sing us your favorite tune

M83 :: Run Into Flowers

…the trip to LA was pretty intense. prior to, i had no way of getting there. i was told i could take a train, but it turns out the train goes straight east, then i’d have to catch a bus to take me to LA. so instead it turned out that kate’s friend was going to LA at 7am on wednesday, so i got a ride. already, i’m feeling weird. i met him the night before we were supposed to leave, and a few things came to light about our trip. first he told me that he had two cars, one was his (79 mercedes diesel), the other his girlfriend’s (volvo wagon). i found out we had to drive both cars across the bay bridge to berkeley to take them to the mechanic. he said “whichever one’s worse, that’s the one the mechanic will take”. so i’m thinking sh*t are we gonna make it? then i find out we’re transporting something illegal and i guess a lot of that something. it is california. so yeah, crap. we take the cars to the mechanic and leave with the volvo, getting on the road and everything’s smooth. the guy turns out to be totally cool, we rap about woodworking and starting a company. on the freeway, a seafood taco truck ends up blowing a tire. the shrapnel flies around the road, we swerve to get out of the way, and a piece of tire hits our windshield, taking out a chunk of the glass. so we stop and get some insurance info. the taco truck dudes can’t speak a lick of english, so we’re trying to translate what they’re saying, but to no avail. while we’re all trying to communicate, they gave us some cold coca cola’s. my driving partner goes to pull out a piece of paper to write some info on and a pair of pink panties fall out of his pocket. we finally get it over with, do the insurance calls and we’re off. within 20 minutes of us leaving the taco truck, we blow out a tire. we’re both freaking out like were not gonna make it. we change it in under 10 min. (because we’re men) and get to the next exit to buy a proper tire. so were about 1 hour off schedule. everything after that seemed ok. stopped at the in and out burger, and finally made it to LA for some serious traffic. after making a drop off and getting dropped off i went out to dinner and saw four guys walking down the street that dressed just like color me badd.

Run Into Flowers (5.8MB MP3)
M83 (website, myspace)

Belle and Sebastian :: We Rule the School

Oh, the workings of memory, and of pain. Anika mentioned the teen yearning of many of these posts, and I think it’s a part of how youth is wasted on the young—I, for one, will never again be capable of the highs and lows of heartbreak and desperation that I was at 15, when life had yet to break my heart. Who amongst us has not laid in a pile of dead leaves in a graveyard on a gray day, unable to contain our multitudes? To borrow a phrase from Jonathan Lethem, most adults feel ‘nostalgia vu’: longing for the longing, remembering the age you were when you imagined yourself being nostalgic for the age you were, from a vantage point unimaginable, but probably a Manhattan loft.

So, friends: it’s a gray autumn day, please feel the tree bark under your hands. It’s a little colder than sweater weather but not yet glove-worthy. The violin goes without saying—that’s the sound a tree makes while tenderly petting your head. I will write a song more melancholy, autumnal, and twee than We Rule the School once I invent a synthesizer that pings each listener’s brain just so, and it would seem like your first heartbreak apologizing to you, or is softly saying your name. The risk of stroke would be considerable, but no more so than combining effete vocals, xylophone, a breathtakingly precious violin bridge, and harpsichord. I don’t listen to this song too often for fear my bloody tears will stain the torn lace of the antique wedding gown I wear to haunt the cemetery, or Target. I don’t listen to this song too often because the burden of all this useless beauty cannot be borne by a working adult but can only brush up against me, suddenly, in October.

We Rule the School (4.8MB MP3)
Belle and Sebastian (homepage)

Art Ensemble of Chicago :: Nonaah

what tiMe is it?? and what the heLL does that thing in the corner think it’s staring @?? ? fetch me: The Broom!!! what?.. ? .. ?, I think. it’s trying to communic8. that’s/not a ir/rational argument.        No.    No, I do not dig.. SssssshHhHhHhut. up. Please find assemble picture to fit size and/or shape. end transmish. OK.

            now, or

nonaah,,,5/.

No w?

!      !
    .
    ~

_naah_

Nonaah (6.6MB MP3)
Art Ensemble of Chicago

Neil Young :: Tell Me Why

“Everything will be asked of us, and everything will be given”

This line popped into my brain this week while I was riding the train home. Tears pounced on my eyes, a swelling inspiration moved into my chest. I couldn’t remember which book it was from, I had to look it up (The Satanic Verses), but minus the context, the sentence has hung around in the back of my brain for years. I wasn’t raised religious, I have no slot built into my brain for god or heaven or penance or prayer, but fervent devotion has always touched me. I CAN understand activity, movement, or work that express something felt internally.

