours with three friends, spent a good part of the day wandering the city near the venue, and got to see The Pixies open for U2.  It was, of course, an amazing show and an amazing experience – hell, The Pixies actually opened for them on that leg of the tour – but I realized much later that seeing U2 live represented the climactic moment of my love for that band.  I’m still a fan, and will be until I die, even though they’re not the pinnacle of my musical taste like they were.  Seeing Zoo TV was the conclusion of that period of my life, which was changing quickly.  I graduated High School three months later, I moved away to College five months after that (and ended up living down the street from where I saw U2 barely half a year before).  I saw them again in August of that year, and then thirteen years passed before I saw them once more, on their Vertigo Tour, general admission, right up front.  That’s probably the last time I’ll see them perform, live, because nothing could top that experience outside of being their personal guest or something.

People change and music changes, and 19 years can seem like 19 years, and can also seem like just last week or last year.  The agonizing wait for an album is gone – music gets leaked, officially or unofficially – in the case of their No Line on the Horizon album they streamed it on their MySpace site for a week prior to the album’s release.

I’m a U2 fan, but will probably never be as into U2 as I was in 1988-1992 and probably will never be into any band that much again.  Music obsession is a young man’s game and it has to be, because that music will be with you for the rest of your  life.  When Generation X hits retirement age, rest homes across the world will have Grunge nights, and arguments will break out in the lunch room over the merits of Nirvana over Pearl Jam, just like High School with more wrinkles, more grey hair and less of it.  The rec room will be filled with the music of Ministry and Nine Inch nails, and especially U2.  II still listen to Achtung Baby regularly, like Doolittle, like Nevermind, like so many other albums that stood the test of time.  And, like every memory I have of that year and time of my life, I’ll never stop listening to it.

 

Even Better than the Real Thing

19 years ago this very day, I ducked out of school on my lunch break, drove to the local record store, and bought this:

November 19, 1991 was the day it was released, and here’s the story behind it.

I have a confession to make – I am a U2 fan.  I realize that’s an un-cool statement to make, given that U2 are not cool by the normal standard.  The only thing cool about U2 is to viscerally hate their pompous, earnest stadium rock (the same grief Coldplay gets – and another band I quite like, so there).  Somehow, Radiohead gets a pass because they’re all arty and serious, but their fans are the biggest shitheads around and worse than people who constantly berate you for buying a Mac instead of a PC, because these things supposedly matter.  But I am a U2 fan – I have all their albums, saw them in concert several times, and even liked No Line on the Horizon.

This all has to do, I realize, with the age I discovered them.

I discovered them, along with most of you, in 1987 when The Joshua Tree was released and you couldn’t walk the street without tripping over “With or Without You.”  For an impressionable fourteen year old, the great thing about U2 was that they weren’t what was clogging the airwaves at the time – Bon Jovi and Warrant and “Unskinny Bop” – they were serious, they had a conscience, they were all about Amnesty International and Greenpeace and to someone on the cusp of adulthood, concern for the state of the world was becoming a growing concern.

Another reason I responded to them was, by this point, I was still the “new kid” at my school and at my new hometown.  We’d moved in August 1986 and while I made friends fast, still felt like something of an outsider.  And as so much of The Joshua Tree is about alienation, and fear, and desire, it was like handing a glass of ice water to a man dying of thirst.  So I dug U2, but not in a huge way.  I didn’t get The Joshua Tree until Christmas 1987 (on Vinyl), and had to make a cassette copy to listen to on my walkman.  Of course, the U2 steamroller had just got going when they dropped Rattle and Hum – the album and the movie, and went from “cool, serious band” to “overexposed” in a heartbeat.  I saw Rattle and Hum in the theater, and as it was my first exposure to the band in something of a live setting, my appreciation for them deepened.  The only concerts I’d been to by that point were Jan and Dean, Donny and Marie, and a pre-Private Dancer Tina Turner, so seeing Bono’s ego projected larger than life was a sight to behold.  But more important, the theater sound system was the best stereo one could imagine – the walls were shaking.  Needless to say after the experience I was a full-on fan, no longer just a casual one.  I bought up their back catalog and nearly wore the cassettes out.  The fact that R&H is not a good album by U2 (or anyone else’s) standards is beside the point – it was the right album, and the right movie, at the right time.  I was a fan now, and I anxiously awaited their next album.

