Author Archives: Matthew Appleton

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About Matthew Appleton

A dad and loving husband who is also an easily distracted sf&f junkie, LEGO enthusiast, Phillies fan, and writer wannabe who really has too many other responsibilities to be working on his many different on-going projects.

Daily Album on CD: ‘Pyramid,’ by The Alan Parsons Project

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Chose this one today simply because I love the band, and this particular CD is comfort music. With full acknowledgement that Rush and Yes are considered the premiere prog rock bands, The Alan Parsons Project is my personal favorite. They are one of the few bands — any genre — whose entire discography is in my music library, and there isn’t a single bad album by them. My personal favorite off of this one is “In the Lap of the Gods,” an epic instrumental that is perfect for inclusion in a playlist for, as one of my best friends has stated, “killing fake people in video games to.” I keep hoping that Ghost someday decides to perform and record their own rendition of the song.  

Daily Album on CD for Jan. 20: ‘The Tipping Point,’ by Tears for Fears

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For a lot of very understandable reasons, most of the albums that we deem our all-time favorites are the ones from our teens and young adult years — at the time of life when the memories associated with the music we listen to are far more intense and intertwined. It doesn’t hurt that at the stage of our lives, nearly all the songs and albums we are listening to is new to our ears, regardless of how old that material is. Therefore, it’s no coincidence that by the time you reach your mid-to-late 30s, your taste in music starts to calcify and it seems to take more energy to find new music that ends up being as meaningful to you as what you listened to in your formative years.

Therefore, it was a surprise to me that The Tipping Point quickly became the album it did in my collection. It may very well be my favorite album of this century thus far. I fell in love with it almost immediately, and the play counts in my Apple Music library show I’ve listened to it a half dozen times in the nearly four years since purchasing the CD. More than that, it led to my doing a full deep dive into the Tears for Fears catalog. Before this, I never owned a copy of The Hurting (though my wife brought her CD of it into the marriage,) and while Songs From the Big Chair was one of the first I owned on vinyl and ranks amongst my favorite ‘80s albums, at the time of its release The Seeds of Love effectively ended any additional desire to seek out any of their other material. Now, our music library contains the band’s complete discography.

I now appreciate The Seeds of Love in a way I didn’t at the time of its release, see just how amazing a debut album The Hurting was, have songs I love from their reunion album, Everyone Loves a Happy Ending, and even found some gems on the two Tears for Fears albums that were really Roland Orzabal solo efforts with the Tears for Fears name slapped on them. Yet, Songs From the Big Chair, as great as that album is, doesn’t mean as much to me The Tipping Point, which was the right album at the right time in a way that none of their other albums were. The themes, subject matter, and the music itself all just resonated and connected with me in a way that hasn’t happened since Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising.

As a result, it’s not hyperbole to suggest that Tears For Fears currently might now be my favorite band. My listening stats from my Apple Music library for the last couple years irrefutably support that notion. As for favorites off of Tipping Point, there are a few that stand out on an album that was clearly crafted to be listened to as a unified whole, and that’s how it really should be experienced. Having said that, the opening track, “No Small Thing,” is the perfect introduction — a deeply retrospective, almost mellow song that builds in complexity and intensity without letting the music get away from the lyrics. It sets the tone for an album that I recall one reviewer stating could’ve been called The Healing.

Then there’s “Break the Man,” a song clearly born out and absolutely in support of the “Me Too” movement. A successor of sorts to “Woman in Chains,” Tears for Fears clearly demonstrate that they are absolutely down with taking down the patriarchy. But the real gem on this album is “My Demons.” Its dark, pulsing energy and rhythm combined with confrontational lyrics actually brings me a kind of manic joy. On an album that’s my most listened to in years, this one really stands out. It’s been on heavy rotation since the The Tipping Point was released — the play count in my library shows 160 — and I’m nowhere close to getting sick of it. In fact, I played it again while typing this paragraph.

At the risk of writing a full-blown review, it just needs mentioning how wonderful “The Tipping Point,” “Rivers of Mercy,” (which is perfectly placed as the track following “My Demons”) and “Please Be Happy” are. 

If you told me in my teens that Tears for Fears would be the soundtrack of my middle-aged years, I almost would’ve given you a befuddled side-eye. Yet, this is where I am, and it feels absolutely right.