When I was in India I witnessed a pilgrimage. Devotees of a local deity spend 30 days each year walking from their home villages to His main shrine. They carry their local shrines with them, and some hold a pair of sandals. The sandals symbolize a poet-saint from their area, now five hundred years dead, who had also worshiped the same deity. On foot, they enact a spiritual journey the poet-saints made in words. These poets are so well loved because they wrote in the vernacular. The oldest wrote his impressions of lofty Sanskrit texts in his native language, making religious thinking accessible to more people. Later, the devotional, action-oriented, religious movement, went further and took religious activity out of the hands of an elite caste who cultivated purity, and gave it folks who cultivated the earth. In pilgrimage, they get a direct line to god where every step is a sacrifice to Him, without the need of a Brahmin go-between. And the joy these people express as they approach the end of the pilgrimage is stunning, like you could reach into the air and squeeze it.

I’m not of sure of the exact credentials, but if we’re looking for more current poet-saints, I’ll nominate Neil Young. He’s not writing about the perfect glory of god, but lyrically and musically, his fervor can’t be denied. Amid the deluge of messages promoting material happiness, idealizing non-feeling and sameness, he harnesses the sadness and ambiguity that underlie most of our lives, and makes beautiful songs that I can understand. Now that I’ve got the heart-swelling inspiration, I’m trying to hear what’s being asked of me.

Tell Me Why (4.1MB MP3)
Neil Young (homepage)

Buddy Miles :: Them Changes

Back in the day I used to dig for fun. There was a deep bin in the back of a record store called Flat Back and Circular (East Lansing, MI) that was one of my closest friends for a while. His name was Dolla Bin. One afternoon, Dolla and I were hangin’ out and he looked to me and said “Hey, you like Hendrix?”. I of course said yeah and he proceeded to hand me a copy of Buddy Miles Expressway to Your Skull. Seeing that Dolla wasn’t always the most reliable source for good music, I probably went home and put the album in a milk crate for a good couple of months. When I finally got to it, I had a big surprise. I loved it. I mean I really loved it.

It’s been almost 15 years since those days and old Dolla Bin has moved on to younger more vibrant friends. I also lost track of that album…until recently. The other day I found a copy of my old favorite and boy did it kick in some memories. It also reminded me of another song that Buddy did with Hendrix and the Band of Gypsys. Them Changes. Buddy went on to record this song outside of the Band of Gypsys and I think this version is my favorite. He cries, screams and those horns are just so sweet.

Them Changes is a song that would later dictate Buddy’s life of crime, sickness and suffering. There were times he lived in halfway houses, prisons and god knows where else. He never fully established the success he had in the late 60’s and early 70’s but he sure did try. Buddy died early this year and from what I can gather, it wasn’t the best of the times for the guy. I wouldn’t like to think of him in this manner but rather as a crazy bulldog of a drummer and one amazing singer. I know Dolla Bin would like it that way.

Them Changes (4.6MB MP3)
Buddy Miles (homepage)

Thinking Fellers Union Local #282 :: Hurricane

This song comes into my head whenever I look at the ocean. It’s OK, because I’ve loved the song since the first time I heard it years ago and having grown up in Kansas, my times of looking at the ocean since hearing it have been fewer than, say, the times I’ve smoked a cigarette (although more times than, say, I’ve read books by William Faulkner, which is quite a few, and some of those I’ve read more than twice). In fact, one of the beauties of this song is that it will pass before you know it; the waves of it all lumbering into the shore and rolling into your feet, the spray hitting your torso, the sun on your arms and face. Sometimes the waves are rough and sometimes they barely make it, instantaneously swallowed by another wave with more force or lazily left to roll back into the nothingness of the ocean. Sometimes the waves swirl in holes dug with a child’s foot to get sand to build an asymmetrical castle. And then, before you know it, another six minutes has passed.

