Backstory.

This is the one Vangelis is known for. You couldn’t have escaped it if you tried during the 80s.

But my favorite score of his is from the Ridley Scott film 1492: Conquest of Paradise. It’s such a beautiful piece of music! What does a good film score do? Close your eyes and listen to each. The music speaks!

Backstory.

Dallas: Theme.

You’ll see on my 80s chart that I mentioned Television & Film Music. So this week I go over some of the film and television theme music or songs I liked, starting with two shows I was obsessed with.

I couldn’t find any clips with a good audio of the original music, so have to post this remix by Sylvain Cloux.

Backstory.

Yes, I know this song is not from the 80s. But if you’d read my backstory above, you wouldn’t be wondering. My brother used to play this song in our house. It was on a mix tape (an actual tape, son!) and he’d play it over and over. His friends, he told me, would play it over and over too. What is it with Asians and Hotel California? We all seem to know this song word for word. I’ve even seen people who can’t speak a sentence of English properly sing perfectly along to this, including the guitar solos. The only other English tune I can think of is friggin’ ‘Happy Birthday’!

I was looking around for the video clip that had the bit of ‘Seven Bridges Road.’ Voila!

Backstory.

This day, I know a lot of you are spending it by yourselves. And I am right there with you. Some of us by choice, if you believe it, and some of us not. Let’s just change our mindset and remember what we didn’t have and not make it into a reminder of what we don’t have. We won’t have everything, we can’t always be with the one we love,  and we can’t let all of that get in the way of progress. You and I need to be better than that, son!

So…fuck this Valentine’s Day bullshit. Know that half of the people you know who pretend to have found ‘love’ are in denial. You don’t want to be fake like them. Be original. Let things unfold as they may. Don’t let Hallmark cards and stupid heart-shaped commercial products fool you.

So why this song, you might ask. Goes against what I just said above.

Maybe not.

Also check out: 7 Degenerate Love Songs

Backstory.

This is my actual intro to Van Halen. I didn’t know about no Eruption. Didn’t know he went into labor and gave birth to fretboard tapping. Didn’t know that was his brother. Didn’t know the whole soloing on Michael Jackson song. I just knew that this song rocked! How can you not be taken over by that keyboard melody! And I thought it was cool that he switched from guitar to keyboard as if he was switching hands while jerking off. I kid of course. I really did think he was the coolest. Made me want to learn guitar and switch to keyboards in the middle of a song too.

Let me not come between you and some jumpin.’

Backstory.

It was a TV version I used to watch. It would come on every Wednesday night on a local Arabic channel and it would always play ‘Big in Japan’, ‘Beat It’ and some other shit I can’t remember. I’d never seen the music video until now. Hmm.

Alphaville [Site] [Bio] *the site’s pretty snazzy!

No other reason than this being my birth month, I present you with a round trip ticket to the 80s and give you songs I grew up with. Before that, let me give you a mock-up of my musical genes being exercised and massaged during that decade. Yes, I’m being cute.

Well, there you go…a rough sketch. I was young and nothing got filtered before entering my ears and attacking the left brain. I remember being obsessed with Alphaville’s ‘Big in Japan’ and Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. This being a guitar blog and all, let me start with the song that first caught my attention as far as guitar goes. Of course I didn’t know who the guitar players were on the song back then [Steve Lukather - most of it. Van Halen just played the solo] Come to think of it…it was probably the first ‘rock’ song I heard where the guitar sound made an impression on me.

So here it is…