"The Morning Hour": The Jam, Beat Surrender

you wake up, it's sunny. you get out of the house, and tiny drops of rain are getting onto your face while you ride to work. It is what it is, you know what it is!

but today I don't care, last night I got great news! Nothing big, nothing major, but it makes me very happy and blows new energy into my veins. Too soon to say more...

enjoy the video, let your feet move and follow the tune, surrender to the beat!

You'll see me come runnin
To the sound of your strummin'
Fill my heart with joy and gladness
I've lived too long in shadows of sadness

"The Morning Hour": Elbow, One Day Like This

When the idea of "The Morning Hour" started it was meant to include music, words and photos. It was, basically, a way to link three media I'm keen into around the same entity. To help me decide the single song/theme each time, I turned to my alarm and "outsourced" the service.

Words are fast, YouTube is even faster, my eye, my mind and my camera couldn't keep up. Hence I've been writing and posting about each song (almost) every day, while taking some more time to shoot the pictures.

When I heard this song today coming out of the radio, I looked out - it was a brilliant morning, I smiled - I finally had a photo to post with the song! The song has been one of the first to feature in the project and, I remember, came out a few weeks ago in another shining sunny day.

Here is the picture, my own personal way to look at this song, to its melody and its lyrics, to the mood it puts me in whenever I listen to it.



I don't know where the project will end up, but I'm enjoying it. Taking beautiful photos by capturing moments that life offers to us is a tough task, building an idea, looking at ways to implement it through the lens and getting a satisfactory final results is proving to be a daunting one!
But I'm taking up the challenge!

"The Morning Hour": The Killers, The World We Live In

a few days ago I wrote about pushing an elephant... well, I came back from a long weekend in a rainy and turbulent Italy, the elephant was running all the way back against me... what a stampede...

I'm honestly short of words tonight, I'm watching Coffee and Cigarette for the second time in a row to keep me awake but I'm not doing that great. Luckily, there's a great bit with Bill Murray as a coffee junkie, that's just incredible.

"The Morning Hour": Cold War Kids, Hospital Beds

I'm pretty sure the first words I heard today from the radio were "Cheese sandwich", that at 7am in the morning are particularly suited for a sprint waking up. What's more strange is that the first thing I thought then was "Red Wine" and so I started humming "Red Wine, Success" from the Cold War Kids.

Though, since I got to pick, for the morning I went for Hospital Beds, my favourite song from their first album.
The song has a story, it is a story from the deep American country; from places miles away from the jet set, from the golden beaches of the West Coast and the Ivy League schools of the East. I can picture it through the photos of Robert Frank, through the gas stations of Ed Ruscha, through the pages of John Fante. Real people, daily problems, dull lives- but still worth a story!

"The Morning Hour- Double Bill": Travis, Driftwood and Duffy, Mercy

It might be the spring, the April laziness that comes along with the sunny and warm days; it might be the stampede of overdue work and projects that is overwhelming me, but in the last few days I'm not "functioning" properly.
It takes me ages to do simple things and I get easily distracted.
I feel like I'm pushing an elephant around.

Today's a double bill: Travis is yesterday's song, Duffy's from this morning.

Driftwood is a great song, from a few years back but always spot on. I think I'll go back in time today and listen to "Good Feeling", their first album, really really different from anything else they have done ever since.

Duffy... don't like her. Catchy tunes but it seems to me she's trying too hard to emulate something from the past, something that's not of our times and it seems fake to me. Maybe it's my mood... poor girl, I'm being very harsh with her...

Here's Travis


Here's Duffy

"The Band's Visit", ending track and theme song.

A wonderful example of how two clashing worlds, divided by a concrete wall (that's becoming an open-air art gallery by the day) can meet somewhere in the middle and create a beautiful thing.

A bittersweet story with a touch of irony and pure comedy. Lives that meet in the middle of nowhere, in the dullest of the days and in a place that only has slight human resemblances ("No culture. No Israeli culture, not Arab... no culture at all"). Nevertheless, from their clashing, an incredible sweetness bursts off; human stories intertwine, the music begins.

"Do you like Chet Baker?"
"Who?"




the trailer as well..

Devendra Banhart, Little Yellow Spider

I've gotta a new friend, a little yellow spider; only exchanged a few words, the right ones. sometimes you don't need that much to find some magic around.


