335_songs_part_four raze [continued from] — 335_songs — — 335_songs_part_two — — 335_songs_part_three — 286. lou_reed // this magic moment from the album "till the night is gone: a tribute to doc pomus" (1995), and the "lost highway" soundtrack we're into the final fifty now. balloons! rousing theme music! random dancing! i've been holding off on certain things, trying to save them for the home stretch. lou was always going to end up here at some point, separate from the velvets song already included on 335_songs_part_three, but i didn't expect i was going to be talking about him in the past tense. i kind of figured he'd live forever. as velvet underground geniuses go, john cale has always been more my guy. but lou's music was an important part of the soundtrack_to_my_teenage years. i have vivid memories of being scared shitless by some of the more menacing songs on "the blue mask" when i was fourteen years old, giggling at the audacity of the uncredited bruce springsteen vocal cameo on the epic "street hassle", rocking out to "vicious", and listening to "rock and roll animal" in italy a few years later, taken aback by the weirdness of lou_reed doing straight-up anthemic arena rock. there are a lot of memories of listening to lou when i was a less hairy person. they're all good ones. sure, i always thought he was a bit of a dick. and that thing he said about his shit being other people's diamonds? yeah...no. his bad music was pretty bad. but at least it was amusing in its badness. and i'm beginning to think a lot of the "arrogant prick" thing was a front he put up, to keep certain people from getting too close or ever feeling like they really knew him. a game he played. in the last interview he ever gave, just weeks before his death, he said some really thoughtful things about what music and sound meant to him. he also couldn't resist bullshitting the interviewer with stories of making enough money to buy his first guitar by chopping down trees on the family farm. he grew up in long island. his family was jewish. there was no farm. when he passed away two weeks ago, i hadn't really listened to any of lou's music in a long time. how long is "a long time"? about twelve years. i've been doing a lot of visiting and revisiting in the days since, and it's been pretty revelatory. the VU albums are all great. that kind of goes without saying. i said before that i thought the velvet underground lost something fundamental after lou kicked john cale out of the band (though i'm glad the two of them would later stop hating one another long enough to write and record the great "songs for drella" song suite together). i still think that. but even without john's manic creative spark to play off of, some of lou's best songs are on the third self-titled velvets album and "loaded". i wasn't trying to be ironic when i sang "sweet jane" at the audition for a high school arts night. i loved that song, long before i heard the narcotic lullaby the cowboy junkies turned it into. then there's the solo stuff, which is fascinating, and surprisingly far-reaching. there were albums i already knew i liked a lot, but hearing them now is like spending time with old friends i haven't seen in years. they've put on weight in interesting places. they're still telling the same stories, but i'm picking up nuances i didn't know to listen for before. and there are albums i never really listened to much at all or didn't give their due. some of those have knocked me off my feet. lou did charming sleaze (and grating sleaze, and frightening sleaze, and glammed-up sleaze...) better than anyone. i don't think any singer was more adept at sounding like they didn't give a shit. but when he dug deeper, his music had incisive and often sobering things to say about addiction, debasement, love, hate, and the darker side of life. "berlin", bleak as it is, savaged as it was by a lot of music critics when it first came out, may be one of lou's greatest achievements as a writer. "the kids" in particular is devastating. he spends most of the song singing about a woman whose children have been taken away from her, building the case against her, attacking her and spitting a list of every questionable and irresponsible thing she's done. just when you're starting to think maybe it's all for the best, he stops singing and you hear her children crying and screaming for their mother, and it's a thudding punch to the gut. "transformer" is as great as it ever was; "walk on the wild side" isn't even the best song on the album, though it's the one most casual fans remember lou for. "street hassle" is just as acidic as it ever was. "gimme some good times" is hilarious, with lou ripping "sweet jane" to shreds and taking a giant crap all over the more accessible music he'd been making in the previous few years at the same time he mocks his own limited vocal range with those insane jeering harmonies. but those "easy-listening lou" albums have their charms too. "coney island baby" has some really great songs on it, chief among them the title track, which is some kind of sublime half-spoken-word pseudo-doo-wop. and even when he was at his laziest, he was capable of twisting the knife when he wanted to. "sally can't dance", for example, is one of his sleaziest, least loved (but most commercially successful) albums. it's one of the only lou_reed records you could conceivably throw on at a party without derailing the evening. and yet, buried on this bizarre and often bloodless album are "kill your sons", a horrifying recounting of the electroshock treatments he was forced to endure as a younger man (his parents' way of trying to "cure" his bisexuality), and "billy", one of the most moving things he ever wrote, wherein he somehow becomes bob dylan for about five minutes. "the blue mask" and "ecstasy" have always been two of my favourites, full of songs where lou is just being lou, albeit with a new maturity in his swagger. well...most of the time, anyway. there are a lot of people who can't get through the 18-minute-long "like a possum". me, i always got a kick out of the sludgy guitar heroics and lou screaming, "i got a hole in my heart the size of a truck! it won't be filled by a one-night fuck!" lou could do something like that, or sing about sucking nipples and shooting junk, and then turn around and make an album like "magic and loss" — a startling meditation on loss and mortality. that sort of thing can be a difficult slog in other ways, but "dreamin'" is another one of his most affecting songs. "if i close my eyes," he sings to a departed friend, "i see your face, and i'm not without you." there goes the knife again. a lot of different songs could go here. something like the poetic and pretty "NYC man" off of the underrated "set the twilight reeling". something intense and unsettling like "the blue mask" or "waves of fear". something off of "songs for drella" like "open house". something shambolic and caustic like "dirt". something bluesy and simple and just-right like "paranoia key of E". in the end, the song i want to reach for is one lou didn't even write himself. listen to the great drifters version of "this magic moment". then listen to what lou does to it, and you'll hear someone really making a song their own. it's pretty audacious to take that great orchestral ballad and turn it into a stripped-down rockabilly shuffle, but lou pulls it off. what's more, he inhabits the song. he makes it his own. lou's passing doesn't sting in the same way alex chilton's did, or as much as john cale's will, but i'd be lying if i said i wasn't sorry he's gone. he left a lot of good music. i don't think i'm brave enough yet to tackle the album he recorded with metallica. but even if it is as bad as everyone's said it is, that he would be insane enough to record such a thing does a neat job of summing up the kind of artist he was. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eZjwJZF8uE 131112 ... raze (soundtrack_to_my_teenage_years, even. missed underscore hooey.) 131112 ... the evil angel on my shoulder and apparently lou made that song his own not once, but twice. good start, man! good start! 131112 ... raze maybe i did that on purpose, to draw you here, so "soundtrack_to_my_teenage" would become a link. you didn't think of that one, did you? 131112 ... the evil angel on my shoulder ::: head explodes ::: 131112 ... raze 287. laurie anderson // walking and falling from the album "big science" (1982) i wanted you and i was looking for you but i couldn't find you i wanted you and i was looking for you all day but i couldn't find you i couldn't find you you're walking and you don't always realize it but you're always falling with each step you fall forward slightly and then catch yourself from falling over and over you're falling and then catching yourself from falling and this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pcYag8oGik 131113 ... raze 288. gary lewis & the playboys // she's just my style from the album "she's just my style" (1966) one of my new favourite restaurants around these parts is a place called route 42 — a 1950s-themed diner with huge red booths, all-day breakfast, homemade mini-donuts, and old-fashioned glass bottles of coke and sprite. this song was playing when i was there for breakfast the other day, and i couldn't resist singing along and doing a little sitting-down dance. don't you know that she's just my style? everything about her drives me wild. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crrS2YcqtEg 131114 ... raze 289. kid whisky // at the crossroads from the album "room" (2010) kid whisky is belgian-born jeremy janssens. he makes electronic music that chops up bits of jazz, classical, house, soul, hip-hop, and glitch, making a tasty stew that sometimes reminds me of some of scott herren's best and most melodic work. "room" is only available to buy online, and i've always been more of a hard copy person. as luck would have it, i was able to find a web store that sells WAV files, so instead of being stuck with MP3s, i downloaded those WAVs, burned them onto a CD, and my ears were happy. this is some of my favourite electronica i've heard in a long, long time, though i've only now found out about it, three years after it was released. the music nerd in me does a little squee when i hear the sound of an arp-omni polyphonic analog synth burbling in the middle of this song. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swMV74g0Lgk 131115 ... raze 290. the national // this is the last time from the album "trouble will find me" (2013) the national are a bit like what i hoped interpol might someday mature into. i mean, i still like "turn_on_the_bright_lights" as much as i ever did, and "antics" does a pretty good recycling job, but everything paul banks and co. have done since then ranges from "not bad, but not great" to "bleh", at least for me. i was slow getting into the national. i bought "high violet" when it was released without hearing a lick of it, and then forgot i had it for a few years. hearing "about today" in the movie "warrior" served to remind me of the album i'd been allowing to collect dust, so i sat down and listened to it, and it was good. i like how matt berninger's lyrics do this thing where he'll take phrases not far removed from debris lifted out of the cliche_blender, and then spin them on their heads or strip them so bare, they become compelling again. like: "you keep a lot of secrets and i keep none wish i could go back and keep some" and: "i still owe money to the money to the money i owe i never thought about love when i thought about home" and: "you didn't see me i was falling apart i was a television version of a person with a broken heart" the latest national album might be my favourite to date. i'm not sure. i do know it has my favourite national song on it — this one. i instinctively throw in a high third-part harmony of my own during what i guess you could call the chorus, because i'm odd like that. and the last bit where things shift into a more melancholy gear and the drums drop out makes the hair on my forearms stand up. that's either sharon van etten or dark dark dark's nona marie invie singing the pretty lady harmonies. i'm guessing it's nona. i could be wrong. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D9Umq6V0Dg 131116 ... raze 291. vangelis // memories of green music from the "blade runner" soundtrack (1982) "blade runner" is one of those films that creates a world so immersive, and an atmosphere so rich, you almost feel like you can step inside it and walk around. an integral part of that atmosphere is the soundtrack by vangelis. built around synthesizer textures, fretless bass, the occasional reverberating saxophone, and twinkling fender rhodes electric piano, his music is at once cold and expressive. this haunting little song plays during the scene when rachael first visits deckard at his apartment and learns she's a replicant, with all of her memories fabricated — implants to make her seem more human. i like how the acoustic piano is a little out of tune, balancing something organic and imperfect against the synthetic elements. it's a neat metaphor for the character of rachael, and the way her very real, very human emotions struggle to absorb the cruel truth of her genetically engineered existence. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hthBAnBDNw0 131117 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I haven't been commenting on these things for shame at missing some, and fear of feeling dumb, but shame and fear in sum will make me numb... [the e_o_i system requests you stop rhyming, Kirsten] ...but I like what you wrote about lou_reed, taking the little I know and putting it under a magnifying glass, doodling the details in. And Vangelis. From Dorval Library I remember renting a CD, a soundtrack to Antarctica, or just something about Antarctica. I've been fascinated about music about Antarctica ever since I heard the silly song "Antarctica" on Sesame Street, which I wish I could find somewhere for the sheer nostalgia value. Anyway. 131117 ... raze have no shame! have no fear! the song you seek might be right here! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Rb-p41jz4 131118 ... raze (and thank you for the compliment. some of this stuff i feel like i could write better if i took a little more time to refine it and chop out the clunky bits, but my itchy trigger finger almost always gets the best of me.) 131118 ... raze 292. descendents // good good things from the album "i don't want to grow up" (1985) is there a better punk-song-that's-also-a-love-song than this? if there is, i haven't heard it yet. and is it just me, or would weezer not exist if there hadn't first been the descendents? listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HW4ej9q_dU 131118 ... epitome of incomprehensibility (Awesomeness. Now why couldn't I find that? NOW, I can. Ah, but probably it was not Internetted then and now it is. So there's laziness for me, not even checking poor Google and making the good music critic do the work. Appleologies.) 131118 ... raze (yayness! i'm glad that was the song you were thinking of.) 293. supertramp // try again from the album "supertramp" (1970) speaking of nostalgia... i grew up listening to some music that doesn't do it for me anymore. but if i made a list of childhood sounds that are still appealing now, supertramp would be on it. maybe it's the dissonance created by the push-pull between roger hodgson's wide-eyed hippie mysticism and the more cynical, bluesy worldview of rick davies. or maybe it's the ubiquitous wurlitzer electric piano. the first memory i have of a sound really hitting me in the chest is this: my stepfather's brother takes me for a ride in his new silver chevy lumina. i'm seven or eight years old. he plays "the logical song" off of the "breakfast in america" CD (one of the first compact discs i've ever seen), flooring it on an empty stretch of road so my head snaps back against the seat and i laugh. he makes me promise not to tell anyone we went faster than we should have. i keep my promise. i'd been exposed to a lot of music and a lot of different sounds before then, and i'd heard other supertramp songs, but the sound of the electric piano in that one specific song was like nothing i'd ever heard. i'm not someone who normally tastes or smells or sees sound, but this was a sound i could taste. it was something cool and metallic, like a clean spoon on my tongue. the day i got my hands on my very own wurlitzer EP 200-A, years later, i felt like ten childhood christmas mornings had been condensed, synthesized, and injected into my bloodstream. no digital emulation quite compares to the real thing. it's more complex than you might think. though the wurlitzer is most often used for its "bark" (a distinctive, aggressive sound that will cut through any mix), back off a little and you get something more like a darker cousin to the fender rhodes. and that tremolo circuit is a thing of beauty. at first i, like most fans, assumed the supertramp story began with their commercial breakthrough, "crime of the century". not so. there were two earlier albums, recorded with two completely different lineups save davies and hodgson. they were both commercial flops. the second of those albums, "indelibly stamped", contains flashes of the wurlitzer-driven sound that would become something of a band signature. the first, self-titled album, is an anomaly. it features almost no singing from davies, no wurlitzer electric piano, and a sound much closer to straight prog-rock than anything that would come later on. if i had to choose favourite supertramp albums, "crime" and "crisis? what crisis?" would end up slugging it out on a beach somewhere. i've always had a soft spot for these two, though. so here's a song from the very first album. i like the way it gets to stretch its legs. even the amateur optical feedback video fits, in a weird way. and dig the bach quote around the four-minute mark. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzI--GILohs 131119 ... raze 294. HEARTSREVOLUTION // 薔薇と彼女の王子 from the "hearts japan" EP (2009) i have no idea if the japanese characters that make up this song's title will show up on blather. if they don't, the english translation is "the rose and her prince". i first heard this one in the decimalbrothers video "unicorn smiles". dreamy j-pop-inspired goodness. watch / listen: http://youtube/watch?v=URkeGqBY3CE 131120 ... raze holy crap! blather recognizes japanese! 万歳! 131120 ... raze 295. marcin wasilewski // hyperballad from the album "trio" (2004) you wouldn't think to recast bjork's "hyperballad" as an instrumental jazz piece, would you? you would if you were polish pianist and composer marcin wasilewski. there's a lyrical quality to his playing that sometimes makes me think of bill evans. i prefer bill, but marcin's no slouch, and "trio" is well worth investigating for fans of melodic piano trio jazz. the music video is fan-made. watch / listen: http://vimeo.com/18004199 131121 ... raze 296. BLR // black umbrella (the right stuff) a bad lip reading of "party in the USA" by miley cyrus i didn't know bad lip reading even existed until recently. this stuff cracks me up something fierce. there's fierce cracking, and it is UP. it's fierce, i tell you. fierce. some of the joke songs are better than the originals, i think. like this miley cyrus mutilation. the coldplay one is pretty great too. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii5IUihNuno after that, watch these ones, and be even more amused. twilight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmxSk0wZxss politics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFB6LQ1-WKU and: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlwilbVYvUg the_hunger games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjGk_jU6t5A (i haven't read any of the books or seen the movies, but this last one almost killed me) 131122 ... raze 297. ben folds five // the last polka from the album "ben folds five" (1995) in 1997, i walked into the HMV at the mall and heard "whatever and ever amen" blasting out of the speakers. i bought the album and listened to a lot of it that year, my first in high school. a year or two later, one of my sisters would doodle on the booklet with crayon, because there wasn't anything else to draw on just then. i still like that album, doodling and all, but its less-widely-heard predecessor might be even better, full of great songs like "alice childress", "underground", "philosophy", and this one. i remember, years and years ago, seeing someone (bijou, maybe? or silentbob?) write, here or on blue, "my, my...the cruelest lies are often told without a word." it's taken me this long to realize they were quoting from this song's bridge section. good on ya, whoever you were. