Sash & Me Experience ... Surfing With the Alien!

It's Ariel! Yay!

So we were on our first long road trip --

(Ariel: Wait, should this post be about us experiencing our first long road trip? Sasha: Girl, it's our blog. We just write about whatever we want to. Maybe you can do both at the same time? Or save the road trip for later? Who cares? There's no rules. Ariel: Okay I guess ...)

-- uhh ... first long road trip, and msg (that's the BF, but I like calling him msg 'cause that's what Claire calls him, and she's my role model GF) brought along some CDs to listen to, which I guess is sort of cute and old-school since everybody has their music on digital now? Anyhow, he played some CD or another and everybody was like, "Well, that was nice," and I guess he wanted a bigger reaction, so he said, "Okay, well, this next one is one of my favorite albums ever." The CD cover had this very comic-book style picture of a silver guy riding a surfboard through some weird spacey or other dimension background. (I later found out this guy is called the Silver Surfer, which I probably would have guessed if it didn't seem way too obvious. Also the character was created by someone called "Jack Kirby" who is apparently one of the greatest comic book artists ever, which meant we had something else to put on our "need to experience" list, namely reading some comics by him.)

I guess I should say I haven't heard all that much music and Sash has only heard a little more, so we didn't much know what to expect.

And even if we'd heard a lot of music we wouldn't have known what to expect!

Holy moly!

The album is called Surfing With the Alien, and the dude it's by is Joe Satriani, who is obviously the most incredible guitarist I've ever heard, which maybe isn't saying much because he's one of the first guitarists I ever heard, but I think even not knowing much about guitars, I'm safe saying this guy is super-good.

My. Mind. Was. Blown.

Like, from the very first song, which is the title song.

Elle, who is our most cynical GF, asked early on if the whole thing was one long guitar solo, but Sash and I shushed her so we could listen. As far as I could tell, it was for sure a song song and not just a guitar solo song, because there was a verse melody (played on a screaming guitar) and a refrain melody (also on a screaming guitar) and then the verse melody again and refrain melody again and then the first actual solo.

At this point, Elle said, "Holy sh__, I was wrong before, because this is a guitar solo!"

Which pretty much sums up the whole album ... rockin' catchy tunes that would be pretty darn incredible even if they were just the song song parts, and then these insane parts where Joe is just wailing on the guitar in ways that create all these wild and different sounds at super-sonic jet speeds ... Sash and I were pretty much going crazy the entire time it was on. I thought we invented a new thing where you thrash around to the music and pretend your playing the guitar or drums or something, but Claire informed us in her nice, kind way that other people already did this and it's called "air guitar."

It was maybe the wrong album for me to listen to as my first start-to-finish listening of a whole rock and roll album because it made it hard for me to hear other guitarists and think they were good!

Probably I haven't done it justice with this post, but hopefully you get the idea and will go listen to it if you like amazing excellent rock guitar songs.

Okay, I guess that's all for my first post.

Rock on!

(Oh, Elle says to type this:

\m/

Thanks, Elle, whatever that means!)