And waited.  And waited.  And waited …

1988 became 1989, which became 1990 and then 1991 and there was no sign of a new album.  Unlike this internet age where you have that information at your fingertips (true or rumored), in the early 1990s you either read about it in Rolling Stone or Spin, or you heard nothing.  One advantage of the wait was I filled the gap by discovering other bands who would become as important to me as U2 – Midnight Oil, INXS, REM, The Pixies, Jane’s Addiction, and many more.  Summer 1991 saw the first Lollapalooza festival, Pearl Jam’s Ten, and by September the Pixies released Trompe Le Monde, and Nirvana released Nevermind.

Think of that: 1987 was The Joshua Tree, Bon Jovi, Warrant and Unskinny Bop; 4 years later was Pearl Jam, Lollapalooza and Nirvana.  The Berlin Wall had come down, the Soviet Union was on the way out, and still nothing new from U2.  A lot can change in four years, but an even bigger change was coming.

In late September of 1991 I picked up the newest issue of Rolling Stone (with Guns n’ Roses on the cover – remember Use Your Illusion?).  And in the news section there was a small blurb about U2’s new studio album being readied for release.  The title was Achtung Baby, with the first single “The Fly” set for release in October.

I thought it was a joke.  Really?  They’re calling it Achtung Baby?  They’re releasing a song called The Fly?  This, from the band behind the painfully earnest Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum?  It had to be a misprint.  They couldn’t be serious.

Could they?

I began to wonder … by now I was well into the left of the dial music that was slowly sweeping across the land.  By the time AB dropped on November 19, 1991, would I even be interested?  Would I even care? This was not a new phenomenon; in years since I’ve fallen in love and then out of love with lots of bands.  Some were just brief affairs of an album or two, some lasted years before fizzling entirely.  Some I still listen to and buy their new releases, but it still feels like a sense of duty more than something I genuinely want to hear.

Late October, “The Fly” was released.  I didn’t so much hear it as see the tail end of the video on Much Music when I got home from school.  It was a good 30 seconds before I realized it was even U2.  Bono was wearing these goofy wrap-around shades; The Edge was wearing his soon to be ubiquitous knit cap and (gasp) bell bottoms.  This wasn’t the U2 of The Joshua Tree, and the music wasn’t like anything U2 had done before.  I was intrigued, but after the low-fi sonic assault of Nevermind, this slick, studio stuff seemed more self-indulgent than anything else.

There was still a month before release, and on a trip to the record store to grab Badmotorfinger by Soundgarden, I happened upon a cassette single (a.k.a. “cassingle”) for The Fly.

I picked it up too and on the way home gave The Fly a listen.   I listened to it several times, along with an included remix, and an instrumental track they did for a Royal Shakespeare Co. production of A Clockwork Orange.   It was all very … different, but as is the case with anything, the more you listen, the more it tends to grow on you.  So everything was in flux come November 21 when I left school at lunch to hit the record store.  You see, this was THE DAY Achtung Baby hit shelves.  To risk restating the experience of buying it, click HERE if you haven’t already.  Done?  Good.

Because in Part 2 we go in-depth…

Bar Italia

Greetings from Italy, where I’m neck deep in the second draft of my novel; after two weeks I’m finally making decent progress, and still managing to find time to walk the streets, hit the café’s and be all writer-ly.  I bought a nice tailor made suit, and the locals have already given me the nickname “il produttore irritato” which means something I don’t have time to look up.

Okay I’m not “literally in Italy,” which sounds like the title of a bad RomCom (now my title for a bad RomCom – steal it at your peril.  Seriously, my lawyer could use the work).  I’m there in spirit, but believe me if I had the means I’d be there in a heartbeat, walking the streets of Florence, visiting the Uffizi and Santa Croce and Santa Fiore, the Ponte Vecchio – but more likely holed up in some apartment or hotel room, scribbling furiously.  It’s a challenge, writing about a place you’ve never been, but given this place I’ve never been is really the place five hundred years ago, that place no longer exists.  So the result is me, at my desk here in New York, wading through a 600 page manuscript, and chipping my way through that work in the hopes of coming out the other end with something remarkable.  What it’s involved has been a lot of fresh starts and total rewrites, but some cutting and pasting, and for some nice passages, only basic grammatical corrections.  I punch in at 8 and punch out at 5, unless I hit “the wall” before that, when I realize I’ve been sitting and starring at the same page for the past ten minutes, unable to proceed any further.