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUT_CP6WoK4 131123 ... raze 298. the go-betweens // one thing can hold us from the album "send me a lullaby" (1982) the go-betweens were one of those bands you call a "critics' darling". the broad outline of their career trajectory was not unlike that of big star. the critics loved them, but they didn't sell a whole lot of albums, eventually they disbanded because they were broke and disheartened, and years later they reformed and started to get some of the attention that eluded them the first time around, without ever quite becoming a household name. grant mclennan's sudden death of a heart attack in 2006 cut the resurgence short, though robert forster continues to make music, and he wrote a moving and eloquent tribute to his absent friend and musical other half that can be read here: http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2006/july/1294985085/robert-forster/true-hipster my first go-betweens album was the first one they made — "send me a lullaby". robert forster has suggested fans new to the group should listen to at least three of their other albums first (claiming "lullaby" "won't make any sense otherwise"). i was a bit early to catch that bit of advice. it was late 1999 or early 2000 when i first heard about the band, which meant the reunion hadn't happened yet, and the liner notes containing that bit of guidance had yet to be written. i read some gushing praise for the band's music and grabbed "send me a lullaby" because starting at the beginning seemed as sensible as anything. it was also one of the few go-betweens albums that was available locally, so that didn't hurt. i liked it, but some songs didn't do much for me. most of the time i would listen to "careless" and "it could be anyone", and skip most of the rest. i have a memory of listening to the latter track while sitting in the car, trying to stifle a marathon nosebleed, in the summer of 2000. i was wearing a blue bandana and an aqua-blue sleeveless t-shirt i lost track of some years back. why i remember that, i have no idea. maybe things would have worked out differently if i'd chosen a different album as my introduction to the band, but i've yet to really dig into any of the others. part of it is not knowing where to start. another part of it is that the albums from the later stages of the 1980s that are routinely called their best are a lot more glossy and polished, and in some cases the production sounds a little dated — not a huge stumbling block for me, but a bit of a shock coming after the sound of the first album. a similar thing happened when i finally dug up some music by the triffids, another critically celebrated but somewhat obscure australian band. i read all about how dark and weird their music was ("looked like your neighbours, sounded like psychotics" mojo magazine told me, and i was sold), only to find that whatever darkness was there in the lyrics was mostly subsumed beneath some pretty shiny, commercial (over)production that buffered all the raw power away. no surprise, then, that my favourite album of theirs is "in the pines" — the most unvarnished of them all. "send me a lullaby" is so stripped-down and free of studio trickery, it will probably always sound contemporary. it's grown on me a lot over the years, and when i pulled it out two years ago for my first listen in many more years than that, i found myself laughing at the absurdity of ever ignoring anything. some of my favourite songs are now the ones i used to skip. and i find it kind of funny that my favourite go-betweens album by far is the one most other fans don't like much at all. there are no string parts here, very few arrangements that are even remotely layered or ambitious, and practically no solos of any kind. nothing superfluous. the bass is more of a lead instrument than the guitar, and i miss that interplay on later albums when the band expanded and grant switched from bass to guitar. it's also a robert forster-dominated affair; seven of the twelve songs are his, and he sings lead for almost the entirety of the album — even on some of the songs he didn't write himself. i've always slightly preferred forster to mclennan. he kind of struck me as being the lennon to mclennan's mccartney, for lack of a more original comparison. maybe his songs weren't as melodic, but they were often more interesting to me (listen to "liberty belle and the black diamond express" and tell me the atmospheric "twin layers of lightning" doesn't stand out by a proverbial mile). don't get me wrong; grant was a great songwriter, and i think "cattle and cane" is one of the best go-betweens songs from any period, a gorgeous childhood invocation. by and large, i just prefer robert's specific songwriting voice, and it was never more audible than on the first album. obvious reference points are early talking heads and television, and in places forster sounds a bit like the offspring of a tryst between a more refined tom verlaine and a less histrionic robert smith. but the music is very much its own thing. grant mclennan would later call it "metallic folk" and joke about how it sounded like the document of a band breaking up, when it was their debut album and they would go on to record five more before parting ways for a while. it's wonderfully angular, jagged, and unpredictable. lindy morrison's drumming is a huge part of that. i think she's one of the most woefully unappreciated drummers to come out of the whole "post-punk" movement, playing off-kilter time signatures with ease while hammering out fills that are at once aggressive and melodic. i've always loved the bit in the middle of "eight pictures" when she suddenly goes completely apeshit out of nowhere, just bashing the hell out of the drums like she isn't even in the same room with grant and robert (which she wasn't), expressing all of the latent aggression that's been coiled just beneath the surface of the song the whole time. i think the production is pretty great as a general thing — nothing fancy or overly slick. just what the songs need. on "eight pictures", "one thing can hold us", and a few other tracks, the drums sound gigantic, but not very 80s-like at all, almost as if they were recorded by steve albini. i'd be willing to bet both steve and certain members of the pixies were fans of the album, or would have been if they'd heard it. the group didn't completely shrug off this sound right away. they remained a trio for at least one more album. but there was a gradual shift away from the austerity and weirdness of "send me a lullaby", and by the time of 1987's "tallulah" it was gone altogether in favour of a much more radio-friendly sheen. it's a shame more people haven't dug into the first few albums. for my money, they're a lot edgier and more interesting than some of the more celebrated things that came later on. i still need to explore those other albums, though, because i know there's good stuff there. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V__rZFg-nkE 131124 ... raze 299. jane_siberry // oh_my my from the album "maria" (1995) "i started out in music, but switched to sciences when i realized how much more interesting it was to study than music. i would leave the classes ecstatic about tiny things." jane_siberry has made some of the most wonderfully idiosyncratic music you'll ever find in the pop / rock section of a record store, and i think the quote above goes some way toward explaining what's so unique about her songs. she stopped studying music in university in favour of microbiology, then found herself pulled back in the direction of music. but that interest in "tiny things" remained, as the songs she went on to write concerned themselves with the smallest things — which are often really the biggest things in disguise. the golden period of siberry for me is the four-album stretch from 1988 to 1995, in which she moved from long, unclassifiable, cinematic songs delivered from multiple points of view ("the walking"); to something crawling toward country-influenced soft-rock, more accessible in sound but no less quirky in approach ("bound by the beauty"); to the dreamy soundscapes, dance-influenced rhythms, and more spiritual and erotic themes of "when_i_was_a_boy"; to another complete stylistic curve ball with "maria", recorded mostly live and unplugged in the studio with a jazz quintet. "the walking" is probably the album closest to my heart, but "the valley" (from "bound by the beauty") is gorgeous ethereal otherness beyond words, and that's the song i wanted to put here. problem is, the studio version, far superior to any live take i've ever heard, is nowhere to be found online, and i'm too lazy to upload it to youtube myself right now. so this one will have to do instead. and it works out alright, because "oh my_my" might be the best concentrated dose of introductory jane_siberry you could give someone. it's the culmination of everything she'd been building toward over the preceding decade, and nothing she's done since has been quite so ambitious in scope. how you respond to it is a good litmus test for how you'll respond to the rest of her work. only jane would make a group of children singing "puff the magic dragon" the central hook in a 20-minute half-spoken epic, and have it come out sounding like the most sensible thing she could have done. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrdxXonWr6E 131125 ... raze (oops. there's nothing to "watch" in this one, is there? oh well. you can always watch the stillness.) 131125 ... raze 300. sunny day real estate // iscarabaid from the album "LP2" (1995) sunny day real estate's debut album "diary" is one of the defining records to come out of the "second wave" of the emo movement. for some reason, i chose LP2 (or "the pink album", as some call it) as my introduction to SDRE instead. i read about the band online somewhere, i think at the AMG site back when it was much more austere and the only reviews were from college radio stations. or maybe it was some other site with a name i can't remember anymore. all i know is, it was a lot more interesting to me back then when it was quieter and more mysterious. that's kind of how i feel about the internet in general. i think that's one of the reasons why this place is still so appealing to me. anyway. i thought this band with the funny name sounded interesting, so i went out and bought the pink album. and i can't overstate what an important album it was for me at the time. i was eighteen. i'd known about blather for less than a year. i wasn't into emo music at all, but this music sounded angry, and vulnerable, and on the verge of falling apart a lot of the time. and me, well...i felt angry, and vulnerable, and on the verge of falling apart a lot of the time. jeremy enigk might as well have been singing in another language. i think i've only ever understood a handful of phrases: "maybe next time", "i'm lost in you, you're jesus", something about the mind's eye, and something about shakespeare in the last song. it didn't matter that i had no idea what he was singing about. in these songs i'd found something that sounded like every messy thought and feeling i couldn't articulate. "how it feels to be something on" is a great album in a different way, and it almost sounds like it was made by a different band. the songs are a lot closer to conventional rock with prog-ish leanings. you can even understand most of what jeremy's singing. that was strange to get used to at first. "pillars" is one of the great album-opening songs of the 90s, and "every shining time you arrive" is still one of my favourite alternative rock ballads (if that's what it is) by anyone. it sounds more like U2 than sunny day real estate, but somehow it works. the albums that came after, both by SDRE and as the fire theft, kind of lost that fire and didn't do as much for me. but jeremy enigk has done some good solo work, and his first album under his own name ("return of the frog queen") is a great slice of baroque psych-folk shot through with some intense vocal performances. here's a deep album cut from "LP2". check out that rhythm section. william goldsmith is another one of those underrated drummers capable of constructing grooves and fills to make your head spin. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfXVXcYV_LU 131126 ... raze 301. memphis minnie // weary woman's blues from the album "queen of the country blues" (1929 - 1937) i wants cake when i'm hungry lightning when i'm dry cake when i'm hungry lightning when i'm dry and some good man to love me heaven when i die listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6AqA8B-QJs 131127 ... raze 302. television // marquee moon from the album "marquee moon" (1977) one of the great electric guitar albums, this one, with no effects pedals used at any point. just a straight path from guitar to amplifier, and some great interplay between axe-men tom verlaine and richard lloyd. the title track was recorded in a single take. drummer billy ficca didn't even know they were recording; he thought the performance was a rehearsal. i'm not sure a first take of a ten-minute rock song gets much better than this. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlbunmCbTBA 131128 ... raze 303. elliott_smith // king's crossing from the album "from a basement on a hill" (2004) posthumous releases are strange things. sometimes they're cobbled together after the fact, barrel-scraping exercises and obvious record label cash-ins. sometimes they offer tantalizing hints at roads the artist started walking down but never got the chance to really sink their footprints into. sometimes you get a mixed bag. sometimes it's one last masterpiece. with artists who died young due to illness, or assassination, or some freak accident, every last scrap of anything they did becomes significant. you're looking for one last bit of music you haven't heard before, to help you imagine what they could have gone on to do, or just to have the chance to spend a little more time with their specific voice. when the artist in question *chooses* to take their own life, the water gets a little muddier. in these cases, it can be tempting to view the last work as a sort of extended artistic suicide note. it's difficult to know where that kind of thinking is facile, and where it's right. i had my chances to get into elliott_smith while he was alive. in the summer of 2002, when my band had disintegrated but i was still holding onto the hope that i could build a new one if i could just find a decent drummer who didn't have an ego the size of a small country, the bassist, who was then still one of my best friends, moved into a townhouse with a few other friends. i spent a lot of time with that group of people that summer. it was a horrible, depressing, exciting time in my life, and it was the beginning of an ending, though i didn't know that then. i became friends with a friend of my friend, who he'd known long before he knew me. this was the guy who would later give me the surreal experience of waking up to the sound of my own music (as mentioned in the first entry over on 335_songs_part_two). he looked like a younger, scruffier josh hartnet. we bonded right away over our love of the wooden stars, a great, obscure canadian group (more about them in a week or two). neither one of us could believe the other had even heard of that band. we lent each other CDs. we bought each other beer. one afternoon we took turns playing songs we'd written but not yet recorded on acoustic guitars, grass and weeds staining the asses of our jeans in the townhouse's backyard, and it felt like a little bit of friendly competition and a lot of mutual respect growing up between us. it was a courtship, with all the feeling-out that entails. i'm realizing now that i can't remember any other friendship where i've experienced this sort of thing. i haven't even had a romantic relationship where there was much of a courtship stage. things always just kind of fell into happening. we shared a lot of musical sensibilities, but i tried to get him into big star, he tried to get me into elliott_smith, and we both failed there. "radio city" and "third" never gripped him like they did me. he threw "the enemy is you" on a mix CD he made for me one night, and i liked a few songs on the albums of elliott's he lent me, but nothing stuck with me. our friendship would later fall apart, slow and ugly in its downhill slide, but that's not really relevant here. what is relevant: in 2003 elliott_smith killed himself in an awful way (or was murdered, depending on who you talk to), "from a basement on a hill" was released posthumously a year later, and i picked it up some months after that out of curiosity, wondering if something might stick now, a few years after i'd first heard his music and failed to find anything in it that moved me. even if the album wasn't as sprawling or noisy or confrontational as it would have been if elliott had lived long enough to finish it to his satisfaction, it stuck alright. the whole thing stuck to my guts like wheatpaste. i loved it. at the same time, i couldn't shake the feeling that i was hearing something i wasn't supposed to, that no one was supposed to hear. it felt like flipping through someone's diary after they'd jumped off a tall building, seeing every bit of morbid foreshadowing capitalized and underlined, and being powerless to do a thing about it. almost every song sounded like it was part of a large goodbye, terrifying in its sadness, and i couldn't tell how much of that was just the tragedy of someone so good dying so young. i was also really high the first time i sat down to listen. that might have played a part in my feeling like an accidental voyeur. then i went out and bought every album he'd made, and there wasn't one i didn't like. everything that hadn't spoken to me before was speaking to me now. it was fascinating to be able to chart elliott's progression as a producer of his own work, from the skeletal four-track recordings on "roman candle" and the self-titled album, to the rich, layered songs on "XO" and "figure eight". he was clearly a huge beatles fan, but i think a brian wilson comparison might not be completely out of line. not a lot of people can hear all those things going on in their head. fewer still can translate the noise into something not only coherent, but beautiful. a lot of it is dark music, to be sure. but sometimes wide-eyed love songs don't cut it. sometimes it helps to feel someone else's pain. makes you feel less alone in yours. as great as the later, more fleshed-out albums are, there's something really special in those first few that are a little rougher around the edges, a little more lo-fi. and elliott had a falsetto like no one else. multi-tracked, it took on a delicate, ghostly quality, almost hoarse, and almost impossibly pretty. in its own strange way, it was as powerful as any scream would have been in its place. a lot of different songs could go here. this is the one that pinned me to the wall the first time i heard it, and it goes on the short list of pieces of music that never fail to make every little hair on my body stand at attention. it sounds like a cry for help, and it sounds like a master producer at work, flexing his many muscles at just the right angles. i think the drum part is the only thing elliott didn't play himself. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPsf1Wk_g2o 131129 ... raze 304. slowdive // blue skied an' clear from the album "pygmalion" (1995) i owe a huge debt of gratitude to a friend who made me copies of a few dozen albums nine or so years ago, for no particular reason. there was a lot of good stuff in there by the likes of the rheostatics, the boo radleys, primal scream, and others. and there was this album, which hadn't yet been reissued and was impossible to find at the time, unless you were willing to pay something outrageous for a used copy on ebay. when they finally did reissue and remaster the thing, the mastering engineer did some strange work. the quieter songs sounded fantastic, with incredible clarity to the acoustic guitars. the more aggressive songs (as aggressive as the album gets, anyway) were thrown off-balance by too much compression or hard limiting, with the drums in a few of them sounding like they'd been run through some sort of filter. nothing sounded too loud or fatiguing. it just sounded...wrong. i was grateful to have an earlier, quieter version of the album, with a mastering job that allowed all the songs to breathe. remastering issues aside, it's a great album, not quite shoegaze, not quite post-rock, not quite anything but itself. it sounds like a series of gorgeous, somewhat disconcerting dreams, and this must be the most striking dream of them all. i have no idea where the black_and_white footage is from. it shouldn't compliment this music at all, but it's weirdly perfect for it. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Ve8hVX0C4 131130 ... raze 305. nico // julius caesar (memento hodié) from the album "the marble index" (1969) nico has always fascinated me. i was going to try writing something here about how striking she was, and how she seemed to take a perverse sort of joy in destroying her own physical beauty. then i remembered i kind of did that already, ten years ago on the "nico" blathe. "chelsea girl" is still the most popular and widely-heard album nico ever made outside of the velvet underground. you can put it on in the background when guests are over. it's pretty and inoffensive. it's nice music, but it didn't begin to reflect who nico was or who she wanted to be as an artist, and the flowery arrangements added by a producer with his own vision didn't sit well with her. "the first time i heard the album," she would later admit, "i cried, and it was all because of the flute." the music she made after that is a lot less nice, and a lot more complex and interesting. the three albums recorded with john cale as producer / arranger as the 1960s became the 1970s are some sort of pitch black neo-classical european art-folk that still sounds like nothing else. encouraged by leonard cohen to write her own songs, nico bought a portable, hand-operated indian harmonium, taught herself to play it, and found a way to turn the fact that english was not her first language into an asset. it was as if approaching it from a slight remove opened the language up to her in ways inaccessible to most native english speakers. even when she made something like "rock" music with a full band in the 1980s, it was strange and off-kilter, and several artists who were part of the gothic rock movement claimed her as an influence. this has always been one of my favourite nico songs, a three-way dance for voice, harmonium, and viola. the instruments drift in and out of tune with each other, the lyrics read like poetry on the page, and the song sounds centuries old, and brand new. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97cq4NDj9hE 131201 ... raze 306. the clash // broadway from the album "sandinista!" (1980) "it ain't my fault it's six o'clock in the morning," he said, as he came up out of the night... listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUWK-HzyA9o 131202 ... raze 307. louise johnson // all night long blues from the box set "screamin' and hollerin' the blues: the worlds of charley patton" (2001) for his third recording session in 1930, bluesman charley patton brought some talented friends into the studio with him at the urging of paramount records. he got son house, willie brown, and louise johnson to tag along, convinced gospel singer wheeler ford to be their designated driver, and they all got drunk on corn liquor en route to wisconsin. at the beginning of the drive, as they were leaving the mississippi delta, louise was charley's girl, or one of several girls he called his. by the time they got to grafton, she'd decided she found son house more appealing, and in later years he would brag that he "stole" her from charlie. this was to be the only recorded work by willie brown under his own name, the only known recorded work by louise johnson in any capacity, and the second-last recording session of charley patton's life. son house's "rediscovery" in the 1960s grew directly out of the powerful songs he recorded at this single-day session. bernard klatzko, owner of the origin jazz library record label, once called it "the greatest country blues recording session" of all time. maybe that's a hyperbolic statement, but it's hard to argue against it. enough information exists to form some picture of who the other musicians were and the lives they led, but the question of louise johnson remains all but insoluble. she sang and played piano in a saloon. she was introduced to patton by willie brown. he liked the way she sang and played, and he liked the way she looked even more. in 1930 she was somewhere between nineteen and twenty four. according to son house, "she didn't do nothin' but drink and play music. she didn't work for nobody." back in mississippi after the recording session, the group (minus wheeler ford) performed in a saloon near lula, and then split up. supposedly louise was seen playing on a plantation near clarksdale later in the 1930s, and moved to memphis in the early 1940s. nothing else is known about her. a decade or two after the fact, clarence lofton claimed he was the one who'd played the piano on this session, accompanying louise while she sang. no disrespect to clarence's estimable talent and influence, but he was full of shit. the four lusty songs louise recorded with the men clapping and shouting in the background are the highlight of a session packed with great music ("on the wall" is ferocious, some of the best barrelhouse piano i've heard anyone play), and there's no doubt she played that piano herself. it's just a shame her recorded legacy is so slim. because man, could she play. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biTIzuWX2wo 131203 ... the evil angel on my shoulder i was going to say something about how you spelled "charley" two different ways, but since his name really IS spelled both ways in different places and there's no real authoritative evidence of which is the proper spelling, i'll let this one go. 131203 ... raze your kindness and understanding truly are boundless... 