I think it was Thanksgiving 2006. We were living in Blacksburg. I was working at Barnes & Noble down in Christiansburg and everyone came to our place for Thanksgiving. Adam brought Picaresque and we were hooked.
Castaways and Cutouts ebbed and flowed for a while. There were times when it was my favorite Decemberists album, especially when we were in London. Then we saw them perform Hazards of Love live and I was set on that.
Castaways is in the period when Colin’s ambition outstripped the band’s skills. I love that. I like when things fray around the edges just a little and you can tell the author or singer is working toward something.
There’s an interview with Jimmy Chamberlin where he discusses joining the Smashing Pumpkins. By his recollection, he saw them play a show in some bar and there’s Billy Corgan up on stage with James and D’arcy and they’re all plugging away with a drum machine.
Jimmy said, “They were atrocious. But the thing I noticed was that not only were the song structures good, but Billy’s voice had a lot of drive to it, like he was dying to succeed.”
The feeling that comes along with that kind of determination is what made a lot of Castaways and Picaresque work. Colin is telling these beautiful stories and pulling out all of his favorite five-dollar words. It stretches the fabric of the songs in very pleasant ways, but sometimes things just rip.
Odalisque walks through a whole litany of terrors. The song starts out with a woman killing herself, set to a sleepy Colin-driven tune. The meldoy fills in and then we dive into rape, antisemitism and general violence.
Musically, it’s all over the place, which is pretty typical in a Decemberists’ song. It’s done better in other places though. The move they make on Hazards between characters is often sudden and incongruous, but it’s incredibly well-executed.
Odalisque brings together all of these pieces (violence, musical ambition, haunting imagery, etc.) that they band will make work a few albums later. On Castaways, it’s good and it’s compelling, but it’s rough around the edges.
I really like it, but part of the reason I like it is for the rough edges. Maybe that makes no sense. Maybe I just like it because it reminds me of that Thanksgiving and having all those people together.
I bought the album on a bit of a whim. I went to Barnes & Noble to check out a sale they were having on vinyl. There were a few records I was really hoping to grab – Cursive, NIN, Radiohead and some others. They had the Cursive LP, which is magnificent. Nothing else I was looking for was in-store. I grabbed this and the Rushmore OST as impulse purchases.
It’s never going to be my favorite, but it’s also an album I’ll always listen to.
Art is Hard was the single off The Ulgy Organ that caught me. The whole album is self-discovery wrapped in a thin gauze. On Recluse, the other single from the album, the protagonist hopes to be “not that desperate” when thinking about staying in the bed of a one night stand because he’s worried he’ll never be able to get back in. A beat later, he realizes he is that desperate.
Art is Hard is a song about the nonsensical idea of the wounded artist. A songwriter telling himself or being told by an exec they need to “recreate your misery” to sell albums. It’s a fascinating song because the idea of failure as muse is two things – crazy and impossible to shake.
Reading Hemmingway or Joyce or Wilde or Chabon or Dickinson, you get the feeling that they’ve tapped into the horror of their own lives to make something beautiful. You couldn’t do that if you didn’t have horror to tap into, right?
Here’s the thing. I really like Spider-Man: Homecoming. I know Johnathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley have some relevant background. Goldstein was raised in NYC and Daley was on Freaks and Geeks. So that stuff is important, sure. I don’t think, though, either was ever a teenage crimefighter coming to grips with the powers imbued in them by a radioactive spider.
The story is still compelling. The characters are believable. The thing holds together well despite these drawbacks.
You don’t have to be the people in the story or have lived a specific life to generate good work. The deification of sadness is bad news. The people who make art driven by depression don’t end up in good spots and they could make the art without the pain. Or they could make different art, that’s a thing too.
The Ugly Organ isn’t entirely about overcoming expectations of misery. A lot of it is about loss, regret and the weirdness of life. It’s the presentation of those things as reflective experiences that makes the album coherent and powerful.
Instead of telling a sad story, Kasher sings about what happens after the sad story. What the characters think about the events that have unfolded. Art is Hard isn’t about being told to be sad to make art, it’s about thinking about being sad and the burden that puts on a songwriter.
In Sierra, probably my favorite song on the album, the character seems to be basically stalking his ex-lover and daughter. He sees her from afar and wonders about the life she’s now living, regretting his forced distance.
“I’ll never know Know who you are And I don’t deserve to”
He envisions her life and the father who now lives with her. He wonders about the things a person would just know if they hadn’t screwed something up so irreparably that they were walled off from that life. It’s not about the thing he screwed up, it’s about the way he now feels.
The reflection makes it that much more powerful. Regret is one of the things I’m most terrified of. I feel it all the time, but I can’t shake it’s impact on me. At the end of this post, you’ll find the poem BoJack’s father reads in the penultimate episode of BoJack Horseman. It does a great job of capturing the thing I’m terrified of.
Reflection is one of the parts of life I most enjoy. I mean, I’m writing a blog about pieces of plastic I bought. Maybe it’s assumed.
I didn’t end up listening to much Cursive outside of The Ugly Organ. Kasher has said the first three albums weren’t as personal. The band was trying to make the music they liked instead of their own music.
