30-Day Song Challenge Day 6 – a song title that is all in lowercase

Author Ed Miller: “Music is the weirdest human thing. A few dozen songs out of the zillions recorded fire off like a massive dopamine flood every time I hear them.

And then like other people don’t even like those songs.”

A friend and long-time loyal blog follower recently sent me a 30-Day Song Challenge meme in the hope that I couldn’t resist taking the challenge and blogging about it. Here’s Day #6 – A Song Title That Is All In Lowercase: Billie Eilish, everything i wanted.

I believe Billie Eilish is a brilliant and important new artist and her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? has the Grammys (four[1]); sales (triple platinum); critical acclaim; and at age 18, she’s the youngest artist to write and record a James Bond theme song (the upcoming No Time to Die) to back up my assessment.

everything i wanted  – her tribute to her brother Finneas[2] – was included as a bonus track to the re-release of When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? I just love this song to pieces.

Honorable Mention: Paramore, crushcrushcrush. Yes, I’m sorta breaking my original rules of no overthinking by including this. I just watched this video (2:00 a.m. on a Friday nite/Saturday morning) on YouTube for the fiftyleventh time and it could not go without mention nor could I write 30 days of music blogs and not mention My Girl Hayley Williams.

If Billie Eilish wasn’t pretty much everywhere these days and if I wasn’t as enamored as I am with both her and her latest song everything i wanted, there’s no doubt that I would have thought of crushcrushcrush first and really, this is the better story.

I first saw Paramore in 2009 (seen them 4, 5, 6 times since? I’ve lost track) as the headliner for the MTV Ulalume Festival (for Halloween). A rather insistent My Daughter Diandra insisted that we not only go but we had to be down in front in the pit at Merriweather Post Pavillion. She dressed up as Slash for the costume contest by the way but I digress. It was an amazing show that included Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington’s solo project Dead by Sunrise who gave me one of my most amazing concert moments ever and I know My Daughter Diandra would feel the same.

But Paramore. Hayley Williams. Seriously. A true rock goddess. Completely captivating. I kept wondering do these kids know what they’re seeing? I get that they (like both of my daughters) love this band for good reasons like I liked my bands back in the day. But I’m old enough to have history and have seen a few more bands than the ones I liked when I was a kid and I know the difference between “I like them” and “OMG”. Who is this energetic, bouncing pixie holding all of these millennials in the palm of her hand?

I’ll never quite be the fangirl of Hayley that my daughters are – I’ll never be able to identify with her teenage (and now young adult) angst as they do – but as an observer, lover, historian, and partaker of popular music history, she’s on my short list of whatever title you want to give the list.

The MTV festival was televised. My Daughter Diandra and I watched ever so closely to see if we could be seen given our proximity to the stage. Alas, we couldn’t see ourselves in the crowd. But we did see Hayley Williams rule.

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[1] Becoming only the second recording artist and first woman to win the ceremony’s four major categories – Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist – for the same year. Christopher Cross was implausibly the first.

[2] Who won Grammys for his production and engineering work on his sister’s album.