…I kick ass at research. I mean, I’m really, really good at it. Now, I realize this sounds a bit boastful, but I’m quite proud of myself at the minute. Last week, I spent a few days at a lake just east of the Adirondacks.* One of the nights, my cousins and I were sitting around reading. My aunt had put on this local radio station that is…eclectic, I think is the best word. Anyway, without cell service, and without knowing that our Soundhound apps have a function that allows us to save a search for when we do have connectivity, a song came on that we all wanted to know the title of. We were hoping that the super smooth-voiced DJ (I’m talking some Barry White type smooth) would tell us, but alas, we were out of luck. I remembered exactly one thing about the song: there’s a mention of the Manhattan Bridge. This is, as you’d imagine, not exactly the most useful thing ever when you’re doing a search.
So I tried the next best thing…to remember the name of the radio station. I didn’t. I did, however, remember the frequency. From there, it didn’t take too long to sort out which station I wanted and found its website. Then, it got a bit tricky. Like a lot of radio stations, this one posts its playlists. This one does it for a week. Unfortunately, that left me SOL because this was last Thursday, and I hadn’t remembered that I told the girls I’d look it up until this morning. So I pooled all my best resources — okay, the radio station’s website, Spotify, and Google — together and buckled down for a couple hours of listening to clips of every single song on the playlists (minus the ones that were done by women, and songs I’m already familiar with or artists that are clearly not in the right genre — in this case Jimmy Cliff, Steve Earle, Trombone Shorty, The Lumineers, etc.) in an attempt to find it. And I did. Because I rule at research. It took me less time than I’d expected, but no small amount of time.
The song: ‘Dreaming From the Heart of New York’ by Clarence Bucaro.
Along the way, I learned some pretty stellar band names. Among my favourites: Hot Club of Cowtown, Boy With a Fish, The Lone Bellow, Donna the Buffalo, The Dirty Gov’nahs, Trampled by Turtles, Jukebox the Ghost, The Shouting Matches, Family of the Year, Crankshaft and the Gear Grinders, and Mungo Jerry (which I can only assume is a play on T.S. Eliot).
Best of all, as someone who lives in the land of, National Bohemian (which always throws me when I see it on a beer list because it’s almost always just called Boh, or at its most formal, Natty Boh).
*Also included, my first ever visit to Fort Ticonderoga. It was all very interesting, but at some point, forts just sort of stop being impressive because, in the end, they all did the same thing. They kept others out. Until they didn’t. And then they changed hands and kept others out. Until they didn’t. This, perhaps, explains my preference for urban fighting. The most interesting thing I learned was about how the French army adapted their uniforms and fighting for life in the cold/mountains/forests. Their uniforms were adapted from the garb of the Iroquois tribes who lived in the area and were designed to allow freedom of movement whilst navigating mountain and forest terrain.
And Everything In Between 