January 15 - Paranoid

I really had hoped that I would have a song about a mixtape I could put in here, because that is really what this project is all about. As I stated on January 1, my goal is to bring you one new song every day - and hopefully tell you something more about me with each song. That way I hope this blog really lives up to its tagline: The music of my life - or my life in music. The entries from 2016 should really be the soundtrack to my life. That soundtrack would be something like my ultimate mixtape.

I have set some rules for myself - but not too many, and please don't hold me to them.

1. The songs need to be meaningful to me
2. The songs need to be triggering a post - although I will let the posts trigger my songs as well
3. I need to own the songs myself (they are a part of my personal record collection)
4. The songs I share are officially released versions

#4 is by far the most difficult to follow for me, as YouTube is filled with audience recordings that often are far more interesting than studio recordings or officially released live recordings, which often include overdubs and are not representative of what the band truly is capable of on stage. Also, I won't always have personal anecdotes to share, so I have to take brief breathers from time to time with respect to how much I put out there.

All that being said, the song that represents my ultimate mixtape today is a song I originally had on one of my less planned and more "accidental" mixtape. Back in 1984, the Cosby Show was on TV at home, but I also had a radio show to listen to. Every Saturday night (or early evening, to be precise), the radio show Heavyrockmagasinet aired. And every Saturday, I made sure I had a tape with at least some blank space in the radio/tape deck. On one of my first mixtapes like this, I distinctly remember having the song Paranoid by Black Sabbath (I am thinking it might still be around somewhere in my parents' basement. This last year, the song Paranoid showed up on a new release - but this time by Kylesa, a sludge metal band from Savannah, Georgia I discovered right around the same time I discovered Baroness. If you wonder what sludge metal is all about, just remember the tempo of Black Sabbath's Paranoid - and then compare that to this: