Who Says A Blog Post Has To Make Sense? Oh, And Happy Easter!

It's Good Friday and Good Friday is part of Easter so I had this great idea. I haven't done one of those "pick-a-theme-and-roll-the-dice" posts for a while, the ones where I throw a keyword search at my extensive back-catalog of music videos and either go with whatever comes up or, if that's too embarrassing, cherry-pick the good ones.

So I did that with "Easter", because I was pretty sure "Good Friday" would be too specific, and up came...

Nothing.

Not one single song in more than six thousand entries mentions "Easter" anywhere in the title, band name or description. I know it's not much of a holiday unless you're a Roman Catholic but still...

So I thought I'd widen the net. Leaving aside the religious connotations, what do people think of when they think of Easter? Eggs, of course. So I tried "egg" and what did I get?  A dozen songs by The Lovely Eggs and something called "Do The Eggroll" by Peach Kelli Pop, both of which would be wonderful in many ways, just not exactly the ways I had in mind.

Sod it, though. Let's have Peach Kelli Pop anyway.

 Do The Eggroll - Peach Kelli Pop

That is, without exaggeration, some worse audio quality and more amateurish playing than many of the recovered cassette recordings I've been uploading to Suno, none of which stops it also being a work of pure genius, of course. As one of the YouTube comments says "why this doesn't have a billion views is a mystery" (It has 127k but it's been up for fifteen years...)

Still, as I said, it has fuck-all to do with Easter. But I'm still not ready to give up. What else do we associate with the holiday? Chocolate, obviously...

Chocolate got me precisely one result: Chocolate In The Sun by Snowpony. Now, I love Snowpony and that's a great song but I was pretty sure I'd used it already. So I checked and I had. And guess when that was?

On Valentine's Day in 2022, when I played exactly the same game. See what an original thinker I am! Also, see how widely applicable the world "Chocolate" is to multiple holidays. It works for Easter, Valentine's, Mother's Day, Halloween. Even Christmas.

That leaves just one Easter-related topic I can think of - Bunnies. Last roll of the dice...

The singular, Bunny, scores seventeen hits although some of them repeat. Better yet, they're nearly all really good. There's a bunch of songs by Beach Bunny plus some excellent numbers by Caroline Polachek, idialedyournumber and Polly Scattergood - all of which have appeared on the blog before.

Even the seminal Little Noisy Bunny by Furious Monkey House has been on here before. In fact, it was up four years ago, when I had the amazingly creative and original idea of doing a "pull them out of a hat" post about Spring! I don't know if you've ever noticed but there's a very considerable crossover between things associated with Easter and things associated with Spring. No idea why...

One thing that wasn't available to me back in 2020 were all these helpful AIs we trust and rely on so much now. Seriously, it's so hard to remember what it was like back then, when we had to do all our own primary research. How did we ever manage? It was the dark ages! 

Let's ask Gemini, which is my AI assistant of choice, mainly because I can get to it faster than any of the others but also because it tends to give me more answers I can use.

The AIs really hate being asked for obscurities. It scares them, I think, because it reminds them they only know what they've been told and can only make up things that seem likely. Still, they're in thrall to us and can't say no so they have to try and come up with something. 

Gemini offered "Easter" by Patti Smith, which is arguably alternative at least. Still, a bit obvious. Then it gave me "Easter" by JG, which neither YouTube or Google can confirm exists so Gemini most likely made it up. Thirdly, Gemini offered East Nashville Easter by Yonder Mountain String Band. It's real and it's okay but it's not really my sort of thing. 

After that, though, Gemini really did rather well. All three of its remaining suggestions managed both to fit the criteria and be something I was willing to share. 

The most obscure of the three by a margin was the intriguingly-titled "Ether Flavoured Easter Eggs" by Jellybones,  a very pleasant, seventies-inflected soft-rock number that sounds like something I'd have expected from a third on the bill support band back when I was going to gigs in my mid-teens, before punk came along and put a stop to such amiable noodling. I'd have given you the live version of them doing it at their second-ever gig but it runs into a second song, making the whole thing more than six minutes long, which is too much soft rock. If you're curious, here it is. They seem pretty tight for a second gig.

Jellybones certainly qualify as obscure. The studio cut has clocked up just 93 views in nine years although the live version has done a bit better with 731 views in fourteen. 

Easter Parade - Emmy The Great

By comparison, Emmy the Great is a superstar. She may not be famous-famous but she's famous enough in certain circles. And yet she's still obscure in most, so I guess it counts. 

This one's lovely, if bleak, and the video, by the cheekily-named George/Lucas, is lovely, too. It's been on YouTube for seventeen years. I had no idea Emmy'd been around that long. 

Easter Parade - The Real Tuesday Weld

Saving Gemini's best for last, here's the wonderfully-named The Real Tuesday Weld with an entirely different song of the same name. Isn't it gorgeous? I'm so glad Gemini found it for us. 

I'd never heard of The Real Tuesday Weld, who sounds like he/she/they ought to be a drag queen. If I had ever seen the name in my recommends I'd have for sure clicked on it, having a thing as I do for songs or performers named after other songs or performers. 

Curious, I googled and it turns out that a) its a band, not a person and b) they're not all that obscure at all. They have a substantial Wikipedia entry which informs us they "have released several albums, singles and EPs, and many tracks on compilations" . I'm quite puzzled as to why the name has never cropped up before, either in recommends or news reports but there you go. It's a big old world.

Except...

Hang on a minute...