Daily Album on CD: ‘Born on a Pirate Ship,’ Barenaked Ladies

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This CD is the first of many things in my music collection. It’s the first one I ever (as an adult) that on its release date I raced to the music shop to purchase it and immediately listen to it the moment I got home. It’s also the first one I have had signed by the members of the band. In addition, it’s the first one I ever had to replace due to it getting excessively scratched after years of rough handing.

This is the album that BNL was supporting during the New Year’s Eve 1996 show where I first encountered Paula Cole, and it really was the soundtrack to my first several months of living in NYC after moving up there in July 1996. I can still easily recall listening to this album on my Panasonic Shockman player when walking along the east side of Central Park in the evening while walking back to my apartment on Yorkville section of Manhattan from my job just off of Times Square. While “The Old Apartment” became the band’s first US hit, it wasn’t one of my favorite tracks at the time. Those were “Shoe Box,” “If I Should Fall,” “Break Your Heart,” and “Same Thing.” However, in the years since, my favorite track off the album, and one of my all-time favorite deep cuts by anyone, has become “Just a Toy” — a dark anthropomorphic dive into the mind the marionette Gepetto made just before Pinnochio and the jealousy he harbors against his younger brother.

The other interesting thing about this album is that was released as an Enhanced CD, meaning that it was encoded with Mac & PC software that allowed you to interact with additional bonus material when you put it in your computer. Unfortunately, the experience of using the Enhanced CD features is long gone as neither operating system allows you to play that software anymore. In fact, the Mac OS doesn’t even recognize the file system used on the CD, so it’s impossible to even check out the assorted sound and video files that the software used (this was something I was still able to do roughly 10-15 years ago.)

Daily Album on CD: ‘This Fire,’ by Paula Cole

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Opening acts are the crapshoot of going to concerts. Frequently, you’ve never previously heard of the opener, but the fact they are opening for the headlining act typically means that the headliners like them enough to believe that more people should know about them. I’ve gone to enough concerts over the years to absolutely forget a significant percentage of the ones I’ve seen. Others I remember because they were either awful (to my ears) or in the case of one particular band, they were so aggressively boring that I actually feel asleep in my seat during their set. There were a couple who were the reason I actually went to the concert — 4 Non Blondes and Echobelly — and then there was Paula Cole, who utterly blew me away and inspired me to get their most recent album at the next opportunity.

She was actually one of two opening acts on the evening that Barenaked Ladies performed a show at the former Roseland Ballroom in NYC on New Year’s Eve, 1996. Cannot tell you who the other one was, but Cole left a lasting impression. I don’t recall anything about the success of This Fire or any of its singles at that moment in time, but the energy and raw emotion she displayed that evening made you pay attention. Over thirty years later, I don’t recall any of the rest of her setlist, but there’s no way that “Throwing Stones” — my personal favorite of the This Fire album — Cole didn’t play it that night. The memory of her absolutely pounding the final chords of the song out of the piano combined with the way she almost screamed the final lyrics is just too firmly planted in my memory for it not to have happened. That song alone would’ve made me want to get ahold of it for my music library, but the rest of her performance left no doubt that buying the album was the prudent choice.

Oh, BNL was also spectacular that night. It was my second time seeing them live, and thanks to the concert, it was the closest I have ever been to Times Square when the ball dropped (the Roseland was approximately 10 blocks away.)

Revisting LiveJournal

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Thanks to some scuttlebutt over on Bluesky on New Year’s Day regarding the site’s short- and long-term prospects, I recently decided to visit my old LiveJournal accounts and start cut-and-pasting the text from my posts into a Word document. Nothing fancy — I’m not preserving the formatting, tags, comments, timestamp, or any other peripheral information. Just the date, title, and primary text. I’m also not including memes or shared links that are only accompanied by a line or two of snarky commentary. Thus far, I’ve saved the period covering November 3, 2004 through July 29, 2005. The file contains over 28,000 words and is nearly 75 pages long.

Damn, I wrote a lot — and frankly overshared far more — back in the day.

