good songs

Couple of good songs I ran into recently:

They Might Be Giants
Wearing a Raincoat
lyrics
The lyrics pretty much speak for themselves :) But great song.

They Might Be Giants
Your Racist Friend
lyrics
Another great song, made me feel a little unconfortable at parts, is about a party where some guy's drunk friend is making an ass of himself ;) I have really been getting into They Might Be Giants. They can take slightly off-the-wall or dead serious subject matter, turn it into a catchy song, and really put their all into it. Sometimes like in the middle of a weird song, unexpectedly, they just seriously start to JAM. Solid band :)

Ano Tsuku Kotoba
Ryoko Hirosue
lyrics
Am getting the jist that she pretty much knows what she wants to say but just not entirely sure how to say it. I can't find the song on Youtube but theres a lot of other videos of her at least..is fun swimming in the sea of Japanese popular music because there are some real gems out there. Anyways since I can't find a sample of this song, it's really mellow, with pretty piano and a guitar or whistle, with a great and pretty melody. I only had to hear a little bit of the song and I knew I'd like it.

Off Course
Oda Kazumasa
Kotoba ni Dekinai
lyrics
This song conveyed a lot of mellow reflective emotion without even paying attention to lyrics. "Kotoba ni Dekinai" meaning roughly "words to, not able to", or I guess I've read it as "more than words can say" in a couple places. Looking up the words I didn't know led me to conclusion that he is singing about the realization that his girlfriend frankly doesn't love him anymore, found someone better. I dunno it is pretty effective in conveying that empty helpless feeling.
I guess I discovered this song here on this youtube video..it's probably worth the watch, has a ton of funny or interesting images. I ran into it a couple weeks before it was on digg.com, now it has like 300 comments, holy cow. Anyways if you go up to like some of the very first comments there are explanations for each of the images. I think in this use this song's title means "a picture is worth 100 words" or the like :)

Oda Kazumasa
Love Story wa Totsuzen ni
lyrics
Hey I'm sure glad I decided to make this blog post because just learned something new :) I had decided to do a little write up on this song, and did a little research and found out it's from the same guy as who did the last song (right above here). This song has a real 80's Billy Ocean meets like George Michael or I dunno, some smooth 80's pop singer is only way my first impression was. Listened to probably 5 times since and really grew on me, heh. BTW I just learned it's the opening song to a TV Drama, lol. "Tokyo Love Story". Ah, it's still a great song.

I'm not sure yet of who sings it
Opening song to some dumb anime :)
Listen to this song at your own risk. Listen to it more than one time in a row at the peril of your entire day having this song stuck in your head :) First heard this song redid in a couple of "OLDSCHOOL HARDCORE JAPANESE RAVE" radio songs, then discovered the original a couple months later, and took me a couple weeks to put two and two together, why it was driving me crazy. Actually one of my favorite songs from that radio station uses this song (sped up and chipmonk voice) as it's closing part, but it's actually my least favorite part of that rave song. Still a great song. Had to check out the anime after finding out where the song came from...not bad, corny is good. Is from same company that did FLCL and Evangelion.

strange opening song from another anime
I dunno is a weird one :)

Since updating KDE and QT and stuff a few weeks ago I realized that my kana and kanji input was broken so it's taking a little getting used to. On the plus side it's motivated me to copy the lyrics out by hand in kana..I do pretty good but my calligraphy is pretty sloppy. One thing I enjoy looking at my writing in japanese is that to my eye at least my handwriting has the same nuances in both English and Japanese character sets...both kinda scratchly or a little wobbly looking, I mean everyone's handwriting is usually pretty identifiable to themself. I guess what I'm getting at is you can definitely point me out as the writer no matter what font writing in heh. I'm getting pretty fast reading kana at least and maybe the 100 or 200 kanji that I know the best. Can follow along a lot of video game messages at least, and that's why I started studying Japanese in the first place!