When I was at the ocean a few weeks ago with my father-in-law and wife at a really nice little town on the Oregon coast that has, we were told by our hosts, the most expensive real estate value of anywhere in the northwest (or maybe it was the west coast? Who knows, really—they were nice and warm and wonderful people and prompted us for an impromptu concert when they saw there was an acoustic guitar on the wall) and for that reason the town is very quiet and quaint, I could hear the refrains again of the quietest passage of Hurricane—single notes struck like bells into the middle of a storm while Jay Paget tap-tap-tap-tap-taptiti-taptaps on the high-hat, right before the lines, “I don’t want to come up now / I just want to stay submerged / Reeling water, sinking down / I just want to let it all drift away” came into my mind as the water rolled in and out on the cold beach*. We later sat at the only restaurant in town, which doubled as the only bar, and had some pretty great oyster burgers as everyone huddled together at a booth instead of a table because the place was packed** and we talked about politics, the weather, our lives… whatever it is strangers talk about, but more often than not stared at the big screen TV as Ike was coming inland upon Texas and CNN had someone braving the rain with an umbrella and rain jacket. That’s a sight that never fails to crack me up, even if I know the impending doom.

At the end of the weekend, we slowly headed up the coast to show our visitor the beauty of it. We lazed around in Astoria awhile, stopping to look at the sea lions that like to hang out on the boat docks near the edge of town. I made it home in time to go to what was officially a business dinner with a new boss and a few coworkers, but what was really just five people having a few beers and some food and getting to know one another. It was a good ending to a tiring, although very enjoyable weekend. When I came home it was 9:26.

My wife told me that David Foster Wallace had hung himself that Friday. She told me that his father said in the New York Times that he had been on anti-depressants most of his life (like so many… too many people I know, including me for portions of my own life) and nothing was working anymore before he did it, not even shock treatment. And as the barbaric treatment sank into my own mind, I didn’t know what to say. She was visibly distraught and had been crying. It was horrible and I was crushed. He was one of our favorite writers… we’d even made light of the fact that we thought he needed an editor and one less name in a band bio I’d written years earlier. But if he couldn’t make it…. I immediately felt bad for even thinking it; for even putting that into the world. Later that night she reminded me of this passage from DFW’s essay Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise, from Harper’s, which later became the titular story of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again:

There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair. The word “despair” is overused and banalized now, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. It’s close to what people call dread or angst, but it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable sadness of knowing I’m small and weak and selfish and going, without doubt, to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard….

In school I ended up writing three different papers on “The Castaway” section of Moby-Dick, the chapter in which a cabin boy falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Stephen Crane’s horrific “The Open Boat,” and I get bent out of shape when the kids think the story’s dull or just a jaunty adventure: I want them to suffer the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I’ve always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless depths inhabited by toothstudded things rising angelically toward you.

Our guest—my father-in-law—had talked about being set adrift, earlier that afternoon, during a hurricane on the ocean when he was a young marine and how the vomit falling into the cabin below the deck where everyone was supposed to sleep caused everyone to stay up all night play poker. He also talked about the feeling of nothingness he got when he rode in the watch tower (and wondering how many succumbed to the ocean waves then as he told us of the wonder of nothing in his own way) on a carrier bound for the [redacted] coast. And I wondered that as well, in my mind, when he talked about the disorientation of the ride in the lookout tower because as much as I love the ocean and never, ever pass up a chance to go, the ocean scares me to immobility occasionally, sometimes literally I have to force myself to walk back to the shore or some building past it in order to hold onto something while my wife runs to the shore and puts her toes in the water and sings and dances. I have to work my way up to facing the ocean. It’s the noise and vastness and the feeling that I am nothing; and the fact that I can’t see what’s coming at me because you don’t know what is in all that water***, even if you’re onshore; and the overwhelming urge to walk into the water at times while never looking back is almost surely too romantic; and the guilt for even thinking that way; and having to even think about the money it would take just to own a house near the ocean and the victims of hurricanes/tsunamis of recent past and looking at the tsunami sirens on the Oregon coast**** and, finally, knowing that David Foster Wallace had already summed my phobias up in a couple of paragraphs.