I haven’t looked at most of this material in years. So, while working my way through the posts, I’ve skimmed them. It’s been… enlightening. The period I’ve downloaded thus far covers a period in time where, in retrospect, I was beginning to burn out in my previous profession. At the time, I thought I was just in a bad work situation, and during 2005 I had a multi-month long job hunt that led me to the last of the positions I held as an executive assistant. However, the combination of rereading what I wrote and what I recall from being an E.A. at a big four accounting and consulting firm makes it pretty clear that it wasn’t situational at all. No, it was the job itself. The things I’m complaining about in those posts are frankly the kinds of things I dealt with at all my jobs as an E.A. from the summer of ’96 through the end of ’06.

It’s also the period where Brandon was a toddler, and it’s a joy to be reminded of little things that happened during that time that I hadn’t thought about in years. It was also the period where I launched Some Fantastic — something I’m still immensely proud of. Frankly, in retrospect, I’m not entirely certain how I managed to achieve so much during that period.

Reading all this material is also motivating me to start posting here more. I certainly don’t need to post as often as I did in the old LJ days, and that certainly applies moreso to the oversharing that took over there. However, the Bluesky and Facebook formats encourage a style of writing that really isn’t me. The one thing I’ve successfully internalized over the past few years is the need to be my authentic self. It’s time to apply that to posting online as well. 

Today’s Album on CD: ‘Sports,’ by Huey Lewis and The News

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(This is a series I originally started on Facebook several weeks ago. This is a revised cross-post. Starting tomorrow I will be posting these here.)

I recently had a random recollection that this was the first album I ever owned (on cassette.) It really is mind-boggling how many hits Huey Lewis and The News had in the ’80s. Before listening to it, my recollection was that they made exceptionally crafted middle-of-the-road pop/rock that was absolutely recognizable as a product of its era, but was otherwise not particularly special. It’s nice background music, but without this little project I’ve embarked upon, I don’t know if I otherwise would’ve listened to this album in any format. However, after listening to Sports in full, I decided I might have been a little harsh with this assessment. A couple of the songs actually held up rather nicely: “If This Is It” and the lesser hit, “Walking on a Thin Line.”

Side note: Hootie and The Blowfish are absolutely the ’90s version of Huey Lewis and The News, only with significantly fewer hits. How well would we remember them if not for the one Friends episode with the five steaks and an eggplant?

My Year in Music (Frak Spotify Wrapped)

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To repeat what I said last year in My Year in Music (My Version of Spotify Wrapped), though I have a Spotify account, the way I use the service – which, not coincidentally, I have just canceled our premium family subscription plan to because of the variety of ways it is an absolutely shitsome company – simply doesn’t reflect or capture the overwhelming amount of music listening I do. Because of this, the 2023 Spotify Wrapper inspired me to begin exporting on December 1 of each year the usage/meta data from my actively curated Apple Music library, which contains over 23,000 songs that we actually own. Thanks to some above-average Excel skills, this is now the second year in a row I’ve been able to assemble a report to Spotify’s while denying them the ability to gather the user data needed to both create it and, more importantly, monetize and use it for their own nefarious needs.

So, without further preamble, my 2025 year in music…

Listened for 54,871 minutes (highly enabled by working from home and having music on most of the time while doing so,) or 38.1 days of music. I would like to note that my recent transition into playing whole albums on CD rather than through my music library is not captured in this data.

Played 4,501 different songs (I often simply shuffle the whole library.)

Streamed my top song, “Say Goodbye to Mum and Dad” by Tears for Fears, 41 times.

The top song leaderboard:

  1. “Say Goodbye to Mum and Dad,” Tears for Fears
  2. “Astronaut,” Tears for Fears
  3. “Uptown Funk,” Mark Ronson feat. Bruno Mars
  4. “The Girl That I Call Home,” Tears for Fears
  5. “Dear God,” Black Landlord
  6. “Emily Said,” Tears for Fears
  7. “Landlocked,” Tears for Fears
  8. “Close to Me,” The Cure
  9. “Change,” Tears for Fears
  10. “Wrong Bitch” (extended mix,) Todrick Hall feat. Bob the Drag Queen

The first five Tears for Fears songs were an EP (of sorts) of new material embedded at the start of their 2-disc Songs for a Nervous Planet album, which was otherwise a really good live best-of compilation. I listened to that EP independently of the rest of the album frequently, which caused those songs to dominate the list. Just to see what the Top 10 have looked like without those songs, here are the next five in the list:

  1. “And Love Goes On,” Earth, Wind & Fire
  2. “Turns the Love to Anger,” Erasure
  3. “Self Control,” Laura Branigan
  4. “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This,” Eurythmics
  5. “Echo Beach,” Martha and the Muffins

Moving on…

Listened to 1,161 artists.