One, two, three, four

Little yellow spider, laughing at the snow
Ah, maybe that spider knows something that I don't know
'Cause I'm goddamn cold

Little white monkey, staring at the sand
Well, maybe that monkey figured out something I couldn't understand
Who knows?

Well, I came upon a dancing crab, and I stopped to watch it shake
I said, "Dance for me just one more time
Before you hibernate and you come out a crab cake"

Hey there, little snapping turtle, snapping at a shell
Ah, there's mysteries inside, I know
But what they are I just can't tell for sure

And hey ya, little baby crow, you're looking kinda mean
I think I outta spit before you start letting off your steam
For sure

And hey there, little sexy pig, you made it with a man
And you're got a little kid with hooves instead of hands

And oh, all the animals
All the animals

And hey there, little mockingbird, they sing about you in songs
Ah, where you been? Have you broke a wing?
I haven't heard you in so long

And hey there, little albatross, swimming in the air
Ah c'mon, you know I can't fly
And I, I think we really outta play fair

And hey there, Mr. happy squid, you move so psychadelically
You hypnotize with your magic dance all the animals in the sea
For sure

And oh, all the animals
All the animals

And hey there, Mr. morning sun, what kind of creature are you?
I can't stare, but I know you're there
Goddamn, how I wish I knew

And hey there, Mrs. lovely moon, you're lonely and you're blue
It's kinda strange, the way you change
But then again, we all do too

"The Morning Hour": Sheryl Crow, All I Wanna Do

This ain't no country club, ain't no disco.

A spring break song today and Sheryl Crow again, in curious skinny jeans- star&striped butt.

Weather-wise, we are back to february again, and while a few morons on tv keep clapping their hands for the CNBC anniversary (a few youtube videos show how useless such a tv channel has proved to be in the years), a good and healthy thought is that it's friday afternoon and 6pm are fast approaching- ok, they could be faster...

There's some work waiting for me this weekend and I think I'll keep listening to this song just to keep up with it! It's also going to be a Garrett Pierce weekend, I hope he bodes well with photo-editing because I'd really need to pull up a few rabbits from the hat. Hoping for the best!

"The Morning Hour": U2, Magnificient

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

A different start to the post today. Just yeasterday I was day-dreaming about spring time in Italy while looking out of the window onto a decent day in London. Maybe the town felt it wasn't fair, so today we woke up here in a grey and misty day, that it has now turned into a pale sunshine. Anyway, this is the sky we found once back here on Monday... we blame the English weather a lot, sometimes it's not so bad afterall.

This U2 song makes the morning hour for the second time- it's pleasant for a wake up tune and quite catchy. I don't want to write more about it or the band as i'd like to keep this post on the positive (sunny) side... I've picked the video with the album cover, as it's a beautiful photo from a Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Going for an intense afternoon and evening, good things might come today, let's hope for the best!

"The Morning Hour": Franz Ferdinand, Ulysses

This brings me a few years back: Franz Ferdinand were indeed my first ever article on the web, for Yellow Submarine on OraD'Aria. That was also my first year in London with Franz Ferdinand, Razorlight and The Killers being its soundtrack.
It was a rather new music for me back then, I'd been listening to a lot of Brit Pop while I was in Italy and got stuck for a while on Coldplay as an almost natural evolution of the Oasis, Blur, Radiohead years... I still remember the first sentence of that first article "Il vento fresco arriva dalla lontana Glasgow, scende giu' sul sud dell'Inghilterra per divenire uragano e infiammare la capitale, veste con gusto ed eleganza anni '30, sale sul palco in camicia di raso e cravatta, pantalone con la piega e stivaletto, ma ha un'unica missione: divertirsi e far scatenare il pubblico."
The change of rithm and the beat of Take Me Out is still one of my favourite tune ever!

For me it was actually just like that, new town, new music scene, new rithm. This was all I thought this morning as my sleeping ears cought the new song from Franz Ferdinand. The four Scots (or sort of) seem back to their basics, at least for me. I'm not a fan of their second album, but the first two songs of their last one and the white shoes Alex is wearing in this video are promising.


Anyway, I'm back in London after 4 days of Italian spring- jeez, I'm getting more and more homesick by the year, and this worsen a lot with the summer approaching... when, while on that side Ferruccio Tagliavini sings "Voglio Vivere cosi' col sole in fronte", here we have Travis with "Why does it always rain on me".

For the curious (and Italian friendly) ones, here is the link to OraD'Aria http://xoomer.virgilio.it/oradaria/archivio/Giallo-franzferdinand