(Cafe aside. If you’re on a conference call, you mimic being in a meeting. That means, if you’re learning something, you take notes, listen intently and maybe ask a question. If you’re leading the call, you make yourself interesting. A good meeting lead keeps the spotlight on themselves. As such, if you’re leading a meeting in a coffee shop, you’re inadvertently making yourself the center of attention for everyone else in the shop. Please, please don’t do that. Lady.)
People seem to love their stuff, with Happy Hollow being another standout. I should listen to that more/at all.
Bon Iver is one of three bands in an odd little metal collective. It’s a shortlist of things I listened to when I was in North Carolina. There’s more to it than that, though, as I was also listening to Surfer Blood and The Fratellis and some others. Bon Iver sits alongside Blitzen Trapper and Iron & Wine.
We saw Blitzen Trapper. In Chapel Hill. They played Cat’s Cradle in 2011. We must have gone with some folks from Alexandria’s program, but I can’t remember who. Sorry.
These dudes rock.
It was a fantastic show. For a band that I often pigeonhole as being a folk band, they’re not really. They’re a rock band. The show was all guitars and bravado (in the best possible way) and just classic rock sweat. I should get Furr.
Bon Iver gets lumped in there because it’s the same sort of lyricism, if not the same musical presentation.
Of the three bands, Iron & Wine is the one that resonates most with me (or it was pre-2010). His songs about sadness clicked with me – still do. Blitzen Trapper was always the most fun.
I’m realizing Fleet Foxes were also in this mix.
Blitzen Trapper had an upbeat, harder edge. There are guitar arrangements on Furr that are clearly designed to rock a human. To make them bounce a leg or nod a head as the rhythm carries them along like an undulating wave beneath their couch. Iron & Wine wasn’t trying to rock anybody’s socks off.
Bon Iver wasn’t either. Justin Veron is the dude behind Bon Iver and he’s not the kind of person who set out to make a driving album. In fact, he did effectively the opposite. He went up to a family cabin in Wisconsin and watched a bunch of Northern Exposure while he got over sickness/break-up/disbanding.
He eventually started recording stuff and the results are collected on For Emma, Forever Ago.
Earlier this year, preorders started for a reissue of Blood Bank, an album I honestly have never listened to. In a discussion about that album, someone mentioned that For Emma was still available on the Bon Iver website.
For Emma has a whole host of excellent tracks on it, and Justin does a great job of tying them all together with his quiet vocals. There are some just lovely lines in here. Skinny Love is a great song. Flume is excellent. The thing holds together like a rural village covered in snow. It’s warm and wonderful and I’m happy to own it.
That all said, this isn’t necessarily a life changing album for me. I like it and it’s the kind of thing I’m going to pull out a few times every winter. It’s not part of some musical bedrock, though.
Iron & Wine got there. Our Endless Numbered Days and The Shepard’s Dog have lines and tunes that run through my head on an endless loop. They frame the way I think about other pieces.
For Emma has a lot of moments that I adore, but it’s not the top of the pops.
That might be all I have to say about it. It’s a good album, I’m glad I own it but it’s not something that I was dying to own. I bought it on a whim and I’m not upset about that.
Really, it just makes me realize that I need to hunt down these Iron & Wine albums. Those I would listen to all the time.
It also reminds me that I heard Justin Veron on a podcast the other day. It was an interesting interview for a few reasons. The main one was that you could hear how far he’d come from his original recording system. He has collaborators and support systems and all sorts of moving pieces.
For Emma, Forever Ago was a thing recorded by him and for him. That’s one of the reasons I like it. It’s not fancy or trying too hard or even polished. It’s just a thing a person did. I know he can’t recreate that a million times over and, even if he could, who would want to?
I like that though. I don’t need the evolved version of this thing with a new attack. I don’t need Raichu in my life – I’ve got Pikachu.
That’s a Pokemon “joke.”
We didn’t listen to Bon Iver when we were in Iceland last week and that seems like a missed opportunity.
The Beastie Boys are probably the single most important band in my life. They were something just for me, in many ways. At the end of this entry, I’ve copied in the little reflection I wrote when Adam Yauch (MCA) died in 2012.
I’m interjecting here with something. I’ve been listening, just today, to a podcast called Broken Record. It’s Rick Rubin and Malcom Gladwell (mainly) in conversation with musicians. I listened to Questlove (10/10, would go again), Ezra Koenig, Justin Vernon from Bon Iver and one where Rick runs through some of his stuff.
He met the Beastie Boys before they were doing anything of note. He DJ’d for them a bit, then produced. One of the things he covers in this interview is how they thought about things. How Ad Rock, MCA and Mike D tried to play around with the music they made.
I just sat and listened. Stories about the Beastie Boys feel like stories about old friends or ancestors. Here’s how the things that made you the way you are came to be.
Also, Rick Rubin sounds (and looks) indistinguishable from Pat Rothfuss. I just searched for this online. Is no one else seeing this?
Seriously. It’s weird.
Hot Sauce was the Beasties final album, released just over a year before MCA died. It wasn’t supposed to be their last album. It was supposed to be the album they released in 2011, which would set them up for the album they released in 2015, or whatever.
It’s the In Utero of the Beastie Boys’ discography. Fantastic. Maybe their best. Certainly not designed as their last.
Lee Majors Come Again is a fantastic track, piling on the same sorts of punches the group threw back in 1995 on Aglio E Olio (and in their earlier punk days). It lingers on the tracklist back in the second half, but it’s one of my favorites as a central figure in the album. “Dropping bombs like a bombardier, Cacao – he’s a chocolatier.”
