Archives for category: Music

My iPod is trying to break my heart

November 2, 2005 //

I was listening to the iPod at work today, something I don’t do nearly often enough, and it was hitting me with long strings of favorites, as though it knew I was in the mood for the musical equivalent of comfort food. (I didn’t know I was in that mood, actually, since I woke up feeling fairly chipper, but the iPod always knows.) It started out with a dazzling three-in-a-row of Elvis Costello, the Who, and the Jam, but then it started getting into the heart-tugging stuff. A few songs later it played my single favorite Pogues song (“Thousands Are Sailing”—coincidentally, one of the rare Pogues songs that Shane McGowan didn’t write), followed shortly by my favorite Caitlin Cary song (“Fireworks”), and so on. And then it pulled out the big guns: two older Sam Phillips songs in a row. The first was “Go Down,” from “Cruel Inventions,” not my favorite song on that record, but a pretty great song anyway. And then “Strawberry Road.” I know I wrote about that one recently here, but I have to reiterate what an astonishing song it is. Possibly one of my favorite songs of all time. I’ve already quoted one of the killer lines, but for some reason I’d forgotten this one:

“Pain is sharper
When I suspect
That true love runs
Looking for us
Like a lion in our dreams”

And weirdly, all those songs pulling on my heartstrings started to alter my mood—I started feeling sad for no good reason. That almost never happens to me. When I’m already down, music either improves my mood or distracts me from it, and when I’m in a good mood, even the saddest songs are pleasurable. So this was a rare experience, and a little worrisome.

Fortunately, Scott Miller’s entirely silly “Good Morning, Midnight,” from the live acoustic record the name of which provides the tagline for this blog, came on, and Scott’s long, entertaining introduction to it cheered me back up again. And then I turned off the iPod for a while. I have enough trouble staying in a decent mood without outside stimuli—particularly outside stimuli that are supposed to make me feel better—contributing to the problem.

Categories Music

T.S. Eliot, Lori Carson, and other random musings

October 31, 2005 //

(Apparently, I should post pictures of my cats more often—it makes people comment. I like it when people comment. That’s a hint.)

Several days ago, I was going to parse that T.S. Eliot quote, but I’m not sure it would be appropriate to discuss the exact thought process that caused the quote to invade my head, so I’ll just talk about the poem a little as a springboard for a thorough pimping of the magnificent Lori Carson. The poem is called “Portrait of a Lady,” after the Henry James novel (though the poem bears no resemblance to the book). I can’t say it’s my favorite Eliot poem—that would be “Prufrock,” of course—but it’s a poem that meant a great deal to me and made me a little uncomfortable for years and years. It’s about a young man having a relationship of sorts with an older woman, though it’s never made clear how much older she is (I’ve always believed that she isn’t much older than the narrator, and the references to her being “about to reach her journey’s end” are typical of her exaggerated, overdramatic style). The woman is vaguely ridiculous; this comes across when you read the poem in the way she repeats herself and inserts parenthetical phrases and makes dramatic pronouncements, but it was made even more clear to me when I heard a recording of Eliot reading the poem. He doesn’t put on a female voice or anything, but he draws out the syllables of her dialogue, and there’s a distinct note of contempt in his voice. But the narrator is also drawn to her, and the most stunning moment of the poem comes when she kind of puts him in his place:

“Perhaps you can write to me.”
My self-possession flares up for a second;
This is as I had reckoned.
“I have been wondering frequently of late
(But our beginnings never know our ends!)
Why we have not developed into friends.”
I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark
Suddenly, his expression in a glass
My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.

(That last line may be my favorite in the whole history of poetry, I’m not sure.)

It was written around the same time as “Prufrock,” but where that poem showed how prodigiously gifted Eliot was at 29, “Portrait of a Lady” shows that he was also still a young man, and a little bit of a callow youth. I have sometimes worried about bearing a resemblance to the lady in the poem—a little excessive, a little ridiculous—but I also love the poem. I can recite it from memory, having learned it (along with another Eliot poem—not “Prufrock,” alas, though I’ve tried, but one of the “Ash Wednesday” poems) back when I was a college girl who not only read but, worse, wrote poetry. (It was a bit of a cliché, Barnard girls writing poetry, but I couldn’t help it.) Nowadays, I don’t read much poetry, except when something in The New Yorker catches my eye or I pick up my giant volume of the great Paul Muldoon’s complete poems, but I still make sure I haven’t forgotten “Portrait of a Lady” by reciting it in the car from time to time.

I’d never read any criticism of it till a few days ago, so the preceding paragraph is my own interpretation, but I hunted around a little bit for some academic commentary on it the other day, and the consensus seems to be that the poem is about the impossibility of communication between men and women. (I don’t disagree with that analysis; that’s what “Prufrock” is largely about too, after all.) And that’s pretty much Lori Carson’s great theme too. (How’s that for a smooth segue? Heh.) Her songs are preoccupied—you could even say “obsessed”—with the pursuit of love and the failure of love and the transformative power of love, which is part (okay, most) of what I find so compelling about her songwriting. It’s her great theme. I’m sure she’s not as regularly heartbroken as her darkest songs suggest, though judging by the (highly readable and engaging) journal she keeps on her site, she does go through relationships pretty frequently. But whatever her romantic life is like in the real world, the version of it that is revealed in her songs is exceptionally powerful and moving.