Hands up anyone who remembers this?  Yep! The Real Tuesday Weld is (Or are. I can never decide.) in point of fact, not new to me at all. They're not even new to the blog. They did that one about the wolf with the animation that looks like it's based on Red Hot Riding Hood. 

In my defense, it really doesn't sound much like the same band, does it? But the unfortunate truth is that, the longer you do these things, the more recursive and self-reflexive they get. I tend to rely on no-one remembering any of what I do any better than I remember it myself, which is barely at all, these days.

Having asked Gemini, it seemed only fair to ask ChatGPT as well. The results were... less good, although OpenAI's pet thinkbox seemed a lot happier to try. And a lot more confident although, as it turned out, not with any good reason.

 

After the build-up, the let-down. ChatGPT offered just two suggestions: Easter by Walter Martin and Easter by Theocracy. I suspect it was taking the brief a tad too literally. 

Walter Martin is best-known for his involvement with the New York bands The Walkmen and Jonathon Fire-Eater, neither of which I like all that much, although it can't be denied The Rat is a great song. Easter is nice, actually. He has a very nice-to-listen-to kind of voice.

Easter - Walter Martin 

(Weird aside: I just listened to The Rat again and noticed for the first time how similar the chorus is to something in one of my own songs, specifically the one I included in an earlier post. My song's called "Calling Your Name" and the refrain goes "Why can't you hear me now? I'm calling, calling your name", while the Walkmen's lyric is "Can't you hear me when I'm calling out your name?" That would be nothing more than the mildest of co-incidences if it wasn't that the intonation and melody for the two is also really similar. For the record, I'd just like to say I wrote my song about twenty years before they wrote theirs.)

Theocracy is a "Christian metal band", at last according to ChatGPT. I haven't checked and I don't intend to. I certainly haven't listened to the nine-and-a-half minutes of the thing. If you feel it's worth checking, knock yourself out. 

Both AIs also gave me suggestions, as asked, for bands with Easter in their name. None of them  seemed worth pursuing. 

At this point it occured to me to ask myself "Didn't there used to be a third AI?" After some thought I remembered Microsoft had one but I couldn't recall the name. It amused me to ask Google about it so I did. The answer wasn't entirely helpful. 

There's Copilot, which is integrated with Edge, a browser I try quite hard not to use, but Microsoft is also developing its own LLM, which it's calling MAI. MAI isn't available yet but it seems you can access Copilot without infecting your PC with the scourge of Edge so it only seemed polite to let it have a crack at the same question. 

Pause for a song because we need something to break up the text about now. It'd be lovely to stay on-theme but I just wasted an hour scrolling through YouTube looking for something worht sharing and couldn't find anything. So, for no reason other than I've been enjoying listening to her lately, here's the oldest song I've found from new favorite, R. Missing.

Kelly Was A Philistine - R. Missing

Eight years ago, she uploaded that. Good, isn't it? A lot better than the bunny-related stuff I was considering, that's for sure. Who'd have thought there'd be bands called Suicide Bunny and Suicide Bunnies and they'd both be bad? Bunny by the Reprobettes was better but still not quite there. Anyway, on we go...

Back when I was playing this game a couple of years ago, Microsoft always trailed the pack. Nothing seems to have changed. CoPilot didn't bother with the chatty introductions of the other two. Nor did it express any opinions on the difficulty of the job I'd handed it. It just spewed out three songs and then admitted complete failure when it came to bands. Didn't even try. Pathetic.

The three songs were interesting. For a start, they were different. All three AIs came up with completely different songs, in fact, which in itself is quite curious. Of the three, CoPilot seems far and away the most stuck in the past. 

Its first suggestion was Easter by Marillion, to which ew! No, thank you! 

CoPilot's second choice sounded much more interesting, Easter Everywhere by the 13th Floor Elevators. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist. CoPilot hasn't exactly hallucinated it. There is a 13th Floor Elevators album of that name. There is, however, despite CoPilot's claim to the contrary, no "title track" on it. Here's the full track listing if you want to do your due diligence. I mean, why should you believe me? I'm certainly no better informed than an AI. Am I?

Time for another unrelated tune. We almost had "Since April" by the same artist just because it has April in the title and Easter is in April this year. I just listened to it and t's not anything like as good, though, so now we're not.

I Just Do! - Girlpuppy

 

Wasn't that nice? Think yourself lucky I didn't go with the really excellent new one from the very annoyingly-named M(h)aol. It's called I Miss My Dog and it deserves a trigger warning even as a hyperlink. Seriously, I'm warning you. It is very good indeed, though...

And finally CoPilot offered me "Watermelon In Easter Hay" by Frank Zappa. I'm with Lou Reed when it comes to Zappa. I can't fricken stand him. So we're not having that.

And there we are. Surprise, surprise, the AIs weren't much help, except for Gemini, which actually was. I always liked Bard best of the three and now it's changed its name I like it as Gemini. Maybe it just thinks more like I do.

As you may have noticed, you happy few who've made it this far, this post has veered an awful long way from where it started. That's partly because it was composed entirely on the fly and partly because I was indulging myself. 

There's a reason I occasionally do both these "pick a random song" posts and the "Ask The AIs" posts and it's very much not because I think they're likely to be popular or that many people are going to enjoy them. I do them because they're hella fun for me. I could do this every day and find it entertaining, probably. Okay, maybe not every day but certainly several times a week.

When Blaugust rolls around, which is going to be sooner than you think, and we do the part where we all tell each other things we all already know, as if any of us hadn't been at this game for years, I'll try to remember to do an advice post on the topic of "please yourself and screw everyone else". 

And if that's not an appropriate Easter message to end on, then I don't know what is!