This Time It's Personal

Or at least as personal as it's going to get on the interweb.
Bear with me...

So this past schoolyear, for all my talk of "joycore" and writings about secret agent rock stars, has been a fucking difficult one. It started in the fall, in the week I moved in, when I did some truly terrible things to people I cared about very much. Things that I'm not sure I'll ever get away from. Things that I wish I hadn't done, that I'm sorry I did.

But here's where it gets genuinely bad: those people, the ones I said I cared about? Turns out they didn't care about me nearly as much. And somewhere in hearing all the time about what a horrible person I was, I started to believe it. So like I said, a difficult time. Questioning my worth as a friend and as a person. And not knowing where to turn, not really having anyone to turn to. Because all the people I was used to turning to had turned away. And so here are two songs that got me through things, that I'd listen to on repeat late at night in my room to calm myself down and build myself up. They did as much for me as songs can do, which is to say, a lot but not everything.

Stars - Your Ex-Lover Is Dead

This was the one, the most personal and powerful song I heard all year. For only a few key lines, though the whole thing gives me goosebumps every time. "Live through this/ And you won't look back" sing Amy and Torquil, a sentiment so simple and near-cliche that it really shouldn't work. But it does, for me. It became almost an anthem, as I'd sit in my room, eyes closed, leaning back in my chair and mouthing the words silently. "I chose to feel it, and you couldn't choose," Amy sings earlier. I was with her - feeling that the path They had taken prevented them from feeling, or at least from feeling like I did. Maybe I was wrong, but it helped, somehow.

The next part of the song, the final crescendo, is the most important.

There's one thing I want to say, so I'll be brave
You were what I wanted
I gave what I gave
I'm not sorry I met you
I'm not sorry it's over
I'm not sorry there's nothing to say

I'd think of the people who'd left me behind, remember the wonderful times we had together, and sing these lines. It was (and in part still is) wishful thinking - I missed them, and I was sorry it was over. There was nothing to say, anymore, but I wondered if maybe I would've been less depressed if we'd never met to begin with. It was like wishing on a star - putting a thought in my head and thinking it over and over and over until it became true: eventually, I accepted things. I had great memories of these people, but that was it. It was done, finished, over - they were never going to give me another chance, and I didn't even know if I wanted another chance from people who I didn't matter to. Who believed untrue and terrible things of me while behaving in untrue and terrible ways themselves. But they are happier without me, I'm sure now. And maybe I'm not happier without them, but I'm getting there.

The Mountain Goats - This Year

I was a bit too revelatory in the last paragraph, so I'll keep this short and simple: Sometimes, I needed something more direct than "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead," and so I'd turn to The Mountain Goats. There's nothing in this song that so directly applies to my life except the chorus, simple and repeatable and repeated, many many times: "I am gonna make it through this year/ If it kills me." 'Nuff said.


PS I'm aware that "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" has the potentially-awkward inclusion of "ex-lover" in its title. But in the way that all art can, the way that is particularly suited to music, I found that the emotion of it fit just as well to my situation. "This Year" is about a seventeen-year-old John Darnielle, you know.

When I saw Stars, finally, a few weeks back, I was mesmerized. As Torquil sang "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" with an impossible and exhilerated grin stretched across his face, tears came to my eyes. Jaded indie music fan that I am, this is something that doesn't happen often. It happened during "Set Yourself on Fire" and "Calendar Girl" (that especially, emotional closer that it was) too. It was then that I realized just how much these songs, this band had meant to me during the past months. They'd been there during lonely and sad and alone nights, singing just for me. And thank god for that.

Torquil introduced "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" by saying, "This is for the one you want to say 'Fuck you' to the most." And I guess it is a "fuck you," but not only that. (For me, at least.) It's a, "You hurt me, but I've moved on and I'm better." And sooner or later, I'll actually believe that.

Simon & Garfunkel - America

I'm skipping a couple songs to blog about this one, but it's the most important. Given this week's earlier "controversy" over a Paul Simon song I don't even think is Great, I thought I'd post one of his that I do indeed give that "rating." And "America" is that song. It's probably my second favorite S&G song ever, actually. Yes, above "The Sounds of Silence" and "I Am a Rock" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water."
Bear with me...