The playfulness and goofiness that Rubin talks about are present throughout. In the interview, he talks about writing tracks with the Beastie Boys. They’d sit and dream up lines, reading them off to each other until someone laughed. That’s when they knew they had a winner.
I got into the Beastie Boys (apologies if some of this is repeated in the piece at the end, I forget what I wrote and I hate reading my writing) in the mid-90s. Sabotage was the first song that really hooked me and most of that was from seeing the video a few times.
Once I was into it, though, I was set. I listened to Ill Communication on repeat. I picked up older albums like License to Ill and Check Your Head. Paul’s Boutique never hit me like it did some other people. When Hello Nasty came out, I listened to it over and over, learning as many of the lyrics as I could pick up. Same with To the Five Boroughs.
Hot Sauce was something new. It was the first lyrical album from the Beastie Boys in seven years (the incredible, instrumental album The Mix-Up came in between). I was a real-ish adult, not a kid working his first job. And the Beasties seemed grown up. They talked about Ted Danson and high end restaurants and ornithology.
Hot Sauce was a record showing me how bands could grow up with a person. Beck is maybe the other great example of this, by the way.
Despite my love of the Beastie Boys, I didn’t have their albums on my vinyl watchlist. I don’t know why things go on the list or not. I wrote up a vinyl manifesto the other day, but it’s full of holes.
I saw this album pop up on the Instagram of the local record store. If I’m going to have a connection to a store, I now know it’s going to be this one. I’ve struck out before and even this doesn’t have a ton of things for me, but it has some stuff. And the dude who runs it seems like a champion.
I went in and asked the owner about it. Did they still have it? What pressing was it? Part of my collecting is trying to get interesting pressings. First runs, limited editions, new or funky remasters. This was the white vinyl version. It was supposed to come with a 7” single and an iron-on shirt thing. The single was missing, but the iron-on is there.
I’m gonna hunt that single down.
We talked about Beastie Boy albums and our personal histories with the group. He’d seen them a few times, having grown up on Long Island. He liked Check Your Head. There’s a new book and a documentary. Part 2 seemed like an odd thing to name the first one.
It’s odd, owning a little piece of yourself in plastic. I ended up putting the album in my backpack while I went to the coffee shop and store. It was raining a kind of sleety rain and I was worried it would get on the album or that it would get bent in my backpack. I set everything down very gently in the coffee shop.
On Long Burn the Fire, Mike D says, “Makin’ music for librarians to burly jocks, The rapper Mike D known for my curly locks!” I think that’s a good summary of the whole thing for me. The Beastie Boys made music for everyone and they didn’t take themselves too seriously while doing it.
I hope my son listens to the Beastie Boys. I don’t need him to love them, but I want him to understand why they were important to me. They made it okay for me to be me. Or to feel weird sometimes. Or to think that having a record in your backpack was neat.
All that stuff is okay. It can even be great.
Below is the thing I wrote up the day after MCA died. We had the same birthday.
In 1995 I got Ill Communication, after seeing Sabotage on, then-music-video-playing, MTV. I think I finally broke free of listening to just the single a month into ownership, when I finally took the time to look through the liner notes. After that, there was no turning back, the Beastie Boys gave me my first Matrix moment – I knew kung fu.
As a kid I was shy, bad at sports, into fantasy novels, and overweight. School was never a nightmare, and I never got picked on, but I didn’t like being there. It was that time in life when everyone seems to be judging you for who you are inherently. Which is just to say, as a kid you internalize those sideways glances, making them about you instead of about the viewer.
A large part of what separates high-schoolers into packs is confidence. If you’re good at sports you make that a defining characteristic in such a way that it changes your outlook on life. You walk the hallways setting yourself up against everyone else and weighing the outcomes in your favor.
I could never do that. But then the Beasties came along and changed it all. Once I discovered Root Down and Get It Together, I knew something that other people didn’t. I had that hint of confidence running through me as I walked down hallways, looking over the other kids and knowing that I had one up on them. I had the Beastie Boys.
The music provided me with something that friends couldn’t. You can run to a friend to make you feel better about yourself. Friends provided a great support group and a distraction from failed classes, but they were always external. License to Ill was the first album to become a part of me, to help define who I was.
I’d come home from school and go into my room, ostensibly to do homework. But really I’d pull out liner notes and work my way through songs, memorizing everything I could stuff into my little head. The way they talked about the world made me think about things in new ways.
What did it mean to be clever, not just smart? Who was looking out for me, who could I help? Even little things like Heart Attack Man made me stop to think about how I was defining music. Here was punk, my first real taste of 90s punk, on a hip-hop album.
Each little nugget of information gave me confidence, gave me a reason not to avoid hallways. Each lyric gave me something to show off to friends, and to fill my mind when otherwise it would be filled with self-doubt. The Beastie Boys became one of my best friends. They followed me everywhere and could be called on at a moment’s notice for support.
After that the whole world opened up. Bad Religion, Sublime, RHCP, Ash, Blur, the list just goes on. Their surely the main reason I like Gift of Gab and Blackalicious. My iPod is filled with music they inspired me to listen to and that they made themselves.
So I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to say that I lost a very good friend. Adam Yauch always came last in the line-up, always sealed the deal and did so in a way that made him seem older and wiser than the others. He was like the friend from college, who just happened to enjoy a high school kid’s sense of humor.
