5ive Albums That Would Change the Way You Listened to Music: If You Were Me.

Part 3: The Glow Pt. 2 - A Warm Amnesia

It was early winter 2001.  You were living in a small three-room apartment in Tennessee.  You had just read a review of an album that had been released a few months earlier, The Glow Pt. 2 by The Microphones.  It had been years since you had dived deafly into an album, something you used to do often.  After too many disappointments you stopped taking chances and started only buying what your friends were buying.  But you were in need of something new and unique to fill up some empty winter space and lately your friends weren’t around.

The mail arrived 45 minutes before you had to leave for work.  There was not much time to absorb anything before you had to drive your 1984 Dodge Ram pickup into work where you sold propellant driven pyrotechnics to fireworks enthusiasts.  The review told you to put on your headphones.  So you did.  You lay back on your bed and put them on. 

Ukulele strumming oscillated between your left and right ears.  The thunderclouds broke up, the rain dried up, the lightning let up, the clacking shutters just shut up, a soft voice sang.  Sound moved around your head like wind changing direction.  There were moments of calm peaceful lyrics and intimate strums on nylon strings.  Then, there were moments of bombastic surprises of sound—floor toms pounded, cymbals cracked and splashed—loud and distorted.  Every track blended together with little or no space between them.  It felt like you were in the middle of a storm—the middle of the story.  Time up.

Driving to work you thought about an album as a singular piece of art—one complete thought.  If there were no interest in getting radio play, why did an album have to be composted of ten, three-and-a-half minute tracks arbitrarily set one after another?  Why couldn’t an album be one song with different movements? 

You thought about the analogue sounds, the tape noise, the ambient clatter, so noisy and messy and real.  It was as if you could hear the recording space.  The little room in a rented house where Phil Elvrum was standing in a pool of wires and cords singing, I could not get through September without a battle. I faced death with my arms swinging. But there I heard my own breath and had to face that I’m still living.

Lyrics were not overly poetic or philosophical but could not have been more honest or vulnerable. Rarely do they rhyme or have meter.  Thoughts were not forced into a specific rhyme scheme but rather left as they are, random and abstract, at times senseless, with the music built around them.  Thoughts were left incomplete, unfounded, unanswered.  This was unlike anything you had heard before. 

And maybe you spent that night in your girlfriend’s apartment because she was flying home to visit her mom and didn’t want to leave her feuding cats alone in her apartment.  You packed the CD in your backpack because you didn’t want to be without it.  What if your apartment burned to the ground?  You would regret not taking it.  You got to the apartment late and went to bed. 

In the morning you awoke disoriented.  Your eyes opened and it was a dream place.  This was not the real world.  This was not your home.  This was not your bed.  This morning light was not your morning light.  You didn’t have shutters: you had blinds.  And your light was dimmer because of the trees surrounding your apartment.  This light was uninhibited.  You liked this feeling.  Then, there were two toms fighting on top of you—hissing and crying.  Two jocks in love with the same girl.  They darted across your chest and ran out the room.  You remembered where you were but stayed very still, enjoying the warm amnesia of the moment before. 

You got out of bed.  You put your new curio into the player beside the window, turned it on and up, and went into the kitchen to find something to eat.  You poured two bowls of cereal and milk.  You set one on the floor for the cats and walked back to bed.  I’ll wake up, your cat will pounce on me and I’ll meet the day, I’ll be in your bed, you’ll be in the air while I’m awake, it sang.

Had your life already been lived by someone else?  Songs had been sung about love and you knew that love.  Songs had been sung about heartbreak and you had experienced that same heartbreak.  Songs had been sung about being angry and frustrated and you got those too.  You loved them.  This was different.  This was mundane—specific.  This was hearing the wind, hearing a clap of thunder, hearing a car driving by or waves hitting the beach or the roar of a jet engine.  This was seeing lightning strike, seeing sunlight reflecting off of a rock, seeing your bare feet, seeing your bare arms.  It was the touch of fingers in your hair, a cool roof to your bare back, bare feet touching bark, the warmth of a fire, the warmth of the sun, the warmth of someone’s skin.  With limp arms I can feel most of you, he sang.  Never had music been so sensuous.  Never had there been so much beauty in visual, audible, and tactile minutiae.  

The Glow Pt. 2 was about storms.  It was about the recklessness and indifference of a storm and the fear and disorientation that comes with it.  It’s dark, the sun went down and the power’s still out. It’s cold, my blood barely flows.  And it was about calm.  It was about the first time you were able to remove your clothing and feel the warmth of the sun on your skin after a long time of being covered and huddled up.  When the real dawn came I saw it crawl over the hill and I felt clean and shook my hair out in the light.  It was about calm within storms. Your typhoon blows through my harbor but I meet it head on, I just bend like a palm, your deadly blow feels calm.  And it was about times when you wished for storms.  I want the wind to blow my clothes off me, sweep me off my feet, take me up, and not bring me back.  You wished that there would be wind strong enough to blow off your comforts and carry you away reckless too.  And it does this.  Do you remember?

5ive Albums That Would Change the Way You Listened to Music: If You Were Me.

Part 4: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - Watching Lightning Strike

        It was 1998.  I was sitting in my apartment.  The phone rang.
        Hello.

Come over right now.  I found someone who’s a better songwriter than J. Mascus.

Impossible.

I hung up and left.  An eight-minute walk later I sat on the edge of my friend’s mattress.  He lifted the needle and reset it.  We listened. 

I picked up the jacket.  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.  It sounded like an adventure—uninhibited in every respect.  The vocals were bodacious yet vulnerable.  Jeff Mangum’s voice pitched and cracked with emotional impudence.  He did not seem bothered by what his voice could or could not do with proficiency—allowing the emotions of the song to dictate tone and pitch rather than ascribing to standardized rules.  Rather than setting the key of a song within range, the key was raised just beyond reach. Where another singer may have been embarrassed by their vocal limit: Mangum exploited it. 

The same devise was applied to the instrumentation.  Every sound was used to evoke an emotional response.  The use of Theremin and organ added haunting palpability to modern rock cord progressions.  The slow dirge of horns and tambourine and snare drum rolls of The Fool evoked images of death in sepia.  What began with clean and clear acoustic guitar tones, by the end of side A, was blown out past the point of distortion.  The bombastic strumming of Holland, 1945 sounded like it was playing through blown speakers.  Affecting acoustical sound, it was cacophonous, truly oxymoronic.  And beautiful.  Bleedingly beautiful. 

Thematically it was no different.  Spousal abuse, mass graves, reincarnation, apparitions of Anne Frank, marital infidelities in trailer parks, were among the scope of topics retrieved from oblivion like gems by a grave robber. What was beautiful about the macabre scenes, such as, being buried alive with your sister, was that there were beautiful stories dying with these characters, if only they could be unearthed, if only they could be resuscitated.

This album did what I thought only novels could do.  It brought the entire world into the square-footage of your bedroom.  It was a history of ancestors’ life experiences and personal childhood memories; yet it was so common—so relative. 

How could an album contradict itself in so many ways and yet achieve equilibrium: impudent/vulnerable, bombastic/comforting, morbid/beautiful, unfamiliar/applicable.  For me, it stretched the limits of what a rock record could be, from which there could be no recoil.  

5ive Albums That Would Change the Way You Listened to Music: If You Were Me.

                Part 5: Loveless - The Python Eating a Deer

It was 1994.  I was reading an interview with Jason Martin.  He was giving the brief story of how his band, Starflyer 59, came to be.  Silver had been released less than a year before.  His EP, She is The Queen, had just come out.  I had become quite fond of both.  In the article Martin mentions the influence of My Bloody Valentine on his music.  Interesting.

I was in the Columbia House Music Club (membership was still rampant in the 90’s).  I flipped through the pamphlet of monthly musical selections, no Bloody.  I went to my bookshelf where I kept the yearly exhaustive catalogue of albums, no Bloody.  I remembered the cook at the cantina where I bused tables, telling me that he would refuse the obligatory monthly selection and simply (or perhaps, not so simply) write Columbia House a letter requesting the order numbers of the albums that he wanted to buy.  I went to my desk and composed a textbook business letter; complete with return address, date, inside address, salutation, body, complimentary close, and signature.  I took a drake mallard stamp out of my parents desk and a few weeks later I unwrapped the out-of-focus, pink-filtered, close-up of a hand strumming an electric guitar—Loveless.  It felt foreign in my hand.

My immediate reaction was aversion.  It was spacey—otherworldly.  Part of me wanted to turn it off, to accept defeat.  I had bit off more than I could palate.  Yet, others liked it?  There had to be something there to discover.  Either they were crazy for liking it or I was crazy for rejecting it.  I decided to press on.  I pushed my way through Loveless’ dizzying sonance dozens of times in the next few days.  The sounds seemed stretched—every instrument manipulated beyond distinction.  It droned.  It lingered.  It smoldered. It was as if the disk was lagging; yet the songs seemed fast.  It was fire, burning under water.

