It's funny how that works...

Leesburg Cardinals Update

Cards beat the Giants 21-6 to improve to 6-0. Yours truly doin' work with the play sheet again. It’s fun to outwit 10 and 11 year olds.

In a discussion with friend on IM yesterday, I made the comment that it's sad that the only way I take a liking to a song anymore is if I hear it on a commercial, or a TV show. That's not exactly true, but I can say I discovered Brandi Carlisle through a Joe Paterno tribute http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQDlaWFeilE and got my first listen to Ray Lemontagne through an insurance commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G7bGBUlx2M .

But when I think back on it, very rarely have I "fallen in love" with a song by hearing it on the radio; something else usually lights the fuse. Case in point; early in my high school career, I was at a friend's house playing ping-pong and he put on the CD from "Philadelphia" (the movie with Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks where Hanks is the lawyer dying of AIDS, and Denzel is representing him). One of the songs on the CD was a Spin Doctors tune called "Have You Ever Seen the Rain". I really liked it and tried to find out more about it. Little did I know at the time, it was a CCR song, and my mom had it on vinyl. The more Creedence I listened to, the more I liked it, and they became one of my favorite bands.

Fast forward to today and the formula still works. After seeing the Travelers "Dog" commercial, I liked the song and wanted to find out more about it. Of course that leads me to look up the lyrics and find out that they're from "Trouble" by Ray LaMontagne (a song that actually came out 4 years ago-who knew). Now I can't stop listening to it.

But the more I think about it, these "media chains" can get pretty long after a while. Consider this; last year for a tournament down in North Carolina, the producers that I work with on the PGA TOUR Network played the song "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G7bGBUlx2M as a bumper during our coverage. The tune was catchy and eventually I started playing the YouTube video at home. In time, I got curious about the song and wiki'ed it. Turns out, that the author from OCMS actually took a refrain from an old Bob Dylan outtake (Rock Me Mama - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2aaojdq3jw ) and wrote verses to it, and then eventually worked it out with Dylan giving him a co-writing credit. I love the Dylan song, even though you can't make out half the words (which make it like most of his songs after 1980). And after YouTubing it, looking for different versions, I found one set over the movie Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Turns out the outtake was from a recording session for the movie, as Dylan wrote the score - the most famous song from it would be "Knocking on Heaven's Door". The singer actually had a part in the film alongside James Coburn (Garrett) and Kris Kristofferson (the Kid). The movie at the time was panned, but that's reportedly because of overzealous editing, as the director's cut has been hailed as a lost classic. I'm thinking about Netflixing it.

So remember the next time you see a commercial, it might be the spark for something pretty big...or you might just end up looking up stuff all night in the internet; your choice.