It's a song that dispenses with the potential melodrama of the aforementioned pieces while retaining all the emotion - a time when Simon "practices restraint" and it works perfectly. A song about running away and not running away, about the United States and yet neither patriotic nor revolutionary, the song also sounds much more lonely than anything else Simon's recorded (that I've heard, at least).

"Cathy I'm lost, I said/though I knew she was sleeping" the fourth verse begins. This seems to me to be such an honest line, an expression of deep emotion to someone who can't hear. This is a song that avoids the drama of confrontation - the narrator and Cathy are losing each other while they've "gone to look for America," but we never hear this - it's an inexpressible loss, made all the more powerful by the fact that it's left out. The song ends unresolved, uncertain, pointing toward a bleak future but leaving it quiet. Could it be any better?

The Paybacks - If I Fell
I totally fell in love with this group sometime in my sophomore or junior year of high school. This was difficult to do, because I'm pretty sure they weren't signed to a label at the time, and in those pre-myspace days I was relegated to tracking down only a handful of tracks on Kazaa, one at a time and over a period of a couple months.
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Listening to them now, years later, it's still amazing just how much they fucking rock. There's this full, relentless energy to their songs, which manage to be incredibly catchy in spite - or because of - that relentlessness. If I had to compare them to another band, one that's gotten more press, I'd mention The Exploding Hearts. Both bands are unabashedly Rock, though the Paybacks have more of a raw edge I think. And the Paybacks don't have a sadness-tinged sound, because they didn't die. They're still fucking rocking, promise.

Since at least one person watched and enjoyed the previous video, here's a link to another, far more awesomer one: Gruff Rhys playing "Ohio Heat." It's just Gruff and a guitar, so it's a very different experience from a live Furries show, but the song works marvelously just the same. I know some of you out there in interweb land thought this was the best song off Love Kraft; you in particular should enjoy it.
SFA OKAY

From when Elvis Costello was awesome and SNL still had exciting things happen on it:

Thanks, youtube.

That's one of my favorite Costello songs, too. I got the link from O Song!, incidentally.

Spiritualized - She Kissed Me (It Felt Like a Hit)

One of the more disturbing pop songs ever is The Crystals' "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)." Featuring lines like, "He hit me/ And I knew he loved me" wrapped in a classic Phil Spector production and presented in an entirely non-ironized manner, the song was protested and eventually pulled. The Crystals you might remember from songs like "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "Then He Kissed Me."

About forty years later, Spiritualized released "She Kissed Me (It Felt Like a Hit)".
Bear with me...

It's a rocker, stripped down (though not nearly to the "garage-rock" excesses that NME tried to make it) and straightforward. And the lyrics, aside from the title and a line in the chorus, don't directly reference The Crystals' song.

But isn't that a clever title? I think so.

The best part of the song, though, and the reason I like it enough to share it, is the last line, when Spaceman sings "Then she kissed me and it felt like this" and the band goes into the wonderfully understated improvisation of the song's climax. I'm a big fan of Spiritualized's free jazz work, and this hints at that, while keeping it just under the check of a consistent backbeat. It's great.

Flaming Lips - Yeah Yeah Yeah Song

I think of the Flaming Lips as a cut-rate SFA. Trying to operate within the same ideological and musical realm, but not quite succeeding as well in their blend of pop and experimentalism. Dumbing things down a bit along the way, perhaps.

But I do enjoy them, and I tend to love their singles. I don't really listen to Lips albums anymore, but the singles from those albums remain classic: happy and catchy and always perfectly chosen. "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" isn't as good as the singles from Yoshimi, but it's got a unhinged-protooled backing vocal and a nice sound. I like it.

Paul Simon - Graceland

Some of you might already have made up your minds about Paul Simon. Some of you might have made up your minds without having actually listened to the song in question. And that's a shame.
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While "Graceland" isn't my favorite of Simon's songs (that would be "The Boxer") it's still a very strong work. It's got a catchy melody, and Simon's voice is as likeable as ever, but it's this verse that makes it so good:

"She comes back to tell me she's gone
As if I didn't know that
As if I didn't know my own bed
As if I'd never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead"