Tonight while writing this I got up to see why our cat The Big Delicious was crying (she’s always crying for no apparent reason, usually late at night, but she’s happy to see you when you look for her); and I looked at our other cat Mushi Mushi, Gila Monster, who had had his leg amputated a few months ago after he somehow broke it almost at the joint (he’s an insane inside cat) and the hospital had to wait to amputate because his heart was enlarged and we’re still not sure how to get him help or even if we need to—and how will we pay for it if he does after paying some crazy amount for the amputation?; and I looked at my wife sleeping because she’s had a horrible summer filled with the death of a very close loved one and sometimes she just can’t find sleep so I let her go; and I think about David Foster Wallace’s wife having to find him; and I think about the people of Louisiana and Texas and other Gulf Coast states and cities who may or may not have electrical power at the time I’m writing this and may or may not have loved ones who have died while I, who have a computer that mostly works, and a special full spectrum lamp my parents bought us as a gift because the NW kinda sucks in the winter; writes this; and I go to the fridge and open a beer and I know that this song isn’t about hurricanes or the ocean. Of course, as I finish my beer and walk the four blocks to the little convenience store in our neighborhood (that people would ask us, “You know, that’s the ghetto?” about our ‘hood when we got to our new hometown and we’d want to reply, “You’ve got to a fucking kidding? Have you ever seen a ghetto? Cause that ain’t it,” but instead we’d just say, “uhh, yeah, we’ve heard something like that.” And laugh) and some kid asks me for fifty cents and I know that he doesn’t want it for food, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t have any cash anyway and he gives me a “tsk” when I tell him. (This makes me a little angry, but also makes me laugh a little as I head for the crosswalk.) No, this song is a conversation between two people: one who doesn’t want to live anymore and one who (in thought: hint the weirdly disjointed lines of the verse) is so consumed by the other person and can’t do anything but be effected by the other person’s depression that they have nothing to talk about except depression… and that’s when I can’t do anything but know what I’ve always known: that’s what the song is about and hope that anyone listening to it who may be feeling despair tonight or any night will find some small piece of happiness and peace of mind soon*****.

Even if it’s just in a song******.

* If you don’t know, Oregon beaches are hardly ever warm and the water is freezing, even in the summer. It’s always slightly amusing watching men with no shirts and teenage girls in bikinis tough it out as if this is what beaches were made for and, dammit, I’m going to be half naked!

****** The antidote song for this post is What A Wonderful World, by Louis Armstong, but it’s the antidote for pretty much everything, really. I can’t explain why now, or maybe ever.

Hurricane (7.8MB MP3)
Thinking Fellers Union Local #282 (homepage)

Gene Vincent :: Be-Bop-A-Lula

Brushes on drums rustle like a tight silk skirt on rolling hips. She walked past and everyone followed with his eyes. The sound is barely there, so minimalist, all yearning words and Elvis-hip hits. Some girls are just born to be sexy, can’t help teasing those poor unfortunates looking on. For anyone who’s never been a sexy teenage girl, you might not know what I’m talking about. There are many, many people who have been a victim to them, however. I can tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that I wielded my power with a dictator’s ruthlessness—taking down everyone possible, trampling hearts and other organs and not looking back. This song is tops for those two feelings, two sides of the same coin, really: the longing voyeur, the sexy tease. Neither, in their own way, ever come to climactic confrontation with the Other. The song personifies that pent-up, you’re-hurtin-me-girl, kind of a feeling that finally releases (just a bit) in the end in a drum roll and then two soothing, winding down chords (evoking a little bit of the feeling of P.E. (not phys ed, damn your eyes, it’s a medical term).

Be-Bop-A-Lula, written by a young man being groomed to rival Elvis, debuted this song in my high school town, Norfolk, Virginia. Of course, I wasn’t even born then, but I sure took it to heart in my high school years. It’s full of those teenage feelings.

Since this blog began (thanks Josh), I’ve felt the link between those formative teen (or preteen) years and music. Seems like that is the time when our senses absorb more, analyze more, and our feelings for people, moments, and music are formed. Is it all just synapses?

Be-Bop-A-Lula (3.3MB MP3)
Gene Vincent (wikipedia)

Jens Lekman :: Black Cab

I’m going to smile and I’m going to like it.

I am going to sit on your overstuffed couch in “West Town”. I am going to feign excitement for this party. I am going to pretend to enjoy the massacre of a margarita you made in your blender. I am going to stare your dog in the face, and manufacture interest in touching his soggy mange ridden skin, and sloppy nose.

Oh, and when your friend who you think will really “have chemistry” with me, even though the only thing we have in common is being homos, touches my shoulder and winks, I am going to NOT throw up in my mouth. I am going to pretend the American Eagle Outfitter visor he is wearing and his constant use of the word “fierce” is cute. I am going to pretend I can tuck my snobbery into me - the malignant fucking anger I have for forced fun - when I am inconsolable and foul - I will hide so no one will be uncomfortable while they dip another chip into the powdered hummus you are serving.

And I am going try not to ruin the party for my friends. I am going to try not to vibe the room out with my radioactive rage and obvious disdain for everything around me. I am going to try not to be a fucking dick.

