Rosa Say has tagged me with a meme. Now I typically keep my memes to my personal web spaces, but it took all of a heart beat to realize I could make this one work over here.

What I’m supposed to do is come up with a song that makes my heart sing. Something that lifts me up.

Well, I can’t function without music, so this was almost going to be harder than it looked, right up until I thought about the past month or so. See, the last half of May didn’t go so well for me. There was a lot going on, some of it good, some of it really rotten. Once I shook the rotten bits away, it was June, and all I really wanted to do was sit here and stare out my window at the remnants of the Pacific Northwest spring.

But my to-do list was getting longer and longer because I just couldn’t find my motivation. It was becoming a bad situation.
The night I snapped in May, the night I realized I couldn’t handle things anymore, I came home from work with the intention of finding one song to perk up my mood. Paint the Town Tonight is just a fun, upbeat song that I love singing along to, and I knew if anything could shake me out of my funk, it was that song. But I wanted to settle a bit after work, so I wandered around the web dealing with emails, my aggregator, and some of my personal web spaces.

It turned out that the Eric Stuart Band, the group behind Paint the Town Tonight, had earlier that day announced the release date for their next CD and had a track from it on MySpace. It’s a sad song, but a fairly good one. I think I ended up listening to it a few times before I finally sent Eric Stuart a note thanking him for brightening my awful day, and then went and listened to Paint the Town Tonight.

Oddly enough, when I just need to sit down and get work done, I listen to Eric’s music because I find a lot of it uplifting, well written, and it just keeps me running. In fact, the night before I snapped, I’d spent four solid hours listening to Eric while working on a rather challenging freelance editing project. When coworkers asked me the next day how I managed not to be a zombie after that, I replied honestly: “Chai and Eric Stuart on repeat.”

It’s good music, and more often than not, it makes my spirit sing.

Now I’m supposed to tag people, but not many people who read this blog leave comments, so I don’t know who to tag. If you read this, then please consider yourself tagged!

Posted by Rebecca in Uncategorized