Shazamit!

i don’t know about all of you, but i am kind of obsessed with shazam. like…your phone listens to songs and tells you what they are, instantaneously! if this isn’t a sure sign that the computers are taking over, i don’t know what is.

anyway! shazam is one of my most frequently-used apps, and every once in a while i like to take a little scroll back through all of the songs i’ve tagged.  some have become standard faves, while others i can barely remember looking up.

i’ve decided to open up my shazam history for your viewing pleasure. since i have over 50 tags i’m gonna break this up and do a few at a time. for our first shazamit! outing, please join me back in november of 2008…a time of wonder & merriment, when i first got my iPhone…

kyrie – mr. mister
(tagged: 2008-11-14)

“hey soul sister /ain’t that mr. mister /on the radio?”

um, apparently it was. prescient.

jessie’s girl – rick springfield
(tagged: 2008-11-16)

since i was pretty young in the eighties, i didn’t know that rick springfield was on general hospital until my husband recently informed me of that fact. ahaha, amazing. i love it when soap stars have “real life” cross-over singing careers.

anyway, the lyrics to this song really annoy me. like, the singer is supposed to be jessie’s friend, right? but he is totally trying to steal his girlfriend! and he doesn’t feel bad about it, or even seem to think that it’s wrong. dude, that is not cool.

check it out: “and i’m lookin’ in the mirror all the time / wondering what she don’t see in me / i’ve been funny / i’ve been cool with the lines / ain’t that the way /love supposed to be.”

um, no rick. that is NOT the way love is supposed to be, because the girl in question isn’t dating you. god. if i were jesse i’d give you a punch in the face for being such a jerk friend.

whoomp! – tag team
(tagged: 2008-11-16)

i tagged this one at a bar on ossington, because i had just gotten my iPhone and i was trying to show someone how shazam works. i remember being all “see, it’ll even work on a song in a bar. look, i’ll show you!” and the song that happened to be playing was this one.

i know there’s probably some science-y tech nerd jargon out there to describe how shazam works (yup, i was right) but i prefer to think that it’s done by using magic. that’s a much more logical explanation to me.

(p.s. this song is awesome)

electric feel – MGMT
(tagged: 2008-12-13)

my husband and i used to do grocery runs at the dominion (now metro) at college & shaw at like 2 am on the way home from the bar. grocery shopping when you’re drunk is probably one of the funnest things to do ever. you always end up with the most random collection of food items that somehow seemed like a good idea at the time (i once came home with peanut butter, a jar of capers, and an angel food cake).

anyway, we called it the rock & roll dominion because they always played awesome music there, i think because it was open 24 hrs and they got the late-night set who’d come spilling out of the mod club. you’d walk up & down the aisles and see drunk people air guitaring to the songs. it was seriously a pretty fun place to be on a saturday night.

anyway, i tagged this one there and bought the album and LOVE IT. highly recommend.

lovestoned/i think she knows – justin timberlake
(tagged: 2009-02-16)

i like JT, but i don’t love this song. actually it kind of sucks. i thought the other one, “what comes around goes around” or whatever, was way better. especially since it was about britney cheating on him, right?  oooh, scandal. always good. btw, i just realized, because i looked it up online, that JT hasn’t put out an album since 2006. is he like full on actor styles now? i don’t know how i feel about that.

leopard-skin pill-box hat – beck
(tagged: 2009-02-22)

in the very early stages of our courtship, my husband and i spent this awesome night lying around on the floor of my apartment just listening to records together. you know how it is, when you both keep putting on songs you love, and all of a sudden like 5 hours have gone by? and you totally dig the person and the music is so great, and there’s this beautiful kind of synergy to it all? anyway, one of the songs that sticks out in my mind from that night was dylan’s version of this, which is of course the classic. but i really like beck’s take on it too. i am of the firm opinion that if you’re going to cover someone else’s song you should make your version completely different rather than just re-recording it in the same style as the original, and i think that beck did an excellent job of that here.

hold the line  – toto
(tagged: 2009-02-22)

i am quite partial to the ‘80s soft rock genre, so of course i love this band. africa and rosanna are great songs too, but i think i like this one the best.

your love – the outfield
(tagged: 2009-03-05)

continuing on with my ‘80s obsession…

you know what’s weird? these guys were british. i’m not sure why, but i am surprised by that. i always thought they were american. point in fact, wikipedia tells me that the band was much more popular in the U.S. than they ever were in their home country. also surprising: apparently over the years there have been over 1,000 cover versions of this song. is that so, wikipedia? i have never heard a single one of them. but you know what, i don’t want to, because i like this song just the way it is.

don’t change – INXS
(tagged: 2009-03-05)

aw, you guys. i have been going through a real INXS phase lately. i read a book about them (to be reviewed here, eventually) and it took me back to my junior school days, when i looooooved this band so, SO much. i had an INXS KICK t-shirt that i wore to soccer practice when I was a kid (get it? soccer? kick? ;)) and i seriously cried when it finally fell apart from washing & wearing it so often. anyway, they were an amazing band, and this song is really beautiful.

revival – soulsavers
(tagged: 2009-04-06)

this song is not available for download on iTunes. well, actually…it’s available on american iTunes but not the canadian site. can i talk about how annoying that is for a second? why are there different sites? ARE WE NOT AS GOOD AS YOU, AMERICA??? (don’t answer that)

so i had to go chasing around all over the internets to try to find this thing. even at that, all i got was a snippet of the song on the band’s myspace page. just to add to the confusion, shazam had tagged the band name as ‘soulshakers’ even though on the album cover it clearly says ‘soulsavers’. bah! not so smart now, are you, machines?*

*haha just kidding…you’re great! (pleasedontwipeoutmyharddriveokthanx!!)

on that note, i think it’s time to call it a day… but stay tuned for more shazamit! adventures.

as for you, dear readers, what songs you have shazammed that you have loved and/or hated? tell us about them in the comments…