Even though I have more to rely on, and a better support network behind me, the Beastie Boys are still my friends. They helped me become who I am today, and I don’t think anyone who’s grown up with me would dispute that. In losing Adam I lost a role model, and a friend that had kept me safe and sane for 17 years. He helped me navigate hallways in high school, and he’s helped me find happiness in life. I know he can never know it, but I’ll miss him.
The Beastie Boys taught me how to be me and ingrained themselves in my being. With MCA gone, a tiny part of me is changed. In a way, I’m happy. I’ve never looked back and thought all this through. It’s good to know that that piece of me is there. I’m sure a lot of people have a similar chunk of themselves, a little sliver that now feels cold or empty. But I’m glad I have it and I’m glad I had Adam.
In March 2011, Alexandria sent me an email with the subject “I think there’s a new Elbow album.” The body just said, “We should check it out.” That was for Build a Rocket, an album I now own on vinyl and that I’ve listened to somewhere in the neighborhood of six thousand times.
The album peaked at number two in the UK, number two in Ireland, number three in Belgium, five in the Netherlands and 151 in the US. So close. It did reach number one on the US Heatseekers chart, which is a listing designed to track “the sales by new and developing musical recording artists.” In 2011, Elbow had been a band for over two decades and a top ten band for eight years. That’s just a note for your reference. Do with it what you will.
Two of the alleged thousands.
We first found out about Elbow in 2008 or so. I was working in Barnes & Noble. One of the dudes in the music department played Cast of Thousands, the band’s 2003 album, over the loudspeakers. I loved it.
“It’s like sad Coldplay,” he told me.
I think he also introduced me to Earlimart. Thanks, man.
An aside. Barnes & Noble is it. It’s the place where Americans go to interact with books. It’s the local bookstore in a real and terrifying way. I don’t advocate being a blinded devotee of brands, but supporting BN is probably not a bad thing to do? How odd.
Sad Coldplay is a shitty description of Elbow. It’s not 100% wrong, but it’s wrong in important ways. It’s like describing Kendrick Lamar as “Skinny Biggie.” I guess there are parts of that description that point toward the truth, but it’s missing some relatively important pieces.
Elbow was started by Guy Garvey, Craig Potter, Mark Potter, Richard Jupp and Pete Turner. They (well, most of them) joined up in 1990 at a college in Manchester and released their first album in 2001.
I got to see them in 2017 in Philly. It was maybe the best concert of my life. I’m not sure. I hate ranking things in meaningful ways. Maybe I’ve already talked about this, but let’s take a look. Potential top concerts include:
Elbow, 2017
Ash, 2008
Vampire Weekend, 2019
Brand New, 2017
Decemebrists, 2009
I can see that I’ve given preferential treatment to things that I was looking forward to. There are things like the Suicide Machines or the weird Ok Go concert in NY or Jimmy Eat World at the Warped Tour that I’m discounting. Those were also great.
The point is, Elbow is definitely in the running. The texture of the concert was like church. Lights flooding little corners of the room and a priest stood up in front of everyone, directing the service and offering communion. Guy works a crowd.
Jarvis, in all his Jarvisness.
He hosts a show on BBC Radio 6 or maybe they just call it BBC 6 – I can’t remember. He has a soothing, pastoral voice, which adds to the feeling of being in church. For a more on the nose version of BBC radio church, you can check Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service.
Elbow continues to write lyrics that connect with me. I mentioned last week that I don’t do inspiration well. I’m not good at seeing a thing and thinking, “I wish I could do that.” Elbow might be one of the exceptions there.
I’ve never been good at appreciating poetry in the way that an English major should and so I’ve never been good at finding those resonate lines that make another person’s mind shake like crystal, but here’s a few from Elbow that I love.
“the kids were in the kitchen carving up the will when the long line of limousines snaked down the hill the vicar waiting and shaking hands with the prodigal and pompous who knew the man father figures and motherfuckers who knew the man god’s doorman at the party as if god knew the man“
“A muffled battle cry across the kitchen table A baffling contretemps that shakes the day unstable Confessions from the cab, a habit that I got from dad The flurry of departure in a cyclone of cologne Would often devastate the gate and hedge And set our tiny teeth on edge I see it in me now and pledge To knock it on the head, that’s what I’ll do”
“So I’m there charging around with a juggernaut brow Overdraft, speeches and deadlines to make Cramming commitments like cats in a sack Telephone burn and a purposeful gait When out of a doorway The tentacles stretch of a song that I know And the world moves in slow-mo Straight to my head like the first cigarette of the day”
I love all of them. That last one is from The Seldom Seen Kid, which the band released as an album played live with the BBC orchestra and which is theoretically on its way to me from UK Amazon. We’ll see if it ever shows up.
One of my failures in college (of which there are many) was a headstrong and stroppy refusal to understand or engage with sociology. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. I don’t think I was going to learn a whole lot in the class, but it wasn’t any worse than a lot of other classes. I thought it was bullshit and maybe it was, but I certainly didn’t give it my all.
In that class, we had a report on – well, I’m not actually sure. It might have been music? Most of the kids in there were in the music school and music fits into the sociology mold. Let’s say it was on music.
I half assed this presentation on why Bad Religion was a good punk band and some other band (can’t remember who) wasn’t good. I think the whole thing relied on playing clips from songs and then looking at the audience like, “Huh. Right? You see what I’m talking about.”
