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?