It's just great - casual and simple and poetic observation, summing up the end of a relationship in a few easy lines. When Paul Simon is good, he's really good. And the song has other excellent lyrics, too - "For reasons I cannot explain/ There's some part of me wants to see Graceland," Simon sings. His partner (wife?) has left him, and he's seeking comfort in one of America's great holy sites, bringing his young son with him. It's not quite a narrative song, but it gives the beats of a story - the important parts. And it's a song that you must admit, no matter your unreasoned prejudices, has nothing to do with African rhythms.*

*Not that using African rhythms makes a song bad.
Here's a short exchange:
indie cool queen: graceland doesn't rule. graceland is offensive.

odorless boatman: I agree; it's also offensive that Eminem would pilfer rap to create his music. Or that the Clash used reggae in their music. You're using a specious argument, made even more specious by the fact that you haven't actually listened to the song in question. Maybe you'll think the music's good, maybe you won't. But to say it's "offensive" because Simon is drawing on African rhythms is silly. Further, to imply that someone who wrote dozens of songs before delving at all into other cultures' music finds it "impossible to create without first pilfering sentiment, sound, and muse from someplace outside himself" is overly simplistic, not to mention obviously incorrect.

I await proof that an artist utilizing elements of a style of music he enjoyed is racist. I await proof that Paul Simon can't write honest songs. I find any argument based on someone using a different style of music somewhat ridiculous, since every artist (both consciously and subconsciously) draws from and is influenced by numerous sources. I admit Paul Simon's made boring music; some of it is on the same album as "Graceland" and other parts of it are scattered throughout the rest of his catalogue. But that doesn't make this song bad, it doesn't provide proof that he's a racist (though I don't have proof he isn't, but burden on the accuser and so forth), and it doesn't invalidate him as an artist.

Operation Ivy - Unity
Bear with me...

Operation Ivy is a band that changed my life.

I was sixteen (maybe fifteen?) and in high school and just starting to seek out my own music, beyond the radio. I was really into Goldfinger, a never-quite-popular ska-pop-punk band. I tracked down a fan-made compilation of their B-sides and non-album tracks on ebay, and when I got it there were a few live tracks included. One was labelled "Smiling (Operation Ivy cover)" and I really enjoyed it, though I couldn't quite understand the lyrics.

So I went and bought Operation Ivy's album (they only released one, and the LP and two of their EPs are combined on a single CD). Based on a cover of a single song that was about a minute and a half long. Sometimes the most random decisions turn out to be the best, I think.

I put it on, and I still remember my first listen: it was raw, much moreso than anything I'd heard to that point. Op Ivy are third-wave ska, according to AMG, so they're bouncy and poppy, but it's very clear this is an album recorded in single takes with minimal instrumentation. A huge change from the music I was used to, sonically.

And lyrically? I was dumbfounded. "Smiling" turned out to be an indictment of pressure on guys to prove their social worth by sleeping around. And the overall lyrical content is anarchist, utopian, self-righteous, smart, idealistic, political and usually anthemic. Unlike anything I'd heard before. By the seventh song, I remember quite consciously thinking, "This is the greatest thing I've ever heard."

That song is "Unity." Probably the best summation of lead singer/writer Jesse Michaels' utopic dreams, this song still can give me goosebumps. There's desperation in his voice, as he sings "unity, unity, unity/you've heard it all before." But there's hope, too, and that's what the song's ultimately about.

Operation Ivy's music is naive, maybe. So was I, back when I got into them (and I really dug in - I have a handful of live bootlegs by them that I listened to despite abysmal audio quality). They inspired the "anarchist" phase of my life that I'm still a little ashamed of. But they're one the the only bands from my "punk" years that I can still listen to and enjoy. There's honesty and energy and truth in their music in a way that no other band can quite equal, punk or otherwise - the naive, unformed belief that music can effect social change, that their songs could make the world better. It's a shame, I think, that they never did.

Screeching Weasel - Totally
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From the days before pop-punk meant shit, inspired by a Stylus review: Screeching Weasel. This is from their best album (I think), Anthem for a New Tomorrow. It's a song that once, years ago, I tried to make an "our song." You see, there was this girl I was dating, and she had blue hair, and I was all like, "This song fits us perfectly!" But it didn't because I didn't feel for her what this song says. And that was sad: :(

But I'm better now, and this remains a joyous minute-forty-four celebration of love as only Ben Weasel can do it. Which is pretty damn well. I chose this song because of Valentine's Day, because I'm a sap. There are better songs on the album. But this is still good.

