Today's Earworm -- Billy Joel: Sleeping with the Television on

This earworm is a little obscure.  I think I can blame Peter for this one.  Peter's Spotify playlist includes a lot of Billy Joel, and he will play it in the car when we are out and about.  Suffice it to say, Peter does not have this song on his playlist. 

One of the drawbacks (if you want to call it that) of the modern method of collecting the work of music artists is that you select individual songs.  I bought the full album and ended up listening to all of it.  Of course, the majority of songs on these albums did not get any airplay on the radio.  You had to discover them for yourself.  Such is the case with "Sleeping with the Television on" from Glass Houses.

Thanks to Peter's Billy Joel kick, this song has been running around in my mind for a few days.  But I'm not upset about it.

A side note: The song begins with the conclusion of the Star Spangled Banner followed by the static of a station that has ended its signal for the night.  I am old enough to remember when television stations signed off for the night, follow by about six hours of static and a test pattern.  Younger people will be thoroughly confused by this, as well as Billy Joel's reference to the white noise coming from a television left on all night.

Ah!  Nostalgia!

As a bonus, here is a bootlegged live version of the song.  Some poor soul had one of the most unfortunate obstructed view seats in the arena.

Feeling nostalgic

For whatever reason, I have been feeling somewhat nostalgic recently.  Perhaps it is the Christmas carols, some of which resonate from my childhood.  Maybe it was having all the kids home for Thanksgiving and soon again for Christmas, recognizing that these days of having everyone home at once will be harder and harder to pull off.

Anyway, a strange wave of nostalgia came over me on I-696 this morning.  I was noticing the license plate of a car next to me.  It was a Michigan plate, mainly blue, green, and white, which featured the Mackinac Bridge.  While the plates in Michigan, and there are numerous versions, are nice looking, somehow I was drawn back to the solid blue plates with the white lettering.

Hardly as pretty, but somehow still homey to me.  Those are the plates that every car in Michigan had for years and years.  If you played the road trip game of checking off plates from as many states as possible, that Michigan one was easy to pick out.  In fact, people who make pop art out of old license plates usually work with those blue plates.  It is a classic look.


For that matter, I was even reflecting on the Wisconsin plates the same way.  When I was young, for the most part, Wisconsin had what was not-so-affectionately called the bumble-bee plates, solid yellow with black lettering.  Certainly, there is nothing endearing about the look.  The police must have loved them since they were so easy to read.  If you were out of state, the locals could recognize you were from Wisconsin in a heartbeat.  Perhaps ugly, but still unmistakable.  I suppose hardly anyone would want to go back to those license plates, but today I kind of missed them.