Artist	Song
Death Cab For Cutie	Transatlanticism
Kabanjak	These Streets We Walk
Kasem, Casey	Long Distance Dedication (Original Air Date:Weekend of January 15 & 16, 2000)
Mitchell, Joni	Amelia
Parliament	Oh Lord, Why Lord, Prayer
Prince	Morning Papers

Comment:

Whether your travel is transatlantic or just to the end of the driveway for the morning paper, make it a meaningful journey. We have here a collection of unrelated compositions fitting together quite nicely.
Parliament - "Oh Lord, Why Lord?" from 1968, performed by Los Pop Tops was the first pop song to incorporate the melody of Pachelbel's Canon in D. George Clinton and company released this renditon in 1970 on the album Osmium
Joni Mitchell - See below.
Prince - Click here to see Prince perform this song.
Casey Kasem - Provided voices for Shaggy (Scooby-Doo) and Robin (Batman) from the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons. His inclusion here is inspired by Negativland's single "U2". Appears courtesy of AM/FM Radio Networks and Chancellor Media Corp. All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. - Martin Buber
Featured Artist: Joni Mitchell
The drone of flying engines
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you
Then your life becomes a travelogue
Of picture-postcard-charms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm

-from the song Amelia, in the Hejira album

No simple description can do justice to a multilayered work of art. All we can do is to hint briefly at the richness of the music through two of the central pieces in the cycle, Amelia and Hejira (the title song). Amelia refers to none other than Amelia Earhart, the famous pilot-explorer who died in 1937. In the song-poem, she and Joni merge in a surrealist, mythical vision of flight. The music creates a hypnotic, "floating" background that never reaches home. At first listening, it seems to have a key center, until you try to sing it. Then you realize that she, in fact, moves it back and forth between two keys without ever settling into one. The effect of this harmonic design, coupled with the slow, gently swaying rhythms, seem to "open up into the sky." Superimposed upon the basic structure are whining, "cool," electric sounds, often dissonant, that haunt the musical background. The musical elements support a carefully balanced poetical structure. In each verse of six lines, the harmonic and rhythmic tension reach a maximum level in the third line, which causes the following three lines to come gently tumbling out in perfect acoustic symmetry.

A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea, like me she had a dream to fly
Like Icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm
(fifth verse)

For the willing listener, Amelia evokes a totally contemporary experience of time, prompted and shaped by flight over the vast expanse of the modern world - a source of both confusion and revelation. This journey is clearly symbolic of Joni Mitchell's personal journey. Just as the harmony never comes home, neither does the song offer any resolution other than the refrain: "Amelia, it was just a false alarm."

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