Girls of Summer: Get your girl power on

I’m super stoked to have my summer 2011 play list for driving all worked out.  Last Spring  I experienced a reawakening of my  voracious appetite for new music.    It was  a shared interest that PJ and I discovered very early on and is one of the reasons I felt so close to him.  He began to “song me” ;  shoot me links to songs that were supposedly things he wanted to say to me or thought about me or whatever, a wooing mechanism if you will.  And it worked very well for him.  Except for that one time he sent Something Corporate’s Konstantine with the comment of  “this ought to keep you busy for awhile”.   This was proliferated by the add-ons to Google and Skype that can show what song you are listening to via your status.  When we were in periods of trying to stay away from each other each of us would often still show whatever it was they were listening to and it would be implied it was meant for the other one to see and understand.  It was sort of a not so secret code of communicating our feelings when we were not supposed to be communicating directly with each other.    That and being under the same sky, but that is all coming later in the Almost Divorce Story.

Music has always had a powerful hold on me.  The husband also wooed me with music, and poetry actually. But then we had kids and I  became one of those moms who loves kids music.   I loved kids because it was  the only I was going to be listening to for almost 6  solid years and if I didn’t find a way to choose to love it then I’d lose my damn mind.   So we looked for kids music we could tolerate.    That doesn’t mean I didn’t have to put up with Dora, and Barney, and Wiggles etc. It just means we found a way to get off of that as soon as humanly possible.  We found Laurie Berkner before she was on Nickelodeon,  Brady Rymer,  Ralph’s World, Trout Fishing In America, and Justin Roberts.   And we scoured our own personal collections for music that might pass as family friendly-ish.  It started with Cake when they were  really little.   Especially in my car, because I do not have TV or satellite radio in the Lexus.   The kids have to ride with the sun roof open and windows usually down and my  iTunes.  Listening t o music while driving is my number one hands down favorite hobby and has been since I blasted the portable tape deck in my Dad’s 1978 Ford LTD because he only had the AMJAMS.   The only better than driving and listening to music is being driven while listening to music.   Especially close to my heart is the music from the summers where I remember not only the summer, but also the music that got me through it.    Last summer was very much a playlist full of boys.  New PJ provided artists mixing with my  very eclectic top rated playlist.    If I didn’t just choose a specific artist to listen to, and that summer I often did,  I would just treat the iTunes like a Magic 8 Ball for my emotions.  Whatever iTunes decided to play I would let that guide my thoughts and mood while enjoying those long drives back and forth to work or BGC Meetings.   The girls were there too in the form of Paramore and Evanescence, but overall the boys and their songs of emotional battles won and lost.

Something Corporate and Incubus.  Almost everything from both  Noah and The Whale Albums.  Most of John Mayer Battle Studies.   At the end there was Alkaline Trio’s This Addiction and everything else  AK3 I could get my hands on before landing on the penultimate  “Radio”  . Think C-lo Green’s Forget You with electrocution,  it’s a happy f-off and die song, and still one my favorites.     Dashboard Confessional, Damien Rice, Keith Urban, 30 Seconds to Mars,  and Breaking Benjamin . There was Jimmy Eat World almost the entire  Bleed American Deluxe and later in the fall Invented  and by winter almost the entire discography.   As time progressed my appetite for new music didn’t change.  I’m  collecting more new music than I can remember to  listen to  these days.

Right now I’m stuck on the girls of Summer!   It all started with Rhianna.  I made my way through most of her collection and pulled out everything that spoke to me, 26 songs.   Avril  Lavigne’s Goodbye Lullaby album yielded another 12 on it’s own.  Then it hit me; this is the summer for girl power .   Beyonce’s 4 gave me  13 more;  Brittney’s Femme Fatale(Deluxe Edition)  and the Drakos mash-up version gave me another 26.  Can’t forget newcomer Nicki Minaj in this so she gave me 22 more.    In total I have 108 songs or  7 hours of rocking  total girl songs that cover everything from loving yourself to hating him and all things in between.   Just for fun I threw a few Chris Brown F.A.M.E  songs in there.  While he cries on about wanting it All Back and She Ain’t  You, knows he Should’ve Kissed You and wants to be Next 2 You.   I’ll be cruising in the Lexus with the sun roof open and the windows down, sunglasses on and  hair all over the place.   Singing my heart out and smiling in the knowledge that  101 of 108 songs of the time, the  Girls of Summer will be  telling regretful Chris Brown to suck it!