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Agony & Irony

A few months ago, I seemed to have a streak of hearing from people I had not heard from, merely days after I thought about them for the first time in a long time. As of late, certain random questions I've had have been answered -- and it's just rather weird about the timing.

Since these questions involve very little of what I could remember, the most I could ask would be along the lines of a line in Clerks: ". . . that one with that guy who was in that movie that was out last year?" In other words, Google searches wouldn't completely help.

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about:

--Ever since I saw a spoof trailer on YouTube that fused clips from various Martin Scorsese films (or the trailer was cut in a similar fashion to Scorsese's films), I've wondered what the main music cue was used. Since I only knew it was an instrumental, I had no idea how to describe the song other than it had this strong building piano line. Yeah, that's really helpful.

Well, cue to me reading Klosterman's Killing Yourself to Live, and on page 116, there's my answer: it's the coda from Derek & the Dominoes' "Layla." Since I have heard Eric Clapton's Unplugged version hundreds of times and the full length studio version of the song zero times, no wonder I didn't know what it was. The album version features the coda, but the Unplugged version does not. I had only seen Goodfellas once and I never would have believed it was "Layla" if I looked in the credits. I would have just figured it was a song on in the background in a scene.

--For the past few days, I was trying to remember the name of the author that was praised by Oprah for his memoir, but when The Smoking Gun presented evidence that certain parts of the memoir were fabricated, it caused a major uproar. Well, this morning, glancing at Fox News for a second, I got my answer: James Frey. The morning show was teasing a story about his next book. Now I had my answer.

--I picked up Alkaline Trio's Agony & Irony for 50 percent off at a local Borders a few weeks ago. Ever since then, I had wondered about the Trio's record label situation. They signed with V2 after working with Vagrant for a long time, but soon found themselves label-less when V2 was gutted. Signing with Epic and releasing Agony & Irony last year, I thought about their next record, especially since I found their odds-and-sods collection Remains and Agony & Irony to actually be pretty good.

Well, today's word from AP says the band is off of Epic and is releasing their next record on their own label. Oh, the timing.

Where I'm going with all this funny coincidental talk is this: you can never know where answers come from, even if they seem like odd places. I think the same goes with life lessons. Just pay attention, and you'll get most of your answers.

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