I’ve been keeping up a decent pace; I’m getting through about 10-15 pages a day, which works out to roughly 3500 words a day – and of that 3500, maybe 1000 represents “new” writing.  I’m still in the first quarter of the novel – i.e. the part that was written over three years before, and I’m cautiously optimistic (meaning I really hope) the most radical rewrites will be with the oldest material.  I managed to push through the final 40,000 words over the first two months of 2010, so hopefully I’ll move faster the further I get into it.  Still, at roughly a thousand words a day, that’s still 5000 a week, which is pretty good if I must say.  Of course, it also reminds me of how difficult getting to those words a day can be, and also makes me curse the fact I don’t get paid by the word.  I’ve given myself to my birthday to get the thing into shape, so we’ll see how I do.

[The process has also proven a weird thing about my business and my work; whenever I’m hitting my stride on a personal project, a work-related one comes barging in.  Case in point: a TV series I’m Exec Producer and writer of just got a shot of adrenaline at AFM, so I’ll be pulling double duty on it and the novel over the next month or so.  This is not a complaint.]

Some days I hit the ground running.  Other days I don’t.  Sometimes the words come easy.  Sometimes they have to be dragged out kicking and screaming.  Occasionally I want to slink back under the covers and get another few hours of sleep, cut out on work and watch movies or play video games, or read, or do anything other than my work.  But, for the most part, I manage to get down to it and be pretty prolific.  On a good day of screenwriting I can knock out a solid six pages.  With prose, I aim for 1000 to 2000 words a day. When writing a comic book, I aim for five pages of the actual book a day to give me a first draft (albeit a rough first) in a week.  All of the above don’t take rewrites into account, as it’s the rewrites that take the most work and time.  Add in the occasional magazine piece, and I’m pretty much at my desk, keeping as normal business hours as any of you (the difference being you’re probably being paid for your time, where I am working towards the possibility of being paid someday).  It’s a grind, to be sure, but something that happened not too long ago really threw into perspective how much things have changed and I have changed over the last two decades.

So there I was, sorting through some old boxes – the type that have travelled with me from place to place but rarely, if ever opened, when what do I unearth but several folders containing pretty much everything I wrote – creative writing, essays, plays, scripts, et al – in High School?  I guess the first thing I’d like to say about them is they’re brilliant; a true time capsule moment where a budding writer found his voice and pointed to the success and acclaim to come.  I could say that but for the fact it would be total and utter bullshit.  It’s not great.  It’s stuff written by a High School student because he had to, not because he wanted to.  It’s quite the experience to sit there as a 30-something and read the words and thoughts of my 15 year old self.  I find I agree with the grades my teachers assigned to many of these assignments, and I will go on record in saying that they were overall good grades – I think the lowest may have been a 75%, though it wouldn’t have been beyond me to throw out ones that got a worse grade, and those moments and words are now forever lost to time.

But what really gave me pause in re-reading these unearthed treasures made me realize that these are the only copies of these works in existence, and made me wonder how many hours, days and even weeks were occupied in the writing of them.  It also makes me realize that I’m a much more sentimental person than I’ll cop to.  I’m notorious for chucking out things that I wish I’d hung onto years down the road and have probably thrown out more things than I can remember.  The fact they’ve been wiped from my memory is something that weighs heavily on my mind.

Some of these essays are typed – written on either a manual typewriter, or by utilizing the awesome processing power of the Apple 2C home computer, and printed out on a dot matrix printer.  The copies I have are the only copies out there, which tells me I should really scan the documents in the off chance the originals get destroyed because when my papers are donated to some university decades from now (ego is a necessary component of writing after all), future generations will want to dissect and digest every word I ever put to paper, real or virtual.