Not great. The thing I’m trying to convey is that I’m not good at saying why I like things or even why they’re important. I wish I was better at it.
Elbow, for their part, is an extension of lots of little moving parts in British music. The Beatles are the piece that you can’t escape. They pointed to this world where violins and pianos and heartfelt lyrics could all exist and sell records. So let’s start there.
The Beatles also incorporated blues in ways I don’t think had been very popular in the UK to that point. This then extended with bands like the Stones, who took blues from a background element and pulled it to the front.
I don’t know a damn thing about Genesis.
In the 70s, bands started bringing in more orchestral notes. Progressive rock grew in popularity. Elbow has pointed to Genesis as being one of their big influences. While prog rock withered as punk took hold, a few bands held onto the dream.
By the early 80s, just a few of the big 70s progressive rock bands were still really kicking. Instead, the UK was taken over by the New Romantics, new wave and synth pop. These bands kept a weird skewed eye to the world of prog rock but brought a different tone and take. The blues and soul music continued to thrive at the edges, though everything had taken punk’s influence into account, at this point.
The mid-80s brought back Beatles-based rock. Alternative bands like the Smiths rebelled against the all manufactured sounds and styles of new wave bands and returned to simple rhythms and instruments (more or less). They kept a lot of the musicality that had been shoved into the system, though, and also turned to lyrics and songs in the blues fashion – namely, those songs that talked about life as it was lived by normal people.
Now we’re moving into the early 90s, when Elbow was starting to make music. Radiohead puts out Pablo Honey in 1993 and says, “Well what if we can have everything all the time?” Britpop starts to take off. Oasis and Blur fight for dominance. Elbow takes this world and carves out a little niche of poetic, orchestral music.
The Britpop battle was fascinating, by the way. You listened to Song 2 and maybe another Blur song? Oasis was just everywhere all the time, in the US. In the UK, that wasn’t the case. In a week, Blur sold about 275 thousand copies of their single Country House, while Oasis sold 216 thousand of Roll with It. Oasis definitely wins the total album sales war, but Blur did alright for themselves. You should listen to Blur.
After all the dust settles, Elbow ends up with this smart chunk of British music. They’ve kept themselves up in the face of everything from Adele to Amy Winehouse to the Arctic Monkeys to One Direction, which is a group that doesn’t start with the letter A. Weak.
As I believe I’ve said before, I don’t see vinyl collecting as the pursuit of completeness or a total history of me. Elbow is the only band I want to own everything I can from. All the LPs, all the EPs and as many of the little collectibles and one-offs as I can along the way.
At the end of it all, they make me very happy. I think pursuing that happiness is worthwhile. We’ll see how far along I get.
A trio of albums from the in-laws. They tricked me, which is something I like to think happens rarely but is probably something that happens everyday. My MIL (that’s how we say mother-in-law now, because hyphens are genuinely kind of a pain in the ass to type) asked what bands I’d want on a playlist.
I floated a few things in the “would not be too weird or offensive” category. For instance, did not suggest Tyler Childers, even though I think my FIL (reads weirder but still useful) would really like him.
When I opened these, I thought they might get a little play, but nothing crazy. I like the Beatles and Queen, but I wasn’t planning to add any of their vinyl to my collection. Hazards was a solid homerun. I love that album and it wasn’t on my radar as one to grab.
After a single playthrough of both the collections, I’m sold. My son loves them, they sounds lovely and I can listen to Bicycle Race the way it was designed to be listened to. I love bicycle race, by the way. Maybe you didn’t know that about me. Bicycle Race and Don’t Stop Me Now. DSMN is, perhaps, my favorite karaoke song of all time.
The thing about Don’t Stop Me Now is that it’s challenging. I cannot sing the whole thing perfectly. Another thing you may just now be learning about me – my vocal range and command are not as good as Freddie Mercury’s. Who would have guessed?
All that said, I get a lot closer to hitting those notes than I have any right to. There’s a certain hubris that comes with putting DSMN on the little slip you hand over to the dude running karaoke. It’s misplaced, sure, but it’s fun. I think there are always a few seconds where the audience thinks, “Is this guy doing this right now?” I’m not. Not really, but I’m going to try.
At least wear a helmet.
Queen is in rotation. I did not know that Fat Bottomed Girls/Bicycle Race had the greatest album cover of a single ever. The bottoms are painted on, I think. I’m pretty sure the original print ad was just 100% butt.
The Beatles collection has less cheek, but even more songs I love. It also rocks Old Brown Shoe, which I did not know but now very much enjoy.
The Beatles, and this is for the reader’s edification, had a lot of popular songs. This is an album that spans four stupid years. Just four. Imagine how many tracks would make it onto, say, Miley Cyrus 2007 – 2010. Six? I’d listen to three different cuts of Party in the USA, so call it eight.
The Beatles have twenty-funcking-eight tracks on these two discs. Old Brown Shoe is the lone buried treasure. Pick a few songs at random. I’m going to say B6, C2 and A3. Hey Jude, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Four years.
Disgusting.
Cool poster, bro.
Hazards of Love. We saw the Decemberists play through this entire thing in London. Completely reimagined the album for me. The vocals hit harder, the story cuts deeper and the band plays louder. I would go to that concert ten out of ten times it came through my city.