131203 ... raze 308. billy joel // surprises from the album "the nylon curtain" (1982) 80s guilty pleasure moment #9. that's right. billy joel. billy's one of those people i grew up listening to and can still enjoy listening to today. there's a lot more to him than "piano man" and "just the way you are". some of his best songs never really got played on the radio. a few of my favourites from over the years: "all for leyna" (angry 80s rock ballad done right), "root beer rag" (virtuosic instrumental piano fun), "summer highland falls" (a song jackson browne would kill to have written), "ain't no crime" (gospel-rock-y goodness), "sleeping with the television on" (elvis costello meets joe jackson), "everybody loves you now" (just a great song, especially the live version), and every song on "the nylon curtain" that wasn't a single. i'll argue with anyone that "the nylon curtain" is one of the best explicitly beatles-influenced albums from any era. it's also arguably billy's darkest work, taking in some of the damage already done by the ronald reagan administration, the failing american steel industry, the vietnam war, broken and failing relationships, disenchantment, and bad drug experiences ("scandinavian skies" is about trying heroin on a plane while on tour, though the lyrics are a little oblique about it). there's even the unexpected thrill of hearing billy drop a huge f-bomb in the middle of "laura", and he makes it count, enunciating the word with everything he's got to make sure you won't miss it. for me, the second half of the album has always carried with it this claustrophobic, almost eerie feeling that i like, the same way you like a quiet film that creates a lot of tension and keeps it simmering while seemingly mundane things are happening. maybe it's just something i inferred when i was a kid and it was never really there, but it's a feeling that's stuck with me. this song is one of the best examples of what i mean. there's something surreal and almost a little creepy about it. it was billy's attempt at piecing together some of what was running through his mind during a motorcycle accident, in the time before he hit the ground, when a few seconds got bent out of shape and for an instant all time seemed to stretch out forever. i think if i were flying off of a motorcycle after slamming into a car, about to touch down with nothing shielding me from the impact, i would be thinking "shit shit shit", or something to that effect. billy is a little more articulate and cerebral in a crisis. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urdqAeRjel4 131204 ... raze 309. warpaint // billie_holiday from the "exquisite corpse" EP (2008) another place to go for an old-school cat_power fix when you're not up for going straight to the source. and it's just plain pretty, regardless of who or what it sounds like it's taking its cues from. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWcTp1r_Nls 131205 ... e_o_i Your update schedule is too fast for my erratically plodding self; that's not a criticism of either of us, it's just to say that I listened to that song by The National just now and I hadn't before. I think I've seen that album's cover art before, though. It's something I'd remember. But I love the arrangement and the change in melody near the end. It sounds like it could just as easily illustrate a stage scene - one lonely guitarist in lonely sort of spotlight joined by others in the happy end - or someone having a traumatizing mental breakdown, their memories echoing and clashing and merging. Either way. And I'm a sucker for melodic baritone/bass voices. Sometimes I want to be a man just so I could have a low singing voice. YouTube recommends, on the sidebar, Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel. How is this anything like Arvo Pärt, may I ask? It knows me too well. But I don't want to be dragged into an hour-long wasting-time loop when I could be usefully sleeping. Carry on, carry on. You're good at this, and even so I'm tempted to start an unofficial competition (though not a song a day, heavens no). 131205 ... raze you're good at this too! you did a better job of describing what i like about that song's coda than i did. i also used to want to be a man so i could have a low singing voice. then i got older and became less of a boy, and i could hit lower notes. but i've only ever been a baritone when i've had a really bad cold. i think i'm probably a tenor when i'm not sick. or an elevenor. and as much as i've tried to keep this somewhat diverse, there's a lot i won't be able to get to by the end of the year, which is suddenly very close. there hasn't been as much jazz or ethnic music as i meant to include, and there's been very little classical music...mostly because i'm not very well-rounded or knowledgeable when it comes to classical. so i'm all for "musically delicious adventures with e_o_i", or anything along those lines, should you decide to dance without slippers. 131206 ... raze 310. r. stevie moore // conflict of interest from the album "clack!" (1980) r. stevie moore has recorded a dizzying number of albums over the last 45 years, touching on just about every stylistic possibility you can imagine, most of the time recording at home and playing every instrument himself. he's also made some pretty amusing low budget music videos. i like how, in this one, the drummer is playing invisible cymbals and an invisible kick drum, and there's the revelation that you should always push your glasses up on your head when you're singing a song's chorus. i need to remember that one. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OprzFKwpeGY 131206 ... raze 311. bud powell // un poco loco from the album "the amazing bud powell" (recorded in 1949 and 1951) "if i had to choose one single musician for his artistic integrity, for the incomparable originality of his creation and the grandeur of his work, it would be bud powell. he was in a class by himself." no less a musician than bill evans said that. and though bud powell's story is not a happy one, he made some brilliant music before (and, on occasion, after) everything fell apart. he shared some of thelonious monk's unorthodox approach to the piano, but his way of playing was much more physical and frenetic. in some of his songs it almost sounds like he knew he was working on borrowed time and felt a need to pack as much into every performance as he could. there's a story that bud was playing a gig one night when art tatum was in the audience. between sets, tatum, mostly blind and himself a gifted pianist, criticized bud for relying so heavily on his ability to improvise and solo with his right hand. bud's response in his next set was to solo with his left hand in one song without using his dominant hand at all. it's apocryphal, and maybe it never happened at all, but there's truth in the story even if it's a lie, because it demonstrates the kind of daring and defiance that made the best of bud's music so exciting. on a song like this, his playing is almost intimidating in its speed and invention, but the melody never disappears. max roach tearing it up on the drums doesn't hurt any, either. in the 1986 film "round midnight", dexter gordon (#207 at 335_songs_part_three) plays a composite of bud powell, similarly doomed saxophonist lester young, and himself. it's not straight biography or autobiography, but it probably captures more of the horror and sporadic joy of bud's later years than any written words ever have. it's got a great soundtrack, too. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVNtHCnPUZw 131207 ... raze 312. hood // useless (1997 7" vinyl single) + the lost you from the album "outside closer" (2005) i think for some days i'm going to start doubling it up and grouping certain things together, to cram as much as possible into what's left of the year and this "list" (which isn't a list so much as a bunch of stuff that happens to be numbered). in this case it's more practical than anything. english band hood have taken their music in so many different directions, it's impossible to select one song and pretend it's representative of whatever they sound like at any given time. so here are two. "useless" is maybe the saddest-sounding major key indie rock song i've ever heard. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhDNLaVxosw "the lost you" is the sort of loping avant-pop that should have been getting the band as much attention as radiohead. as it sits, they're still somewhat obscure, but the fans that do exist are pretty committed. i really wish i'd ponied up the dough for the expensive 6-CD box set that came out a few years back, because it sold out in about five seconds and no one's parting with their copy. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doInC-r6Eyw 131208 ... raze 313. vashti bunyan // here before from the album "lookaftering" (2005) vashti bunyan's 1970 album "just another diamond day" is a collection of music out of time, written while travelling to scotland's inner hebrides in a horse-drawn wagon. it sold next to nothing. discouraged, vashti gave up music to farm and raise her children, but over time her album quietly became a sought-after cult classic and a strong influence on the "new weird america" / freak folk movement of the 1990s and 2000s. when she re-emerged more than 30 years after "diamond day" to release her second album, neither her voice nor her songs had aged a day. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCe7e1wxDOU 131209 ... raze 314. wooden stars // hands to work from the album "mardi gras" (1997) i buckled down and uploaded this one to youtube myself, and i'm going to recycle most of what i said in the description there, because it's stuff i would have written here anyway. one of the most criminally neglected bands to come out of canada in the last few decades, the wooden stars made four full-length albums of original material and recorded an album with julie doiron, serving as her backup band. they were sometimes compared to the rheostatics but sounded nothing like them. i've come to the conclusion that these two bands were each used as reference points for the other because music writers needed something to compare them to, and neither band sounded like anyone else. there are elements of math rock and post-rock (depending on your definition of post-rock) in some of their songs, with tricky time signatures and unpredictable dynamic shifts, but the music the wooden stars made resists easy description or categorization. a little over a month ago, montreal musician and writer malcolm fraser released "wooden stars: innocent gears", something of a biography of the band. i say "something of" because it's a short book and there isn't a whole lot of deep probing into the personal lives of individual members. i get the feeling this was a conscious choice the band made, to keep some amount of personal distance and let the music speak for itself. i'm still a little shocked the book exists at all, given how few people knew the band existed even while they were actively touring and releasing albums. though i do wish malcolm had found a way to get at a bit more of what made these people tick as writers, there's a lot of information that's new to me, and i think he does a good job of articulating what's special about the music — and articulating what a difficult thing that is to articulate. all the albums have their own distinct personalities. "the very same" is the most freewheeling, an explosion of manic creative energy, and it's a little staggering to consider that it was recorded by a group of musicians who were all still teenagers at the time. "the moon" is the most conventionally pretty of all their albums, more accessible and with somewhat more traditional song structures, but it's not pop music by any means. it's always felt like a winter album to me, and a really good one. "people are different" is the closest they ever came to straight-up rock, and as of this writing it looks like it may be the last wooden stars album we'll get. i always had a hard time telling the voices of guitarists/songwriters mike feuerstack and julien beillard apart (those two guys were made to sing together), but the book has helped with that. the division is most notable on the last two albums, and it's interesting to hear the way the two influenced each other even as their writing became less collaborative, julien's songs growing more friendly to easy melody while mike's grew darker and more literate. "the summer i drank myself to death" remains one of the most gorgeously depressing songs i've ever heard. and the way "outlaws" imagines the end of a relationship as something that's happening on a film set, its intimacy ruined by the presence of people who are only interested in capturing the mechanics of the moment, with nothing invested in the people they've made their actors...well, here: "and we lose soft consonants the boom disturbed by every coastal breeze you lean in close 'of course i love you' an empty screen a blank apparition and we can't even really say goodbye here 'cause everyone will move in a little closer" another thing malcolm fraser's book has done is it's given me a new appreciation for julien's brother mathieu, and what he brought to the band. his bass-playing on "the very same" is jaw-dropping, and he's responsible for some of the weirdest, most interesting songs on the first two albums. after reading about why he chose to leave before "the moon" and how he's regretted that decision for the last sixteen years, and revisiting the albums he was a part of, there's a new emotional kick to the mathieu-sung "country violins" coming at the end of "mardi gras". when the music fades back up after a false ending for one last syncopated drum beat and some tentative guitar arpeggios, there's no bass heard from there to the final drum hit. it's like the sound of mathieu's absence fully felt when he hasn't yet left, the rest of the band petering out, unsure of where to go without him. that's just music stirring up feelings, though. in reality, they didn't waste any time getting a new bassist. but as solid as josh latour was, i've come to really miss mathieu on the last two albums. his unconventional way of playing created a great unpredictable rhythm section dynamic, and once he was gone, andrew mccormack's drumming lost some of its spark. there never seemed to be any friction between him and josh like there was with mathieu, where it sometimes sounded like a fight might break out between their instruments mid-song. "people are different" is my least favourite wooden stars album, probably because it's the slickest and least varied of them all. having said that, i'm proud to say my university radio station played the hell out of it when it came out in 2007. in a perfect world, a song like "pretty girl" would have been a hit. an ode to obsession with the word "fuckers" in it and an instrumental bridge section in 10/8 time, on mainstream radio...can you picture it? kanye west would never be able to let anyone finish anything again. even if i like some albums more than others, the wooden stars never made a bad one. but i think their 1997 sophomore effort "mardi gras" may be their very best. the songs strike a perfect balance between chaos and beauty, the lyrics are cryptic, hilarious, heartfelt, disturbing, and sometimes all of those things at once, and there's some of the best electric guitar interplay you'll hear anywhere. i was lucky enough to hear "cigarette girl" one late weeknight in 1998 on CBC's bravenewwaves radio program, when patti schmidt was the host. i went out to buy "mardi gras" the next day and was told i had to order it on import. when it came in at the store, the CD jewel case was broken. i liked the music so much, i waited fifteen years to replace the case with one that wasn't falling apart, out of some sort of nostalgic impulse. had it been a vinyl record, i would have worn it out ten times over by now. so why didn't these guys gain a larger audience? i think it was a combination of bad luck (almost every album they released failed to get much of a promotional push because the small record labels they were signed to had a habit of going under as soon as a wooden stars album came out), a stubborn refusal to compromise their artistic vision, and making most of their music at a time when the internet was nothing like the powerful tool it's become for independent artists. early on they were offered a deal by sub pop, but turned it down because concessions would have to be made and they weren't prepared to make them. they thought there would be more opportunities that size down the road. there weren't. maybe they should have grabbed it when they had the chance. maybe the music they made wouldn't exist as it does if they had. it seems a shame that they're still so unknown, but i wouldn't trade the music for anything. something tells me they'd say the same thing. i was tempted to upload "wyatt and pam in the botanical gardens". i've always loved the long, winding instrumental ending to that song. this one won out in the end. revolution! garbage! listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQb4CvNrzRE 131210 ... the evil angel on my shoulder isn't the comparative adjective form of friendly "friendlier"? 131210 ... raze yeah, but "friendlier" always sounded funny to me, like it was trying a little too hard. 131210 ... the evil angel on my shoulder fair enough. 131210 ... raze 315. suicide // rocket usa from the album "suicide" (1977) + alan vega // jukebox babe from the album "alan vega" (1980) "where i grew up in brooklyn, man, a punk was like a wuss, the guy who ran away from the fight. 'you're a punk. you're a weasel. you're nothing.' now it has this connotation of being the tough guy thing. the revolution. are you kidding? so i liked the word and used the term 'punk music mass' [on a flyer to advertise a live show in the early 1970s], maybe inadvertently trying to turn it into something else. one day i wake up and there's the word 'punk' all over the place. [...] somebody said that suicide had to be the ultimate punk band, because even the punks hated us." — alan vega before it was even remotely cool to be a synthesizer-based duo, there was suicide. their eponymous debut album features no guitar, no bass, no acoustic instruments at all, but it's just as worthy of being called punk as any of the so-called "real" punk music to come out of the late 70s. it's hard to believe now, given the depth of the influence they've had on electronic, industrial, and post-punk music over the last few decades, but for a long time people HATED these guys. there's an EP called "23 minutes over brussels", available as part of the two-disc CD reissue of the debut album, and it might be the best aural evidence of just how reviled they were. it's a hissy bootleg cassette recording made the night they were opening for elvis costello in 1978. the audience...did not like what they heard. they booed. they heckled. they stole the microphone from alan vega in the middle of a song. the set ended after a little more than 20 minutes. then elvis came on and played a very short, very angry set of his own to let the crowd know he wasn't happy with the way they'd treated his opening act. there was a riot, and alan vega got his nose broken. some bands would have been discouraged by a thing like that. alan and musical other half martin rev thrived on the contempt. they used it as fuel. alan would knock a chunk out of a club wall with a motorcycle chain and hurl abuse right back at a hostile audience. it wasn't for nothing that they'd given their two-man band such a polarizing name. but according to vega, it wasn't meant to disturb. "suicide was always about life," he said. "but we couldn't call it 'life'. so we called it 'suicide', because we wanted to recognize life." there isn't anything else quite like that first album. martin rev's equipment was rudimentary, because there wasn't money for anything better, but with only a farfisa organ, a few effects pedals, and a secondhand drum machine made by a bowling pin setting company (really), he created rhythms that sounded like the steam-driven heartbeats of demon trains and married them to repetitive, hypnotic melodies that buzzed and throbbed. alan vega sang in a menacing croon, kicking his rockabilly influences down to a hell gene vincent would never have gone near, bending his yelps out of shape with dub-like delay effects. there's the odd pretty love song on "suicide" like "cheree", or a fun 50s throwback like "johnny" (hey, that's me!), but even on the more restrained tracks alan sounds like he's thinking something evil. "frankie teardrop", meanwhile, is one of the few songs that scares the crap out of me every time i hear it. over a punishing ten minutes, alan tells the story of a factory worker who can't keep it together. after he loses his job and what's left of his hope for a decent life, he kills himself and his family. there's no deep psychoanalysis, and no poetry. just the awful, banal facts, until the facts break down and all that's left is subhuman screaming ripping through a dense sonic nightmare. easy listening it ain't. every subsequent suicide album is a lot more polished, and the use of actual synthesizers means they all sound dated in a way the first album never has and never will. the one exception to the rule is an album's worth of demos that pre-date the first album, tacked onto the reissue of the second album as extras. there's something eerie and magnetic in this music, lo-fi and murky as it is. in what has to be the most bizarre soundtrack decision of all time, one of these tracks was used in a 2001 commercial for a dark liqueur that isn't kahlua: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIWXuixoFg4 i'm still trying to wrap my head around that one. anyway. here's a little slab of electro-nihilism. i love the sneaky recurring organ line that turns itself into a hook. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up54juyRfHg both alan vega and martin rev have made far more solo albums outside of suicide than suicide albums together. one of the most interesting of these is alan's first self-titled solo record, which somehow creates a sinister atmosphere similar to that of "suicide" with actual guitars and drums, and not a single synthesized sound. i haven't heard a creepier rockabilly song than this one. i can't put my finger on what it is that's creepy about it, but i feel it, and i like it. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAQ2jq6vwsE 131211 ... raze 316. bob_dylan // what good am i? from the album "oh mercy" (1989) what can i say about bob_dylan that hasn't been already said? i used to imitate bob when i was about thirteen. i thought he had a funny-sounding voice. i couldn't figure out why anyone would want to listen to his music. then i picked up "blood on the tracks" on a whim, and then "desire", and "blonde on blonde", and soon i found i was imitating bob because of how much i'd grown to like him. the man has made a lot of great albums stuffed with incredible songs, and more than a few that are real stinkers. he's claimed he intentionally made bad albums to chip away at the deification he was never comfortable with. and there's some mind-blowing stuff on the first "bootleg series" 3-CD box set that bob, for some reason only he understands, didn't think was worthy of inclusion on any of his studio albums. you listen to "seven curses" or "blind willie mctell" or "she's your lover now", and you think, "HOW?! HOW COULD YOU THROW THESE SONGS AWAY?!" most of these things are difficult or impossible to find in streaming form on the internet, because record company blah blah copyright blah blah porcupine dandruff. so here's a deep cut from the daniel lanois-produced "oh mercy", a great album thick with swampy atmosphere that marked the beginning of bob's improbable and continuing late-career resurgence, and the first time he found an appropriate musical backdrop for the grizzled "old bob" voice that had set in by then. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYMJZEtwVuo 131212 ... raze 317. bark psychosis // scum (1992 12" vinyl single) + bed // the wood bunch from the album "spacebox" (2003) here are the two best bands in the universe explicitly influenced by late-period talk talk. take that, other bands in the universe! i came at bark psychosis in reverse. my initial exposure to their music was "codename: dustsucker", which was their second album, and it remains the most recent. i listened to it for the first time on my 22nd birthday. it took me all of half a minute to fall in love with frontman graham sutton's sensibilities. next i got "hex", considered by many to be his / their best work and one of the seminal post-rock albums (though "dustsucker" still has a slight edge for me). and then i picked up the "independency" compilation, collecting all of the pre-"hex" EPs and documenting an insane amount of range and artistic growth over a short period of time. aside from a few other EPs and b-sides, that's all there is. it's a slim discography, but a richly rewarding one if you're in tune with what graham & co. are doing. if there's one bark psychosis song that sums up how exciting and unpredictable their music is at its best, it might be "scum". in 1992 their record label wanted a single. the band responded by renting a pile of recording equipment and setting up a makeshift studio underneath a church. they had no written material to work with. they improvised for ten days, cobbled together the best of what they came up with, and "scum" was the result. i hesitate to even call it a song. it's more like a film for the ears. in 21 minutes it moves from pure ambient sound, to slow-motion grooves with dub-influenced bass lines and washes of tremolo'd electric guitar, to free jazz blowing, to all-out cacophony, and back again. the surreptitiously captured bit of found sound from a pentecostal prayer meeting wields an awesome sonic power, and the whole thing ends with an epic, perfect fadeout that starts to seem like it might never finish fading, until it finally does. i only pull this one out once every year or two, because i always find myself wishing i could live inside the music. and that's a dangerous place to be. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MiuqyWVQ44 as graham sutton is to bark psychosis, benoit burello is to bed. he released two albums of beautifully fragile, melancholy music, and then he kind of lost me when he threw all the delicacy away to pursue a more mainstream-friendly sound. "the newton plum" and "spacebox" are where it's at. this is the closing track on "spacebox". if "scum" contains my favourite fadeout, here is one of my favourite refusals to fade out, as the same refrain is repeated what feels like dozens of times and still i wish it would never stop repeating. i have no idea what frenchman burello is singing half the time, but there's a comforting quality to his voice even when the words and their meaning are beyond my understanding. this is what one half of the climactic overlapping lyrics sound like to me, and i'm positive they're all wrong: "they can sit in quicksand and cotton kissing comas to teeth a world over my compost harder to face the quorum carbon keys" listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5ND3XKVPaY 131213 ... raze 318. a triple dose of recent electrostuff / synthpop: [i] jessy lanza // kathy lee from the album "pull my hair back" (2013) jessy lanza is from hamilton, ontario, and has been compared to grimes. i prefer jessy. her music is darker and stranger, and she had the good sense to work with jeremy greenspan of the junior boys on her debut album. she's bubbling just beneath the surface of becoming next-big-thing-ish right now. it'll be interesting to see what happens there — if she keeps her weirdness, or if she tries to pull things in a more palatable direction to appeal to a wider cross-section of listeners. i like the way this song, like the dirty radio track at #255, doesn't reveal all of its layers until the final chorus. i have no idea what's going on with the video, or what the deal is with the dude...but he's got some moves. given the elusive quality of the song itself, it seems fitting that you never get a clear shot of jessy's face in full. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF2lZesYZo0 [ii] junior boys // in_the_morning from the album "so this is goodbye" (2006) speaking of jeremy greenspan, some of his music makes me think of a sultry, alternate universe hall & oates, if daryl hall were fronting a smooth electro-funk band in space. jeremy would probably shoot me if he heard me say that. but there it is. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzYbu1-lKfc [iii] james blake // limit to your love from the album "james blake" (2011) this takes feist's original, snips out the chorus, throws the rest away, and mutates what's left into something infinitely more spacious and soulful. and i like my feist. the bass on this one is intense, if you've got the headphones or hi-fi system to really get it across. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOT2-OTebx0 131214 ... raze 319. pomplamoose // be still from the album "pomplamoose videosongs" (2009) pamplemousse is the french word for grapefruit. pomplamoose is california musical / romantic couple jack conte and nataly dawn. love is what i feel for the offbeat, surprising chord progression of this song. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXVktRI04w4 131215 ... raze 320. this is about two of the only men who can sing "i_love_you" and make me believe they mean it every time. only one of them is dead. the blue nile // heatwave from the album "a walk across the rooftops" (1984) someone once said if frank sinatra had been born in scotland, and if he grew up listening to roxy music, he might have made music that sounded like the blue nile. instead, we got paul buchanan, a scotsman gifted with a voice that is emotionally resonant beyond all reason and an ability to wrestle something naked and human from the belly of almost any cliché. the blue nile have made four albums in thirty years, and may never make another. on those albums are some of the most genuine, deeply-felt songs you're likely to hear. "a walk across the rooftops" and "hats" are heavy on synthesizers and atmosphere, "peace at last" takes a bold turn away from that and is built largely around acoustic guitar, and then "high" tries to split the difference. this last might be the least satisfying blue nile album as a whole, but it contains one of the best blue nile songs, "broken loves". everything that made them great is there: paul's fractured funk-influenced guitar licks, a voice that refuses to even flirt with artifice, a drum machine that doesn't try for a second to sound like a real drum kit, and lyrics that achieve a sort of transcendence through their complete ordinariness. a lot of people cite "hats" as the masterpiece. and there are some great songs there, chief among them "let's go out tonight". but "a walk across the rooftops" has a boldness and sonic daring to it that none of the other albums can match, recorded as it was by three men who were young and hungry — literally. halfway through recording, they ran out of money and resorted to sleeping on the floor of the recording engineer's house because they had nowhere else to stay. constructing the sonic architecture of each song was a painstaking process without the use of samplers, but the result of all that hard work is an album that has a great depth of sound to it and rewards careful listening. here is a recent interview with paul buchanan that's one of the most emotionally uninhibited things of its kind i've read: http://thequietus.com/articles/09375-paul-buchanan-blue-nile-interview and here's a song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeQhK79YkEo dennis wilson // time from the album "pacific ocean blue" (1977) dennis was the only member of the beach boys who actually surfed, and if not for his suggestion to brother brian that he write a song about surfing, that band as we know it might never have existed. not much was expected of dennis from the other members of the group. he was "the good-looking one". but when brian fell apart and was out of commission in the late 1960s and early 70s, it was dennis who stepped up and contributed the songs that kept things going. still undervalued in his own band, and pushed to the side again when brian came back from the wilderness, in 1977 he released the only full-length solo album of his life, "pacific ocean blue". one of the most surprising things about dennis' music is that he doesn't sound like he ever really belonged in the beach boys. his voice is ragged and imperfect, closer to tom waits than mike love. but it's the perfect voice for his songs. he put his heart and soul into his music, and played a lot of the instruments on the album himself. he was a creative powder keg, taking full advantage of his access to a beach boys-owned recording studio, and he started working on a follow-up album before he was finished the first one. but dennis was also troubled, and ultimately he couldn't outrun the demons. drugs and alcohol took their toll, the studio was lost, and he died a husk of what he'd been, with almost nothing. there was a sad poetry to his death. he was diving off the side of a friend's boat next to the slip where his own boat had been docked, before it was repossessed and sold for half of what he'd invested in it. on the floor of the marina he found things he'd thrown overboard one drunken night years before. he went down there chasing the past, and the past kept him anchored there and drowned him. but the music is all about life, and yearning, and searching. that he couldn't find what he was reaching for doesn't make the reaching any less compelling. there are songs that rival his brother's studio tapestries, like "feel the pull (tug of love)" and "river song", punishing, intense piano ballads like "thoughts of you", and then there's this one, which starts out sounding like a sad love song and then turns into something else entirely just past the two-minute mark. apparently lykke li is also a fan. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNUnUxYnvn0 131216 ... raze ineedtoseeificanstretchthepageoutalittlesoitlooksnicer. 131217 ... raze could have stretched it a titch more, but that'll do just fine. 131217 ... raze 321. mary margaret o'hara when you know why you're happy from the album "miss america" (1988) "i have a long history of being told i have no rhythm, and of people saying, 'i've heard chickens sing better than that.'" — mary margaret o'hara sister to actress catherine o'hara (she of "SCTV", "home alone", and "six feet under" fame), once called a "national treasure" by michael stipe, and a regular fixture on canadian (and some non-canadian) "best-of" lists for some years now, mary has only made one authorized full-length album, no one knows exactly how old she is (her date of birth is impossible to unearth), and most people have never heard of her. an art student in the 1970s, she was signed to virgin records on the strength of some demo recordings made in the early 80s. XTC's andry partridge got the call to produce her first album. depending on who you talk to, he either left or was fired after one day. mary went on to produce the album herself, only to have the record label hold it back for four years when they decided what she was doing wasn't commercial enough. in an interview on cbc radio one's Q a few years ago, she said she was told by someone at virgin, "captain beefheart is weird, but he's good. you are weird and insane, and you are the worst thing we've ever heard." they offered to bring in someone else to write an album for her. they would arrange and record the music; she would only have to swing by the studio to lay down her vocal parts. they had signed her with the promise of total artistic freedom. after hearing the results, they decided they had no interest in what she had to say as an artist. eventually the songs were mixed with guitarist michael brook, four of them vetoed by virgin for being too weird, and what was left of the album was released as "miss america" in 1988 to critical acclaim. in short order, the musicians who'd abused and attacked mary for her unorthodox methods during the recording sessions started thanking her for what she'd taught them. there's a story that she was slated to perform on "saturday night live" to promote the album, until one of the producers noticed her arrhythmic dancing during rehearsals and cancelled her appearance, giving the explanation that handicapped people in the audience might be offended. and yet joe cocker's spastic arm movements were okay. at least some work was done on a second album, but mary used the cash advance she was given from the label to pay the band for their work on the first album, felt strange about virgin suddenly treating her like she had some value to them, and got skittish. they threatened to sue her. she released a four-song christmas EP in 1991 and waited for her contract to run out, and then never signed another one. in the years since, she's been more active as an actress in quirky independent films, a guest on the albums of others, and an occasional contributor to tribute albums for the likes of kurt weill and vic chesnutt. 2001's "apartment hunting" soundtrack functions as an unofficial sequel to "miss america". in keeping with the theme of nothing quite going according to plan, it was released without her permission. she agreed to act in the film and provide the soundtrack, but not for it to be sold. still, it's an essential piece of the m2oh puzzle, as is the song "dark dear heart" on the henrys' debut album "puerto angel". she continues to play occasional live shows in toronto, and they're almost impossible to prepare for because the dates are often announced at the last minute with little fanfare. that's probably just the way she wants it, too. mary hasn't given many interviews over the years. in her 2009 appearance on Q, she brings to mind gena rowlands' indescribable performance in john cassavetes' "a woman under the influence", in that a lot of outside observers would probably think her crazy (and a few of the youtube comments make it clear that some do), but really it's that she has no filters. she's completely honest and unedited and raw and in the moment, and also maybe a little damaged. everything she wants to say comes pouring out of her at once. it can be a little overwhelming at first, but she's not so difficult to follow once you accept the lack of any consistent linear thread. it pisses me off, the way she's been treated. i bought "miss america" when i was still a teenager, expecting and halfway hoping to hear near-unlistenable chaos. instead i was bowled over by how beautiful it was. "to cry about" and "help me lift you up" are as unaffected as love songs get, the first of them written for a boyfriend who thought it was about him when it wasn't, but then he died and the song became about him without a word being rewritten, and you can feel the truth of that change in the song. "keeping you in mind" sounds like some great jazz standard that could have been sung by billie_holiday and was somehow lost for decades. "year in song" and "not be alright" are mutant rock songs that sound like nothing and no one else. she uses her voice as an instrument, testing it, refracting it, making it bend and growl and short-circuit at will, and each time she opens her mouth she seems to be rethinking what words mean to her, which ones she wants to use, and how to use them. what really baked my brain was learning that someone from the record label told her the album's closing track, "you will be loved again", was so horrible it made them sick. what made them want to puke is one of the most spellbinding pieces of music i've heard in my life, just mary's voice and an upright bass, and it's so pure and broken and somehow hopeful, it makes me feel like weeping every time i hear it. the cowboy junkies cover version doesn't come close. it's not even on the same planet. even if she never records another proper album, i think there's more fire and beauty and invention on "miss america" alone than most people manage in a lifetime of making records. here's mary on the short-lived "night music" tv program in 1989. that "dancing" is definitely something different, but i don't think it's really dancing at all. i think it's her way of trying to get inside the music. (this song also plays over the closing credits to bruce spangler's hard-hitting but little-seen film "protection") watch / listen: http://youtu.be/Nxtm7mw0wcc?t=28m26s 131217 ... raze 322. the police // tea in the sahara from the album "synchronicity" (1983) when i was a kid, i got into an argument with a babysitter named melanie over whether or not the singer in the video for "every breath you take" was sting. she didn't believe sting and the guy in the police were the same person, and nothing i said would convince her he was. she also let me watch "the exorcist" when i was way too young to handle it. i lasted right up until the little girl's head turned around 360 degrees. then i bolted from the room, screaming at the top of my lungs. so maybe her judgement was a little questionable. but she was cute. so i forgive her. today there isn't a police album i don't like, but i prefer the first three, when the band interplay was at its tightest and least embellished. it's easy to forget now how good sting could be when he kept his ego in check (well, comparatively speaking). and while he came up with some pretty wicked bass lines and wrote some great songs and sang them well, it helped that he had a beast of a drummer in the shape of stewart copeland (who started the band in the first place, as so many forget), and the genius fingers of andy summers coaxing some truly original and unique sounds out of his electric guitar without much more than an echoplex unit and an amplifier. of course there are the hit songs everyone knows, like "every breath you take" (still one of the most effectively uneasy love / obsession songs anyone's written, as overplayed as it's become), "message in a bottle", "walking on the moon", "roxanne", and all the rest. and there's nothing wrong with them. but some of my favourites have always been deep album cuts that you never, ever hear on the radio — early stewart copeland-penned songs like "contact" and "does everyone stare?", and the complete lunacy of "any other day". there's "canary in a cole mine", giddy and almost a little creepy in its infectiousness. there's "driven to tears", one of the earliest examples of sting trying to write something somewhat political, made that much better by the fact that it's a little vague and open-ended (unlike some of the heavy-handed message songs he would write later on in his solo career). "so lonely" manages the neat trick of alternating between being a reggae-and-doowop-influenced ballad during the verses (now there's a different hybrid for you) and a full-throttle melodic punk song during the choruses, with sting hitting notes full-voice that would be outside the range of some female singers. it also turned up in a dream of mine a few years back and took on a whole new meaning in that context. who knew you could slow dance to it all the way through? even a lot of the b-sides that didn't make it onto proper albums are pretty interesting. "friends" is hilarious, and "once upon a daydream" is the bleakest, most disturbing thing sting has ever written. it really should have been an album track, but the song's descent into pitch black madness probably would have scared the shit out of most police fans. it still makes me a little uneasy, and i've heard it more than a few times over the years. "tea in the sahara", the final song on the final police album, has always gripped me in a different way. part of it is the story it tells of three sisters deceived by a prince and left to die in the desert (a story borrowed from paul bowles' novel "the sheltering sky"), and part of it is the ominous, spacious mood the music creates with nothing more than bass, drums, a little bit of oboe (played by sting), and some alien-sounding atmospheric guitar. it's a strange, muted way to end an album packed with hit singles, but it digs into places a more anthemic song never would have reached, and it lingers long after the fade. watch / listen: http://vimeo.com/16755246 131218 ... raze 323. mark isham empty chambers / romeo is dreaming / end music from the film "romeo is bleeding" (1993) someone on imdb already said it better than i ever could, so i'll borrow their words here: peter medak's "romeo is bleeding" is "a fascinating and unusual hybrid of highly personalized old fashioned 40s noir and ultra-violent stylized 90s crime drama. it's the kind of movie they never make anymore, with an unappealing protagonist, an entirely corrupt universe where justice and virtue won't triumph, and a heartbreaking ending which basically guaranteed it would never be a commercial hit." the critics defecated all over it when it came out, but it's developed some cult appeal over the last twenty years. i first saw it when i was eleven or twelve years old. it is...not an appropriate movie for someone that age. at all. ever. but it didn't disturb me (see "weird_confessions" for a brief explanation of what on-screen activity did disturb me at the time). while i wouldn't make the argument that it's high art, it was something that spoke to me at the time, and it's never really stopped speaking to me. it's a movie that gets pulled out every few years for a re-watch. if anything, it gets better with age. the last time i saw it, i picked up on an integral part of the denouement i'd somehow never noticed before, making the whole thing even more effective. you know what makes *everything* in the movie more effective? mark isham's supremely moody soundtrack. and you know who else was almost involved on the musical side, but isn't missed in his absence? jon bon jovi. it turns out he wrote the power ballad "always" for the film, only to change his mind after seeing an advance screening. i find that kind of hilarious — both the idea of that song in *that* film, and the fact that he offered it just to take it back. maybe lena olin's turn as the femme fatale to end them all shook him up a little. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=botsI7ZTEuk 131219 ... raze 324. elvis presley // that's all right from "the sun sessions" (recorded 1954/1955; compiled in various different forms) for a long time i thought elvis was a phenomenal set of vocal cords wrapped up in a big hollow ball of schlock. when i was about fourteen, i saw the documentary "this is elvis" for the first time, and it humanized the ball of schlock for me. it made him a man. what really did it was seeing him near the end of his life, singing "are you lonesome tonight?" onstage, a bloated, drugged-out wreck. he confessed to the audience that he'd never learned to play guitar beyond a few chords ("i faked 'em all," he said, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up at such a naked admission), but said he was going to play for them, for one song. someone passed him an acoustic guitar and he held it like a man who never became a father, unsure of how to hold someone else's child. he forgot the words halfway through, improvised some gibberish about hair loss and losing his place, laughed at himself, and then sang the final verse flawlessly, ending the song bathed in sweat. that performance was later edited out of "this is elvis" at the behest of the presley estate (i think it was finally reinstated for a recent and long-overdue DVD release of the film). that was a mistake. his sad, slow decline, at least as it's shown in the film, loses a lot of emotional traction without that moment. seeing elvis struggle with a song he'd sung a million times over a period of seventeen years, completely lose it, and then somehow pull himself together to demonstrate that, though he might have lost everything else, he never lost his magnificent voice...that moved me. it made me want to give him a hug. i started reading up about elvis. i found him more interesting the more i read. he had a stillborn twin brother. a plethora of psychological arguments can and have been made about his life as a "twinless twin", and what it must have been like to feel that the one person who would have understood him was born but never lived or drew a single breath. colonel tom parker's side of the story is the stuff of grotesque show business nightmares. the drugs, the paranoia, the surreal meeting with richard nixon to offer his assistance in combating drug use while he was himself a drug addict, the memphis mafia — all of it makes for a bizarre, engrossing story, no matter how many times it's told, what angle it's told from, or who's doing the telling. a few years back i bought a CD reissue of the music elvis recorded at sam phillips' sun studio in the mid 1950s, when he was an unknown memphis truck driver who couldn't find a band that would take him. all at once, i got it. i got why he was so important to the beatles. i got why he was and is such an icon. forget the choreographed las vegas shows. forget elvis in hawaii via satellite. the songs he recorded in that little studio before he even had a musical career, playing the cheap acoustic guitar he'd been given as a child, his only backup one electric guitar and a standup bass doubling as a percussion instrument, synthesized what he loved about country music, gospel, and the blues, and it twisted it all into something no one else had done in quite the same way before. though elvis never wrote a song in his life, this stuff is the most "him" he ever was on record. he would never do anything so exciting again (though the '68 "comeback special" gets close). the music is vibrant, elemental, a far cry from the overblown rhinestone-encrusted elvis of later years. it's even *weird* in places, as on the eerie, etiolated take on "blue moon", like no version of "blue moon" you've heard before. if you only own one elvis album in your life, you should make it some permutation of those sun recordings. it's hugely important music in the development of rock & roll, and it's just plain good. elvis also died on my birthday, six years before i was born. so there's that. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWgprZu4Hk4 131220 ... raze andnowineedtostretchthepageoutjustalittlebitmoreoohlalacucumber. 131220 ... raze success. but i said "it" one too many times. half huzzah, half profane outburst. 131220 ... raze two entries today, to get caught up. i was too tired to really dig in yesterday. i blame the train ride home. 325. connie_converse // talkin' like you (two tall mountains) from the album "how sad, how lovely" (compiled in 2009 from recordings made in the 1950s) + bobbie gentry // ode to bille joe from the album "ode to billie joe" (1967) two mysterious ladies, both of whom pulled disappearing acts. connie_converse grew up in concord, new hampshire as the middle child in a baptist family. back then she was called elizabeth. always creative, she stunned her parents by dropping out of college and moving to new_york to pursue a career in music. she got a job at a printing house, adopted the nickname "connie" she'd been given by her new_york friends, and started writing songs, having taught herself to play guitar. she mostly played for friends in casual settings. one of those friends was gene deitch, who recorded a few dozen of her songs at her apartment and in his own kitchen with a reel-to-reel tape recorder. he was able to get her a spot performing on "the morning show" on CBS in 1954, but all that survives of the television broadcast is a photograph. her parents refused to support or even acknowledge her musical aspirations; her father died without having heard a note she wrote. with the help of gene, connie pounded the pavement, trying to drum up some industry attention, but new_york in the 1950s wasn't interested in what she had to offer. after half a decade and no positive results, connie gave up on music and moved to michigan. her younger brother got her a job as a secretary at the academic journal of the college he was teaching at, which led to a position as the managing editor in 1963. she never wrote another song. for ten years she did that job and grew more and more demoralized by her failure to succeed in new_york, until she was outwardly depressed to the point that friends at work paid for her to take a leave of absence and spend the better part of a year living in london. she came back no less depressed. a subsequent trip to alaska with her mother, during which she couldn't drink or smoke, only made things worse. her mother thought distraction was the answer to whatever connie's problems were. she began planning another trip. meanwhile, connie was wrestling with the discovery that she would need to have a hysterectomy. no one can remember ever seeing her on a date or in the company of a man who was anything more than a platonic friend, and there's some speculation that she may have preferred the company of women. but even if that were the case, i don't think homosexuality makes it any less troubling for a woman to be told a part of her body needs to be removed and any hope she might have had of having biological children will be taken away along with it. in 1974, around the time of her 50th birthday, she wrote goodbye letters to family and friends, packed what she owned into her VW beetle, drove away, and was never seen or heard from again. her surviving brother thinks she drove her car off a bridge, and some of what she wrote in her last letter to him does make it sound like she'd given up on more than just her music: "...i've watched the elegant, energetic people of ann arbor, those i know and those i don't, going about their daily business on the streets and in the buildings, and i've felt a detached admiration for their energy and elegance. if i ever was a member of this species, perhaps it was a social accident that has now been cancelled. [...] let me go, let me be if i can, let me not be if i can't." there's a terrible weight of loneliness in those words, and in the ones quoted on the "connie_converse" blathe. then there's the meticulously organized filing cabinet she left behind full of letters, drawings, personal writings, and those reel-to-reel tapes of her songs. that could have been the sort of cleaning house someone will engage in when they've decided to take their own life, or it could have been an affirmation of what she'd created, even if almost no one else knew about it, and something she meant to leave behind so she could return to it. she could have committed suicide. or she could have started a new life in a new city. i get the sense there are things no one has talked about yet that may illuminate some of the murky parts of the picture. her brother admitting that a few years after she disappeared someone told him they'd found someone with her name in a phone book somewhere, and he chose not to try and contact her...that has a funny smell to me. maybe the documentary film andrea kannes is making will offer some answers, if enough of the people who were around at the time are still alive and willing to talk. connie's music was virtually unheard and unknown outside of her family and closest friends until the 2009 release of "how sad, how lovely". what's most interesting to me about her songs is their timelessness. they're deceptively simple-sounding, just voice and acoustic guitar, but there are strange, subtle harmonic things going on inside them. she would have fit right in with the "alternative folkies" like devendra banhart, if she hadn't been four or five decades ahead of them all. if she's still alive, she would be 89 years old today. hopefully she drove her car to a new, happier life, and not into the huron river. bobbie gentry vanished under less ominous circumstances. she was an only child, born in chickasaw county, mississippi. back then she was called roberta lee streeter. her grandmother noticed roberta's love for music early on and traded one of her cows for a neighbour's piano. roberta took her stage name bobbie gentry from the film "ruby gentry", studied philosophy at UCLA, did clerical work during the day and performed at nightclubs after hours, and later studied music to hone her songwriting skills. her first single in 1967 was a blues song, but it was the b-side that got everyone's attention. "ode to billie joe" is one of the all-time great story songs, and at its heart is a disquieting two-part mystery: what did billie joe mccallister and his girlfriend toss off the bridge, and why did billie joe kill himself? bobbie knew the answers to those questions but chose not to tell anyone, understanding that when the record company forced her to chop out half the verses and the explanation evaporated it actually strengthened the story. "the song is sort of a study in unconscious cruelty," she explained. "but everybody seems more concerned with what was thrown off the bridge than they are with the thoughtlessness of the people expressed in the song. what was thrown off the bridge really isn't that important. everybody has a different guess about what was thrown off the bridge — flowers, a ring, even a baby. anyone who hears the song can think what they want, but the real message of the song, if there must be a message, revolves around the nonchalant way the family talks about the suicide. they sit there eating their peas and apple pie and talking, without even realizing that billie joe's girlfriend is sitting at the table, a member of the family." the record company didn't expect much to come of the song (the a&r man at capitol records told arranger jimmie haskell to "put some strings on it so she won't be embarrassed. no one will ever hear it anyway."), but radio DJs spun the b-side until it became the a-side, and in a week it sold three quarters of a million copies, kicking "all you need is love" out of the top spot on the charts. it stuck there for a month and won three grammy awards. bobbie was an outspoken feminist, a glamorous woman in an era of singer-songwriters who were eschewing big hair and makeup, and she had strong ideas about the direction her music and career should take. she produced her own nightclub act in vegas and said at the time, "i write and arrange all the music, design the costumes, do the choreography, the whole thing. i'm completely responsible for it. it's totally my own from inception to performance. i originally produced [most of my records], but a woman doesn't stand much chance in a recording studio. a staff producer's name was nearly always put on the records." after an ambitious self-produced album was a commercial failure and a few subsequent singles failed to make an impression on the charts, bobbie decided it was time for something else. she made one last public appearance in 1982 and then receded into a private life. nothing substantial has been heard from or about her in the years since. maybe she married a wealthy man involved in real estate. maybe she had children. one sure thing is that she's been turning down any and all interview requests for thirty years and running. a recent radio documentary revealed that she did phone haskell sometime over the last few years, telling him she'd written a new song, asking if he was interested in producing it. he blew her off and suggested someone else. when he decided maybe he was interested after all, she wouldn't return his calls. she was one of the first female country artists to both write and produce the bulk of her own material, though i think to stuff what she did into the country genre does it a disservice. as far as anyone can tell, she's happy with the life she's built for herself outside of the spotlight. where connie might as well have driven her car into thin air, bobbie simply chooses not to be seen. listen to connie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3IfRX3NwbA listen to bobbie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZt5Q-u4crc 326. roxy music // for your pleasure from the album "for your pleasure" (1973) in high school, roxy music, tom waits, and david sylvian were my beatles, kinks, and rolling stones. i loved the beatles, kinks, and stones...but this was music that felt like it was *mine*. i didn't know anyone who was listening to this stuff. everyone i knew was into slipknot, or our lady peace, or the dave matthews band, or something else that was popular at the time. which isn't to say that my taste trumped theirs. i just enjoyed feeling like i was privy to some secret world no one else was hip to. i've always liked the idea that you could play someone unfamiliar with roxy music a song off of one of their wonderfully weird albums from the early 1970s, and then something off of the ultra-slick "flesh + blood" or "avalon", and they probably wouldn't believe both songs were by the same band. the only real through-line is the way bryan ferry almost never "closes" his chords when he's playing the piano. and that's another thing i've always liked. i think "manifesto" is an underrated album, striking an interesting balance between the weirdness that had come before and the slicker approach that was just ahead, but those first four albums (two with brian eno, two without) are really in a class of their own, and "for your pleasure" may be the best of them all. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ddUl7G1YAA 131222 ... raze 327. syd barrett // golden hair from the album "the madcap laughs" (1970) + skip spence // all come to meet her from the album "oar" (1969) here are two guys who have long been saddled with the "mad genius" tag, which has been something of a mixed blessing. with syd, while he clearly had a breakdown that wasn't helped by his LSD use, i don't believe he was ever as far gone as some people liked to paint him. on some level, at least some of the time, i think he was playing possum. his final gift to pink floyd was an unrecorded song called "have you got it yet?". it was a call-and-response number, with a chorus that had syd singing the titular question, the rest of the band responding with, "no, no, no!" the problem was, no matter how much time they spent on the song, roger waters and the other musicians couldn't quite seem to get it right. it took a while before they put it together that syd kept changing the chord progression and the structure each time the song was played, just enough so that they never would "get" it. i think that's kind of brilliant. syd's retreat from any kind of public life after one last shambolic attempt at making music in the mid-70s only fed the myth of poor crazy syd who lost his mind, but it seems to me like he put himself back together pretty well and just decided he wanted to live a quiet life painting and spending time with his family, away from all the noise and pressure of the music business. as his sister rosemary said, "[he] may have been a bit selfish — or rather self-absorbed — but when people called him a recluse they were really only projecting their own disappointment. he knew what they wanted, but he wasn't willing to give it to them." after his death, it was discovered that he'd written a book about art history. not exactly the behaviour of a permafried acid casualty. in some ways syd was more a part of pink floyd in his absence than he was during the time he was the frontman. giant chunks of the most successful and iconic floyd albums ("the dark side of the moon", "wish you were here", "the wall") arguably wouldn't exist without his decline serving as songwriting inspiration. if roger waters' continued milking of the "syd gone mad" story can start to feel a little too exploitative at times, david gilmour (who replaced syd in the band) turned out to be a real friend, helping to produce syd's two solo albums when no one else was up for it and making sure he continued to collect royalties in later years. it would be difficult to overstate the influence syd has had on psychedelia, glam rock, and many different permutations of folk and rock music. alexander "skip" spence, on the other hand, is still so far from being a household name, i'm not sure you could say he's been much of an influence on anybody. a lot of parallels can be drawn between syd and skip. they both lost their grip on the bands they'd helped start after drug-related meltdowns. skip's last really lucid contribution to his band was a song called "seeing", an almost overwhelming, unpredictable slab of psych-rock that sounds like a beautifully screamed goodbye. the same could be said of the last officially released song syd contributed to pink floyd, "jugband blues", which is less intense but no less affecting. both men had a star quality and a peculiar energy about them that made them the on-stage focus of any live show they were a part of. both burned brightly, briefly, and then lived longer than they might have and died younger than they should have. and there are stories about both of them that have achieved mythical status, whether they were ever true or not. but where the floyd achieved significant commercial success and syd went on to become a cult hero whether he wanted the fame or not, moby grape were doomed from the start, and skip has largely been treated as little more than a footnote in rock music history. instead of backing away from fame and living his life on his own terms, skip got lost in hard drugs and schizophrenia, and there was never much of any real fame to run from to begin with. while syd was effectively sacked from his own band, skip was welcomed back to moby grape whenever he was in good enough shape to play, in spite of his troubles. and though some of the myths about syd's more outlandish behaviour are just that, in skip's case most of the stories are true — like the one about the time he overdosed in 1973 and was pronounced dead, only to sit up in the morgue and ask for something to drink. the story of skip spence and moby grape is one that almost begs not to be told. it includes a satanic and inept manager to rival elvis' colonel, a lot of great music that got lost in poor promotional decisions and surreal legal disputes, black magic, a horrifying amount of bad luck, and not one band member who struggled with mental illness and eventual homelessness, but two. that leaves the music. the one solo album skip made was barely released by columbia records, received no promotion, and was deleted from their catalogue within a year. you could say no one knew what to make of it at the time, except pretty much no one heard it at all until it got the CD reissue treatment shortly before skip passed away in 1999. the album was written in skip's head during a six-month stay at the bellevue mental hospital. moby grape producer david rubinson was able to get skip a small advance from columbia after he was released, part of which went toward buying the motorcycle skip rode from manhattan to nashville with his wife, where he recorded "oar" over seven days in the dead of winter, in an editing room fashioned into a makeshift recording studio, producing and playing all the instruments himself. the panning is hard left, hard right, twelve o'clock, and that's it, because the songs were recorded on an old ampex three-track recorder (already obsolete in 1968). the sonic palette is limited to voice, acoustic and electric guitar, bass, and drums. the music veers from uptempo quasi-rock songs to country-folk ballads, from earthy to ethereal, from silly jokes to howls of pain. a few of the catchiest songs are guitar-free, made up of nothing more than bass, a live vocal, and drums. this same arrangement is used for the mesmerizing, ineffable fourteen minutes of the "grey / afro" / "this time he has come" medley. taken as a whole, "oar" must be one of the most honest and unvarnished looks inside an artist's mind to be released on a major record label. i like beck well enough, but his cover versions of these songs don't even begin to scrape the surface of the weird magic the original recordings have. the thing that throws me every time is hearing how many different voices skip had. he sounds like at least four completely different people at different times. there's the bright, joyful-sounding skip who slips into a dreamy falsetto on "little hands" and "war in peace"; the baritone-voiced skip of "cripple creek", "broken heart", and "weighted down", sounding like a sleepy cousin to fred neil; the playful skip who shows up on "margaret - tiger rug" sounding like a vaudevillian outcast; and the skip who unleashes a hoarse roar on "books of moses". maybe david fricke summed it up best: it "remains an album of stunning musical and emotional clarity, the sound of a young man's blues — spence was only 22 — poured from the inside out, as naked, honest and solitary as robert johnson's 1936 san antonio hotel room session. spence took everything he had, all that was left inside him after bellevue, and put it on a record. then rode away." listen to syd set a james joyce poem to music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1SFIAsz3Go listen to skip sing you a little piece of himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TadkSF3fZyc 131223 ... raze 328. rain tree crow // pocket full of change from the album "rain tree crow" (1991) listening to the music david sylvian's been making over the last ten years or so, you'd never guess he was something close to a pop star in the early 1980s, lumped into the new romanticism movement. there's a good chance you've heard his band japan without knowing it. only, when you heard them, they were called duran duran. simon le bon and co. essentially ripped off japan's fashion sense, lifted the most accessible elements of their music, and made a career out of borrowed clothes and borrowed sounds. there was more to japan's music than was the case with a lot of their contemporaries, and "ghosts" is a classic "should have been too weird to be a hit single but was a hit anyway" 80s song, but david was destined for more interesting things. his post-japan solo and collaborative work has taken in everything from jazz, ambient, and progressive rock, to experimental electronica and electroacoustic improvisation. as the gorgeous layered melodies of past work have tapered off, his voice has only grown better and richer with age. oddly enough, one of his most "difficult" albums (2003's "blemish") features some of the least emotionally distant music he's made, openly grappling with the dissolution of his marriage. i can understand the fans who wish he would return to making more melodic and inviting music, but it's funny to me how surprised some have been by "blemish" and "manafon". this is a guy, after all, who has recorded a number of experimental instrumental albums over the years, both as commissioned works for art installations and just because he felt like it, and when he was asked by his record company to write a single in 1989 to promote a compilation album, he gave them "pop song", a venomous sonic urination on the very idea of an accessible hit single. so it's not like the signs weren't there... i picked up the live "greatest hits" japan album "oil on canvas" after reading someone compare sylvian's voice to bryan ferry's, and i liked it, but my real introduction to david's music came one day when i was fourteen and i bought "secrets of the beehive" and the self-titled rain tree crow album (made by a reformed japan, but light years away from "gentlemen take polaroids" and "tin drum"). i listened to both albums in my bedroom on headphones, and by the time ryuichi sakamoto's final dramatic piano chords were ringing out in "forbidden colours", i didn't feel like the same person anymore. i felt elevated. that was a good day. for sixteen years i've secretly wanted to slow dance with someone to this song in some elegant, cavernous space. the chances of it ever happening or slim, but i can dream, can't i? i can dream, and mick karn's liquid bass can sing me deeper into sleep. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MyI9wnf-Ps 131224 ... the evil angel on my shoulder holy hell. how could you put "or" in the place of "are"? how could you miss that? have you no shame?! 131224 ... raze yeah...i got nothing. you take over, if you think you can do a better job of ferreting out typos. 