Sometimes you can’t cheer yourself up. Jens Lekman gets that. Sometimes you just dread the world. And you know, it’s actually ok.

The lyrics and tone in Black Cab are a bit incongruous. While Jens’ almost lackluster vocal performance lines itself up in tandem with the seemingly up-beat tempo, there is some weird polarity going on. Yes, he says:

“Don’t want to look this dead, don’t want to feel this dread.”

BUT - there is this weird pardon he accrues for his darkness. Because of the almost ambivalence with the positive and the negative, you kind of just take the song at face value. All he really wants to do is go home.

And I am going to pretend I never feel this way.

Black Cab (6.7MB MP3)
Jens Lekman (homepage)

John Fahey :: I am the Resurrection

Fall isn’t the time we usually talk about resurrection; everything’s folding up now, getting tucked away. But it’s also the harvest, what was buried or sheathed is brought to a new life as sustenance for other living things. So I guess we’re on the cusp of a resurrection even if it’s not the Jesus kind. There are no lyrics in this song, and I’m not sure I’d feel the same weight of I am the Resurrection if it wasn’t titled so. I’ve been trying to figure out what this little ditty means to me beyond conjuring up the stuff I learned in Sunday School. Among other things, I’ve decided it sounds like a year in the midwest. I am the Resurrection quietly plods and plucks through winter and into April when the frost breaks. The tempo picks up then slows again when we realize we still can’t leave the house without a coat. In June, things really start to move, ratcheting forward through summer until abruptly ending in a deliberate and exhausted October that quickly resolves to fade back into winter.

Ah, the old familiar cycle of life. Summer came and went too fast, but I’m itching for some crisp new school clothes and cider. The air is charged with promise, the promise that things will change. For better or worse that remains to be seen. Our financial institutions are crumbling, this year’s presidential election is more about who made the most gaffes than anything real, we’re in an endless war and the weather is going totally nutzo. Our small seasons, our puny planet: if it doesn’t work out for us, maybe we can be resurrected in spirit, we can be fuel for the next cycle until the universe sets itself right. But before I get too doom and gloom and start preparing myself for the apocalypse, I know I can put on a sweater and soothe my spirit with a little steel-strung guitar.

I am the Resurrection (3.2MB MP3)
John Fahey (wikipedia)

Ted Leo and The Pharmacists :: the Ballad of the Sin Eater

A couple of summers ago Ted Leo was following me. Every show, every fest, benefits for day care centers, street corners, there he was, he and the guitar player with the white-guy afro. Prior to this magical summer, Ted Leo was a passing thing, the Wilco or Suede of years before—staples of the mixtapes people made me, never to capture my heart.

Well, the dumbasses never put this song on a tape. When I heard it, early in the summer, I was electrified and damned. While my friends walked away when Ted Leo and the Pharmacists started playing, you know, because they had seen them play that morning at the Jewel, I could only stand and wait for this song: a succinct musical indictment in travelin’ preacher patois AND a drum n’ bass n’ cowbell breakdown. It is driving and brilliant, loving and slicing, the perfect song for people who want to travel but know that traveling—especially in that English/Australian backpacker template—has a undertow of privilege and Orientalism that you can’t scrub off. On the other hand, who the hell wants to stay home? Not me and not this guy.

The narrative arc is of a wandering sort, reaching more and more exotic lands, still thinking that he can slouch off his skin and history with his indomitable spirit, only to find: they hate you cause you’re guilty.

Jonathan Kozol’s first book is the impassioned ramblings of a wealthy son of Boston who is brilliant and loving and just found out the world is fucked. From the idealistic mess comes this: “[There are] two very different kinds of guilt… the guilt that simply binds up individuals within a tight and frightened know of shame and fear, and—in striking contrast—that experience of pain and outrage, followed by a sense of individual self-liberation, which functions not as a neurotic bind but rather as a threshold into energetic and reflective action.”

A note on the Beau Geste reference, a literary nod to the English paternalism and adventure hero and a term that has come to mean (according to Wikipedia) “a gracious (but usually meaningless) gesture.” Catch this: the last time I saw them perform this song, Ted Leo took the mic and smashed it into his forehead three times: “They hate you because [bash] you’re [bash] guilty [bash]. “ Blood ran down his face. If the blood of good men could save us, trouble would have ended long ago; but I appreciate the gracious and meaningless gesture, brother. I truly do.

the Ballad of the Sin Eater (7.3MB MP3)
Ted Leo and The Pharmacists (homepage)