5 Songs A Day - Day 3

Greetings, my peeps. I know you're dying for more of the love, so I won't keep you waiting any longer. Today's five are all totally mainstream, unapologetic pop music. Here they are and they're all good ones:

1) The Way I Am - Ingrid Michaelson
2) She - Elvis Costello
3) Crazy For You - Madonna
4) Hold Me Now - Thompson Twins
5) Littlest Things - Lily Allen

5 Songs A Day - Day 2

Good evening, dear lovers of love songs. You chubby, gushing cupids of togetherness. For tonight, I tried . . . tried . . . to think of ones that you may not have heard before. But you may have. I really don't know. Tonight's 5 are:

1) You and I Both - Jason Mraz
2) Super Duper Love - Joss Stone
3) Blue For You - Men at Work
4) My Love is You - David Byrne
5) Perfectly - Natalie Imbruglia

5 Songs a Day Until Valentine's - Day 1

I like love songs. No, I love love songs. I admit it. If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm sappy romantic schmuck, OKAY?!! Anyway, in honor of Valentine's Day, I wanted to do a 'Top 5' playlist of the best love songs ever. But after about 30 seconds of contemplation, I realized this would be an exercise in futility. There's just too many good ones out there. So considering it's exactly 5 days until Valentine's day, I settled for a doing a Top 5 each day. But they can't exactly be considered a 'Top 5' either because to place them in any particular rank and order would not only be unfair to the artists that wrote them, but totally inaccurate because each of the songs can be ranked in about 17 different ways depending on why I like them. So whatever. The point is that I'm going to post 5 of my favorite love songs until Valentine's Day and you can listen to them on the cute little red sappy mp3 player to the right of this post. Here are today's five (and I stress in no particular order):

1) Send Her My Love - Journey
2) In Your Eyes - Peter Gabriel
3) Thank You - Dido
4) Our Love Is Here To Stay - John Pizzarelli
5) Like The Deserts Miss The Rain - Everything But The Girl

Giorgio Armani Is Not To Blame!

I like to think that for the most part I'm sort of a happy, positive, good-natured guy. As such, I consider hate to be a generally destructive emotion. But a recent email conversation I had with a friend reminded me that there are a few things in life that I do, so truly and passionately, hate. Our dialogue reminded me of two things specifically: 1) Acqua di Gio cologne and 2) the song 'Take My Picture' by Filter. Curiously, the cologne smells really good and the song's actually pretty cool too. Perhaps I should explain.

Almost a decade ago, I held a job as the General Manger of an Einstein's bagel shop. At first, I thought it would be a very cool job. Kind of a 'hip' place, good bagels, decent coffee, laid back atmosphere, etc. But over a short period of time, I came to detest my job at Einstein's so much that my feelings escape accurate description.

Anyway, we used to listen to a lot of X96 (a fine alternative radio station in SLC) in the kitchen when we were baking. At the time, 'Take My Picture' had just been released, so they played it no less than eighty-seven times a day. Naturally, I came to detest it. (I'd like to note paranthetically that I also detest Blink 182. Not because of Einstein's necessarily, but because they're horrible and the fact that X96 overplayed 'All The Small Things' around that same time too didn't help. With that said, I should note sub-parenthetically that 'Blink's' singer, Tom LeLonge, now sings for Angels and Airwaves and they're pretty catchy actually.). But I'm already getting way off track and my hate for the Filter song goes much deeper, so back to my explanation . . .

We had this thing in the kitchen called a proofer. It looked like a big stainless steel refrigerator, and was basically sort of a low-temperature steam oven. All of our bagels were shipped to us frozen and pre-shaped. At night, we would take the frozen bagels, place them on baking sheets, and then place the sheets in 6' tall baking racks. Each rack held about 20 sheets, about 300 bagels in all. We'd roll the baking racks into the walk-in cooler to thaw slowly overnight-- a process known as 'slacking'.

Each day at around 3:30 am, when my baker would call me either from the county jail or a 'kegger' telling me he wouldn't be in that day, I'd show up for work by myself to bake fresh bagels for the morning rush. I would take the baking racks out of the cooler and begin applying toppings (e.g. cinnamon/sugar, garlic, minced onion, sesame seeds, etc) to the bagels as necessary. Once the bagels were topped, I would roll the rack into the proofer (big steamer fridge-looking thing) to bring the dough up to a consistent internal temperature and proper level of humidity. The pre-baking temperature and humidity of the dough are essential for ensuring the bagels will have that delightful, chewy texture. If the dough isn't wet enough, the bagels will have a dry and bread-like consistency and no one wants that. If you wanted to eat bagel-shaped bread, you'd buy your bagels from a supermarket. If the bagel dough is warmer on the surface than in the center, or if the center is still partially frozen when you put them into bake, the bagels just turn into crap.

Sorry, I got side-tracked again for a minute there. To the point: The smell of raw bagel dough is not in and of itself a bad thing; nor are garlic, caraway seeds, cinnamon, or asiago cheese in any way offensive by themselves. But when you open that proofer door to retrieve the rack of raw, multi-flavored, fully-topped bagels from their hot steam bath . . .man oh man . .. the aromatic assault of humid, toe jam-esque funk is nauseating beyond description. (Imagine combining the smells of sweaty gym socks, cinnamon, garlic, chocolate chips, and yeast, and you might kind of get the idea.) And since I'm not a morning person to start with, I already began each day with a stomach ache. To make matters worse, I would down something like 11 or 12 espressos throughout the morning to keep me awake.

I started my job at the bagel shop right after New Year's. Everyone who knows me knows that I love cologne and Karolee had given me a bottle of Armani's Acqua di Gio that year for Christmas. It's a light, clean, almost soapy smelling cologne and I LOVED it. So like anything I get excited about, I went totally overboard and wore WAY too much of it everyday for weeks on end. But after a month or two of waking for work in the middle of the night, getting kicked in the nostrils every morning with that warm cinnagarlic-footonion-dough smell, and drinking myself sick with espresso, the cologne started to make me gag. Every time I put it on, all I could think of was asiago cheese. It was like a $60 bottle of cologne and I had to give it away to Karolee's brother because I couldn't stand it anymore.

Hearing that Filter song has almost exactly the same effect. That song actually SMELLS bad to me. I still gag every time I'm near someone who's wearing Acqua di Gio. I lasted at Einstein's for all of about 8 months. I don't hate the company, though I do blame them for causing me to know what it is to really, really hate something. And I don't hate the guys from Filter for writing that song, and I don't hate Giorgio Armani. But I bet NONE of them ever has ever baked a single bagel.

So now you know. . .

Please. Don't hate,

Jake

In Case You Wanted Something To Listen To . . .

I added a few more March Hare songs tonight for your listening satisfaction. Go ahead and have a listen. Let me know what you think. Tell me if you love it. Tell me if you hate it. Please feel free to comment. Any comments are welcome, although I generally prefer the ones telling me how cool you think this stuff is.

You can stream all the songs on this page from the new player I added, or if you actually like them enough to want your own copy, you can download them from this here post. (to download, right click on the name of the song then select 'save target as'). I'll add links to more songs as we finish them.

I didn't make 'Milky Way' available for download on this page as I wouldn't want to upset the copyright police. If you really want a copy, leave me a comment here or email me. Or if you'd like, we can arrange to meet in a dark alley way to make the handoff. Either that, or I'll just send you a link. Or, even better, pick up a copy of the original, vastly superior version of the song by The Church from their circa 1988 'Starfish' album. (every song on that release is amazing). But you know, whatever works for you.

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