Yesterday I “tweeted” this: I have the words/title for a new trio: “I got two oboes and an English horn. Where it’s at. Where it’s at.” Someone please write the music. To which my friend Sara (hi Sara!) asked, “Patty, have you been listening to Beck?” (The answer was no. The words just came to me. I’m special that way.)
Today I ran across a Beck interview with Will Ferrell that included this:
B: Oh, Can you hold on one second? I have a technical…
W: Glitch? You have an old cassette recorder don’t you?
B: Yes. Radio Shack.
W: Did you have that phase as a kid? “Uh, let’s tape record ourselves.”
B: (laughs) I had an entire era of my childhood where I was obsessed with cassette tape recorders.
W: Yeah we did too. Because you have the microphone and then you do fake shows. You do funny voices. You’d also just log hours of strange conversation as a kid and just play it back. But I remember that was a common theme: “I know, let’s tape record ourselves.” “Great!” But what a simple joy! (laughing) It’s like what, exactly? Why was it so fun?
B: I know. And there are probably many, many kids that were doing the same thing. Whoever invented the cassette technology was not developing it for the purpose of 9 year-olds to create their own imaginary radio stations, which is what we did. Me and my friends were obsessed with the Muzak station. They don’t really have Muzak stations anymore and I was mourning the loss of that recently. I was remembering that when I was a kid they had these Muzak stations which were straight orchestral instrumental arrangements of pop hits of the day. There were no vocals, it was all instrumental. But they did have a DJ and we thought the DJ’s were great because they were really mellow. They were really, really sedated, really relaxed. And there would be Muzak covers of the most inappropriate songs too.
W: (Laughing) Like “Hot Child in the City”.
B: And “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” but it would be an oboe doing (both simultaneously make sound of oboe playing “Hit me with your best shot”) And then all the typical power ballads…
Coincidence? I think not. ;-)
