Venus and Jupiter are Alright Tonight

Finally getting out of my recent case of Winter Blues today, though I don’t think I can blame the time of year since these Blues seem to manifest at any point of the year off and on for the last couple of decades or so. It’s during these times I usually end up buying something on-line. The last time I ended up getting the Rubber Soul CD by The Beatles after needing to listen to In My Life every day for a couple of weeks via a video with the lyrics somebody uploaded to YouTube .

Yes, it is amazing that YouTube is good for something other than watching cat videos. Now that it is the go to outlet for artists to upload their official music videos, you can pretty much listen to anything you want on the site now. You can find a few hidden jewels in there too with just some random searching. During my recent bout of listening to You’re Beautiful by James Blunt, Someone I Used to Know by Gotye, and Monster by Eminem/Rihanna, I ended up watching clips of amateur performances on the TV shows The Voice and X Factor. There are some really good unknowns out there, one in particular caught my attention during a clip of the British version of X Factor. It was a 16 year old (at the time in 2011) girl from Northern Ireland named Janet Devlin who sung Elton John’s Your Song (another all time great tune). She had such a unique voice that I just had to find out what happened to her and if she ever put out an album. As it turns out, she finished in 2^nd place during that season, and later raised some money to put out an album on her own, which was later re-released officially under a new name. So it is now with great anticipation that I await my CD of Running with Scissors by Janet Devlin in the mail! (Yes, for you Weird Al Yankovic fans, that was the first thing that came to my mind as well, but it’s definitely not a re-make of his parody album)

Anyway, I had all those songs running through my head as I was enjoying the peacefulness of dusk this evening while shoveling out the driveway and brushing the recent snow from the cars. We finally got a bit of snow on my weekend off that I could actually take the time to enjoy like I mentioned in my last blog. Just a very peaceful evening with the only sounds (aside from my scraping) being the wind rushing through the trees around the street with the cloudless sky above me. I don’t know why that relaxes me, but it seems it was just what I needed to break myself out of the Blues that had me in their grip the last week or so. Or perhaps it just could have been the mystical forces of the juxtaposition of Jupiter rising in the East and Venus setting in the West. Regardless, I am feeling like my old self once again and looking forward to listening to a great new artist in another week or so.