one of my favorite posts ever

The Scott Pilgrim relationship chart but with the IASIP characters

Inspo under the cut

Glue Trap (Charlie) is a changeling, he reformed with his mom and she made him present as an earth pony for most of his life. When he became obsessed with the waitress he changed to a pegasus to match her, whenever she's dating he changes his form to match her partner's race and genuinely believes no pony will notice. The Waitress' flank is always covered so you can't see her cutie mark.

"I'm spending this one alone," he said "Need a break, this year's been crazy" I said, "Me too, but why are you? You mean you forgot cranberries too?"

The Waitresses - Christmas Wrapping

Christmas Wrapping (Long Version)

Okay, friends, I’m back again to discuss more seasonal music!

Since we’re less than 24 hours to Christmas at this point, I want to know what some of your favorite holiday songs are. Again, I’ll share some of mine, too. Starting with:

Shake Up Christmas by Train:

Funny about this song: I first discovered it in a Coca-Cola commercial several years ago. It’s got a really uplifting tone to it, and an overall good message: Christmas is a time to be happy, and you gotta spread it.

Driving Home for Christmas by Chris Rea:

This song really hits me right this time of year: the feeling of going out on the road, coming home for a few days, and noticing all the other people doing the same. The instrumentals really tie it all together.

Christmas Wrapping by The Waitresses:

This one just screams 80s. It’s a potpourri of madness, but in the best way. And it’s very relatable: the holidays are rough to deal with, especially with all the people to face and all the tasks you gotta check off. Sometimes you just need some time to yourself during the holidays.

Let It Be Christmas by Alan Jackson:

Yes, more Alan Jackson. This song is a nice little snapshot of all the different places around the country/world that celebrate Christmas, and everything that makes Christmas so special.

And there you go! Some of my favorite Christmas/holiday songs. How about the rest of you? What are some of your favorite songs around this time of year?

I have embiggened the Xmas playlist.

341: The Waitresses // Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful?

Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful? The Waitresses 1982, Polydor

The Waitresses were such a peculiar project: considered a borderline novelty band based on their two hit singles (no wave-y stripper anthem “I Know What Boys Like” and wondrous ska noel song “Christmas Wrapping”), their membership connects dots between the ‘70s Akron scene (Devo, Tin Huey), Television, the Psychedelic Furs, and John Zorn, and featured an actual waitress on lead vocals. Said waitress, Patty Donahue, was a true natural at the post-punk sprechgesang thing. For other singers, a flat affect was often a way to mask shyness or to de-emphasize the vocalist’s personality. Donahue was cool enough to simply be herself up there, sarcastic, fabulous, smart, and messy. She makes the lyrics sound so natural you assume she’s basically singing her diary—which is why not a day goes by without some bright young woman, who’s felt utterly seen by a song like “No Guilt,” giving a startled “Oh!” at the realization the very much male Chris Butler wrote all the words.

Their debut Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? is often nearly as prog as it is punk (try to follow the zig-zagging “Quit” or “Heat Night”), the songs crammed with wild hairpin tempo changes and skronky bridges that somehow still sound like something you might hear playing over the PA at the grocery store. They need all that busy-ness to accommodate Butler’s absurdly verbose lyrics, which have the respect for meter of a jazzy spoken word recital (so none, I mean). The musicians need to really have their working boots on to keep this stuff feeling poppy, but for the most part they nail it with panache.

And those lyrics! I can think of few albums as legitimately clever as this one, even forty years on. Donahue’s glib performance of a young woman getting her shit together on “No Guilt” could describe any number of girls I knew in college and, from what I glean from social media anyway, still works for the present generation. And truly, today’s assembly line of singer-songwriters trying to score clout by writing the most withering lowercase boy-bye diss (see Kara Jackson’s damp “therapy” for one) wish they could do what Butler does with “Jimmy Tomorrow.” The potshots are sparkling (“There's nothing that's wrong with me / That money can't cure / But I don't want to be somebody else's / Learning experience / Some rich kid's way to spend his allowance”), but Butler understands that the woman in the story’s more intriguing than the bad ex, and by keeping her the focus of the monologue he finds both a pithy diagnosis of her social ailments (“It's what happens when your choices / Are narrowed to fashion or violence”) and her emotional ones (“I guess I set impossible goals / And I don’t know when to quit / Is that it?”). On an album with no ballads and little sentimentality, Donahue’s vocal finds something really resonant in these lines, even as the band absolutely goes off behind her. But for the Waitresses, angst was always best used as a springboard for a brilliant punchline, and they end the album with an all-timer: “My goals? / My goals are to find a cure for irony and make a fool out of God.”

The band didn’t last long (two LPs and an EP), and it’s not clear whether their very specific brand of schtick could’ve survived the transition from new wave to alternative rock without losing its dazzle. But Butler and Donahue deserve to be mentioned when the all-time great lyricist/vocalist tandems are discussed, because like a good kitchen / front of house pairing, they make a very complex business look seamless.

341/365

Christmas Wrapping - The Waitresses - 1981

The Waitresses - Wrapping Paper Song

Crank it up. Some of you know all the words but for those who don’t here it is with lyrics!