All Pank Considered

As much fun as I had on Tha Radio this morning, wow, there is just never enough time. I wanted to play a HUNDRED songs. And I wanted to talk to Mick all day.

We got in some great Valentine-Appropriate Songs -- Dwight Yoakam's Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room... Steve Earle's Valentine's Day. (Podcast here)

We got in suitably vague Valentine reminiscences (I spent much of the Storm of 94 in that very radio station.) Those are the songs anybody would expect me to play -- love and loss and bloodshed. I think of it all as being summed up by what Lloyd Dobler said at the beginning of Say Anything: "I WANNA GET HURT!" (Yes, I know what my beloved Chuck Klosterman would say about that, and you can read a post-social-media take on his theory from Salon here.) I can't help it. Cliches get to be cliches for pretty good reason, even post-Irony.

I don't feel any more self-conscious on the radio with Mick than I would writing this blog, for the same reason: it never occurs to me that anybody's listening (except for maybe my college roommate's dad). That's how I end up telling Ambien stories that wrap up with "heyyyy, is that the door?" --where I've invited someone over and had virtually no memory or evidence of it except for the fact that my freezer is now packed with Graeter's ice cream. (I know I didn't buy it.) And don't get me started on how I ended up with two blue pin-striped shirts hanging on the back of the door and nearly sent the wrong one home with the wrong person. AwwwwwkWARD.

Being on the radio transports me right back to my favorite fraternity's basement with everyone dancing to the "Venus Butterfly" mix tape I painstakingly crafted -- it's a mix that would consist mostly of songs you'd find in every single John Hughes movie -- I wouldn't want to imply I was especially original. Throw in a lot of Roxy Music. (Years before that, I was just a little girl holding a cassette recorder up to the radio, pressing record and play... and hoping the DJ wouldn't talk over all the requests I'd meticulously called in. We had an 8-track even before THAT, but I never figured out how to record on it. I sure knew how to set the bass up though. Socializing with the Presbyterian Middle Class was quite a notch up.)

You'd think all the excitement would be enough to really get me involved in an iPod, but it's eluded me so far. (First, I shun it. Then I embrace it. Then I act like I invented it. That's how it works. God help us all should I ever catch on to YouTube.) So, mostly it just makes me want to own a radio station.

We got a lot of calls this morning (and by "calls," I mostly mean facebook and twitter messages, although a few listeners actually used the phone, like an Animal) --  and I don't think we played anything anybody asked us to -- Mick explained his response according to the universal laws of communication (hear, validate, confirm the relationship): "I know. You're upset. We ran out of time... can we still be friends?" (It reminded me a little of Randy Pausch's law of apologies which nobody but me appears to have ever heard of.)

Anyway, that's all just a long way of saying THIS is the song I wanted to play. Maybe my guilty pleasure isn't everyone's guilty pleasure, but I still hope this is what was playing for you in the backseat of every BMW you've ever been in.