Vanessa

I'm gonna start with Vanessa, because this song was the one that gave me this idea.

I first came across Vanessa around 2002, I think, when I used to post on the Aimee Mann message board. We bonded over a Fiona Apple song called Never Is A Promise, specifically the "live on KCRW" version of the track (which I absolutely adore). You can find it on Volume 3 of KCRW's Rare on Air series, if you want to look for it.

Things around the message board got kinda weird, so I deleted all of my posts and decided to just live on the now-defunct Bowlie forum. I didn't feel particularly attached to the Aimee Mann community, and I spent way more time at Bowlie, anyways. Vanessa was the only person (on the Aimee board) I really liked, so I told her I was gonna bail, sent a Bowlie link to her and asked her to come along. To my surprise, she did and everything turned out pretty cool. We got to hang out more than a few times and we became pretty good friends. I'm fairly sure the pic above is from a Bowlie meet in New York in 2003. If it wasn't for this Fiona Apple track, we might not have chatted much at all.

Fiona Apple > Never Is A Promise (live KCRW)

Friends and Songs

I've been toying with this idea in my head. I want to post songs that remind me of friends/acquaintances, maybe a pic of the person if I have one. However, it's actually kinda hard to come up with concise ideas, like this song represents this person and that's that, mainly because most of the people I know are very much into music, think of the peeps in High Fidelity. And to make matters more confusing, they are into music that's all across the board and very difficult to pin down. So, I'm gonna give this a go, just because I think it'll be fun, and like most things around here, it's going to be very informal. Since I'm going strictly off my memory, I'll expect get little details wrong, like when I met someone or the bands they like. You've been forewarned. Thanks for reading and listening.