Top artist was Tears for Fears. Played their songs 650 times for a total of 2,881 minutes. (This was the second year in a row that they top my list, and it wasn’t even close.

My top artists, based on song plays:

  1. Tears for Fears
  2. Erasure
  3. Pet Shop Boys
  4. Depeche Mode
  5. Barenaked Ladies
  6. Duran Duran
  7. Eurythmics
  8. New Order
  9. Suzanne Vega
  10. Ghost

It’s worth noting that if this was based on minutes played instead, Suzanne Vega would fall out of the Top 10, and The Alan Parsons Project would move into the 10th spot.

Finally, attempting to determine which album I listened to the most is exceedingly problematic, though I feel I have a very good guess as to how Spotify calculated it. So, without attempting to come up with parameters for filtering and sorting the data in an effort to determine it, I’ll just note that there were two albums released in 2025 that I listened to each over a dozen times: Flying With Angels by Suzanne Vega and Skeletá by Ghost.

35 Years Later

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My 35-year high school class reunion is taking place in two weeks. Amusingly, I’ve been to more of my wife’s reunions than my own. In fact, I’ve only been to one of mine, the 10-year. As you may surmise, that one provided zero motivation for me to attend future ones. To starkly illustrate, that reunion provided a wonderful anecdote I’ve loved sharing over the years. My previous wife went with me to that one, and I informed her in advance that I hadn’t seen or talked to anyone from my graduating class in the interim. As we walked back to my car at the end of the night, she said, “I can see why you haven’t talked to any of those assholes since high school.”

Before I go further, I first need to share a little something about my high school experience. While I understand that most people, at a minimum, do not look back fondly on that time of their life, my teen years were kind of brutal. I was basically an outcast, and while I got along well enough with the others who were also in all the advanced and college prep classes, I also didn’t have any real friends amongst them. In fact, my best and only real friend at the time, Dave, was an anti-authoritarian metalhead who was constantly getting in trouble with the school administration. He was dyslexic, likely ADHD, and almost certainly high functioning autistic (things that schools in the late ’80s just were not looking for nor equipped to handle.) In fact, the administration basically badgered him into dropping out. In addition, he was actually a year behind me — I only got to know him because he lived a block away.

(There’s a great story about how we met, but that would be digressing far too much.)

Anyway, for all practical purposes, I felt like an outcast in high school. It didn’t help that my signature blend of neurospiciness made me a target of ridicule for some of the jocks at the school. Nothing intense — I wasn’t bullied (that only happened in elementary and middle school) — but it was enough to make me dread interacting with those mouthbreathers when at gym class or the other times we crossed paths. Frankly, high school felt like something I needed to endure and survive. The biggest positive that happened during that time was that the isolation I felt allowed me to fully embrace my weirdness during my senior year. I grew a mullet tail, created my first decorated denim jacket, and using the money I made at my part-time job, bought enough different pairs of Converse Chuck Taylors to do the Punky Brewster thing with them.

So, in an incredibly demented and sad way, not social, I at least got to be my authentic self in all its glory that year.

It’s in that spirit I’m going this year’s reunion.

Yes, I’m going with the dial turned, with extreme prejudice, all the way to 11. Weird nerdy t-shirt with an esoteric reference to a movie or TV show. Check. Glitter-covered Chuck Taylors? Absolutely. Gothic velvet rainbow pride kilt? Fuck, yeah! The only question is whether I wear my silver sequin-covered jacket or one of my brightly colored and decorated denim jackets. I’m going to arrive in full fabulousity, the way Romy and Michele should have when they first arrived at their 10-year reunion.

I’m going to fucking enjoy myself, arriving like a conquering visigoth, and not just because in the interim I’ve married the valedictorian. Okay, she went to a different high school, but humor me here… I’m rolling. (Besides, do you understand how hard it is for a neurospicy cis hetero male to find and marry one. There are *far* fewer of them than cheerleaders.) I’m living my best life at the age of 53, and I want to show it off.