131224 ... the evil angel on my shoulder maybe i will. 131224 ... raze i'd like to see you try! 131224 ... the evil angel on my shoulder fine! 131224 ... raze fine! 131224 ... the evil angel on my shoulder 329. akim & teddy vann // santa claus is a black man (1973 vinyl single) it's christmas day! you're gonna need a christmas song! here! take this one! in mitchell kezin's documentary "jingle bell rocks!", akim vann's mother tells a great story about the family's visit to a department store at christmas time when akim was a little girl, and how a question about why there weren't any black santa clauses when there were plenty of black customers led to the hiring of a black santa the very next day. it also led to the writing of this song, a reggae-fied remake of "i saw mommy kissing santa claus". listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz04BwDgRkI 131225 ... raze not bad. 131226 ... the evil angel on my shoulder oh, but there's more! 131226 ... the evil angel on my shoulder 330. tim & jeff_buckley (five songs apiece) if you were me, you would have devoured david browne's "dream brother: the lives and music of jeff and tim buckley" in the summer of 2002 while a little bit obsessed with tim and jeff (tim more than jeff, but not by much), and you would have paused to wrestle with a knot that formed itself in your hair, in the place where you'd tied the bandana you were fond of wearing at the time. you would have won the wrestling match, barely, and gone on devouring what was left of the book. later, some conflicted feelings would have swollen inside of you, like gum tissue swelling in your mouth around the unflossed food fragments left between your teeth after the paper meal. most of the feelings would have had to do with the way the author paints tim as self-defeating and mentally ill, while letting jeff off the hook for most of his transgressions, minimizing or failing to analyze many of his eccentricities, giving him a "difficult genius" halo, clearly more enamored with the son than the father when it's obvious to the reader that both men were similarly troubled and both could be assholes. you would have appreciated the way chapters were broken up with excerpts from journal entries and letters written by jeff, many of them moments in which he revealed that as much as he denigrated his father and minimized his connection with the man and his music in public, privately he understood both man and music better than anyone and felt a painful love for a ghost who could not love him back. more than anything, you would have been left with a feeling of emptiness when thinking of how both the father and the son ended sadly and ended too soon, and how they were not doomed from the start as much as they seemed to grow into being doomed. you would have then found yourself amassing a large collection of bootleg recordings, featuring some music that was thrilling, and some that was not but was made halfway thrilling by the excitement you projected onto it, and you would have spent a ridiculous amount of money buying a physical copy of tim's long-out-of-print "starsailor" album on ebay without regretting it for a second. then the near-obsession would have tapered off over time, until there were healthier-sounding things in its place, things like "admiration" and "respect", and you would have stopped wearing bandanas after suffering a knot severe enough to almost necessitate an unwanted haircut. of course, you're not me. so none of that ever happened, probably. tim and jeff both had astonishing ranges, as singers and as writers. both were underrated guitarists (tim did some really unique things on electric 12-string; jeff was a wizard on the 6-string). tim was able to pack more into a shorter period of time because the music industry worked differently in the 60s and 70s than it did in the 90s, and because he dealt with the same sort of crisis of confidence in his own craft that hit jeff after "grace" but was somehow better equipped to fight through it. in just eight years he covered an almost unfathomable amount of musical ground (at one point releasing four albums of original material in the space of just a little more than a year), moving from quaint folk, to more ambitious politically-charged psychedelic folk-rock, to intensely personal vibraphone-kissed near-jazz, to wild experimental music influenced by free jazz and avant-garde classical composers, to straight-up soul music and what some have called "sex funk", with many detours along the way. jeff had a similar chameleon-like quality, but not as much time to explore it, though he lived longer than tim did by two years. given more life, i'm not sure anything would have been outside his reach. he could have recorded an album made up of old gospel songs just as easily as he could have written a rock opera with a post-jazz death metal band, and both would have been amazing. tim flirted with stardom and commercial success and made a point of turning away from them before he was forced into trying to regain what he'd lost. jeff was in the process of becoming a star somewhat against his will when he died and was frozen as a cult artist with a passionate following. the son is still the more widely heard of the two. my first tim buckley album was "greetings from L.A.", and it didn't make much of an immediate impression on me beyond "this guy's voice is nuts". it grew on me, slowly, until i found myself in italy marveling at the vocal performance on "sweet surrender", encompassing everything from smooth crooning to guttural belting and crazed falsetto shrieking, as the song itself lurched from weird soul ballad to twisted disco and back again. the other albums fell into place bit by bit, some easier to find than others. the holy grail stuff for me was and is the most "free" work tim did when he left verse-chorus-verse song structures behind and started treating his voice as another instrument, beginning with the album "happy sad" and peaking with "starsailor" and a few relevant live bootlegs that started circulating thirty years later. there are things tim did with his voice on "starsailor" that i've yet to hear anyone else do, both in terms of timbre and sheer insanity of notes reached and held. one of the best examples i can think of is a track called "jungle fire". the first half of the song is in free time, all rolling clean electric guitar and flickering bass. tim sings an abstract rendering of a near-fatal car accident his second wife judy was involved in before he knew her, pulling his high tenor down near to the city of baritones. the chords change, the music grows in intensity, and when tim sings "and life breathes from deep inside", two things happen: (1) he's talking about judy's son taylor, who was still in the womb at the time; (2) he hits one of the only bad notes you'll find on any of his studio records, on the word "inside", coming down on it hard and very sharp, and then he draws it out, holding the bad note until he warps it into an insane yodel. then he stretches it out even more. it's one of my favourite moments in all the music i've heard, taking a clear mistake and embracing it, twisting it into something so ridiculously right. then, of course, the song takes a sharp left turn into a funky 5/4 groove with some amazing polyrhythmic drumming from maury baker (a man on fire throughout the whole album), as tim howls "mama lie" over and over again and overdubs himself into a dissonant vocal horn section. the whole album is full of songs and moments like this. it's easy enough to buy now in MP3 form or as a reissued vinyl record, but the CD remains a great candidate for the reissue/remastering treatment (if it's done right). not that i think it'll ever happen. the album was considered career suicide at the time, and it's still an acquired taste, to put it mildly. thirty years later a band would take the name starsailor and steal the font from the album cover but none of the music's adventurous spirit, but the only song that's had some crossover appeal is "song to the siren", which has been covered quite a bit over the years, by everyone from george michael (huh?) to robert plant (huh). the best cover version might be the one by this mortal coil with elizabeth fraser singing, but even that doesn't capture the power of tim's original recording. there's about two hours worth of additional material on those live bootlegs from the "starsailor" period if you add it all up — three if you include the professionally filmed performances for the "boboquivari" tv show (only available in full in bootleg form) and WITF-TV's "the show" (available in piecemeal form on the "my fleeting house" DVD; the full performance has yet to surface). that stuff might even be more out-there than what's on the studio album. even the songs that are recognizable are heavily improvised, sometimes given completely different lyrics, and a lot of things were more or less conjured out of nothing on-stage. the sound quality is sometimes awful, sometimes surprisingly good for audience recordings that are now more than 40 years old, but the ferocity of the performances always comes through. if time travel becomes possible in my lifetime, one of my first stops is going to be late 1970 in california, to see one of those starsailor band shows in the flesh. there's a quote from one of jeff's journal entries in "dream brother" where he says he wishes he could go back in time and play with his father, to give his later songs the respect they deserve, and he "just can't get through" the last few albums tim made. neither can i. with "sefronia" and "look at the fool", you can't even hear his 12-string guitar much of the time, most of the songs are uninspired light soul fare, and though the singing is still technically great, it almost sounds like tim buckley doing an impression of tim buckley. there's something depressing about hearing anonymous female backup singers moaning all over the place as tim sings a line like "i don't know why you bring my sex alive" as if he's forgotten what sex is. by the time you get to "look at the fool", you can hear the heart has gone, even on the songs where the lyrics are important puzzle pieces for anyone curious about where tim's head was at. there's a bizarre push-pull between the bloodless performances of the session musicians and tim singing baldly about how his romantic relationship is destroying him. that the last recorded song by a guy who once led his band in 20-minute live improvised adventures would be a limp rewrite of "louie louie" just seems wrong. the story wasn't supposed to end that way. at least on the "sefronia" demos that were released on the posthumous collection "the dream belongs to me", maury baker is back on drums for a hot minute and tim's guitar is high in the mix where it belongs (the liner notes are all wrong…anyone who's listened to tim's music for more than five seconds knows that isn't joe falsia playing guitar, and it isn't buddy helm behind the drums). otherwise, aside from a song or two, those last two albums aren't much fun to listen to. "greetings from L.A." is the last one i can get all the way through, and where i like to pretend tim's discography ends, with politically incorrect lyrics about humping and spanking. if he'd been born a few decades later when home recording was more of a thing, it might have been different. back then, record companies held all the cards. tim was allowed to do what he wanted until it became clear what he wanted to do was make aggressively uncommercial music. "starsailor" was the last album he had the freedom to produce himself. after that, the record company cut him off, he played live as much as he could to get the music out there, self-booking shows, unable to properly record all the new material he and his band were creating, and then he ran out of money and the record company said, "make some rock music we can sell or you'll never make music again." so he did. or he tried. but he couldn't even do that, because now he was considered something of a sellout by whatever audience was left that had been there for "lorca" and "starsailor" and didn't want to hear "tim buckley, love man". so those albums didn't sell either. at least on "greetings", the spark is still there. the relentless creative restlessness is mostly gone from the songs themselves, but tim's singing is just as free, and a lot of the songs get jammed out until whatever lyrics are on the page are forgotten and whatever dirty thoughts are in tim's head come spilling out in their place. it's raunchy enough to make a lot of better-known sex-soaked funk sound tame by comparison, but there's still room for the PG-rated seven-minute acoustic blues trance of "hong kong bar". i don't think tim sold out exactly. he took the starsailor music as far as he could. but it's hard to listen to the last two albums without feeling like it's all a little too safe, too sterile, trying too hard to please and not succeeding in pleasing anyone. music was his livelihood. he did the fearless artist thing as long as he could afford to do it, and then he tried to do what people said they wanted him to do. they just decided once he did it that it wasn't what they wanted anymore. with jeff, right from the start the record company didn't know what to do with him. they tried to get him to pin down what kind of album he wanted to make. he wouldn't be pinned. "grace" is a better album for refusing to stay in one place, taking in everything from the hard rock of "eternal life" to a stunning version of the 15th century hymn "corpus christi carol". but jeff wasn't sure where to go next. he was almost too creative for his own good, pulled in too many directions at once, and record label pressure didn't do anything to help. tim died playing music that didn't begin to express a fraction of what he was capable of, probably feeling at least a little bit demoralized. jeff drowned just as he felt he'd had an artistic breakthrough. i came to jeff in about as backwards a way as i came to tim. he first came to my attention in the summer of 1998 when i was up later than everyone else on a friday night, hanging out in the basement living room, reading a jane magazine with liv tyler on the cover, messing around with dumbbells. i turned the television on and muted it. in a rare display of good taste, muchmusic was showing jeff's "live in chicago" performance in full. i kept the sound off because i didn't want to wake anyone up. your first introduction to someone's music being a silent one is…well, it's different. i watched the way he moved and his facial expressions, wondering what sounds were meant to go with them. i had no idea what kind of music he made. he *looked* interesting. a week or two later i went out and bought "sketches for my sweetheart the drunk". as with my first tim buckley album, i wasn't sure how much i liked the songs at first, but one thing i was sure of was that the guy had an incredible voice. again, as had been the case with tim, the album grew on me. and as sacrilegious a thing as this might be to say, i like "sketches" at least as much as "grace", if not more. maybe some of that comes from it being my first jeff_buckley album. i think more of it is about the roughness and the groping. it isn't as perfect as "grace" is, but i like that. i like that the songs are less produced, less final-sounding, more exploratory. those 4-track recordings that are almost unlistenable to some people are some of the best stuff jeff ever did for me, recorded alone on the floor of a memphis shotgun shack with a microphone, an electric guitar, and a few effects pedals. he taps on the mic for a kick drum sound or makes a crude loop to supply a rhythm, or else there's no percussion at all. it's lo-fi, gloriously weird, the sound of a man tripping over his own thoughts, sometimes laughing on the way down, sometimes screaming. there are ballads both pretty and edgy ("thousand fold", "i know we could be so happy baby [if we wanted to be]"), there's a filthy, punchy song that sounds like a drum-free version of the white stripes before the white stripes existed ("your flesh is so nice"), and there are songs like "demon john" and "murder suicide meteor slave" that defy description and would never get radio airplay in a million years no matter how they were recorded. there's always going to be the unanswered question of what those songs would have sounded like if jeff had the chance to record them with his band and "finish" them in a professional studio setting. but i think they're already finished. there's a full-band studio recording of "i know we could be so happy baby" that leaked a while back, and though it's cool to hear the song given a different treatment, it's the 4-track version, with rewritten (and far superior) lyrics, that sounds like it's what the song was supposed to be, tape hiss and all. the studio-recorded songs on "sketches" are pretty great too. "witches' rave" is proof that catchy near-pop songs were well within jeff's grasp if ever he wanted to grab them, "new year's prayer" is hypnotic slow-motion spirit funk, "nightmares by the sea" is as catchy as it is unnerving (never less so than when my uncle was wordlessly singing along to the chorus in the summer of 2001 as we drove through toronto looking for my grandfather on empty stomachs and bad directions), and "you and i" is eerie in the way it brings to mind some of tim's vocal floatiness on "starsailor". that jeff didn't think much of this was release-worthy just goes to show you that he was as crazy as his father. suck on that 'til the flavour runs out, david browne. to that end, as posthumous releases go, some of the stuff that's come out since jeff's passing has only come out because jeff hasn't been around to stop it from being released. on the tapes for one pre-"grace" album he scrawled a brief review: "disgusto garbage". you can buy that album now. it's called "songs to no one". but the "legacy edition" of "live at sin-é" is pretty fantastic even after you factor in the post-death popularity cash-grab side of things — two CDs of jeff in full flight with only a blonde telecaster to exert some gravitational pull, taking in everything from bob dylan and nina simone to nusrat fateh ali khan. and there are some great live bootlegs, none quite as wild as tim's, but some of them with sound so good it's funny they haven't been remastered and given an official release when all the other stuff jeff never wanted anyone to hear is fair game. now they're starting to make movies about jeff and tim. it's useless to complain about this, and bringing some great music to a wider audience can't be a bad thing even if the vessel for the bringing is caked in fragrant fish guts. all i can say is, i hope they don't fuck it all up too badly. here's some music. [tim] the choirboy sings pretty folk songs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rokVYoeuogU an anonymous_proposition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h4t98LPBzo often covered, never bettered: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pxvXI1i9cw (there's also an earlier version from "the monkees show" that's a great demonstration of how much a few years and a difference in approach can utterly transform a song) watching the silence of overturned trains: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT_ypV2aVx4 sex funk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3gI6hYQ2kw [jeff] screaming down from heaven: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CI6MMqaxzs ghost comes to visit with my keys in his pocket: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sEQhyqpkjU with the jazz passengers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCNucRq5S2w with elizabeth fraser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRNeGC7k5J8 happy? happy. happy? happy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyTGQdGIJyA 131226 ... raze you used the "taking in everything from [x] to [y]" blanket twice! you're no better than me! do your laundry! 131226 ... the evil angel on my shoulder redundancies ≠ typos. but i'll wash a load of yours if you do a load of mine. 131227 ... raze no deal. 331. john cale // leaving it up to you from the album "helen of troy" (1975) + hanky panky nohow from the album "paris 1919" (1973) i was working on another longish one, but a stupid headache knocked me out for a while and now there isn't enough time left to finish before blather's turnover time. so i'll save that one for tomorrow. john cale's music had a huge impact on me at a time when i was hungry for something to hit me. his "stark, urgent piano-playing" (not my description, but a perfect one, so i'm borrowing it) was a serious influence on my own piano-playing, and i once performed "fear is a man's best friend" for my grade ten french class, screaming my head off at 9:30 in the morning. what they made of that is anyone's guess. not all of john's albums do it for me completely, but he's never less than interesting. he can make literate baroque pop with the best of them, and then he can turn around and make deeply disturbing music that threatens to collapse into complete psychosis (and sometimes does). he has one of the best screams i've ever heard. even in his prettiest songs there's often a feeling of tension, that things might take a nasty turn at any moment. "music for a new society" still scares the hell out of me. but in a good way. and his reinvention of "heartbreak hotel" is a twisted masterpiece, expressing all the latent menace in the song that was obscured for years by elvis' hip-shaking. here are two different sides of the cale coin. deep dark psycho-rock: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhmoMyf8xwE one about the elephants that sing to feed the cows that agriculture won't allow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlWeVY64TpU 131227 ... raze 331. karen dalton (an oral history, sort of) i was trying to write something about karen dalton, when it occurred to me that there are so many different stories out there, and stories that contradict those stories, that the best approach might be to just use the words of people who knew her, sourced from as many places as i could find them — album liner notes, interviews, articles, scans of decades-old typewritten press releases and clippings and the like. the idea was to try and arrange and edit it all so it reads in a linear way, with the least amount of exposition between quotes possible. this is my attempt at doing that. karen was born in 1937. PETER STAMPFEL: karen grew up in oklahoma. her grandmother was a fiddle-playing, gospel-shouting baptist, and karen grew up with musical family get-togethers. the fiddle was her first instrument, and her first guitar was a plywood gene autry model from the sears catalogue. JOE LOOP: they say [she was] half-cherokee, which is what she would always say, but it isn't quite the truth. she did have some cherokee blood in her — but according to her daughter, not enough to qualify for benefits. ABRALYN BAIRD: her dad was a respected welder. her mother was a nurse. not terribly "grapes of wrath". 