you might very well think so...

... but I saw this from madmanofprague, and remarked on how different his list was from what mine would be. So here it is.

Protocol

1. Put your iTunes on Random
   
2. Transcribe the first line from the first 20 songs
   
3. Post and let everyone you know guess what song and artist the lines come from
   
4. Strike out the songs when someone guesses correctly
   
5. Looking up lyrics using an online search engine is cheating
   

I removed those songs that had no lyrics (about 5 out of 26 total) and removed one song whose lyrics were principally culled by sampling old foreign films not in English, leaving the 20 presented here.

I noticed the iTunes "random shuffle problem" when doing this -- it really is random, but you're trained to think it isn't because of all the artist and album clumping that happens. This meme was constructed with the slider set to "really random".

The toonz

1. Slowly runs the lazy river and in it I pitched all my dreams
   
2. Show me something worse than a child outside a church begging with a cardboard box
   
3. We are not true, we are not pure, we are not right
   
4. When time was young, we walked the road together
   
5. You been telling everybody how much you love me, but I don't know
   
6. There is a time for love and laughter, the days will pass like summer stars
   
7. When I cry, cry, cry for you, when I'm blue, blue just for you
   
8. I'm not interested in what you have to say, you're just a vacant space
   
9. Today your problems are not of blind belief; that is, or means, belief ain't enough
   
10. Oh it's so funny to have seen you after so long, girl, and with the way you look I understand that you are not impressed
    
11. Whipporwill on a telephone wire, sings so safely as the sun expires
    
12. My latest sun is sinking fast, my race is nearly run
    
13. You can talk about true love, say we're through
    
14. No guts, no blood, no brains at all
    
15. I'm not ready for this, though I thought I would be
    
16. Just because they seem to understand the way you feel, it just doesn't mean that they'll feel the same way, too
    
17. No-one to talk with, all by myself, no-one to walk with, but I'm happy on the shelf
    
18. So here we are in Italy with a sun hat and a dictionary
    
19. I once met a man with a sense of adventure; he was dressed to thrill wherever he went
    
20. This songbird yearns to sing a love song; the roses yearn just for that dew
    

Several of these are very easy, as they're standards; of course, that means you've got to be really clever to pick the artist singing them... 8)

Got my copy of Shriekback's Natural History today in the mail, which makes me a happy fellow. I finally have decent recordings of much of the material from Jam Science (I had previously only had a cassette, rather ancient and heavily worn).

Already slipping it into my iTunes library, and soon it will find its way onto the sleek black thing that is my nano. Ahhh!

Score!

I managed to find a used copy of Shriekback's Natural History from a guy on Amazon, and convinced him to ship it north of the border (w00t). Hopefully he was not yanking my chain, and in four to ten days, I'll finally have my hands on it (so I can stop whining to daveq and spamily to guiltily ask about ripping theirs). To celebrate, I secured a copy of Cormorant from the ITMS, and am testing it out (even as we speak).

As I expected, it's good, but not quite my favourite Shriek stuff (not yet, anyway); where o where have all the rolling basslines gone? (::sniff::) Ah well, mustn't complain: this is one of those cases where more is better than not more.

Now if only The Sundays would stop their working lives, and make use of that damn home studio they reportedly built...