Radio 58, side A, track 10: “New Music promo: Belinda Carlisle, Midnight Oil, and Laurie Anderson”

Oh, KISD FM, one can never have enough new music promos!  And just like the last new music promo, I jumped ahead to check and see if I’d captured the songs featured on this one, because a couple of them didn’t sound familiar to me after all this time.  And while I was lucky enough to capture Belinda Carlisle’s new hit, I wasn’t so fortunate with “Blue Sky Mine” and “Babydoll”.  So I tracked them down on YouTube and listened to them for the very first time ever just for this post.

It’s fascinating to me listening to these songs now based off a new music promo from 1990, because while Belinda’s song is deeply ingrained in me (as we’ll discuss in the near future), I’m only familiar with a few fleeting snippets of the other two songs.  Had I spent a different hour here or another hour there sitting in front of the stereo, in all likelihood, those two other songs would have gotten recorded and I’d be writing about all my favorite memories of them on here.  But that didn’t happen.  So now I can only guess what I would have thought of them.

As is no surprise, I’m pretty open-minded when it comes to the music from my radio station since I loved pretty much everything that was ever on it.  And “Blue Sky Mine” is the most upbeat song I’ve ever heard by Midnight Oil, if one can use the words “upbeat” and “Midnight Oil” in the same sentence, which I’m not actually sure that you can.  But yeah, it’s a pretty great song, and I guarantee that had I heard it back in the day, the whole message about environmentalism and mining would have gone right over my head, and I would have thought it was a happy song about the sky being blue.  Now of course it depresses me even as I’m enjoying it, which is exactly what a Midnight Oil song is supposed to do.

And Laurie Anderson. . .all I can say is that I think it speaks volumes about how awesome my radio station was that “Babydoll” was a hot hit.  Besides this song, the only other reason I’m familiar with Laurie Anderson is because I watched “Home Of The Brave”, which I’d borrowed from the library, and I’d been interested in seeing it because it was recommended in the book “Guide For The Film Fanatic”.  All I’ll say is that the movie wasn’t my cup of tea.  And I don’t like the taste of tea.  So yeah.  And “Babydoll” sounds exactly like the kind of song that would be featured on “Home Of The Brave”.  Make of that what you will.

The best thing about all of this, though, KISD FM, is that even after all these years you’re still introducing me to new music.  You’re the best!