Viva La Vida!

Being that I'm now old, and a musical fuddy-duddy that complains about today's crappy music and longs for the wonderful old days of the 80's, it's a rare occurrence when some actual NEW music comes along and catches my fancy. It's rarer still when I get a little bit of that wonderful teenage ability to obsess over new music.

So a couple of weeks ago, I catch this commercial for the first time.



I'm not a big Coldplay fan (I can NAME two of their songs, and that's it). But something about it connected with me right away and not ten seconds later I was logging into iTunes to see if the song was available. It was, and (I love modern technology), within three minutes of seeing the commercial and hearing that sample for the first time, I was listening to the full version of the song.

The CD came out about a week later and I made a special trip to Wal-mart to get it. It was early enough that they didn't even have it out on the floor yet and had to go dig it out of the warehouse in the back.

And then I eagerly listened to the CD... and kind of shrugged. None of the other songs were as immediately fantastic as "Viva La Vida". But I gave it a couple of more listens in the background while I was doing other things and a couple of songs started planting roots in my brain.

But it wasn't until my son, who also was entranced by the Ipod commercial, started listening to the CD over and over and kind of listening to it through his ears and hearing which ones were his favorites helped me to listen in a different light.

So flash-forward to this past week when we went to Louisiana for work, and we listened to the CD all the way to and from Houston, and now, this is easily my favorite CD of the 2000's. And that first song that caught my attention, "Viva La Vida", has now been running on almost a constant loop today while I work, and I'm not only not tired of it, I can't get enough of it.

It's neat when you discover that something special like connecting with a song can still happen to you, years after you thought you were done with that sort of thing.

And watching that iPod commercial again after not having seen it since that first time, I marvel at how much the look and feel of that commercial totally captures and expresses the way the song feels. Excellent job. It has nothing to do with the song itself (the POV of the singer is that of a deposed king, likely Louis XVI or Charles X), but that commercial is the song. When they release this song as a single, they need to do the whole music video like this.