She’s also a perfectly wonderful singer, a breathy but very clear and pure and strong soprano (with the minor caveat that she will occasionally slip into a sort of baby-doll voice, not quite Victoria Williams-like, but still potentially off-putting if you’re allergic to that kind of voice. But she doesn’t do it much, and she’s done it less and less as her career has progressed).

Lori holds a place in my heart because her second album, “Where It Goes,” was my soundtrack/security blanket during the year that my first marriage was falling apart. When I think of that year, the first image that comes to mind is me on the train ride from Park Slope into the city, listening to the first four songs on “Where It Goes” over and over and over again. (It was a while before I learned the rest of the record as thoroughly as those four songs.) It’s really an extraordinary run of songs (and very well sequenced, too). The first song, “Down Here,” is addressed to a lover who has died, and it’s wrenchingly beautiful:

“Down here itâ??s as you left it
Iâ??m waiting for the grey to clear
Donâ??t know what Iâ??m running on
But some time ago all hope was gone”

That’s followed by the upbeat-sounding (but heartbreaking) “Waking to the Dream of You,” which is about surviving the aftermath of a breakup and the advice that you get from friends who want to help you get through it. After that is a very passionate and romantic song about new love after old, “You Won’t Fall,” in which she promises,

“You can rest easy
Your beauty is clear to me
You wonâ??t fall
You wonâ??t fall”

I could quote the full lyrics from all four songs, because they’re marvelous, but I won’t; I’ll just quote the fourth song, which so perfectly captured how I felt that year—bruised and battered (emotionally, that is) from one major relationship ending and simultaneously hopeful and terrified and thrilled at the new relationship that was starting up—that I could hardly bear to listen to it, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. It’s called “Petal,” and it’s one of my all-time favorite songs ever ever ever.

“Iâ??ve been looking for it all my life
But never found it
I got used to being alone
I know how and I do it so well
Even if we learn to speak the same language
How long can it last
You know as well as I do
How it goes
The way it goes

You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those thorns
You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those
Iâ??ve changed my mind, Iâ??ve changed my mind
Iâ??ve changed my mind, Iâ??ve changed my mind

Iâ??ve been waiting for it my whole life
And so many times I thought
Hey this is it
Iâ??m ready letâ??s go baby
But it all led nowhere
Turned out wrong
And I still believe in it
But not much
I know Iâ??m strong enough to fall again
But isnâ??t it just foolishness
Knowing how it goes
The way it goes

So, should we give it
Just another chance
Although I know the odds are against us
We know how to fuck it up
We do it so well
And even if we love each other so much
And plan our lives like we will stay together
Make a home and a family
Can we change the way it goes
How it goes?

You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those thorns
You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those…”

And then there’s “Little Suicides,” a song that Lori co-wrote with Anton Fier. They recorded it during her tenure with the Golden Palominos, and it’s pretty much a perfect song, one that kills me every time I hear it, no matter how many times I hear it, with its repeated theme of “Can’t I (/we) just be happy for a while?/It happens all the time,” and my favorite line, “If love heals anything at all/We should be flying.” Not to mention the chorus:

“All these little suicides
They hardly make a mark
I can take these funhouse rides
I’m a natural in the dark
I’m a natural in the dark
In the dark…”

Lori’s best records, I think, are “Where It Goes” and “Everything I Touch Runs Wild,” but her more recent work is worth paying attention to also. The most recent record, “The Finest Thing,” is all textures and soundscapes and might be best suited for people who are already converts, but it’s still worth picking up. And “Stars,” which came out in 1999, is seriously underrated. Still, I’d start with “Where It Goes” and/or “EITRW,” and go from there, if I were you. So go buy them, right now. You can find them used all over the place, unfortunately.

(It’s a little odd to be writing about Lori Carson when my head is still completely possessed by Patty Griffin’s most recent album, and especially by the song “Useless Desires,” which I listened to no fewer than four times today. They’ve actually got a few things in common musically, Griffin and Carson. But I came late to the party with Patty Griffin, and I can’t say anything very well-informed about her; I can only talk about how powerfully her songs have affected me lately. I’ve been a Lori Carson fan for a lot longer, so there’s more to say.)

Oh, and while I’m going on and on and on, I have an actual movie recommendation: “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” a new noirish movie that is both homage to and parody of the noir genre but is also an insanely clever and entertaining film on its own. It helps that the cast is so great: Robert Downey, Jr., whom I love and always root for (geez, if anyone ever needed evidence that addiction is a real, and incredibly challenging, disease…), is at the top of his game, and Val Kilmer is equally good, just note-perfect. I’d never heard of the female lead, Michelle Monaghan, before, but she’s one to watch—she handles a not particularly easy role with aplomb. The movie stops just short of being too clever for its own good, but it is very, very clever, and hysterically funny in places. I expect we’ll see it again when it comes out on DVD. Go see it after you buy those Lori Carson records.

