Song #1 of 9999 - The Garden by Mirah

Song #1 of 9999

Title: The Garden
Artist: Mirah
Year: 2002
Album: Advisory Committee

There's a lot of pressure to choose a first song, so I'm going to avoid it and simply pick a song I listened to last night that continues to be stuck in my head. It's short, which I think encourages people to listen.

The main reason I love this song is the uneven phrase lengths in the verse. She throws in a 2/4 measure at the end of the second line which is really unexpected and kind of turns everything around. In the second verse, the 2/4 bar is at the end of the 2nd and 4th lines. I love this kind of meter play in pop songs and I think it works especially well in a song with such spare instrumentation because there really aren't any other clues about meter being revealed by other instruments. I also like the blend of sounds in this songs: the drums are so harsh and clumsy, the bass is essentially just a sine wave and the fuzzy bells have almost no sustain and are out of tune. This blend of instruments make it seem like a really unstable track. Cleverly arranged and just the right length at 2:21.

9999 Songs

A few years ago, a bunch of my internet friends started "10000 songs" blogs with the intention of posting one song a day for 10000 days, the expectation being that they would complete this mammoth project in roughly 27.5 years. I thought it was kind of a cool idea but I didn't jump on the bandwagon because...I don't know, I'm lazy I guess.

Not being quite as ambitious as those folks, I have decided to post a song a day for 9999 consecutive days or maybe two one day and none on another day or maybe I'll post for like a month and then give up or maybe I'll post for 15 years and give up. Who knows? Maybe I'll just run out of good songs to write about. Nonetheless, this is my new blog, 9999 Songs.