We also lucked into seeing Emmy the Great open. Emmy is a charming songwriter and singer. She’s very British and very clever and often that combination makes me feel tired. She managed to make it engaging and thoughtful. She also dated Tim Wheeler from Ash (as seen in the header for this post), for a while. Good taste. She’s got an album I haven’t heard, so there’s something to do tomorrow.
Hazards of Love ticks a lot of boxes for me, and of the three Christmas discs, it’s going to be my favorite for the foreseeable future. Now I just need to figure out what other albums I want so I can be more active in my own deception next time.
I got this as a preorder on mango vinyl. Not, like, vinyl made out of mango pits or something. It’s just orange colored. Less environmentally conscious, better for audio fidelity.
I actually hadn’t listened to it until today. I’d heard the album on Spotify a few times (I thought), and it didn’t resonate. Something not quite right about it.
Then, over the weekend, I got tickets to go see Bad Religion when they come through town with Alkaline Trio, a band I would be close to 0% on naming any tracks from. I’m leaving that sentence, but I want you to know that I know that it’s a weird, possibly incorrect, construction. We know this together. I’m not dumb, I’m lazy.
Bad Religion is a band I absolutely love, but I’ve only seen them once. Montreal in 200X. They played with Less Than Jake and Hot Water Music. On the Process of Belief tour, the internet would have me believe. I guess this was March of 2002. They played the Uniprix Stadium (now called the Stade IGA).
Less Than Jake put on an incredible show, and we were way up front for it. They came out with some staticy, Saturday morning cartoons-ish thing on an otherwise dark stage. When the lights kicked on and they crashed into their set, I moved up twenty feet in about five seconds. The surge of kids behind me was incredible.
It was around 20 degrees outside (F not C), but the inside of this place was lit up like a bonfire.
Bad Religion played an excellent set. At one point, Greg challenged “any of [us] fuckers to a game of tennis” (quote approximation). For some reason that’s reminded me of a live set from BR that I used to listen to all the time. It was a European festival in some German-speaking region.
Liter is French.
“What’s the [locality] word for water?” [Yelling.] “Wasser? Makes sense. Consistent with the rest of western civilization. What’s the one that makes no sense? L’eau. What the fuck is that?”
After we left the tennis stadium, we walked back to my car in the freezing ass cold. Some French Canadian dude behind us saw my Florida plates and just said, “Gainesville. Rock city!” I didn’t actually know that much Less Than Jake at the time, so I had to have it explained to me by my friend.
Age of Unreason is a lot better than I remembered. I dislike Lose Your Head, and it spoiled me on the rest of the album. It feels over processed and over thought. It’s a blip in the tracklist, though, and the rest of the album is excellent. I had a similar reaction to Tyler Childers’ Country Squire album. I heard one song that sounded like someone convinced him to try his hand at a top 40 hit and got turned off. Then, after hearing some of the songs live, I gave it another go and loved a lot of it.
I’m going to run Unreason back tomorrow and see which songs really jump out. I ended up being a big fan of True North after not loving The Dissent of Man. I’m hoping Age of Unreason continues to grow on me like the former.
I guess I should also listen to some Alkaline Trio songs? I must know a few of these things, right? Hold on. Yep, nope. I have no idea what any of these songs are. That’s on me. Sorry A3, or however your fans abbreviate that so that they don’t have to write alkaline a ton off times.
I’ll let you know how the concert goes. I’m taking a tennis racket.
I went to the archery range today. Next to me was a teenage girl. Her dad drove her, set her up and then walked around on the hill next to the range, pacing and fiddling with sticks. Occasionally, he’d say something to her. Motivation or guidance or chastisement. I’m not sure.
She stood there, ten yards out from a five foot pad leaned against a pile of hay bales. The rain from yesterday made the field slick with mud. We all rise above it on square shooting pads, laid out in ten yard increments from the targets. Only when we go to retrieve arrows do we squansh down into it.
She fires her six arrows and sets her bow down on a stand and slips over to the target and pulls them all out and goes back and does it again. She’s doing this over and over again at a pace that, to me, seems hurried.
And she’s horrible at it.
At ten yards, even a halfway decent shooter could occasionally get all six clustered within a two foot circle (“Hey, Google. Set a reminder to see if I can do the thing I’m suggesting is straightforward.”). She’s got shafts running up and down the length of the pad. There’s one sticking out of the bales. It’s a mess.
I’m bad at liking things. I don’t care about political candidates or teams or fandoms. I have a lot of things that I like, but those things never break through. As they grow, they push against the bounds of fanaticism and are pushed gently back down, like growing against a rubber ceiling.
I used to love things and care about them and get in arguments over them. At some point, that all got to be too much. I like the things I like and if someone else hates them, that’s kind of okay. I don’t need to be right about legislative policy or ethics or why this band is good or anything.
The closest I get to heroes are probably musicians and authors. Even then, I know it’s not worth holding on too tightly. I love Cormac McCarthy, the Beastie Boys, Guy Garvey from Elbow and probably some others. They’re people whose work inspires me to do better things. There are a few smaller folks I get into.
Paul Dean is a video game journalist and the cofounder of Shut Up and Sit Down, a podcast about board games. I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything he’s written on video games, but he’s fascinating. He did a series for a few months of him playing a video game called Spelunky and just talking about life. Now, he’s recently finished up a series on emigrating to Canada. Also lovely.