So, for those of you reading this who are also going to be at the reunion, consider this both a promise and an advance warning. In fact, I would love it if you showed up flying your own freak flag as well. It would be legend… wait for it…

March 3, 2025, 4:15 AM

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Currently thinking about Harlan Ellison’s waxing philosophically about being a part of the walking dead.1 Along those lines, I’d love nothing more than to just live a life untroubled by the knowledge of the world around me. I know that for the overwhelming majority of people throughout human history, life has been hard – my comparatively cushy life contains privileges I’m sure to don’t comprehend. Nonetheless, I currently function under the strain of a couple of anxieties that are paradoxically separate yet also somewhat intertwined: anxiety over the current state of affairs here in the United States, and anxiety over the many existential threats looming over the long-term survival of the human species (and if not the species, then absolutely human civilization as we now know it.)

Anyway, the upshot is that waking up in the middle of the night and then having issues getting back to sleep is a real thing. Some nights, such as this evening, reading fiction after waking up in the middle of the night allows my brain to settle down enough for sleep to resume. In fact, I spent most of the past two hours doing just that before my focus drifted from my ebook to jotting down the thoughts now appearing on the screen. Thus far, tonight – maybe I should really say “early morning” – this effort to burn down my mental energy hasn’t worked. 

(Quick aside: it seems amusingly fucked up that reading Deadline, a novel set in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, is preferable to letting the anxiety siblings run amok in my head.) 

Anyway, for some time now, I’ve been saying I needed to start forcing myself to write again in some fashion. All things considered, maybe using insomnia time to write, in addition to the reading, may not be the worst impetus to make that start happening.

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1 “You think I enjoy getting up angry every morning, going to bed angry every night? To go through the day with the veins standing out, the bolts unscrewing in my neck? Jesus Christ, I would give anything to be able to be as mellow and cool as most people. I would be one of those slaves, the walking dead, but it would be a relief. Give me six months as a walking dead and I will never say anything angry again.” — Harlan Ellison, Dreams With Sharp Teeth

My Year in Music (My Version of Spotify Wrapped)

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As I stated on Bluesky and Facebook yesterday, I only use Spotify to try out new-to-me music before deciding whether I like it enough to purchase it (preferably on CD in order to rip my own high quality digital tracks) and add it to my Apple Music library. Thus, Spotify Wrapped doesn’t properly present my listening this year.

However, last year I planned ahead and at the time Spotify started providing last year’s Wrapped reports to its listeners, I performed an export of the listening stats and associated song data from my Apple Music library. Then when this year’s Wrapped reports went out, I did another such export. Thanks to some decent Excel skills, I was able to create a similar report without having my data mined.

Here are the expanded stats:

Listened for 57,404 minutes (highly enabled by working from home and having music on most of the time while doing so.)

Played 4,922 songs (I frequently shuffle the whole library.)

Streamed my top song, Florence + The Machine’s “Dog Days Are Over,” 40 times.

The top song leaderboard:

1.  “Dog Days Are Over,” Florence + The Machine
2.  “Uptown Funk,” Mark Ronson
3.  “Dear God,” Black Landlord
4.  “Wrong Bitch” (extended mix,) Todrick Hall feat. Bob the Drag Queen
5.  “Gronlandic Edit,” of Montreal
6.  “I Was Made for Lovin’ You,” KISS
7.  “Off the Wall,” Michael Jackson
8.  “Rapture,” Blondie
9.  “My Demons,” Tears for Fears
10.  “West End Girls,” Pet Shop Boys

Listened to 1,183 artists.

Top artist was Tears for Fears. Played their songs 715 times for a total of 3,179 minutes. (This was the year I deep-dived into their catalog, listening for the first time to four different albums, which included this year’s new album of concert tracks plus five new songs.)

My top artists, based on song plays:

1.  Tears for Fears
2.  Erasure
3.  Barenaked Ladies
4.  Pet Shop Boys
5.  Duran Duran
6.  Weezer
7.  They Might Be Giants
8.  The Decemberists
9.  Eurythmics
10.  The Alan Parsons Project

It’s worth noting that if this was based on minutes played instead, They Might Be Giants would fall out of the Top 10 all the way to 14th, and Depeche Mode would move into the 10th spot. TMBG really do write songs that are much shorter on average than those released by nearly all other bands.