Within a week it had me.  Anytime my mind would wander throughout the day it would dead end at Come in Alone or Sometimes.  Those melodies would find me.  They would stalk me with haunting resonance.  There are other albums that I replayed frequently because I liked them, because I enjoyed them, because they were easy and comfortable.  Loveless was the first album that had ever courted me—that ever pursued me—that summoned me to listen.  And it didn’t just want the time that I spent listening to it.  It wanted every wasted thought, every idle moment.  If there were space, its melodies would squeeze through.  Loveless took time to dissipate.  It took time to digest.  It was thick and layered.  It crept in slowly over many listens.

The vocals were slurred and hidden.  Lyrics were as indefinable as the instrumentation.  In fact, at times, they were indistinguishable from the instrumentation.  And, yet, they were unforgettable—resonating, following, predatorial.  You could neither forget them nor remember them entirely.  But the melodies imposed themselves even without lyric comprehension: somehow that was acceptable.  It was lyrical without narrative.  It was so unique and incantatory that you could get something out of it without knowing exactly what it was saying or doing.

How could something that was initially so contrary to my instincts and so unapproachable in its intonation and attitude become so loveable, so lovely.  In Loveless the shrill sounds of sirens whose intentions are seemingly vague and frightening become comforting, intimate whispers that in the end, hold you—warm and spellbound.

These Words

You will not remember these words

They will not needle into your head

And stitch themselves inside with thread

These words won’t be your conscience

You will not remember these words

They will not infect your skin

Dilute, diffuse, and swim

Into streams and currents,

Ebbs and flows, allocate and permeate

These words are not a toxin

These words are not pretty

You will not package them

With paper, bows, or ribbon

You will not give them

To your friends as gifts

Print them on a bookmark

Or frame them on the wall

These words are not a token

You won’t find comfort in these words

They won’t wake you sweating

Undress you, make you flush,

Ravish you, break your heart,

Slip away in the dark

You will not miss them when they’re gone

You will not remember these words

You won’t sell them in dark alleys

Or buy them in seedy neighborhoods

You won’t dissolve them on your tongue,

Roll them up in paper,

Or inject them in between your toes

They will not lift you up when you are down

Or drag you down when you get high

These words won't mitigate the wound of being you

You will not touch these words with science or technology

You won’t pin them on your table under light and lens

Dissect them, break their bones in quarters,

Section them, or suck their marrow

You can not augment these words

You will not manipulate these words in politics

Or decorate these words with metals

You won’t discuss them in universities

Print them on your shirt

Chalk them up on sandwich boards

Or quote them in your letters

These words won't bring catharsis

These words won’t be your guiding light,

Muse, or alma mater

You won’t add them to your cannon,

Recite them in cathedrals,

Synagogues, or mosques

These words won’t be your anthem

These words will not birth ideas

Or bring about revolution

These words will not start war

Or bring peace,

Raise the dead or heal the sick

These words won’t walk on water

These words will not affect you, burden you,

Change you, harm you, or better you

These words have no intent

These words have no detail

There is no irony in these words

These words are right

These words are true

These words are absolute

This ink is light                and   hardly     visible

  Yet these words do not hint

But you will not remember these words

               Because 

These 

Words

     Are not written here.

What does Tony Soprano have to do with John the Baptist?

            It is amazing to me how much we all love it when this happens.  There is something inside of each of us that actually longs to see things put back together.  It is astounding how evident this is almost everywhere you look.  People love seeing it, and I believe, ultimately long for it.

I remember when I rented the final installment of The Sopranos.  I don’t have cable so I didn’t get to see the finale when it originally aired.  It was quite a few months later when it was finally released on DVD.  I had tried hard to avoid hearing or reading anything about the ending by word-of-mouth, magazine articles, and the ubiquitous blog postings that were still circulating the internet months later.  I walked up to the counter at Blockbuster and handed this young guy the box.  He instantly got this sour look on his face—as though just seeing the cover triggered a latent emotional bitterness.  Obviously quite unimpressed by my selection he said, ”so, you ready for the anti-climatic finale?”   Aside from the fact that he nearly ruined my experience of watching the final episode without having any expectations for what it would or would not be, he genuinely seemed upset.  As though David Chase had personally offended him: he was holding on to this grudge.  What was he so upset about?  What were so many who followed that show so upset about?