I can't believe I've written about so many songs today. I need to rest my brain.

PS I'm working on getting A to dye her hair blue, but don't tell her, it's a secret.

Modest Mouse - The Good Times Are Killing Me (Alternate)
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I think I got this off of Said the Gramophone a year or so ago. I think I recall the main point of the post being, "The background clicks you could almost make out on the album version? They're tap shoes!"

The background clicks you could almost make out on the album version? They're tap shoes!

The Olivia Tremor Control - The Opera House (7-30-05)
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Someone recorded this song at a concert I went to over the summer. It was one of the greatest musical moments of my life, the realization of a dream I'd had for a few years at least: seeing OTC live. And it was a dream I'd given up on entirely, figuring that (as with Pulp) I'd just never get the chance.

But I did, and as high as my expectations were, I was amazed. It was a near-transcendant musical experience, and this song sorta encapsulates why (though the recording's a little soft).

For this song, OTC brought a little girl, maybe five years old, up on stage to play tambourine with them. That's her Bill Doss is referring to at the end, when he says, "She wants us to do that again!" The girl was there for most of the concert, sitting on her dad's shoulders near the front. He was pretty drunk, and pretty loud. Annoying - not the sort of person you'd want to stand next to, not the sort of person you'd want at your concert. Many lead singers would yell at the guy, and that can be funny - I've got audio of Jeff Tweedy ripping on hecklers that's fairly amusing. Not OTC. Other bands respond with agression, but they're beyond that. And that was fairly awesome.

But even more awesome is the music. Some good bands and some bad bands have come out of the Elephant 6 collective, but the Olivia Tremor Control are a truly great band. They combine a love for sunny, catchy pop with a love for tape-experiment radicalism into something truly unique, something that draws from numerous sources to become far more than the sum of its parts.

They're one of few (I can't think of any others now) bands to take the cut-and-paste recording style Brian Wilson used so effectively and take that technique to levels Wilson never imagined. Their masterpiece, Black Foliage: Animation Music Vol. 1, is a collage of repeating themes, images, and sounds. It's magnificent, a strong step forward in a type of music that not many have the skill to explore.

And yet they have fun with it. There's no pretension to their experimentation; I listen and get the distinct impression that they thought, "here's a cool sound, let's put it on tape for the record!" Interviews with the band members confirm this - things that were accidents in the mastering that sounded interesting stayed on tape. Laughter at the end of a fading theramin to close out their first album. OTC may have their proggier aspects, that's true. But the sense of enjoyment and lack of affectation saves them from being anything other than boring.

Because, finally, they can really rock when they want to. And they do here, in their encore from the Chicago show. Little girl on the tambourine, five or six or seven other people on the stage, and they tear into this song. The lyrics are excellent, pulling in the ideas of reality and fantasy that OTC so often deal with: "And a religious figure/who's not really a religious figure/'cuz he is an ACTOR!" This is the music to a film that'll never be made, and it opens with a song about going to a movie. Make of that what you will. The Olivia Tremor Control make it into a rocking, poppy, fun and perfect end to a dream-fulfilling night.

Sugarcubes - Birthday
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I'm not sure the lyrics to this song make any sense. And if they do, they may be somewhat disturbing. But the sound, the sound is great. Not that this is atypical for Bjork, but still. This is the first song of hers I fell in love with, and I still get it stuck it in my head. And it's Bjork's voice that does it, of course. This might not be her best vocal with the Sugarcubes (maybe "Regina" for that?) but at the end, when there's only about half a minute left in the song, she shows why the lyrics don't matter, doing a little bit of scat-type singing. It's glorious, effervescent, impossible to put into text. Listen.

Waterboys - Sweet Thing (Van Morrison Cover)
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This is probably my favorite cover, ever.

Van Morrison is a very difficult artist to cover - his idiosyncrasies put him alongside few others in this respect. He inhabits his songs in a way that it seems no one else could.