Inspiration is difficult and I think Paul summed it up nicely in a speech he says he never gave. In short, inspiration is the kind of thing that ends up pushing those already in motion (most of the time). People can be moved to action and I’ve seen it happen, but more often than not, their trajectory is merely shifted.
One of the difficulties with writing or music or movie making or any creative thing, I suppose, is the time you spend enjoying the thing you aspire to is time not spent achieving it yourself. Every book I read or podcast I listen to is a chunk of time spent being inspired and not making a thing.
Imagine if every time you ate lunch you fretted about never living up to your potential as a chef. That’s how musicians and aspiring authors often feel. Especially those at the beginning of the journey.
When I first started writing, I didn’t have a group to work with. I still don’t. I don’t like groups of anything and the idea of having someone slog through my work and my having to slog through there’s seemed off putting. I know now that’s not really the way it works. It’s like being on a golf team, or something, where you help each other and there’s a lovely camaraderie to it.
Without a group, you’re left looking for inspiration in books. Here’s a peek behind the old publishing curtain – the authors you’ve heard of are usually very good at what they do. Especially anyone who’s done it for a long time or who did it a long time ago.
McCarthy is a perfect example. First novel published in 1965 and his last book came out in 2006. He’s a good writer. Married three times, so maybe not great at everything, but a good writer. That’s not fair, he’s more than a good writer. I think he’s one of the greatest authors of the last X00 years. Pick a number.
When that’s your inspiration, though, good luck feeling adequate. You can go back and read Outer Dark and think, “Oh, well this isn’t the best book ever written” and feel a little better, but it’s still not like reading the story your buddy Paul just got accepted into the regional lit mag. There you can see the line between you, the aspirante, and the published author.
What you can get from that kind of inspiration is just a reminder to go write something. It’s not going to be the thing that people read and call the next Moby Dick, but it might be the thing they read and call the next thing you should work on. Having that, a little something to work on, a little raw scrape on your knuckle you can’t stop rubbing, having it means getting better.
The girl at the range will be incredible. She’s out doing it a million times. I’m going to see her in three months and she’s going to be shooting tight clusters from 20 yards. In six months, she’s going to be pretty consistent from 50. It’s better than I’ll be, for sure.
She has that raw edge that she can’t keep from rubbing. She’ll wear the rough spots completely smooth and you’ll be able to polish silk with the results.
Having good heroes and inspirations can help. Being good about inspiration is just as important.
I would love to be better about inspiration. I’d love to have a hero that I not only look up to, but that I look to for guidance. What would MCA do?
Blogging is better than nothing. It may all be nonsense. It may all go unread (currently rocking two visitors in the last 30 days). It may be mediocre writing. I’m hoping it makes it easier to find inspiration. I’m hoping, in six months, I’m consistently near the target.
10 Feb 2020
UPDATE (Kind of, I’m editing this before I publish it, so I’m only updating the draft.): Here’s me from ten yards. I think the two foot thing was reasonable.
One of the side effects of starting to collect vinyl is that you’ll suddenly be gifted a bunch of records. Which is awesome. For Christmas I ended up with Queen’s Greatest Hits, The Beatles 1967 – 1970, Arcade Fire’s Funeral and Xaviar Cugat’s Cugi’s Cocktails.
The other side of gifts is that you end up expanding beyond what you would have purchased.
The family bumped into a neighbor the other day, and he mentioned having a whole bunch of old vinyl in the garage. Then he said I could come check it out and take anything or everything.
There were a whole bunch of records lined up in an old Peaches crate. Right off the bat, I came across Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall. I’ve always like MJ’s records because of how easy they are to dance to. I never really got into his music, but I thought it would be one of those albums to have easy access to every now and then.
It’s a lot of fun.
Next, he had a Talking Heads Speaking in Tongues. I wish I’d grabbed this one. Talking Heads aren’t a band I’ve ever loved, but they are good and interesting. I’m almost certain I’ll never buy and album from Talking Heads, but I wouldn’t be against having one in the collection.
Comes in a cool, clear case.
As a note, my neighbor had a great selection in this crate. Rock, jazz, funk and a lot from in between. As I’ve said, the music you like can say a lot about you. That’s not really fair. It’s not like I came up with that idea. Nick Hornby turned the thinnest of premises about music defining you into a novel (or career, depending on how generous you’re feeling).
My son was with me during the crawl, and he kept wondering if things we from the Beatles. He doesn’t know a whole lot of bands (Beatles, Elbow, Jack Johnson, TMBG), but he likes the ones he knows.
We came across Green River, by Creedence, and he liked the look of it. Again, thinking it was the Beatles. We grabbed it. My wife grew up with Creedence on the speakers at home, and I’ve always liked their sound.
Next, we found a B-52’s self-titled album. I think there’s a small, small chance I love the B-52’s. I suspect I don’t, because I’ve never listened to a whole album and I can name all of, say, four of their songs. There’s still a chance I think they’re great.
This disc has Rock Lobster on it. A song millions of people must enjoy, judging by how often I’ve heard it on the radio. However, I don’t know if I’ve ever met someone who’s on the list. I love it. Rock Lobster is weird and catchy and I think it shows off Fred Schneider’s songwriting approach and skills.
You know. I’m gonna put the album on now. Hold up.