Categories Everything, Music, Muzzy-headed introspection

Another one for the shortlist

October 25, 2005 //

(that is, the list of records that I need to remember not to forget when the end of year best-of lists roll around, as they will any day now):

Low, “The Great Destroyer.” One of the most improbable records ever to show up on a list of mine, because for many years, I loathed Low (and justifiably so, I think, though others will disagree, and have disagreed, with me vehemently on that topic). I mean, I am not mope-averse, don’t get me wrong. I love Iron and Wine (though I understand why many people don’t), I’m a Death Cab for Cutie fan, and the semi-mopey Dolorean (about whom I really need to write something extensive one of these days) are among my current very favorite bands. But Low weren’t just mopey, they were wrist-slittingly mopey—not meaning that their songs were so sad that they made the listener suicidal, but meaning that you’d willingly slit your wrists just in order to not have to hear them anymore. And then they made “The Great Destroyer,” which is largely upbeat and poppy, and what isn’t upbeat and poppy is lush and evocative. Totally different from anything I’ve ever heard from them before. It won’t be in my top 5, but I’m pretty sure it will make the top 10…which currently has, as usual, about 15 records in it.

I thought of about four other shortlist candidates earlier this week and can’t remember them now. Which is proof that I need to keep the shortlist going.

Categories Music

Faith, Sam, and me

October 23, 2005 //

(Note: “faith” in the subject line is the lowercase-f kind. There will be no mention of Faith Hill—arguably the most egregious example of All That Is Wrong with Country Music (or at least the most famous one), in this post, or indeed, any other that I will ever write. I promise.)

Someone on one of my e-mail lists posted a link to a quiz recently that focused on religion and spirituality. I’m an Internet quiz buff, I freely admit; I know that most of them are poorly constructed and fuzzily conceived, but they’re fun, and harmless fun at that. So I always take them whenever someone posts a link to them. On this one, my results classified me as “spiritual”—80 percent spiritual, to be exact, but also 60 percent “reason-oriented,” and—perhaps because the quiz seemed (based on the way the questions were phrased) to have a slight bias toward fundamentalist Christianity—they had reason at the opposite end of the spectrum from faith. Which I guess makes sense in a way, but then again, I consider myself both a believer in logic and reason and a person of faith, so the results bugged me a little, even though I know it was just a dumb badly constructed and probably biased Internet quiz.

Faith is something I don’t talk about a lot, and it troubles me a little that I don’t even think about it as much as I used to, but it’s definitely something I possess. I believe in God, unlike many (most?) of my friends. I am purely a secular humanist type in orientation; I believe in science, I believe in evolution, I do not believe that God created man in His image. (Furthermore, and especially because I live next door to Kansas, I am a devout Pastafarian.) And I believe, ever more passionately, in the necessity of the separation of church and state. But I believe in God. There have been times in my life when I’ve wished I didn’t, because the belief doesn’t really make sense when paired with the rest of my worldview. But I think that’s what faith is, what the Kierkegaardian (I was a big Kierkegaard fan back when I still read things like philosophy) leap of faith is all about: I believe because I am incapable of not believing. For me, believing is very much like knowing; it’s something that I feel—not in the frequently misused sense of that word, when people say “I feel” when what they really mean is “I think,” but in a literal, physical way. I’ve even tried not to believe, to abandon anything like faith, but I can’t. It’s not something I can choose to do.

Nonetheless, I’m okay with the fuzzy term “spiritual,” because in the sense in which the quiz used it, it implies that belief is important to me and is an essential part of who I am, but organized religion is not. And that’s completely accurate. I sometimes wish I were part of some sort of religious community, but I don’t know which one I’d join, exactly; if I had kids, I’d raise them in my family’s religion, which is Judaism, but it’s just me (since my husband, raised Methodist, doesn’t believe in God), and I find myself drawn to aspects of several religions: Catholicism, which I investigated pretty extensively when I was in college, and some of the more liberal/socially conscious Protestant denominations (Quakers, Episcopalians, Congregationalists) appeal to me, as do the basic tenets of Judaism. But I figure I’m probably never going to be a religious person exactly, except in my own very personal way. I used to think of myself as a seeker (in the Pete Townshend sense), when I was younger and did a lot of religion-shopping, but now I’d just call myself a believer. I wish I paid more attention to that aspect of my life, as I used to; I used to pray nightly, and now I mostly do it on planes. (That’s an oversimplification, though semi-serious.) It’s been on my mind lately, though, and maybe I will start focusing on it more again, both because just exploring it, and attempting to reconcile it with my decidedly godless-commie-secular-humanist views, interests me, and because it brings comfort and hope to my life, which I occasionally can’t generate on my own.

