A Tale of Two Songs

I'm terrible at keeping up with current music. I always know what movies are out and what awesome things are currently on TV, but my knowledge of music is usually hopelessly out of date. For instance, last year I decided I really liked a song I kept hearing at the gym, so I located it online and discovered it had gained popularity after having been featured on "Grey's Anatomy" the year before. Ugh! Two other recent favorite songs of mine were songs I downloaded after hearing them in commercials. It's embarrassing.

There are two songs I've had on almost constant rotation on the old iPod lately, and they could not be more different. One is the Oscar-winning "Falling Slowly" from the film "Once," which I recently watched. It's a pretty decent little indie film that I can recommend to anyone who can grasp the idea that in the movie, two people become friends and make music and that's pretty much all that happens. "Falling Slowly" is a beautiful, heartfelt song, and listening to it always reminds me of when, on Oscar night, Jon Stewart brought the two singer/songwriters back onstage so the female one could give an acceptance speech, apparently feeling it was rude for the orchestra to have rush the two of them off the stage prematurely. Any song that reminds me of how I heart Jon Stewart is a good song.

In sharp contrast to "Falling Slowly," the other song stuck in my head non-stop these days is at least brand new. I read about it in some pop-culture-themed blog where the basic idea was "no, this song will not suck me in," so I ended up watching the video and felt compelled to download the song almost immediately. The song is an incredibly asinine little dance tune sung by Vanessa Hudgens of "High School Musical" (and naked internet pictures) fame. The lyrics detail her desire to put on sneakers and go out dancing with her presumably also sneaker-clad friends, and it features the line "Basically what we're gonna do is dance" 18 times in three minutes (yeah, I counted). It's called "Sneakernight." And I admit I love it. No, I'm not kidding. I dare you to listen to it and not feel like dancing. Basically.