After I watched the last episode I went back and read through some of the online articles and blog posts and even watched an interview with David Chase, the show’s creator.  In the articles and blogs and in the responses from fans that Chase recalled in the interview; it was clear that the fans were hoping for one of two outcomes.  Some wanted justice; others redemption.  It was amazing how many fans of that show wanted to see the main character, Tony, pay for his crimes with his own life.  Many fans were calling for blood.  Others wanted to see Tony repent, or participate in some action that would make recompense for his crimes.  No one wanted the sinner to continue sinning.  Is this strange?  Shouldn’t this secular American popular culture be on the side of freedom?  Shouldn’t Tony be allowed to just be Tony?

But this is just one example.  You can pick any popular movie or novel and it will, more often than not, finish with either justice or redemption; or frustration on the part of the viewer.  We don’t like it when a story leaves us hanging.  We want our characters to repent… or die.  I’m reminded of John the Baptizer standing at the bank of the Jordan River offering similar options to those that came to hear him. Which begs the question, why are we so set on having justice and redemption in inconsequential places like popular movies and books but not quite so apt to see it in places where it really matters, like ourselves.

We can see the need in others; well, we can in extreme cases.  We believe that terrorists should pay—murderers, extortionists, racists, rapists—things that we haven't spent much time doing.  We’re not so concerned with sins that we regularly take part in.  Gossip, slander, arrogance, being untrustworthy, getting angry, bragging, these don’t need to be redeemed.  Do they? 

What is so hard to see in the small, private, personal missteps that we all make everyday becomes quite obvious when we take them to their extreme conclusion—that we need redemption.  We hate the final episode of the Sopranos because Tony is that extreme.  And so we hate this show’s finale or that movie’s ending or that novel because we never get to find out if that character cleans up, sobers up, turns around, pays, changes, bleeds.  And yet John’s message doesn’t just come to those extreme, followed to their conclusion, terrorist, extortionist, FBI’s most wanted sins.  John’s message comes to all of us.  This desire for justice that you so easily and naturally look for in the big, obvious sins that publicly affect a lot of people, is rooted somewhere deep inside of you.  What you have and I have and that guy at Blockbuster video had is an inclination that things are not the way they are supposed to be.  There should be justice, there should be redemption, or there can be no conclusion. 

What we long to see happen in HBO series, Coen Brothers’ movies, and Cormac McCarthy novels, John wanted to see in the characters in his own story and God longs to see in everything, everywhere, forever.

Sheen'ku

I

High priest Vatican assassin warlock

Fire-breathing fists

O. D.’s are gifts

II

Fools.  Fools.  Trolls.

Sad, weak, defeated, droopy-eyed, armless, children

I was born dead.

III

We win

Radically in our underwear

Before our first cup of coffee

IV

Within not giving great advise

Is great advise

What’s up

V

With a full house screaming

Can’t is the cancer of happen

Winning

VI

Different mind, different heart,

Different Constitution

Bitchin’ness

Why Cover?

The continuous attempt to remake good songs

            Why do we keep making the same song?  Better yet, why do we keep remaking everything?  Novel into movie, television show into movie, novel into radio drama into movie into remake of movie, comic book into movie into comic book adaptation of movie, movie into musical and back into movie, just what are we trying to reach?  We have cover bands, tribute bands and even prolific song writers with a well established repertoire can’t get through a set without throwing in a couple of covers.  Are we merely trying to capitalize on someone else’s success or is there something more to all of this replication?

            The first time I heard Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah I thought it had to be the greatest song ever recorded.  Actually, I still sort of think that.  Being ignorant of Leonard Cohen, it wasn’t until I heard John Cale singing it on the Basquiat soundtrack that I realized it was a cover.  Of course later I heard Rufus Wainwright, K. D. Lang, Damien Rice and too many others try to bellow out its brilliance only to fall short of Buckley’s paramount interpretation.  The point is they still tried.  There is a compulsion to sing a good song.  It is why people karaoke.  For an artist there is an even greater compulsion.  A good performer wants to teach others about music by sharing the same songs that taught them something about music. 

            Whether it’s The Fugees or The Jackson 5 singing Roberta Flack or Soft Cell singing Gloria Jones, covers speak to the innate immortality of music.  Each version emphasizing some other isolated nuance of the melody—some new adaptation of the progression.  Fact is, the continuous remaking of a song is one of the true proofs that the song is actually good.  Sometimes you can’t trust your own taste.  We can find ourselves admiring a song for sentimental or nostalgic reasons that have nothing to do with melody or harmony, structure or innovation.  So then, what is the scale with which we can use to measure music? 

Every year there are dozens of one hit wonders cramming into our radios and streaming over our music apps.  And every time we are convinced they are the absolute best there ever was.  And in another year or so they are sitting on a yard sale table or a pawnshop rack, or being deleted to save space on our hard drive.  And we are left wondering why we ever even liked it, equating a work of art to a seasonal wardrobe accessory. 