Sam Phillips—the female singer, not the Elvis guy—is also a believer, and someone who examines her own spirituality and faith regularly, which is one of several reasons that I adore her and wish more people loved her music the way I do. She was raised in a moderately observant Episcopalian family, but somewhere in her teens, I guess, she became more serious about religion; I don’t know if she would have described herself as born again, but she was definitely a Christian. She recorded a few contemporary Christian records under her given name, Leslie Phillips (Sam is a childhood nickname, I guess), at least one of which, “The Turning,” is very good and still widely available. Somewhere along the line, she broke with organized fundamentalist Christianity, but she is still a believer, a seeker, someone who seeks to find truth and meaning through God, I guess. (I’m saying “I guess” a lot because I’m obviously not fully comfortable writing about something as intimate and personal as religious belief on behalf of someone I don’t know, based only on what I’ve read in interviews and, especially, what I’ve gleaned from her songs.) Listening to Sam often helps crystallize my own thoughts about faith and belief, because she writes so eloquently about it. Her most recent record, written in the wake of her divorce from her husband of quite a few years, the fine musician, songwriter, and producer T-Bone Burnett (who has also been part of, and then separated himself from, fundamentalist Christianity), begins with the line, “I was broken when you got me,” which I suspect she is singing to both her ex-husband and to God. That line has been resonating with me (to use a phrase I detest but seem unable to avoid) recently; it makes sense to me on some gut level that I can’t quite explain.

Musically, Sam is a true original. The two great records that she released while she was married to T-Bone (there are several, but there are two in particular, “Cruel Inventions” and “Martinis and Bikinis,” that are nearly perfect) were produced by him, and they’re full of elaborate, Beatles-y arrangements, so they’re a delight to listen to on a purely musical level even if you pay no attention to the lyrics. Her two equally great recent records, “Fan Dance” and “A Boot and a Shoe,” which were not produced by T-Bone, are almost the polar opposite, striking in their spareness and understatement.

And then there’s Sam’s voice, which is also totally unlike anyone else’s sound. She herself has compared it to the braying of a mule, which is unnecessarily harsh, but it’s true that it’s not a conventional voice by any stretch of the imagination. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a wonderful, listenable, affecting voice; it’s just kind of odd, but in a powerful way. It’s instantly recognizable, and when a Sam song comes up on the iPod, I get chills right away, because I know it will make me happy or just make me feel.

I could quote Sam’s lyrics for days on end, but there are a few songs in particular that get at her concept of faith in a particularly concise and thought-provoking way that I’ll quote briefly here, because I’m in the mood to. The song that made me a Sam fan—I read a review that described it in detail and quoted from it, and I was so intrigued by it that I went out and bought the record (on cassette; this was back when my first husband and I could only afford a few CDs a year, and if there was a record that we weren’t both going to listen to, I’d buy it on prerecorded cassette to save money and listen to it in the car) without ever having heard a note—is “Lying,” which is on “Cruel Inventions.” She wrote it partly in response to Sinead O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got,” and the last verse, which addresses that song directly, goes:

If I said I don’t want what I don’t have
And all the answers are in love
If I said I believe in myself
And that’s enough
I’d be lying…

Then there are two from “Martinis and Bikinis” that have a way of coming up on the iPod whenever it’s the exact moment when I need to hear them. One is maybe her best song, an irresistibly catchy pop song called “I Need Love,” and the first verse is pretty stunning:

I left my conscience like a crying child
Locked the door behind me, put the pain on file
Broken like a window, I see my blindness now
(and then the chorus:)
I need love, not some sentimental prison
I need God, not the political church
I need fire to melt the frozen sea inside me
I need love

I find myself singing the second verse a lot when I’m commuting in wretched I-70 traffic on my way to and from work:

Driving into town, tired and depressed
Like a flare, a streetlamp sent an SOS
Peace comes to my rescue
And I don’t know what it means
(followed by the chorus again)

Then there’s the song “Strawberry Road,” which people tend to think is a reference to “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but which actually came from some Eastern religious reference that Sam read. She envisions it as a sort of physical locus of faith, I guess (there’s that “I guess” again):

The strawberry road where the dream fades
Is down between our longing and desire
The strawberry road where our hearts break
Into love

It also contains one of the most beautiful lines in any song I can think of, and that’s the one that tends to pop into my head most often. I’m not quite sure what it has to do with faith, specifically, but it’s tied into it somehow—I feel that, too. It also sums up the way I’ve lived my life at certain times, so it has a special poignancy for me:

You censor longing
And organize beauty
Because you’re afraid you want it more than
Oxygen or light
You can’t get there
With your morals
Or without love…

I have a feeling this post isn’t making much sense, but it’s been fulminating in my head for a couple of weeks now, and this might be as close as I can get to articulating it. And now I need to go listen to some Sam.

(She’s not a huge star by any means, but she tends to inspire tremendous devotion in those of us who do love her. In that spirit, I think, a list friend whom I’ve never actually met recently sent me a live recording of Sam that someone had sent him. He’s never actually seen her live, and it’s one of the great musical gaps in my world that I never have either. I think that if I did, I’d be almost too overcome to bear it, and I’d probably spend the whole show barely able to breathe; that’s what happened to me the first time I saw Iris DeMent, who—as I said a few posts back—has a post of her own brewing in my head.)