It makes me think about all the things I threw away and can never have back.  I think of old class photos, Valentines and Birthday cards, Christmas pageant programs – all those disposable things we never think we’re going to want to look at again, only to be happily surprised when you discover some stuffed between the pages of an old photo album.

The genesis of my Mixtape project was a direct result of that uncanny bit of foresight.  The combination of unearthing my old collection of music cassettes and boom box, piles of old Rolling Stone and Spin magazines, and old yearbooks, and mementos from 90s era life were a definite inspiration for it.

Re-read the third paragraph again; in the final weeks of drafting my novel, I was drafting 1500-2000 words a day.  The average length of a major High School essay, worth 30-40% of your final mark in some cases, was 1500-2000 words.  Now, that amount of words is a typical morning for me.  Hell, peruse several of the posts on this website and you’ll find they’re well into that essay length range.  And as we reach the end of this installment in the ongoing life of this author, I note with pride that I’ve already crossed the 1500 word mark.  My High School self would be proud of me.

The Waiting Place

November is not a good month for me; in fact, I absolutely dread November.  November is when I start to take account of the year that was, and without exception I always find it to be lacking.  I always look at what more I could have done, I look at projects that stalled, and I look at deals that collapsed.  The only thing I have to look forward to is that there’s only about eight weeks left in the year when, presumably, the slate is wiped clean and I can start the process all over again.

This year, however, November is different.  It’s different for a number of reasons, but more than anything for the fact I can look back on 2010 and see the positives overwhelm the negatives.  Work-wise; nothing really spectacular, but nothing I would consider to be an outright disaster either.  Stonehenge Apocalypse was a hit, which makes me look good, and got better than average reviews for a SyFy Channel movie.  There’s been some forward momentum on a project I optioned and later sold to a New Zealand company, and with the American Film Market kicking off, a couple projects I’m deeply involved in are being shopped and will hopefully lock in some development and production financing so I can eat for the next year.

There’s also been some positive development on a couple other projects, neither of which I’ll go into detail on, given I remain superstitious about blabbing about a new cool project publically, only to have it fall to pieces shortly thereafter.  I’m actually ducking out early for a meeting on one of them today that, if all goes well, will mean a big announcement coming, so keep watching this space.

This is the life of a freelance writer; difficult at best and bloody impossible at worst.  But what I’ve come to learn over the years is the value in having one project – only one – that exists for yourself.  Something unencumbered by expectations and demands, something that you create for your own personal reasons.

A little while ago I came up with the brilliant idea to figure out just how much of my life has been wasted by other people; I got to the three year mark before I had to lie down for a while and rest my head.  For a freelance writer, a lot of your day is spent waiting for someone to get back to you, for that check to show up in the mail, the works.  We fill that waiting place by writing, partly because it’s the job, but largely to retain our tenuous grip on sanity.  I’m pretty damn intolerable when I don’t have something to work on; some years ago, after a particularly grueling run, I bottomed out at the end of October and for the next two and a half weeks did sweet fuck all besides dick around on the internet, watch movies and read.  Sounds nice, huh?  It isn’t, believe me.  I had zero energy, zero motivation, and with a mind roiling like the North Atlantic in January, turned those impulses on myself, decrying my life and my work and wondering what the point of it all was.

Things got so bad that my then-girlfriend-now wife made the decision that we were going away for the weekend, to snap me out of my funk.  I was so listless and rudderless I agreed, and after only an hour in a different city, I felt normal again, walking around, taking in the sights and living my goddamn life again.  On returning home I had my mojo back and commenced working on a project that ended up being one of my better efforts.  Ever since, she and I have had a mutual agreement that whenever life gets to be too much for either of us, we go away someplace.  It always works too.

But on this particular trip, I took stock of a lot of things and realized that 90% of my waking hours were devoted to movie writing, movie critiquing, hustling for meetings with movie people; the works.  My work had become, well, work.  And that’s when I knew something had to change.  I knew I had to change.

