I'm still stuck on waking up with Bob Marley going through my head, but it's getting better, thanks to Electric Light Orchestra.

I cancelled my Netflix subscription until further notice (and now have nothing to look forward to in my mailbox except bills and junk mail - why bother?), and one of my last rentals was "Electric Light Orchestra - Live/Discovery". The live portion was a recording for television back in the '70s from the "Out of the Blue" tour. It was partly disappointing because of the few songs where, I believe, they are so obviously playing along with a backing track or outright lip-synching! Or they may have added in the studio elements for the broadcast, but I'm not sure they had the technology to do that so precisely back then. Either way, the effect is the same when what you're hearing doesn't match what you're seeing, and it's even worse when what you're hearing is verbatim what's on the record, studio processing and everything, but that was only one song, the opener.

But they're really performing for most of it, and that was cool. The "Discovery" portion is cheesy studio performance lip-synchs of every song off their "Discovery" album, which I think I still have on vinyl in New Jersey (grooosss!!). Great album, but I wouldn't want it taking up space on my CD rack. The point is it's been a walk down memory lane and put Out of the Blue in heavy rotation on my CD player. I love going back to albums I loved when I was a kid and hearing it in a new way as an adult. And "Out of the Blue" is one damned fine album, start to finish (with the CD, I now listen to the excellent Side 4, which I never used to listen to because "Mr. Blue Sky" at the end of Side 3 sounded like such an album closer, making Side 4 sound more like a coda). Adult, huh, yea.

I woke up to "Exodus" going through my head this morning. Other songs I've woken up to in the past week include: "Exodus", "Trenchtown Rock", "Jammin'", "Zimbabwe", "Ride Natty Ride", and "3 o'clock Roadblock". Let's hope things change after tomorrow, the last day of waking up at five in the morning.