Monday Music, cub scouting and other stuff.

I just came back from camping with the cub scouts, and I am tired, we have been wide open since before Christmas and I am just pooped.   We had an abundance of rain Liquid Sunshine so it was a bit messy but the kids had a good time.  I mentioned to my wife on the road trip back, "I am camped out".  Well I have cub day camp in june and the wife is taking our son to Webelo Day camp in July so she took some time off for that one.  I am hoping my days settle down, I have a lot of stuff that needs to be handled at home and I am hoping to find the time soon. 
    On a different note, I see the spin meisters trying to cover the Obungler administration on Bengazi, the IRS targeting Tea Party groups and his justice department pulling phone records from the AP.   Goebbels would be proud to see the big lie repeated again and again, if they keep saying it, they are hoping that the American citizens will swallow the deception.  I heard on some poll that 53% of the American public approve of his handling of the situation and I keep thinking " What survey and who are they asking these questions to"?  They must have gone to their super duper secret roster of hardcore democrat supporters to get those numbers.

    Well anyway here is another installment of "Monday Music.  I decided to go with "Pressure" from Billy Joel, it is off his Nylon Curtain album and I considered it a very good album.  I still have my record that is LP at home. 

"Pressure" is a synthesizer-driven song from 1982 by Billy Joel about difficulty dealing with the stress of daily living. The song was a single from the album The Nylon Curtain.

Themes

In Night School, a show airing on MTV in 1982 that ran roughly a half-hour long, in which he answers questions posed by audience members, Billy Joel reveals that the pressure he was talking about in the song was something along the lines of writing pressure and pressure to provide.

When I was starting out and trying to get things going, the pressure was if you don't get things going, they're going to throw you out of this apartment. There was that kind of pressure. "I'm hungry," my stomach was going, "pressure, food." I think that's pretty intense pressure. The pressure I was writing about in this song wasn't necessarily music business pressure, it was writing pressure. ... At the time, I was saying, "Well, I gotta write some more stuff for the album"; I was about halfway through, and I said, "Well, what am I gonna do? I don't have any ideas, it's gone, it's dead, I have nothing, nothing, nothing. There's nothing." And then the woman who is my secretary came into the house at that point and said, "Wow, you look like you're under a lot of pressure. I bet you that'd be a good idea for a song." And I went, "Thank you!"

 Single and album edits

The single version removes the third verse (starting with "Don't ask for help, you're all alone") and the second bridge. This version of the song was included in the original release of the Greatest Hits I & II compilation album, but the full album version was restored for the remastered edition, as well as the Complete Hits Collection in 1997. Radio stations vary in whether they play the shortened or the full version of the song. The song is written in a minor key. In playing the song on a TV special, Joel played the song in a major key, and commented that it sounds like a polka when played that way.

 Music video

The music video of the song features the full version, instead of the shortened one. A common motif in the video is the use of water, whether splashed on Joel's shoes, rushing out from school desks, or flooding his apartment. The video was directed by Russell Mulcahy and made its premiere on MTV on September 9, 1982. Several scenes in the video make references to movies such as A Clockwork Orange and Poltergeist. During a game show parody two-thirds of the way through the video, a bio for Joel briefly flashes on the screen. It reads: "William Joel, Age: 29, Occupation: Computer Software, Interests: fast bikes, cooking, water sports, satellite." Joel was actually 33 when the video was shot.