I’ve been kind of boring lately here, I think, so I’ll try to post something less esoteric and more entertaining next time. I think I’m going to try to finish up my Replacements tales pretty soon, because I need to stop having those be my main distinguishing feature; they’re old stories that I’m tired of hearing myself tell, so I’ll finish them up here and then retire them.

Categories Music, Muzzy-headed introspection

Music weirdoism

October 20, 2005 //

So I’m pretty used to the idea that I, and the music-crazed types on the various music-related lists I’m on, are way more passionate about music than most people my age—hell, most people, period—are. And by “most people,” I mean not only those folks for whom music is, at best, a pleasant background at work or in public places, but also people who still buy a few CDs now and then and listen to their old records fairly regularly. The people who make up the majority of my world are in a whole different universe of music fandom.

I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; it just is. Sometimes I wonder vaguely about whether my continued involvement in the music world, as a fan and as a Twangfest organizer, is a symptom or maybe even a cause of my not being a real grownup, but mostly I just accept it: this is how I am, and it’s how the people on the e-mail lists are. We’re not music fans, we’re music weirdos.

This morning, I experienced a classic example of my music weirdo status. I’ve been listening to the iPod on the way to and from work all week, because NPR is pledge-driving (my commute isn’t really long enough for me to fuss with hooking up the iPod, so ordinarily, I just listen to NPR, but I can’t hack the pledge drives), and when I got to the parking lot at work, the live version of “Maggie May” from the indescribably great Faces boxed set, “Five Guys Walk Into a Bar,” was just starting up. It was just past 8:30, which is when I’m due at work (though it’s never a big deal if I’m a little late), and I should have just turned the car off and walked the block to the office, and of course, I’ve heard “Maggie May” more times in my life than I could possibly begin to count. But this was the live version, which had never come up on the iPod before, and I had to hear it, all five+ minutes of it, because it sounded so perfect and I couldn’t miss it. So I sat there in the car and waited for the song to finish. I couldn’t do otherwise.

And as I turned off the iPod and got out of the car, I thought, yup. Music weirdo.

Categories Music

The first shortlist

October 17, 2005 //

I am so hopelessly overwhelmed by depression today that I can only think/work in little dribs and drabs, so it seems as good a time as any to make a list I’ve been meaning to make for a while: the Don’t Forget list. We’re heading into that part of the year when best-of lists will be on my mind, and there are some records that I’m afraid I’m going to forget to include. Most of them will be in the “honorable mention” category rather than the actual top ten, but I still don’t want to forget them. So far, the list includes:

1. Bloc Party, “Silent Alarm.” Not exceptional, but good solid indie Britrock that is relatively free of pretention and bombast, unlike a lot of the indie stuff that seems to be so popular these days. (Can you say “Arcade Fire”? I knew you could.)

2. British Sea Power, “Open Season.” A likely low-top-tenner, so I probably won’t forget it; it just came out so early in the year that I’m afraid it will slip my mind. Ironically, BSP may be eclipsed by their cousins Brakes (Brakes’ lead guy used to be in BSP), whose record has much of the same oddball charm combined with echoes of Echo and the Bunnymen and their musical cousins…although I’m listening to “Open Season” right now and thinking that it’s really a great album that may deserve to rank higher than Brakes after all. Hm.

3. Chatham County Line, “Route 23.” (I need to quit thinking that this record is named “Dear 23,” which is an old Posies record. Chatham County Line do not sound like the Posies, to say the least.) I’m generally a little dubious about rock bands who decide to start playing sort-of-bluegrass; I’m not a bluegrass purist by any stretch of the imagination, I just usually find that rock bands can’t pull off the transformation very well. But Chatham County Line aren’t actually a bluegrass band, really, and they have no trouble throwing bluegrass elements into their sound, which I’d describe as Americana if I didn’t loathe that ill-defined, kiss-of-death term so much. They are not yet a great band, in my snooty opinion (IMSO?), but they’re getting there, and though I haven’t spent a whole ton of time listening to the whole record, I’m always glad when songs from it come up on the iPod. The singer’s voice isn’t necessarily the type that usually appeals to me, but as it turns out, I like it a lot. Good songwriting, too.

4. The Wrights, “Down This Road.” The Wrights should be getting played on country radio, and despite the fact that the husband half of the duo is Alan Jackson’s nephew, they’re not. I liked this record a lot when I first got it; haven’t beeen drawn to listen to it a whole lot since then, but it will be somewhere on my list.

There are more records to be added to this list, and there’s a corollary list, Records I Need to Spend More Time With, but this brief start will do for now. I’ll add more as they pop into my head.

Categories Music

Make that three

October 14, 2005 //

I don’t generally like Slate, for various reasons, but this article on the “re-proletarianization” of the American worker, is well worth your time:

And just to throw some music content in: a discussion about Sebadoh on Postcard today led me to listen to “Bakesale” (which is, unaccountably, the only Sebadoh record I have on my iPod) straight through twice. God, that’s a great record. Then I switched back over to shuffle, and the first three songs it threw at me were:

“Live Free”—Son Volt
“Pop Art Poem”—The Jam (I still have the original flexidisc of that somewhere, I bet)
“Waltzing’s for Dreamers”—Richard Thompson

I love my iPod. And it loves me.