            What we can trust is time.  Time judges all things fairly and you can’t keep a good song down.  Every wonder why Mozart or Schubert are still around?  Music is meant to be played.  Songs are meant to be sung.  It is the very nature of the art form.  If a song is good, it will never cease to be.  If it must, it will trudge its way from aberrant obscurity to take its place in the annals of musicdom.  Or the canon.  Or your Top 25 Most Played playlist as the case may be.  So this is not a call to start a tribute band.  (Those guys are actually trying to capitalize on someone else’s success.)  But keep reinventing.  Keep innovating.  What if Buckley hadn’t covered Cohen?  What if Eva Cassidy hadn’t covered Sting?  Or the Ransom Notes had not covered Over the Rhine’s Latter Days, one of my favorite examples of why we should keep reinventing good songs.  You never know what song may next transcend everyone’s expectations, even the artist who wrote it.  You never know when you might just stumble onto something new, in something old.  So remake all you want, I’m fine with covers, as long as they don’t make The Langley School Music Project into a video game.

S. Andre Crosby

Something Nearly Intangible

Thoughts on Rock and Roll

            We used to know where to go to find rock and roll.  Well, maybe we didn’t, but our parents did.  It used to be easy.  If they wanted to find it they would simply buy two tickets for Dylan or Zeppelin or pick-up the newest release from The Kinks or The Rolling Stones.  Wait.  Perhaps we should start over.  Since there are those fans among us who believe rock and roll still is that easy to find, maybe we should define “rock and roll.”  Better yet, perhaps I should define rock and roll. 

            The reason I’m stepping in here is because many still believe rock and roll to be a particular sound: I don’t.  My parents definitely did.  I have friends that do.  And, it is true; there was a time when it was a sound but only by coincidence.  It was never the sound itself.  The sound just helped to pinpoint something else—something bigger.  We needed the theatrics of Hendrix, the histrionics of the Stooges, the antics of the Who to help us isolate something nearly intangible.  A couple generations ago the sound found that right moment.  The two coexisted.  Because of this, the moment was amplified, God saw that it was good and we called it “rock ’n roll.”  So say we all. 
            Now because the moment and the sound were both there at the same time and place, in some minds, the label got stuck to the sound because they thought that the sound caused the moment.  Let’s call these people rock and roll “fans.”  Now, at the same time, others assumed that “rock ’n’ roll” was that moment itself.  We’ll call these people rock and roll “lovers.”  And this is where we split, father against son, brother against brother, animal against other animal ad infinitum.  This is the difference between rock and roll fans and rock and roll lovers.

            On one side you have the fans that think rock and roll is a sound and they love all things boisterous and rhythmic.  These are the happy ones, the satisfied ones, the ones that can in good conscience attend every concert from Maroon 5 to My Morning Jacket—buy every album from Scott Stapp to Radiohead and attend a local show by the band with three drummers and a bass player who stomps an effects board to eek out Pink Floyd covers and enjoy it all equally never thinking themselves walking contradictions, or as the rock and roll lovers like to think of them, hypocrites. 

            On the other side, you have the rock and roll lovers who indulge in those simple, elusive moments when the spirit of rock and roll shows itself.  It may be at a show or on an album or on the radio, but it’s definitely not every show, the whole album, or everything on the radio.  And it definitely has nothing to do with Maroon 5.  Sorry.  It has everything to do with those moments that get you out of your skin—those moments that leave you feeling lighter and more alive.  The more you know about rock and roll, the more you’ve honed your ear, the more sensitive you are to those truly great, preternatural moments, the less you find them.  Maybe the fans are the lucky ones—the ones that can still listen to pop radio and feel it.  They don’t have to look as far.  They can always retreat to the sound.  But for the lovers, after we’ve poured over the taped recordings of Daniel Johnston and scrounged around used record stores for Seam albums (if we could just find one more My Bloody Valentine track) we begin to feel despondent, as though we’ve exhausted the worlds supply of rock and roll moments.

            The truth is there are still a lot of great moments out there waiting to be discovered—waiting to be created.  But it is also true that in the crowded market of internet distribution and friendly, Flash, recording apps, they are less commonplace.  We’ve acquired an appetite for the obscure—for the inventive—the new.  We lovers want new music to build upon what went before, not merely recycle it.  We are the hardest to please. 

            So to the ones that play shows that no one attends, the ones that put out records that no one buys, the ones that get buried for not being marketable enough, for those that care more about what there songs mean than how they sound, keep playing.  Because even though we don’t always know where to find it, we’re always listening.