All That I Want - The Weepies

This little song showed up in a JC Penney's commercial some years ago and I looked up the fok singing it. I liked it so much I bought it for 99 cents on the Internet. The song is an odd little Christmasy song by an indie group from Seattle called "The Weepies". It was this song that showed me what a powerful tool the Internet was. These guys did a song they liked. They put it up online and sang it in little venues around Seattle without the permission of any big record companies. An advertiser stumbled on it and they made some money on it and found some new fans including me!

I love the Internet. It's technological capabilities are breaking down the stranglehold that big companies have on music, books, and even movies and television. The Internet provides a platform for creative people to publish their work without having to get the approval of some stodgy old gatekeeper. If you think you've written the next "Hunt for Red October" or "Harry Potter", then you can just write it up, publish it yourself on Amazon and with a little hard work and marketing you can have yourself a hit. You can sing your songs and sell them online. You can even record your music in your living room with a modicum of equipment and produce your own CDs with printed labels or sell your music online as Mp3s.

So without further ado, here's the little song that taught me why the Internet is actually a good thing for real people and conversely, why big digital, record companies, movie companies and book publishers would rather the government control it. It makes keeping small upstart competitors from messing with their markets because it's easier to bribe 10 or 20 FCC staffers than it is to make 10 million customers happy.

So, I give you, The Weepies performing "All That I Want" live.






This song reminds me of another Christmas tradition up here in Washington State. If you ever watched Sleepless in Seattle, you got a peek at the community of houseboat dwellers along Puget Sound. Every year a bunch of folk load guitars and singers into kayaks and canoes and paddle among the houseboats singing Christmas carols. I just think that's inordinately cool. This would be a good song for that. The words talk about "carols on the water". Maybe that's what they were talking about.

Here's the recorded version if you want the Mp3 for your I-pod.

© 2017 by Tom King