Then there's this song, where Mike Scott takes one of Morrison's most identifiable compositions (and probably one of the best lyrics ever) and makes it entirely his own. The song starts like a plunge into warm water, sweeping you up and pulling you deeper as Scott's voice slides easily into the lines, turning the words over in his mouth over, over, over. It's a very Van Morrison thing to do, but Scott does it more, does it better. The words lose meaning as he repeats them, become mere sounds, syllables without reason, then, without you realizing it, the words reform themselves, pulling every meaning in, become all-encompassing. And the music pulls you along, pulls you right into the nearest any song can get to a "twist ending." Jarring? Maybe a little, the first time. Perhaps even the second, the shift will take you by surprise. But by the third, you'll wonder how the song could have ever been any other way. It couldn't, you know. This is exactly, perfectly, marvelously, how it should sound.

American Music Club - Goodbye to Love (Carpenters Cover)
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There are some singers whose voices I implicitly trust. Mark Eitzel, lead singer of AMC, is one such person. No matter the content of the song, he sells it to me - I couldn't doubt his sincerity if I wanted to. Here, it helps that he's covering this beautiful song of the Carpenters. It's a respectful, relatively understated cover. The arrangement suits the song perhaps better than the original, since it lacks the Carpenters' MOR sheen. And while Eitzel's voice can't match the beautiful proficiency of Karen Carpenter's, it more than makes up for its technical deficiency in beautiful honesty.

Download
AWWTM

Flaming Lips-At War with the Mystics

Thoughts on Kathryn Williams's "Thirteen"
Like many people, I absolutely love the Big Star original. I've also made a hobby of collecting cover versions of it, though a quick look at AMG shows that I've a by-no-means-comprehensive collection. And while I think I heard the Wilco version even before the original, and while the Elliott Smith recordings are great, it's Kathryn Williams's cover that's my favorite. The violin in this is great, I think - adding an undercurrent of tension and uncertainty, as well as a solid bass level to balance Williams's higher voice. She loses a little of the emotion that Tweedy and Smith put into their covers, maybe, but the quiet beauty of her vocal has a power all its own - the phrasing in particular really sells this (check out the "would you be an outlaw/for my love" part).
More after the break...

Thoughts on Frank Black's "Hang on to Your Ego"
It would be easy to listen to a lot of Pixies songs without ever realizing that Black Francis was a huge Beach Boys fan. The influence is there, I think, but subtle. With his solo work, though, Black showed just how much he was into the band; this song, from his first album, isn't a cover of a released Beach Boys song. No, it's Frank Black's take on an unreleased version of a Pet Sounds track. Which is pretty cool in itself, but wouldn't count for much if the cover sucked.

Thankfully, it doesn't. Black takes the song and makes it sound entirely his own, while still preserving a lot of the spirit of the original. I can't say that I prefer this to the Beach Boys version, since in the transition to proto-grunge/new-wave/whatever it loses a lot of the anguish of the original. But it gains something, too - that awesome synth part, those gravelly "hang on" backup parts, the subtextual resonance of Black recording this post-Pixies-breakup. It's a cover that doesn't supplant the original, but definitely compliments it.

Maybe I'm jumping on the bandwagon?
Bear with me...

Thoughs on Van Dyke Parks's "Number Nine"
I'm a Van Dyke Parks fan generally, but this early single remains one of my favorite songs he's ever done. Taking the famous main theme to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Parks creates a glorious pop song. And while he based a lot of his career on reconceiving outdated tropes and musical modes, here Parks does his work without ironizing the source material at all. This is a song that revels in the happiness of its melody, bouncing along for nearly a minute with Parks only "da da da"ing before he quickly transitions into the German of Schiller's Ode and then into his own lyrics for the melody. It's a marvelous nod to the history of the piece to fit Schiller's words in between the sunshine pop imagery of the rest of the song, and this ability to combine the old and the new seamlessly remains one of Parks's marks of brilliance. This single was released as he worked with Brian Wilson on SMiLE, and while the completion of that album revealed a level of depth, consideration, and genius that may never be replicated, it (even in its modern, happier incarnation) could never hope to equal the sheer exultation of "Number Nine."

And those trumpets!

Blog update finished, finally. I was making a really stupid mistake in the coding that slowed things down a lot, but once I realized it things went awesomely. But let me know if anything's funky. (Except the "This Is Hardcore" post, which I know about.) And refresh if things look the same, because they definitely shouldn't!

And for god's sake, let me know what you think. I only do this for the adulation.

Back to typically-sporadic updates, duders.

The blog's being re-done. Which requires me to re-figure-out HTML stuff that I used to know, and find out about stuff I never did know.
Bear with me...

It could get messy.