Close Your Eyes Boy, and Dream of Home

And so it begins.

There was nothing particularly methodical about the choosing of the first song to present to you today. Normally, I would have gone through some sort of process like XIV did, turning over option after option in my brain and eardrums until I found something that I thought would a) impress the reader b) entertain the reader and c) mean something to the reader. I would have tried to look for something with mass appeal that was still lyrically deep. I would have tried to find something new, but not brand new. Something relatively obscure, but not so much that I’m posting it merely to be hip because it’s obscure. And, in the end, I probably would have posted something by House of Heroes. But there will be time for that band later. Lots of time.

The song I chose for this post I think fits all the categories that I listed above, and possibly does them better than just about any HOH song I could find. It also exemplifies something else I love in my music (and my literature and film, for that matter), a feeling of triumph against adversity. Something that can lift your spirits when you are down and save you from the darkness.Which, if you listen to the lyrics, you will see is exactly what it was meant to do. And it just popped into my head randomly a few minutes ago while I was taking out the trash (hey, I told you it was random).

That, ladies and gentlemen, is Foxy Shazam. I love this song so much, and I kind of love the video too, for different reasons. The juxtaposition of song and video is a weird one, but it works. On one hand, you have a clearly powerful and serious message being delivered by way of Eric Sean Nally’s Freddy Mercury-esque vocal chords, on the other, you have a video that includes a cartoon entry, a bearded man playing upside down piano and breaking the keys, a choreographed women’s basketball team, and a freckled man-child with a ridiculous-looking mustache. But as odd as the blend is, it’s perfect. “Lock this song away for a darker day” Nally tells us. Yes. Do that. Because one of these days when you are feeling down, you might just need to hear someone tell you with the truth of impassioned experience that “in the morning, the sun will rise”, and to “Keep on keepin’ on”. And it also might help to hear it in a child’s dreamland of awesomeness, because in those times, it’s really the faith of a the child in us who needs to be brought out the most.

-13

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