Track 44: "Chinese Translation" by M. Ward

What do you do with the pieces of a broken heart?

I was hoping to get a little further into the tracks, quantity-wise, before I started repeating artists, but there's really not much rhyme or reason to how I come up with the songs for this blog, so I guess it's really not a big deal. Songs just sort of pop in my head, or I'll hear them for the first time in a long while, or I just know a song is awesome as hell and is blog-worthy. But chances are there will be a lot of repeat artists on the Playlist, because well, most of my favorite bands/musicians have more than one great song...duh.

I spoke of my relatively new-found, non-gay, man-crush on M. Ward on Track 8 with the superbly chill "Here Comes the Sun Again." I really have only been listening to M. Ward for a couple of years, and it's easy to say he's one of my most favorite "new" musicians. There's just something invitingly simple and really gorgeous about his songs. He's got a great knack for hooks and there's just something cool and easy about his sort of Indie-folk-crooner voice.

I was floored the first time I heard "Chinese Translation" off of the album "Post War" (which is a GREAT record). The cool acoustic intro, the pumping rhythm, the spacey/melodic electric guitar tones--it's just a great sounding song.

But the song itself tells a pretty cool story. Young man goes on a journey, sails across the sea, climbs a mountain to find the proverbial wise old man on the mountain top. He asks the all-important three questions and the old man breaks into a song about how he was once a young fool who sailed across the sea, climbed a mountain to find a wise old man, asked him three questions, and the old man broke into a song...just one of those stories that could perpetuate itself infinitely.

And this is just one of those songs I could listen to over and over and over....