1969 CAPITOL RECORD PRESS RELEASE: karen grew up in oklahoma, left home to sing in kansas city and san francisco, and became the fourth member of a singing-songwriting pack whose other members were [tim] hardin, [fred] neil, and dino valenti. individually and collectively, they peddled their wares to an uninterested music industry during the legendary pre-60s folk era, and starved with fellow musicians bob_dylan, dave van ronk, john sebastian and others. BOB_DYLAN: she was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry. karen had a voice like billie holiday's and she played the guitar like jimmy reed and went all the way with it. i sang with her a couple times. JOE LOOP: it's amazing how many musicians would go out of their way to play with her back then. she played with all the best people. all those people loved her and loved playing with her, but it wasn't the kind of stuff the record labels were looking for. 1969 CAPITOL RECORDS PRESS RELEASE: the way karen tells it, she played every coffee house in the village and when she first met dylan, he was only 17 and couldn't play in some of the clubs she worked without lying about his age. karen even formed a group called the trio which featured hardin on guitar but [the band] broke up when karen married bassist richard tucker, the third member of the trio. RICHARD TUCKER: if you saw her on a stage in a small club and heard her voice, it was just awesome. my favorite was when she did blues, really slow. the slowest blues i ever heard in my life. karen had already been twice married and twice a mother by the time she was 17. ABRALYN BAIRD: my mom was kinda headstrong. she wanted to get on with stuff. in most states then you could get permission to marry before you were 16; it wasn’t a total scandal or anything. PETER STAMPFEL: karen was the first person i knew who was raising a child on the scene, the set, or whatever it was called at the time. two years before abby was born, she had a son named lee, but lee was raised by her mother evelin. abby had a reputation as being a very cool little girl. JOE LOOP: it's true that she did lose custody of lee sometime before abby was born, back in oklahoma. i don't know why exactly. that was before I knew her. but she had lost custody of him, and her mother raised him. she said she always sang ["red are the flowers"] when she started thinking of her son. when he got old enough to be on his own, he and karen got together, and they were living together most of the time after that, actually. i don't know how much of that time abby might have spent with them. she also lost custody of abby when she divorced her second husband, a literature professor. so she reconciled with him, and then left him again, this time with abby in tow. ABRALYN BAIRD: yeah, she took off with me. but remember, she was a 19-year-old girl. they had the same temperament, my mom and dad. they were very forthright. quick to anger. very stubborn. LACY J. DALTON: her soul was very deep and powerful. she was tall, willowy, had straight black hair, was long-waisted and slender — what we all wanted to look like. [she had] a voice for the jaded ear. there's a horn quality to it and her phrasing is exquisite. i once heard it described as cornmeal mush, but it's more than that. when she sang about something, you believed her. she was also missing two of her bottom teeth. ABRALYN BAIRD: the man she was living with at [that] time, he came home and found her in bed with my soon-to-be stepfather. and yeah, and a fight ensued. and she got punched in the face. she always said, you know, when she got that big recording contract and became famous, she was going to have teeth put in. 1969 CAPITOL RECORDS PRESS RELEASE: new_york_city was the marketplace where you could see the greatest things happen, if you could stand to hang around that long. karen couldn't, so she and richard moved to boulder, colorado, gigged locally, and gradually became the social centre of a hip community that included hardin (again), singer judy roderick and filmmaker stan brakhage. back in new_york, they forgot karen "just because i disappeared". what really happened was that it was great living in the mountains and even though the living was poor, everything was groovy. [but] not all of it. richard had to trim trees to make a living. and karen found herself working as a maid for $1,25 an hour. part of the time it was for people in their homes, part of the time for a fraternity. KAREN DALTON: you think it's temporary and...suddenly…it's your life. PETER STAMPFEL: karen and abby, during those years, lived in a small series of cabins — typically renting for about $15 a month and furnished with objects such as an old rocking chair found in the trash and an old orange crate with a head of cabbage on it. but in typical karen style, they were a perfect old rocking chair, a perfect orange crate, and a perfect head of cabbage — all in exactly the right place. JOE LOOP: one morning i drove up to karen's and found her tearing out the wall between the cabin and the tool room built on the back of the cabin, and burning the wood in the wood stove. the roof of the tool shed was lower than the cabin ceiling, so karen tore out the wood floor [and] burnt it in the stove too. she then carried stones up from the creek and made a stone floor so she would have enough head room to stand up in there, and turned the tool shed into her kitchen. i had never known another woman that would have or could have done that. PETER STAMPFEL: she was the only folksinger i ever met with an authentic "folk" background. she came to the folk music scene under her own steam, as opposed to being "discovered" and introduced to it by people already involved in it. by 1960, there were a number of young folksingers who had listened to folk music all their lives, but that was due to the academic, bohemian, professional, or political orientation of their parents. karen was the real thing. [PASTURES OF PLENTY] from the album "cotton eyed joe"; recorded live in 1962: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VznrnadNdU RICK BOLSOM (from a 1971 just sunshine records press release): karen is part of the generation of writers and musicians who came to the village in the early sixties, and played at the pass-the-hat clubs, at the gaslight, at the bitter end when it was still called the cock and bull. that was in the days when dylan had just arrived, when tim hardin, dino valenti, fred neil and the rest — and karen dalton, too — were all learning together, influencing each other. if it is not far from the truth that you had to be one of those people to know about karen, it's probably because she had a way of packing up and heading back to texas (where she was born) or to colorado, to spend a couple of years in the hills… KAREN DALTON: i like being alone. if you don't like solitude then colorado will drive you nuts. you can go for days without seeing anyone, when you don't go out and nobody drops by. i like that. JOE LOOP: karen knew that she had to be in NYC to further her career, but she didn't want her daughter in the public schools in NYC. so she would go to the city for a while and then retreat to the mountains to rejuvenate. FRED NEIL: i first picked up on her one night in the village at cock and bull, which later became the bitter end. her voice grabbed me immediately. she did "blues on the ceiling", which is my song, with so much feeling that if she told me she had written it herself, i would have believed her. 1969 CAPITOL RECORDS PRESS RELEASE: neil, who had spoken of her to capitol producer nick venet, found her in boulder and asked her to audition for venet in new_york. eight bars of neil's "a little bit of rain" led to a recording contract. FRED NEIL: her voice is so unique that to describe it would take a poet. all i can say is that she sure can sing the shit out of the blues. CHEECH MARIN: karen dalton i heard when i was living in vancouver and i was reviewing records, and this record came through, and i heard this voice. it was the most incredible voice i'd ever heard. i go, "i gotta find out some more about this woman." when i came to LA and i was reviewing records for magazines here, i asked them…they said, "who would you like to interview?" i said, "karen dalton." [surprised voice] "oh…she…really? karen dalton?" so i knock on the door. they told her i was coming. it's karen dalton. and i was looking for a place to stay at the time, 'cause i was getting kicked out of wherever i was, and they had a room there to rent out, and i rented the room. so i lived with karen dalton for maybe six months, and i got to see [her] up close. she's the most incredible voice. and then there was this other person there that lived in the house named jill byrem, who later became lacy j. dalton [she took her stage name in tribute to karen, who she saw as something of a mentor]. in 1969 karen's first studio album "it's so hard to tell who's going to love you the best" (a line from blues singer leroy carr's song "in the evening") was released. stories have been circulating for years that she had to be tricked into recording it. PETER STAMPFEL: [that album] certainly never would have happened without the brilliant sneakiness of nick venet. nick had wanted to work on a karen dalton record for quite some time, and he had made four previous attempts, which karen had thwarted in one way or another. finally, she was invited to a fred neil session and required to bring along her instruments. nick asked if karen could, as a personal favour, record fred's song "a little bit of rain", for his private collection. the ice was broken, and the rest of the album was recorded in a single session. most of the cuts on this album were karen's first and only takes. in the press release that went out with promotional copies of the album, karen told a different story. KAREN DALTON: the album took three days, three separate sessions. we knew what we wanted and we went in and did [it]. i like it a lot and nick venet is a great producer. i'm happy with it. it shows how well i play the guitar. there are also stories that karen didn't know she was being recorded until after the fact. it's hard to say what the truth is. what everyone can agree on is that karen was not at her most comfortable in a studio environment. PETER STAMPFEL: like many instinctual musicians, karen tended to freeze up in situations involving recording or playing for people in the industry. she did some harmonies with me on a holy modal rounders album in 1972, and everyone had to wait over an hour for her to "prepare" herself, a complicated procedure which concluded with her ripping the bathroom sink off the wall. JOE LOOP: she had a way of carrying herself and an aura about her of strength that made it surprising that somebody who had such a strong personality would get in a situation like a recording situation and be really shy and intimidated by the whole thing. HARVEY BROOKS: she didn’t like pressure. she was a very intimate performer. we didn’t have the word "stress" then. [IT HURTS ME TOO] filmed in 1969 or 1970: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaZXSBTv8mk karen doesn't seem to have ever written a song of her own. though some feel that hurt her career at a time when audiences wanted to hear singers perform their own songs, she felt more at home interpreting the songs of others. PETER STAMPFEL: although she had written poetry for years, karen never became a songwriter. but she gave everything she sang a singularly haunting, bluesy touch. almost everyone used the same two words to describe her voice: billie_holiday. i sometimes referred to her as hillbilly holiday, but never to her face. she didn't like the comparison at all. i think she just happened to sound more like billie_holiday than anyone else. karen simply sounded like karen. JOE LOOP: she'd take some old blues song or spiritual you’d never heard before, and just make it devastating. it was all in her voice. and it worked in harmonies too. HARVEY BROOKS: she had an advanced understanding of time and phrasing. she knew she was going to get there eventually. PETER STAMPFEL: she tended toward the more obscure, unknown songwriters, but occasionally she would take on something more familiar. her version of the walker brothers' pop hit "the sun ain't gonna shine anymore", which she did in an open guitar tuning, is one of the most stunning pieces of music i've ever heard, and i never cared much for the song during its top ten heyday. KAREN DALTON: (from a poem) the singer strums a chord, and bends the silent after-drum into the singularity of my mind. she picked up live gigs where she could. things didn't always go smoothly. PETER STAMPFEL: in 1969, michael lang, one of the organizers of the woodstock festival, lined her up a european concert tour opening for santana, of all people. she had a stellar backup band and great support, but she was difficult to travel with. by the end of the tour, she had missed at least one date by simply refusing to come out of her dressing room. JOE LOOP: she didn't have much of an act at all; she didn't get up there and try to entertain like most people did. her music was, of course, some kind of communication, but she didn't get up there and talk very much or anything like that. she just sang. and she had quite a bullshit detector. she didn't care much for bullshit and bullshitters, and that's most of what you get. that's pretty much the world she had to live in, and she just wasn't commercially oriented at all. she was real laid back, and shy, actually. she was a really strong woman, but in a lot of ways, she was shy. it was just a foreign thing to her to go out there and say, "hey, i'm great." DAN HANKIN: before we went on this european trip, she bought me a guitar. after that trip, she went back to woodstock and was trying to get another band together. she invited me to join her, and after several weeks with nothing happening, i started saying, "when are we gonna rehearse?" i had to leave because i had a life elsewhere, but she didn't want me to leave. after i got back, she called me up in the middle of the night and demanded that i send her the guitar back. i sent it back and never spoke to her again. the album sunk without a trace, given no promotional push by capitol records. her second studio album was released in 1971 on a different label. it was called "in my own time" — as perfect a title as you could give a karen dalton record. [SOMETHING ON YOUR MIND] from "in my own time" (1971): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bxxR3Ny0b8 RICK BOLSOM: fall, 1970, mike lang is in the process of putting together his record company, and hears that karen [is] out of her earlier record contract. fred neil calls to tell her to expect michael's call. karen's mother once saw a picture of lang and thinks he looks like jesus, so she approves. karen talks to harvey brooks (another of the old gang — he played bass on her first album), and she comes into woodstock to do some demos, with harvey as producer. she went back to enid, oklahoma, to pick up her two teenage kids (lee and abby), her dog (shalom, a poodle-chihuahua), and her horse (who shall remain nameless)…drove them all the way back 1900 miles to woodstock while she cut the album. KAREN DALTON: this trip to new_york was the first one for my son. i told him it was a lot different from LA but when we got off the plane and stood on the bus and saw all those cemeteries you pass on the way into the city, it just blew his mind. i don't blame him. i think that shit is worse than air pollution. the indians used to just bury their dead in a tree. just put them up in a tree and soon there's nothing. the process was very different this time around. the album was recorded over a period of six months. HARVEY BROOKS: the fact that she wasn't a writer meant that we really had to create something for her. it was a lot of work, because her emotional personality had to be dealt with every step of the way, and respected. this was a folk-rock record that tilted towards pop, and on pop records you concentrate on getting the performance out of someone. on folk records you accept what it is. with pop, you have to work the singer. so i worked her. it took some cajoling, but she let me do it, and she liked the idea of the more pop-sounding record. but she made sure that she had "katie cruel" on there. ABRALYN BAIRD: she wanted to have her sound. that's what they told her they wanted to hear. and then she'd get in a recording studio, and they're like, well, we'll just add a couple of tracks to this. and she's like, no! you know, she'd get — just get furious. my mother was the kind of person who would scream at bank tellers. RICK BOLSOM: the musicians on the back cover are very well known to regular readers of back covers. she does a valenti song, a butterfield song, a richard manuel song, several blues standards and traditional songs. her next album will include several she's written herself. there was no next album. PETER STAMPFEL: always brutally honest, she never went out of her way to ingratiate herself, and she nonetheless expected the whole world to acknowledge her musical brilliance. unfortunately, that attitude only works after one has become very famous. she disliked performing almost as much as she loved music; she once told me that, in a perfect world, she wouldn't ever have to be onstage. she could just play music with friends in her living room and (magically) there would be a large audience, rapt, silent, and enthralled, which karen could then completely ignore. HARVEY BROOKS: it just didn't work out for her. for some people it's just like that; they give, but they don't get. and it just broke her heart. after that, she couldn't get her life together, and in the music business you have to be able to promote your product. that album didn't sell, and nobody was gonna put the money up to make another. RICHARD TUCKER: she wash't seen as very commercial. the people in charge didn't get it. DAN HANKIN: she never had the personality to pander to an audience. she didn't reach out to them. she had too much pride. JOE LOOP: she had a lot of success as a musician. she just didn’t have any commercial success. she got probably $20,000 for that second record. that’s not a lot of money, especially for someone who'd been broke for such a long time. i'm sure that didn’t last a long time at all. and the only other income she had was from singing in coffee houses, and stuff like that. [SAME OLD MAN] from "in my own time" (1971): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er8PVjBB5xM she continued to play the odd live show for a year or two. the fear of performing and unwillingness to do things at anything other than her own speed and in anything other than her own way persisted. JOE LOOP: i know she got fired from one gig for sitting and tuning too long. she wasn't gonna play if it wasn't in tune, but sometimes it takes a while to tune a twelve-string guitar. and back then there were lines of people waiting to come and play for nothing, just passing the hat, you know? so there was a lot of competition. PETER STAMPFEL: in the early 70s i was proud and happy to be a member of her backup band, but an unfortunate pattern emerged. we would rehearse madly for a couple of weeks, and on the night of the gig, karen would be too exhausted to get out of bed. and there she'd stay. ED OCHS: (from a review of a november 1971 live performance at new york's gaslight au go go) [karen is] a blues singer who picks the dust of ruins for traces of dreams without bothering to refine the raw or real for those who prefer their blues polished and protected. her cry comes in an inside, subterranean and colourless language, pulled from the hollow, the hell-hole where the blues are incubated. applause for her short set only drove her from the boiling gaslight platform, her two guitars crashing into each other in her confusion for something missing. not much is known about her life over the next twenty years. some relationships fractured, and her instruments were pawned for drug money more than once. RICHARD MANUEL: (lyrics from the song "katie's been gone", written about karen) katie's been gone and now her face is slowly fading from my mind she's gone to find some newer places left the old life far behind dear katie don't you miss your home? i don't see why you had to roam KAREN DALTON: (from a poem) in reflection the singer seeks only own eyes, reaching away memories, the whale buoyant, curving suspended huge flesh of life, breathing begin and stop, first and done. LACY J. DALTON: she was of the old beat generation that felt you had to be burning the candle at both ends and dying of hunger to call yourself an artist. i've always called them canaries in the coalmine, because they were in some ways hypersensitive to what was going on in the world. they were expressing their feelings of powerlessness and they felt they should live, do drugs, drink, whatever, to take the pain away. HARVEY BROOKS: i only knew her as an addicted personality. she had drug problems the whole time i knew her. she had a painful personality and i think she did drugs to soothe the pain. CHEECH MARIN: she had drug problems, and, you know, that can slow you up a lot…and it did slow her up a lot. RICHARD TUCKER: [we had a] very tumultuous relationship. karen was strong-willed but she wasn't self-confident. there was a fragility there. i remember having an argument in the middle of denver and me getting out of the car and walking away and never seeing her again. LACY J. DALTON: you could never take anything for granted with karen, even her love. when she granted it, it was not given lightly. she was judicious with her affections, and knew who she was. PETER STAMPFEL: i've noticed something obvious that i missed all the years i knew her: she had always been what we now call clinically depressed, and that may have been the main factor that fuelled her extreme and obsessive need for drugs and alcohol. JOE LOOP: i don't remember karen being a depressive person. you know, what was going on in this world was enough to depress anybody. also, of course, i know she was frustrated by her lack of recognition and success. and it was hard for her to do much about that. all those things added up. and i think what was happening to our planet affected her more than most people. so it wasn't just her personal life, and anyway, i don't think she was more depressed than just about anybody else who was living in poverty, broke and hungry most of the time. it's not a real happy existence for a lot of people. her response to being saved from an overdose during these "lost" years was telling. LACY J. DALTON: she called me up after [i called the ambulance] and she said, "i guess it's been three weeks. it's taken me this long to call and say i guess i oughtta thank you for something." she was furious at me for bringing her back. she was homeless for a time in the late 80s or early 90s. lacy got her into rehab. LACY J. DALTON: we got her guitars out of the pawnshop, we got her damn cat from pennsylvania, and we got her on a plane to texas. there was a recording session set up for her for when she'd finished. she called me when she got there. she said, "i oughtta stick my cowboy boot up your ass! one of us oughtta change her name. get me a plane ticket home now!" i said, "karen, stay long enough to get your teeth fixed." but what i didn't realize at the time was that her teeth [were] how she was getting access to codeine. and so she went back to new_york and died on the streets a year later. JOE LOOP: the last time i saw her was probably about the mid-70s sometime. i did talk to her in the early 90s, i think a few months before she died. i don't know exactly how long before. PETER STAMPFEL: towards the end of her life, when she was too sick to do music anymore, she told [a friend] that music had been the only way she could relate to other people, and now she had to find some other way to do it. i don't know if she ever did. KAREN DALTON: (from a poem) the singer strings a song some window reflecting my eyes opens. a feather flight, dreamfloating my heart away hanged in space, a white cloud torn on winds of birdwings. JOE LOOP: i guess you've read all the stuff about her dying homeless on the streets of new_york? well, i'd like to correct that. that isn't true. she was actually staying in a house owned by peter walker — a guitar player who lives up in woodstock — and he also has a place in new york. she was staying at his house — had been for quite some time. she was there when i got ahold of her. and, she told me, matter-of-factly when i called her, that she was "staying in this cabin this guy got me to croak in". those were her words. we chatted and all that. her son lee was with her, taking care of her. and, actually, when she passed away, peter walker was with her in the room, and he didn't realize she'd gone for a