Categories Music, Politics 'n' stuff

Falling in love again

October 12, 2005 //

Okay, so this has been something of a recurring theme for me lately, but…

Sometimes, there’s no experience quite like hearing a beloved old record for the first time in a really long time. Right now, I’m listening to “Big Plans for Everybody” by Let’s Active, a record I don’t think I’ve heard since approximately 1987 (i.e. a year or so after it came out). It’s not Let’s Active’s best record, but it has some amazing, heartbreaking songs on it, and hearing it again after all this time is sheer bliss.

I can understand people who say things like, “I hardly ever listen to new music anymore, I just listen to the old stuff.” Having just listened to a fine new record by the wonderful Canadian punk band the Constantines, I can’t say I share that attitude completely. But I do understand it—particularly right now, with this Let’s Active record tearing my heart to shreds in the best possible way.

Categories Music

Live and in person

October 11, 2005 //

I’ve been going to see bands in clubs on a regular basis since I was 14 years old.* That was 30 years ago, which means that I’ve been going to clubs for just a tiny bit more than 2/3 of my life. So it shouldn’t be surprising that—’ow you say—ze threel, she is gone, to say the least. Standing around in a smoke-filled club (this town still hasn’t instituted a no-smoking ordinance for bars and clubs, though there’s one in the works, I guess) on an uncomfortable floor and waiting and standing and waiting for the band to come on just doesn’t appeal all that much, usually. Add to that my recent decision to give up drinking completely, and a night at a club can seem very long indeed, even when it’s a band I like.

But “usually” is the operative word there, because sometimes I forget how transcendent it can be to go somewhere and see/hear a band live. Yeah, I’m old and jaded, so I almost never seem to be completely distracted from my feet hurting or the stench of cigarettes, and I’m pretty much always ready for the set to be over when it’s over so that I can go home and rest my feet and wash the smell of smoke out of my hair. But sometimes, for an hour or so, I can mostly forget those petty annoyances and lose myself in the music. Still. Even after all these years.

In the past few years, that feeling has hit me most often (not counting Twangfest, where all my usual rules and habits are suspended because I am Happy Twangfest Amy rather than regular Amy) at Grand Champeen shows. It’s hard to explain why sometimes, because Grand Champeen’s local performances—they play nearby Lawrence pretty often, always at one of two clubs owned by the same guy, and they have lots and lots of friends there, and those friends all buy them shots, so their sets in Lawrence tend to be shitfaced and sloppy. But still massively fun nonetheless, because Grand Champeen play with such sheer joy and reckless energy and so embody everything that thrilled me about live music to begin with that it doesn’t matter if they miss a chord or a lyric here or there, or even if their sets degenerate, as they sometimes do, into strings of goofy covers with audience members/friends taking over the mic. Grand Champeen are what live music—live rock music, at least—should be, and they’re still at a point where they’re continuing to get better all the time. (They’re also incredibly good guys, instantly likeable and bright and polite and charming, which shouldn’t matter but sort of does.)

I was at a Grand Champeen show about a month and a half ago, the weekend after my birthday, with several dear friends who had driven up** from St. Louis and parts east for the show, slightly tipsy and feeling a general sense of well-being, rocking out to Grand Champeen, and a phrase popped into my head, all unbidden: “This is my church.” Right at that moment, standing in the (smoke-free, not overcrowded) dive bar where there isn’t really a stage to speak of, it felt like I was exactly where I belonged. It felt like my religion, it felt like everything I believe.

I had a little variation on that feeling this past Saturday night, when I saw Son Volt play an outdoor show in a parking lot (not as bad as it sounds—the lot belongs to the wretched, vile Beaumont Club, which was a “hot new country” bar complete with line dancing and mechanical bull, back when “hot new country” was still a term that people used, but they did a pretty good job with the outdoor setup; it was crowded but not uncomfortably so, the sightlines were decent from almost everywhere, and the sound was remarkably good considering the environment).

Son Volt aren’t really Son Volt anymore, I guess, at least technically; the current touring lineup isn’t even entirely the same as the lineup that played on “Okemah and the Melody of Riot,” the Son Volt record that was released in July. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the “real” Son Volt a little, but really, it was only a little; the original Son Volt weren’t Uncle Tupelo, either, and we all adjusted to that. For me, Jay Farrar and whoever he has playing with him and wants to refer to as Son Volt is just fine.

And they sounded glorious. I’ll admit that the songs from the first three albums thrilled me the most (and the final encore, an expected but still stunning version of “Chickamauga,” thrilled me even more than that), but I was amazed at how wonderfully the new material came alive too. I shouldn’t have been surprised, since I love “Okemah,” which is guaranteed to be my record of the year, but I was, a little. There are a few songs on the record that I enjoy but don’t have extremely strong feelings about, like “Who” and “Atmosphere,” and both of those sounded just gorgeous live. And my favorites, like “Jet Pilot” and especially the Middle-Eastern-inflected “Medication,” were magnificent. I usually say that I have no objectivity at all about Jay, but that’s not exactly true: about half of “Sebastopol” leaves me a little bit cold, and though I like hearing those songs live, I almost never play the record. So, see, there’s a little objectivity. I’d also like to think that if he suddenly started to put out really sucky records, I’d be able to judge them on their (lack of) merits rather than letting him coast by on the strength of his past work. But right now, he’s still among my favorite artists ever and my favorite singers ever, and it had been way too long since I’d seen him, and for the hour+ that they played, I was completely transported. Sometimes, it’s good to be reminded that I can still have experiences like that.