I had been kicking around the idea of writing a novel for a while before that little crash; I wanted to be more than just a screenwriter, at a time when thousands would gnaw their own arm off for the opportunity to be one.  Want proof? If you find yourself in LA, stop a random stranger on the street, act like you know them from somewhere, and ask them how their script is going.  Chances are solid that they’ll start talking about it.  But I’d already become a screenwriter; I wanted more.  I wanted to take my time and tell a story that couldn’t be told in under two hours. I wanted the usual budgetary concerns to go out the window.  I wanted to lay myself bare onto the page, and have it read by more than the producers and development executives who’ve thus far been the only people to actually experience my work first-hand, before rewrites and revisions and “director’s vision” muddied the waters.

But more than any of that, I wanted to do it to prove to myself that I could do it.

How many of us talk about things we want to do, but never get around to doing them?  I know I do, constantly.  The screenplay I recently finished drafting was a 7 year old idea.  There are many more just like it; ideas in search of the inspiration – that spark of creativity – that it takes to bring it from your mind to the written page.  So for me, writing a novel was The Thing to prove I could do it.

Makes sense, right?  But I couldn’t content myself with just writing a quick and easy book.  I wasn’t going to write the standard fictionalized memoir and pass it off as a work of great genius.  No, I was going to make things difficult, because writing a novel isn’t difficult at all, right?  No, my novel had to take place 500 years in the past, in a real time and place, and feature some of the greatest historical figures of the day embroiled in a mystery that only the greatest mind of the age can solve.  It had to require months, if not years of research.  It had to require me reading, consuming and digesting every bit of information I could find on the people, places and events of early 16th Century Europe.  It meant I had to learn an entirely different skill-set and master it.  It had to be the most challenging project I could conceive of, written in a format that was unforgiving of error or false moments.

This was to be my first novel.  Screw the minor leagues; I had to bat for the Yankees.

Well, over the next three or so years, I wrote that damn thing, front to back, top to bottom, 600 pages and roughly 127,000 words.  It was written in fits and starts, with some unfortunately large gaps in the writing of it as real life (i.e. stuff people were paying me to write). This past March, after nearly 3 years of on and off work, I finally typed The End.  But it wasn’t the end – just the beginning.  I put it away and focused on other matters, but a few months later I picked it up, turned to the first page and read it, from beginning to end, making my notes as I worked through it over the course of four weeks.  And at the end, I was awe-inspired and humbled by it; inspired by the fact that I fucking did it – and humbled by the fact there was a lot more work to be done.

So, November is upon us, and I have a stack of manuscript pages – about 600 of them, plus a notebook filled with notes on that manuscript, and if I devote myself and focus, I should be through this new draft in less time than it took to write the first.  That’s assuming what usually happens doesn’t happen; that the phone rings, that the email chimes, and one of those projects I’m waiting on finally crashes through the door to occupy my life.  The novel has been the best friend I could have as I face the dying days of 2010; the physical embodiment of what happens when you say “fuck it, I’m going to do this.”  Those 600 pages, 127,000 words did not exist until I put my ass in my chair and put words on the page.

And in the end, that’s what matters more than anything November can throw at me.

Life on a Planet of Sound

This is what one would call a reprint or maybe a cover version of a note I wrote on my Facebook page a year ago.  Occasionally you get those email chain letters from people, and they’re uniformly pains that I usually delete.  But, there are exceptions to the rule, and when one asked me to pick a favorite band and then answer the questions using only the titles of songs by said band, I couldn’t really resist.  It was kind of fun, actually, and as the music related posts on this website get the most hits, I figure a reprint of it is in order.

Pick your Artist: The Pixies

Are you a male or female: Here Comes Your Man

Your last relationship: Tame

Your fear: Break My BodyWhat is the best advice you have to give: Gouge AwayThought for the Day: Down To The Well

How I would like to die: Head On

My soul’s present condition: La La Love You

My motto: Build High

Describe yourself: Bone Machine

How do you feel: Where Is My Mind?

Describe where you currently live: Planet of Sound

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: All Over The World

Your favorite food is: Caribou

Your best friend is: Is She Weird?

You and your best friends: Weird At My School

What’s the weather like: Stormy Weather

Favorite time of day: Distance Equals Rate Times Time

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called: Evil Hearted You

What is life to you: I’m Amazed