Strong start. James Bond meets the late 70s. They’re from Athens, GA. Home of REM, The Drive-By Truckers, of Montreal and the Elephant 6 Collective. One of my favorite parts of the B-52’s sound is the little twangy, southern spike on everything Fred sings.
The ability of a singer to lean into their accent is important. A lot of popular British music sounds indistinguishable from American singers. Good singers can tease out their homeland. Alex from the Arctic Monkeys, for instance, when he’s talking about trying to get into a club on Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured.
This (The B-52’s) thing is good. The music is slimmed way down. Just beats and simple tunes layered up ever so slightly. It gives the vocalist a lot of room to take up with their voices.
Finally, we came across Modern Lovers Live. This one is fascinating. I don’t think I’d ever heard of the Modern Lovers – until the morning of the day we were going through these records. That day, I listened to some AI-generated playlist on Spotify featuring a Modern Lovers song.
I looked up the band up after hearing the song and spent a few minutes discovering this new thing (more like new guy, as Modern Lovers is mainly Jonathan Richman). Then, I went to the coffee shop, stopping it at Red Onion Records. They had, for whatever reason, a copy of Modern Lovers displayed on the wall.
Then I saw the live version in the Peaches crate and decided to pick it up. Haven’t listened to it yet, but it was such an odd series of repeated run-ins I decided it must be worth having, if only for the story.
So there’s the story of how I ended up owning Modern Lovers Live.
I’m not a deep knowledge kind of guy. I have a really wide, shallow pool to draw from. Part of that is a memory problem. I don’t know what it’s called or if it even counts as a thing, but I can’t remember stuff. When I was a kid, I thought I was bad with dates and place names. Things that required rote memorization.
As an adult, I can see there’s more to it. I can’t remember the name of my favorite author a lot of the time. People I meet are just familiar faces for a very long time. I have a coffee grinder I use twice a day – no idea who makes it. Two bikes I adore, but I can’t tell you what kind they are.
It’s a real hurdle when trying to get into a hobby. I have to look at my turntable and speakers to tell you what I ended up with.
There are, basically, two ways to make a record player system work. Turntable into preamp into amp into speakers or turntable into powered speakers. I took the second route. It’s cleaner, simpler and easier for someone without the knowledge or interest to develop that knowledge.
The major drawback is upgradability. I can’t swap out one of four major components (not counting lots of other pieces not captured in that chain that are also major components) to upgrade the system piece by piece. If I want better sound, I’m going in for a pretty major upgrade.
There’s also something to be said for the way it used to be, which is largely that first component chain. You can find old, excellent speakers and recreate a retro vibe. You can get deals on stuff that needs work or skills to make it shine. With my setup, I’m pretty reliant on the market rate and having other people fix what’s broken.
All of that is preamble to the setup. I have a Denon DP-300F turntable with the stock stylus and a pair of Kanto YU6 speakers. The whole thing is one a single shelving unit (frowned on) and the speakers are on monitor pads to absorb the shakes they would otherwise pass along to the turntable.
Boom boom.
Apart from the shared surface, the major drawback to my current setup is its location. Space is at a premium in my home and the speakers are playing a few roles, so they need to be near stuff. I can’t just carve out a niche in my listening room or anything.
It’s all crammed in with the TV so the speakers can be used for a rare movie night. I also wanted the setup to be in a commonly used room so we could actually enjoy the music, instead of making it some special, reserved thing.
Unfortunately, the turntable is tucked kind of behind the TV? Also there’s a pretty substantial PC on the floor in front of the whole thing, limiting the space to address the turntable from. Plus, my kid’s little table is in that corner, too. So, you know, Lego mishaps abound.
Space issues aside, it’s great. I can get to and use it. Now that I’ve gotten the monitor pads in, I can crank it up without creating feedback/distortion. I just got all my albums (30ish) into outer sleeves and I’ve started pulling the actual vinyl out into static-free sleeves to store alongside the cardboard inside the outer sleeves. That makes getting a record out much easier, but also lets me keep everything together and protected.
I’m a fan of hype stickers (the little things on the shrink wrap telling you why this album is cool) and I’m trying to keep any record with them in the original shrink. Pulling inner sleeves out of the main sleeve is a miniature nightmare when the shrink is on, so storing the discs outside of that sleeve is a trouble saver.
On my list of things to get. A brush for cleaning off the vinyl before I play it. A slipmat for the turntable. I have no idea what they’re supposed to do, but they’re cheap and everyone seems to have one. A thing to display or hold the sleeve for whatever’s currently playing. I’m propping the sleeve up in front of the TV right now – not classy.
Right now, I’m listening to Spotify. Having the speakers in the main living area and having a Bluetooth enabled pair has been a real boon. Even though It’s not the same as listening to the work on vinyl, hearing a really rich version of The Mix-Up is pretty amazing.
As I said before, I’m just not a person who’s going to get into the weeds of an audio setup, so my focus has to be on practicality. How can I generate the most happiness out of these wires and magnets? Beastie Boys is a good answer. To almost any question, really. What’s cooking? Beastie Boys. What’s your weekend look like? Beastie Boys. Do you know why I pulled you over? Beastie Boys? No, sir – your dog is driving.
Someday, I’ll expand. Or have a better plan for managing all of these pieces in one small spot. Until then, I’ll enjoy The Rat Cage pumping out of the corner.