(The next night’s show—two shows in two nights, almost unheard of for me, and not something that I care to repeat anytime soon—was not such a positive or transcendent experience. We saw Dwight Yoakam at the aforementioned, and despised, Beaumont Club, and though it was a fine performance, it wasn’t much more than that; I’ve seen Dwight four or five times now, I guess, and this was the least impressive of the shows I’ve seen. It was far from bad; Dwight’s the consummate professional, which can mean that his performances sometimes feel a little bit phoned in but also means that he sees his responsibility as an entertainer to charm and captivate the crowd, and he did. But the printed ($30!) tickets said the show was at 6:00 p.m., so we raced and rushed to get there by 7:00, only to be greeted by a sign on the door that said “Doors 7:00 p.m., show 8:00 p.m.”…which meant that we sat in the stupid club, Bill pounding overpriced beers and me nursing my $3 bottle of water, for two full hours before Dwight went on. Grrrr. Plus I was distracted by checking the @$# ! Yankees score on my Sidekick every thirty seconds for the first half of the show. Still, I can’t say it was a bad show; it just wasn’t transcendent, and if Son Volt reminded me of how transformative an experience live music can be, Sunday evening reminded me of why the thrill of live music is, in large measure. still gone. Most of the time.)

*I’ve been going places to hear live music for slightly longer—my first concert was Three Dog Night, in 1973 I think, for a friend’s 12th birthday party. A month later, another friend took a group of us to a concert for her birthday party: Deep Purple at Madison Square Garden. If their birthdays had just been reversed, I could at least claim that my first concert ever was Deep Purple, but alas, I’m stuck with Three Dog Night. I’m sure I thought they were great at the time.

**People here always say they’re driving down to St. Louis, and they talk about friends driving up from there. It is true that KC is fractionally north of St. Louis (less than a degree of latitude), but when you drive from one to the other, what you’re really doing is driving across. It’s almost a straight line on I-70 from one end of the state to the other. But nobody says “I’m driving across to St. Louis,” or even “I’m driving over to St. Louis.” Then again, they also say the number of the highway before the word “highway” here—so for example, US Highway 40, which also goes clear across the state (and beyond), is referred to as “40 Highway” (and if you’re a St. Louis native with the local accent, which not all native St. Louisans have, that’s pronounced “Farty Highway”).

Categories Music

Listmaking, part 1 (of many)

October 4, 2005 //

I like making lists. There’s an old (and not particularly memorable) Go-Go’s song called “Girl of 100 Lists,” and I always related to it (although it applies even more to my friend Vicki, the Queen of Listmaking). I don’t make written lists quite so often as I used to, because in my current job I’m usually focused on a single task at a time, so to-do lists aren’t as important as they once were. I do, however, just as an example, carry around index cards with lists of books that I want to get at the library on them. These are mostly gleaned from the appropriately named Booklist, the American Library Association’s magazine devoted to book reviews. It’s insanely expensive, over $75 for a year’s subscription, but I got so used to having company subscriptions to it when I worked in publishing, and I missed it so much after I left, that as soon as I could afford it, I started subscribing again. It’s one of several little annual presents that I allow myself. Plus the reviews are geared toward librarians, with the goal of helping them determine whether to order a given book for their library, and since I’m a librarian who has never worked in a library—sort of a library wannabe, I guess—it lets me sort of almost pretend that I work in collection development in a large public library.

Not that I would actually want to work in collection development, given my druthers. It would probably be my second choice if I were to work in a library, but my first choice is cataloging. Which ties in to my love of listmaking, I think, as well as to my actual life as an information architect. (And I miss cataloging, much as I love being an IA.) Cataloging doesn’t actually involve making lists, but it, and IA, involve imposing a structure on disordered information, among other things. And I love that. I’m not sure why, because my own life is utterly disordered (I’m one of those people who occasionally buys CDs I already own either because I don’t know I have them or because I can’t find them—and I take books out of the library that I’ve read already, too), and I’ve coped okay with that for 44 years. But one of the things I love about cataloging is that it is extremely rule-governed, and I like rules. I like order. I like structure. It’s why I’m obsessive about obeying traffic laws and stuff like that (although I’ve been known to flout certain laws…but that’s not relevant here), and why it drives me crazy when other people don’t—I can’t stand people who think the rules don’t apply to them.

And rules aren’t that different from lists, I guess. Except that lists are way more fun. So I’m going to try to start a tradition of listmaking here on the blog.

(Geez, it took me a long time to get to the point there—even by my already windy standards.)

