The mock drafts were more or less the first area where I started interacting on KSK, and still remain one of my favorite features.  Every now and again, when a good idea strikes me, I’ll send in suggestions to KSK for a topic.  Some get used (I will always be thrilled with how much fun everyone had with the “Rock Star Girlfriend” draft), and others don’t.  Some, hopefully, (like my suggestion of “Celebrity to Give the Eulogy at Your Funeral”) are sitting in the hopper for a slow week.  Some ideas are just a little too weird or complex or just have too thin a draft class to be good topics, and this one has been kicking around in my mind for a bit so I figured this would be a good place to drop it.

The topic: choose an artist/musician to compose and/or perform the soundtrack to your existence on this planet.  You can only choose one artist for the whole album – think Simon and Garfunkel’s soundtrack for The Graduate.  Living or dead is fine.  For my pick – I’m going to go with Harry Nilsson.   I’m not even that big of a fan nor do I think his songs match my life events particularly well – but for some reason he’s been stuck in my head as my pick since I thought of this.  I guess it’s just a sense of intuition that he would have done a good job.  So here I go.  A few representative tracks that would make the final cut:

1. “Early in the Morning” – For that morning as a sophomore in college after I hooked up with a half-Japanese violinist and was walking home through the mist – feeling ten feet tall – past all of the freshmen headed to their P.E. classes.  It would probably have to be re-recorded as an instrumental, as the lyrics are the exact opposite sentiment from the triumph I was feeling, but the music fits nicely.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_FGC0VHiTk]

2. “Jump into the Fire” – For that big day/night out in Durban where we went to a rugby game and saw a team score a last-second try to snag a playoff spot, followed by a trip to the nightclub Tiger Tiger where my ride got kicked out for dealing ecstasy (he was actually giving it away) and I found a nice young girl named Natasha to bring me home.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QghwNqlCRE]

3. “Without You” – I chased a girl for ten years, caught her, and lost her.  After she broke things off this pretty much summed up how I felt for months.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bQGRRolrg0]

4. “The Puppy Song”/”Good Old Desk” – I’d ask Harry to somehow combine the sentiments of The Puppy Song with some of the lyrics and music to “Good Old Desk”, with reference to my dog, who is the most wonderful creature on the planet.  Uh, except for my wife, I mean.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DafgwTBk8pQ]

5. “Coconut” – Exit music, for after the cirrhosis finally takes me.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmsqV7AmOcc]