The Swimming Song

The ladies (and few gents) over at ONTD_Olympics never really cease to inspire these posts.

The other day in one of our infamous "off topic" posts, someone posed the question "which songs remind you of the Olympics?" Now usually for me, I make pretty strong associations between songs and events and sometimes with people. Usually what happens is this "event" of sorts will be going on and I'll just happen to be listening to a specific song on heavy rotation at the same time, thus the two become linked. This time, however, the song I associate most closely with the games was one that I had in my song library for a pretty long time and didn't make that connection until after the Olympics were actually over.

Allow me to explain. In preparation for our first show of "Oh, Yes They Did!" I wanted to, of course, discuss the games (being that the USMOST was basically my 24/7 for 8 days of the games and countless days following, it just seemed appropriate) but I also wanted to dedicate a song to the boys. Honestly, I thought all of the songs that NBC had chosen for the Olympics pretty much all sucked so... I definitely wouldn't be using any of those. Plus, I wanted to be a little more original and choose something of my own. We could, of course, go the comedic route (which we later did) and choose a song by Lil Wayne or Young Jeezy - two well known favorites of Phlochte - but for this show I wanted to play something that was a bit more serious. I mean we love to poke fun at our swimmer boys but all joking aside, watching them this summer made us all incredibly proud and even a bit emotional at times (not gonna lie, I totally cried when Phelps won his 8th gold medal) Though I could have lived without NBC playing Peter Gabriel's "Your Eyes" during a Phelpsian montage, I think the majority of us felt and knew that we were witnessing something pretty special. Hey, they make you wait four years - it better be special!

In my ongoing search to find the perfect song I looked to my own music library and low and behold - I found it. The song was sweet, a little sad and all about my favorite Olympic sport: Swimming. It was the first song we played on the show and I was very honored to learn that a listener was inspired to download it after hearing us play it. Even though it might make you a little sad and nostalgic for those two weeks in August I think it'll bring back some great memories too. For those of you who didn't hear it on the show, here is "The Swimming Song" by Loudon Wainwright III


Oh, and for those of you who are wondering. Loudon is Rufus' dad.

And P to the S, Cullen Jones will forever be my hero for being a proud member of the facebook group "That's What Those Frenchies Get;" a group dedicated to the fact that the USMOST destroyed the French in the 4x100 freestyle relay after Alain Bernard started talkin' some trash.