Pandora-ing to Wyclef Jean fans (or, I was distracted)

So anyways, April Russo had a request:

If you live in the US, and have both a Pandora and last.fm account, you can do something really nice for Kol.

It turns out that Kol, being British, is adversely affected by Pandora's geotarding, so April requested that we listen to a particular Pandora station, then take any song played by the station, go to last.fm, and tag the song on last.fm with the tag "kol pandora." This way, Kol could kinda sorta get the Pandora effect from last.fm, which people in the United Kingdom CAN access.

Well, I got temporarily distracted after the second song that I tagged - Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" (which, ironically, isn't currently on last.fm, but I tagged the entry anyway in case it is added later).

Wikipedia says the following about the song:

"Wish You Were Here" is the title track on Pink Floyd's 1975 album Wish You Were Here. The song's lyrics encompass writer Roger Waters' feelings of alienation from other people. Like most of the album, it refers to former Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett and his breakdown.

Rolling Stone, which labeled the song as the 316th greatest song of all time, shared a sad story about the recording of the song:

Syd Barrett...mysteriously appeared in the studio in such bad shape nobody recognized him....

But that isn't the saddest story that I heard. After I shared the story of how I was distracted by the Pink Floyd song, April Russo shared two things with me.

The first was a story that appeared on a website called The Cosmic Gift. The writer mentions how he had lost track of an old friend of his named Steve Bresnahan. By the time the writer found Bresnahan, he had already passed away ten years previously. Steve's father explained the circumstances:

"[Steve died in an] Auto accident. I suppose you know Steve worked with the homeless in Florida. There was a woman that he had helped get an apartment. She needed money and the day it happened, he went to work, picked up his paycheck, cashed it and took her some money. On his way back to work a van broadsided his car on the driver's side. The impact severed an artery to his heart and although they worked on him in surgery for hours trying to save him, it was too late. I'm an atheist, but Steve was a born-again Christian. If you believe the story in the New Testament about the Good Samaritan, then doing what he did was just about a guarantee of instant sainthood. The people I met in Florida at his memorial service all seemed to act as if they believed that. Even for an atheist, stuff like that strikes me as pretty cool."

If you read to the end of the item, to the obituary, you will see why this was shared with me.

On a happier note, April also shared a three-part tribute to Pink Floyd on YouTube, performed by Shadow Gallery. The first part is here. (Warning: the video portion of the third part is NSFW.)

But I don't crowd source EVERYTHING; I do a bit of discovery myself. Not finding the original "Wish You Were Here" on last.fm, I began searching for cover versions - and discovered that many of the last.fm songs entitled "Wish You Were Here" bear no relation to the original, although Kosheen used the song as the basis for something else that they did.

Wyclef Jean, however, shared a cover version that was very nice, and included an extra verse that personalized the song for him. This one's on YouTube also.



So after all of that...I found yet another cover version of Fox on the Run, and the video even included a dog. None of the other versions that I cited in my post Blinded by the Bluegrass had a dog. But Pink Floyd did, I guess...