Bon Jovi, Heartbreak Eyes.

This apparently is a lost demo from the first Bon Jovi album. The user who posted it has a ton of similar outtakes, demos and so on (man, gonna be here all night!), but Bon Jovi has a particular place in my heart, so this is something a little special for me.

Cos... one of the fucked up things, for me, about the invention of sound and video capture technology is that even while it gives us chance to have the past at our fingertips, it really rams home the fact that you can't have it all, ever. There's more material already on record than any one person could ever sift for everything they wanted to hear, and much of it locked in vaults or forgotten in attics where you couldn't get to it anyway; and that's before you start asking for the stuff that wasn't caught on the magic reels, the one-nights-only that nobody taped, the old episodes that the BBC threw out. The rehearsals where someone achieved that one perfect riff while the deck wasn't running.

And even what we do capture and get to general release, is never the same as being there. This is why I love eighties hair metal videos and watch them with tears in my eyes; they're like tiny perfect splinters, sent shattering to the winds when the nineties put a sledgehammer through my sonic birthright and sent the pieces flying through time on the precarious wings of VH1 Classic and fans' old tape collections. And somehow, miraculously, they survived until now, twenty years later, they can embed themselves under my skin and dump their small cargos of preserved light and sound and beauty into my veins. I'm staring through a Youtube-sized, pixellated window into an age that doesn't exist any more and probably never did outside the daydreams of a pack of fluffy-haired adolescents in tight trousers, and it hurts so much to know that it was broken before I ever got there - but I can never stop hunting for more pieces.

...maybe some part of me still does believe that one day I'll find them all and be able to put it back together. *soft smile*

Rath

I'd never heard this song before today, but I picked it up while Youtube-surfing and suddenly found myself with my eyes stinging: Belinda Carlisle, Summer Rain. Usually in my life, when I've been lonely it's been because I was missing one particular person who I already loved... but this song?

Just makes me wish I was in love at all.

And wish I was in America, but that's kinda a given with me. *s*

Though speaking of America, the other song I've been falling in love with today (for the millionth time, but, y'know) is Black Velvet, which I link here just in case there's one person left in the world who doesn't know it and happens to be reading my journal. I don't feel up to articulating right now why I love this song so much, but I really do.

Hmm. Looking at my journal, I note that of my last ten posts, more than half have been locked "private". This is not the way I used to do things. Guess I don't feel like sharing at the moment... I'm in the kind of mood lately where if you met me face to face, I'd be distantly moody and kicking at small stones on the asphalt and not really able to explain why. Halfway between not feeling sure I want to say anything, and not being convinced that anyone wants to hear it anyway.

Oh, well. When we can't speak for ourselves... that's what music's for.

Laters,
The Navigator

It just opened up outside and rained so hard for a few moments. I think it's still raining, though not as hard, as I just heard a crash of thunder. Guess who came out today in shirt sleeves and without her jacket?

I can tell I need regeneration, on some level, because I'm quietly praying that it will still be raining when I go out to walk home. Walking three miles in a summer storm sounds welcome, today.

Laters,
The Navigator



So we spread like fire, like fire burns the land
So we rise like steam... assemble
Assemble and command.