Serendipity

So for a couple of months now I've been wondering who wrote the song on the Sony Bravia commercial - the one with all those bouncing balls. Anyway, about 6 months ago, I had my parents down for dinner, and I was showing off my new home theatre set up to my old man with the Nick Drake - Treasury SACD, and my mum LOVED it. My parents and I have never had much in common musically, so I'm pretty stoked, but more than this, I've now opened up a whole new world in the previously very sparsely populated category of 'Things to buy my Mum and Dad for birthdays/christmas/mothers/fathers day'.

So for Christmas Mum gets a couple of Belle & Sebastian albums (Dad still gets Scotch, its just the rules).... given with some trepidation, because a. Just because she liked Nick Drake doesn't mean she'll like B&S, and b. There's no guarantee my Mum is actually capable of telling me the truth if she doesn't like them, and I could have started down a path that leads to Mum having a pile of indie/folkish records gathering dust in a cupboard somewhere, to be brought out only when I'm around to spare my feelings.

It come to Mothers day and I'm browsing my local record store, when I stumble across a CD called Modern folk, and I think - Perfect! Not only should my Mum dig most of this stuff, but if she likes some artists in particular, then I've opened a treasure chest of future gift options. It's got Sufjan, Devendra, Antony & The Johnsons, Final Fantasy - all the usual suspects, so I grab it, take it home and have a listen (just to make sure Mum will dig it). One of the few artists I hadn't heard was Jose Gonzalez, who I must admit I had assumed must be a tropicalia artist from the latin name, and the fact that I had heard of him, and in the online musical circles I travel this tropicalia stuff is fairly popular, but its never done much for me. This was the standut track on the album for me, so I decided I need to grab his album, the 2003 release Veneer.

I'm bumming around the house listening to this album, thinking what a fool I'd been for not investigating this guy before, just because of a name, when I hear it. The song thats been bouncing around in my head for months - the song from the Sony commercial. I just love it when I discover gems like this purely by accident.