Today’s list, which is a preliminary one, is the Songs That Make Me Cry list. There are several subsets of this list that I’ll explore later on, such as the Songs I Can’t Sing All the Way Through Without Choking Up list, and the Songs That Make Me Cry Out of Sheer Joy list, and the Songs That Shouldn’t Make Anybody Cry But Have Such Powerful Associations for Me That They Make Me Cry list (that one may consist of only one song, though: “Let’s Go” by the Cars makes me cry. I can sort of explain why, but won’t right now, because it’s…just an odd story).

But this list is just songs that make me cry. Some songs on thist list are also on one or more of the sublists, and this is definitely just a preliminary list, but I’ve been meaning to start compiling it for a while and was reminded of that fact by the first song on the list—it came on while I was at the gym last week, and I had to skip it, because crying on the elliptical trainer would be weird. And yes, now I am just typing to take up more space before I get to the actual list, because it amuses me. I crack me up. Someone has to, after all.

1. Iris DeMent, “My Life”
2. Iris DeMent, “Our Town”
3. Iris DeMent, “Mama’s Opry”
(Okay, so there’s actually a significant percentage of Iris’s catalog that makes me cry, and I’m thinking a whole Iris post is going to be needed soon…but those are the top 3. I think.)
4. Patty Griffin, “Useless Desires”
5. Townes Van Zandt, “Tecumseh Valley”
(His hokiest song, in a way, and yeah, I have a problem with the resolution of the story, but it still makes me cry)
6. Sandy Denny, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”
7. Sandy Denny, “The Pond and the Stream”
8. Nick Drake, “Northern Sky”
9. Nick Drake, “Hazy Jane I”
(And oddly, I’m not sure any other Nick Drake songs make me cry consistently, even though if there were a soundtrack to my depression, it would be the work of Nick Drake, boy howdy. Some of them give me chills, and some of them move me beyond belief, but those two are the only ones that always get to me. I can’t sing “One of These Things First” without choking up, but that’s another list for another day, as previously noted.)
10. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, “Perfect Blue”
11. Keith Whitley, “I’m No Stranger to the Rain”
(Actually, if that song doesn’t make you cry, I recommend checking yourself for a pulse. There’s a Keith Whitley post in the offing somewhere too, I think.)
12. Soul Asylum, “Ain’t That Tough”
13. Soul Asylum, “Closer to the Stars”
(Most Soul Asylum songs make me cry since Karl died, actually…but those two always got to me, long before Karl got sick. Soul Asylum were touring when Husker Du’s manager, David Savoy, killed himself, and they played a version of “Ain’t That Tough” on stage that night (in Boston, I think) that was as blistering and furious as anything I’ve ever heard—I wasn’t there, I was in Minneapolis in a state of shock over David’s suicide, but I heard a recording of it later. And never forgot it.)
14. John Prine, “Hello In There”
15. Lucinda Williams, “Sweet Old World”
16. Richard Thompson, “Small Town Romance”
17. Richard Thompson, “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” (which really belongs on a list of its own: the first time I ever heard it was right before “Rumor and Sigh” came out, at an RT show at the Guthrie Theater in Mpls. in 1991, and before I’d even heard all the lyrics, the sheer beauty of the guitar-picking made me cry)
18. Dale Ann Bradley, “East Kentucky Morning”
19. Rosanne Cash, “The Real Me”
20. Elliot Smith, “Miss Misery”
(Totally because of the movie, which also makes me cry. It’s a flawed movie, but it still gets to me, and has continued to do so each of the 75 times or so that I’ve seen it.)
21. Peter Gabriel, “In Your Eyes”
(Speaking of “because of the movie”…)
22. The V-Roys, “Goodnight Loser”
(I do just fine until Scott gets to the “Ain’t she the sweetest thing?” part, and then I’m lost)
23. The Replacements, “I Will Dare”
(“Answering Machine” used to be the one song by any artist that absolutely without fail made me cry, but somewhere along the line, all the heart-grabbing Mats songs—”Within Your Reach,” “Unsatisfied,” even “Hold My Life,” which comes closest to still getting to me— became so familiar to me that they no longer choked me up. “I Will Dare” makes me cry in a happy/sad way because it is, quite literally, the song that changed my life, more than any other single song ever.)
24. 10,000 Maniacs, “Back of the Moon” (mock if you will, but that’s the best song on by far their best album. It’s also #1 on the list of songs I can’t sing without choking up—it’s among my favorite songs in the world to sing, and I’ve sung it literally hundreds of times, and I still choke up every damn time.)
25. Joni Mitchell, “Urge for Going”
(See notes on 10,000 Maniacs song, but multiply the number of times I’ve sung it by at least 10. And it’s a good one to end tonight’s list on, because the weather is finally supposed to turn sharply colder overnight—the mere phrase “turning sharply colder” in a weather forecast can make me happy, especially this time of year—and I’ll probably be singing it in the car tomorrow. And choking up, right around the part about “See the geese in chevron flight.”)

Comments noting songs that make you cry are especially welcome.

Categories Libraries and IA, Music