Starlee Kine is a contributor for This American Life, which recently produced an episode about breaking up and the heartache that follows.
Starlee and her boyfriend were fans of Phil Colins. After breaking up with her boyfriend, Starlee decided to write a song about her heartache and consulted Phil Colins for advice on writing a song. She came up with a song, “The Three of Us,” with the help of musicians Joe McGinty and Julia Greenberg. TAL held a remix / cover contest where listeners could submit a version of “The Three of Us.” The winners were posted on Friday. These are our favorites.
First, Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark wants to bring love and peace to the world. Yeah, our cynical Brooklyn hearts didn’t buy that hippie-dippie LA peace, love and harmony crap either until we saw this video.
Lavender Diamond’s music is often simple, beautiful, and very repetitous. The verse might be one sentence, the chorus another, but damn Becky sells it. We do not know anyone else that can sing the same thing over and over and not make us nauseous. Also they freaking dance in the street in that video. Tell us that didn’t make you smile!
Second, we’d like to direct you to one of our favorite This American Life episodes. It is one of the strongest and funniest we’ve listened to. This episode is centered around the theme of music lessons. David Sedaris talks about when his father forces him to take guitar lessons, but David dreams of singing jingles as he imitates Billy Holiday’s voice. And Sarah Vowell talks about her passion for music and, specifically, the recorder. It’s a great episode from beginning to end. We laughed and cried. Good stuff.
We can’t link directly to the full episode unfortunately, but you will find it on this page. The second “full episode” is the link.
