Music Shuffle Monday 09.27.10

1. "Help You Find Your Way" by Michael W. Smith
This song is from Smith's late 80's era album "i 2 (eye)". As typical of his music from that period (and most others), it features electric guitars and lots of keyboards and a big "booming" chorus plus a guitar solo thrown in. This was a pretty good album though - one of my favorites of his actually.

2. "If Today Was Your Last Day" by Nickelback
Now I know awhile back I wrote a post (which many of you commented on on Facebook) where I stated bands like Hinder and Nickelback should just stop making their crap music. I will admit though, Nickelback does has a few good songs - I really enjoyed their "Leader of Men" album that came out when I was in high school, but then once they "made it" and in recent years they kinda focused on singles that have a lot of stupid sexual content in them. Anyways, this song, off their latest album "Dark Horse," is actually pretty inspirational, as it poses the question of "If you knew that today was your last day, what would you do?" and encourages us to live everyday like it could be our last and make it count.


3. "Somewhere Out There" by Our Lady Peace
This one is actually labeled incorrectly on my iPod - it's listed by being by the band Default (known for their songs "Wasting My Time" and "Deny") but it's really by Our Lady Peace, from 2002. I remember this came out near the end of my senior year of high school and I got a copy of it when I was in college. It's a pretty song - a bit emo, but it's got some cool instrumentals playing in the background too.


4. "Sanctuary" by Utada Hikaru
If you've ever played the PS2 game "Kingdom Hearts II" by Disney and Square Enix (the sequel to Kingdom Hearts), you know that this is sort of the theme song for the game. It's a J-Pop techno-ish song, that's very calming and serene. Utada has a really pretty voice too. If you've never played the Kingdom Hearts games, in the first one a boy named Sora is trying to find his friend Kiari and Riku whom he was separated from when The Darkness began taking over their world. In his adventures he meets Goofy and Donald looking for King Mickey who also went missing on their world when The Darkness took over. The trio fights through a variety of classic Disney worlds, encountering and getting help from various classic Disney characters along the way. Part 2 is much of the same basic premise, only there's a new kid named Roxas who's storyline is interchanged with Sora's which we learn why later on. In addition to The Darkness, there's also a group of baddies called Organization XIII working alongside them that needs to be defeated. There's also some of the classic Final Fantasy characters thrown in too (many from FFVII)! If you like RPG games, this was a pretty fun series!




5. "Bittersweet Symphony" by The Verve
When I hear this classic late 90s song I think 1 of 2 things - the amusing video of the singer walking down a sidewalk, being a jerk to everyone by deliberately walking into them rather than go around them when they get in the way of his stride, OR the epic ending to the movie Cruel Intentions, as the song closes out the last few scenes where Katherine (Sarah Michelle Gellar's character) gets her due. Anyone else that saw the video think the singer looks a bit like an alien? I mean he's like really tall and his eyes look so dark like he's almost wearing sunglasses and it makes him look like he has "bug" eyes... lol... he always kinda weirded me out!