while. anyway, [that's] a little bit of a different story than the one you usually hear. PETER WALKER: she was perfectly functional mentally. she was living in hurley, in upstate new_york between kingston and woodstock. she lived with AIDS for more than eight years, but with an excellent quality of life considering the disease. that her addiction was her downfall can't be glossed over, but it's a mistake to paint her as nothing more than another drug casualty, as some writers have. LACY J. DALTON: the thing i remember most about her is a certain gentle warmth and, in her best moments, a sort of cleanness that you don't see very often in this world. she was a wonderful cook, and she could make anything grow. she was magical. ABRALYN BAIRD: she was really intelligent and really well-read. i mean, our house was always full of books. she knew what was going on in the world. she knew, you know, how things worked. she knew literature, the whole bit. when people approached her as being the stupid farm girl from oklahoma, it could really piss her off in a hurry. PETER STAMPFEL: only those who jammed with karen in completely recreational circumstances know how talented [she] could be. karen and hunt middleton shared a loft on 33rd and seventh avenue in manhattan during the 70s and 80s. one evening when i was there playing with them, we were joined by perry robinson, who dropped over after a gig with dave brubeck, victor ortez (a cuban conga player from the lower east side who had once played with tito puente), gino biando (who brought his double bass from his regular gig with the american symphony orchestra), chris anderson (a blind piano genius who had taught herbie hancock, and whose life karen had once saved, but that's another story), and rock/fusion drummer frank steo (who had played with larry coryell). everyone's common bond was that they loved playing with karen. JOE LOOP: i can still see her in my mind, sitting in her rocking chair with that longneck banjo, rocking back and forth playing. LACY J. DALTON: i think her time is coming now, because people are fed up [with] slick, over-produced voices. and this old world is not a child any more. we need the truth. it doesn't need to be in words. it needs to be in delivery. CIRCUS MAGAZINE, JULY 1971: [karen] speaks quietly when she [talks]. she's not saying [these things] for anyone to hear especially, just 'cause they're true. KAREN DALTON: why do you think you have to sing so loud? if you want to be heard, you have to sing softer. [REASON TO BELIEVE] from "1966": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5H4-Eafu8A . so there's that. and here's what i think. karen could play the hell out of the acoustic 12-string guitar and a longneck banjo someone carved from a bedpost. her musical career was over before she was much older than 30, but it's easy to guess at what she might have sounded like as an older woman. she already sounded ancient when she was in her early 20s. and in a sense, given how much she'd lived in such a short time, she was. her dark muted trumpet of a voice imbued everything she sang with a gravity most voices with wider ranges and prettier tones never get close to. listening to her sing tim hardin's "reason to believe" after growing up hearing rod stewart's overwrought cover version on the radio is a revelation. maybe the reason she disliked performing so much (unless it was in a living room with friends, or alone, where she felt in her element) was because she didn't know *how* to perform. she didn't sing songs; she lived them, for as long as they took to sing. hers is a rare case where i would recommend the albums that have been released since her passing over the two that came out while she was alive. on "in my own time", something about the arrangements doesn't sit right. it's as if the producer and the other musicians are trying to pull things in a more radio-friendly direction, and karen's voice and personality won't be bent that way, so what you get is a weird middle ground that doesn't always work. when it does work, it's fantastic. "something on your mind" might be the single best example of what she could have sounded like with a sympathetic full-time band behind her. but i think trying to turn her into an upbeat soul singer was a mistake. it says something that the songs where she's practically alone with either her longneck banjo ("katie cruel" and "same old man") or her 12-string (just the closing track; her guitar-playing is barely heard throughout the album) stand out by miles and miles. "it's so hard to tell who's going to love you the best" is much more like her, and that was my introduction to her voice. i'm a little proud to say i got into karen before devendra banhart (who was aping her singing style, which for her wasn't a style but just the way she sang, pretty hardcore for a while there) and nick cave and bobby dylan started name-dropping her and she became "cool". i read a tiny sidebar in a magazine that mentioned her, tracked down the 1997 reissue of "it's so hard…" (before it was reissued a second time), and it blew me away. but it's on the live album "cotton eyed joe" and the home recordings "green rocky road" and "1966" that she comes into full focus for the first time, playing and singing for herself, by herself (except on "1966", which features some duets with richard tucker). she slips into this gripping "dark night of the soul" thing on some songs, like in her weightless, mournful version of ray charles' "it's alright", and it's a thing i've only ever heard one other singer swim around in. that was tim buckley in 1969 and 1970. maybe it's an acoustic-12-string-guitar-playing, indescribable-voice-having thing. i don't know. the strangest thing is that all these recordings, made on joe loop's reel-to-reel tape machine, predate both of her studio albums. the latest of them was recorded when she was still in her 20s. and yet she already sounds fully-formed. if anything, her range is revealed to be much wider than anyone would have guessed based on either of her "proper" albums. in a DVD that's available in a few reissued album packages (i got it with "cotton eyed joe"), you can see some black_and_white footage of her playing and singing. seeing her smile to herself, eyes closed, immersed in the music, you realize that as sad as some of the songs she chose to sing were, there was joy in that music for her. she knew who she was as an artist and what she wanted to do long before she set foot in a recording studio. she just wanted to do it on her own terms, in her own time. supposedly there's more material that might see the light of day soon, including a recording of that walker brothers song, presumed lost forever until some vault-combing for a documentary about radio pioneer bob fass uncovered two performances karen gave on his show that no one knew about, one in 1976, the other in 1980. in most cases my feelings about posthumous releases are mixed and medium-cynical at best. not so this time. i say bring it on. the more of karen there is to listen to, the better. 131228 ... raze 332! i forgot to change the number! that was #332! and "wash't" instead of "wasn't"? really? i'm glad this serial thing will be finished in a few days and i can go back to making regular typos in other places. it's kind of a kick in the balls to put all that time and work into something, only to find you fucked it up and you CAN'T FUCKING EDIT IT. 131228 ... the evil angel on my shoulder feel better now? 131228 ... raze yes. muchly. 131228 ... the evil angel on my shoulder you know, the h kind of looks like an n carrying a picture frame on its back... 131228 ... raze yeah. too bad the 1 doesn't look like a 2. 131228 ... raze and the footage on the DVD is only half black_and_white. half of it's in colour. the b&w footage dates to 1969, the colour footage to 1970. i'd forgotten that part. anyway. 333! 333! this is #333! time running out! time running out! for the fool still asking what his life is about! jackson browne lyrics notwithstanding, we're down to the final few. there's stuff i just won't be able to squeeze in now, as much as i'd like to. but i'm wedging in this one. watch me wedge. 333. mice parade // double dolphins on the nickel from the album "mice parade" (2007) after co-founding the dylan group with dylan cristy, adam pierce rearranged the letters of his name and started a solo project he called mice parade. what began as a self-recorded one-man effort that lived somewhere near the intersection between post-rock, shoegaze, and idm has expanded over ten albums and fifteen years to encompass many different sounds and include many different musicians and collaborators. some fans wish pierce had never started singing (his laconic work in front of the microphone is not to everyone's taste), but he's taken a much more song-based approach on the last few albums and shows no signs of wanting to backtrack to the instrumental ways of old. two things that were there in the beginning are still a part of the mice parade sound now: great drumming, and the sound of the vibraphone. on one of the early albums there's a song called "purple blather". my brain did a failed backflip just now, trying to picture what that would look like. digression, digression, bad first impression. court is now in session. we're all out of bibles. please raise your right hand and swear on this pest control pamphlet. swear to tell something not too far removed from the truth, so help you ants. where was i? celebratory mice. right. in 2007 a guy i was basement-level friends with (no knocking knees in the attic for us) was still DJing at the local university radio station. he would soon be fired from his volunteer position for stealing music from the station. but he hadn't been fired yet. his show was on friday nights, and one friday night he played a new album all the way through. he did that from time to time. he called it the "artist spotlight" feature. people who weren't him called it "being lazy and not bothering to program a whole show". this album was unfamiliar to me. i liked it. i called him to ask what it was. there was no answer. after about an hour, when the album had started playing from the beginning again, i put it together that he wasn't actually in the studio. no one was. the album played on a loop at least half a dozen times. the last time i'd heard this happen, it was the papa m compilation "hole of burning alms" that did the "groundhog day" thing, and i liked that album enough to go out and buy it by the second or third time through. same thing here. only, with the papa m album i'd been able to figure out who the artist was. this time i was stumped, and googling a few lyrics i was able to pick out didn't do any good. lucky for me, they'd just started an MP3 archive on the university radio station's website so you could listen to shows you missed as podcasts. i downloaded the show before my friend's and caught a dude saying he was throwing on the new mice parade album to fill up space. bingo. bingo was that moment's name-o. i've since acquired most of the mice parade albums and a few by the dylan group. i pretty much like it all, but the self-titled album i first heard that friday night in 2007 has a special place in whatever part of me decides what music i like best. i think it's the left elbow. kristín anna valtýsdóttir of icelandic band múm lends her voice to this song — the first one that really hooked me when i was listening on the radio. it's all about the nylon string guitar, the vibraphone, and that little girl voice. the newest mice parade album is better than the pitchfork review would have you believe, too, written as it was by someone who, by the sound of it, is prejudiced against any song that doesn't follow a conventional, repetitive structure. what did unconventionally structured songs ever do to you, man? they're just trying to make it through the day, like all the other songs out there. i miss kristín's voice a little on the new songs, but caroline lufkin does an admirable job in her place, there are some nice sonic and structural surprises, and pierce's drumming is as rock solid as ever. he can keep recording songs with singing in them forever if he wants to. i won't mind. listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq91x6OUNSk 131229 ... raze 334. scott walker // bolivia '95 from the album "tilt" (1995) UK's mojo magazine has a regular feature called "last night a record changed my life", wherein interview subjects will talk about albums that were important to them during their formative years and had a significant impact on the artists they became. if there was an alternate universe in which i was someone people wrote about in magazines, and if mojo was one of those magazines, i would talk about scott walker's album "tilt". when i was fourteen, something happened to me. i woke up one morning and every album in my collection was boring. everything on the radio was boring. everything on television was boring. none of it did anything for me anymore. it was not a progressive thing. it happened in an instant, as if some small surgeon had crawled inside my skull and cut into my brain while i was sleeping. it didn’t make any sense to me then, and it still mystefies me. how do you outgrow all the music you love overnight? whatever made it happen, i needed to find something new to listen to. i had no idea where to start. someone out there must have been looking out for me, because after leafing through my rolling stone rock 'n' roll encyclopedia and failing to find much that interested me, i came across this book in the chapters bookstore at the mall called "rock: the rough guide". a quote from a review on the back cover called it a "sexy, all-conquering guide, with big, brash entries colourfully written by opinionated maniacs", which is a pretty fair assessment. instead of dry facts and chart information, here was a book written by music fans, for music fans. and the stuff inside...most of these artists and bands i'd never even heard of before. i scoured the pages of that book for anything that sounded like it might be interesting and different, and started completely rebuilding my CD collection. styx, foreigner, journey, all that corporate rock i'd loved so much was forgotten. in came nick drake, my bloody valentine, tom_waits, big star, kate_bush, the pixies, television, jane_siberry, the replacements, laura nyro, marvin gaye, and too many others to mention. it isn't an exaggeration to say this book is the single most important musical resource i've ever had. it became my bible. without it, i'm not sure what i would have done. i didn't have a home computer. i didn't have regular internet access, and the internet wasn't what it is now. but with the book as my guide, i plunged head-first into an exciting new world of music that was totally alien to me. scott walker was one of the people i read about in the book. i thought he was an interesting character. he started out as a crooner in a band of fake brothers, setting the charts on fire with pretty harmless pop music (though “the sun ain’t gonna shine anymore” is a great chunk of phil spector-influenced infectiousness any way you slice it, and i can just about hear how karen dalton might have played it), went solo, found his voice as a writer, lost the plot for a while, stopped writing songs and released a few albums of schlock, almost became tom jones (pre-reinvention), and then turned his back on all of that and found a brand new voice, alienating his entire fan base in the process, rewriting his own musical language to such an extent that the songwriter he'd once been ceased to exist. it all sounded very cool to me, especially when he was compared in some tangential way to david sylvian, who i'd become a huge fan of. given how superficially similar the first music i heard by sylvian's band japan sounded to late-period roxy music, i was expecting something along the lines of "david sylvian with more electric guitars". i ordered "tilt" on import, thinking that was the best place to start, waited a few weeks, and then got the call telling me it had come in. i popped it in the car CD player on the ride home from dr. disc and heard this huge trembling voice come wailing out of the speakers, and i thought, well, that must be a guest vocalist or something. surely that isn't scott singing. but it was scott. the voice sounded barely human to me. almost grotesque. it was a sweaty handshake that was too firm and lasted too long. there was nothing in the music i felt i could grab onto. the dynamics were all over the place, the instrumentation was orchestral one minute and industrial the next, there was hardly a discernible chorus in sight, and if i'm honest it all kind of scared the shit out of me. the closest thing to a "normal" song was the title track, and it sounded like a country song played by a band of skeletons in hell, sung by a disembowelled opera singer. i couldn't believe i'd bought this thing. after a great purple patch, the book had finally let me down. i hated this music. at home i took the CD with me down to the basement, sat at the desk in my little music room, and listened some more while i worked on a geography assignment i knew i wasn't going to do well on. geography was always one of my worst subjects, and my high school geography teacher was a prick. he told us not to ask stupid questions before we'd asked him anything. he did that a lot. he sounded like a poor man's charles bronson when he said it. sometimes when someone raised their hand to answer a question and he didn't feel like hearing them speak, he would say, "you got the answer? shut your mouth." he wasn't the kind of guy who made you feel like it was a good idea to approach him when something wasn't making sense to you. he wasn't going to help me with geography or scott walker. i was on my own. there was a dark-haired beauty named tabitha in that geography class. she talked to me a bit. she was nice to me. at least there was that. if i had any experience or confidence at all, i might have picked up on it and seen that she liked me, and i might have worked up the nerve to ask her out. when she gave me a christmas card before the holiday break and signed it "love" and i was the only person in our class she gave anything to, that should have been the tipping point. i should have asked if she wanted to go for a coffee or something. but those words weren't there for me to say. i just felt awkward. the idea of a girl liking me didn't compute. so i was sitting at my hulking desk in the basement, trying to figure out this map i was supposed to draw, right before or right after the christmas card and the awkward feeling, i can't remember which. and i had headphones on and was listening to this insane music that made less sense to me than maps. i might as well have been trying to take a bite out of a brick wall. i was able to make it look like i did my homework without understanding anything i was doing, so it wasn't a total wash. i listened to the last song on the album in bed. at least i gave it a chance, i thought. i got through the whole thing. i tried. i went to sleep thinking not much had been accomplished in the time i spent struggling with the map. i still sucked at geography, i was still probably going to fail the class, and i still regretted buying "tilt". i was disappointed. i was at least partially right. that was one of only two high school classes i didn't pass (the other was grade eleven math, when the concepts changed and the skills that had served me so well in the years before shrivelled and died). but i was wrong about "tilt". something drove me to keep listening to those songs. i felt a need to get at least *something* out of them. for the next week or two, that album was all i listened to. and in the space of about ten days, i went from actively despising it, to thinking it was the most enthralling music i'd ever heard. it ripped my brain out of my head and performed a much more violent kind of surgery than whatever the tiny visitor had done that night he took my love of mainstream radio away, and at some point it just clicked. i would lie in bed at night reading the lyrics and listening. the words were like fever dream poetry. the voice that had sounded so ugly to me before became this wonderful, unearthly thing that soared above and beyond the endlessly shifting landscape of strings and drums and flutes and detuned guitars. this music changed everything about what i thought music could or should be. that's not hyperbole. without "tilt", half the music i have in my collection now wouldn't be there, and if it was i wouldn't be capable of appreciating it on the level i do. tim buckley, john coltrane, those last two talk talk albums, aphex twin, autechre, suicide, mingus, ellington, monk, cat_power, peter gabriel's "passion" soundtrack, nina simone, can, the stooges, even scott's own more recent work, which almost makes "tilt" sound warm and friendly — none of this would be part of my vocabulary. brian eno’s ambient music and miles davis' electric period wouldn’t do a thing for me. i don't think half of the music i’ve made myself would exist. take away "tilt", take away the growing it forced me to do as a listener, and i’m a different person, and a different writer. i still dig for interesting music that lives off the beaten path. the internet has become a great tool here, even if i still like to buy all my music the old fashioned way and avoid online distribution as much as possible, and i sometimes miss the days of not being able to audition anything before i heard it and having to go in cold. there are a lot of things i intend to listen to that i haven't got around to yet. i still have lists of things i first read about in the rock book and jotted down, only to forget all about them. lists i wrote half my life ago. it took me more than a decade after i read about them before i got around to hearing anything by the band wire, for instance. but it seems like certain things come around when they're meant to. i wasn't ready for "tilt" when i heard it the first time, but i needed to hear it when i did. it's an understatement to say that this kind of music isn't for everyone. and there are other points of entry. the four self-titled solo albums scott made in the late 1960s are all great examples of dark, subversive baroque pop (you haven't heard jacques brel covered properly until you've heard scott walker cover him). "nite flights" by the reformed walker brothers is where the new, singular songwriting voice scott developed really had its coming out party, specifically in the track "the electrician". he has a way of setting up a half-dissonant, half-pretty drone with the strings in a song like that or "it's raining today" that really hits the spot for me. "climate of hunter" is one of the stranger albums of the 1980s, with billy ocean (yes, billy ocean) duetting with scott on lines like, "delayed in the headlong / resembled to breaking point / i swear you never slept at night / when the growing is slow". and if you listen to "the drift" or "bish bosch" before bed, those albums will probably give you nightmares. who doesn't like a good old-fashioned music-induced nightmare? listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GEI16QPSfA 131230 ... raze 335. end of the line. well, here be the end. when i started this early in the year (WHERE DID THE YEAR GO? WHERE? DID YOU TAKE IT? DID YOU?!?!), it was a pretty impulsive thing. it was almost a bit of a joke, to see if i could pull something like this off. the entries started out pretty brief, and then they got longer and more ambitious depending on how much i felt i had to say or how strongly i felt about the songs. some days i was lazy or pressed for time and didn't write much of anything. sometimes i made stupid typos that made me want to take a bite out of my laptop. ("me?!" the laptop just said to me. "i didn't do anything! bite your hand if you have to bite something!") there's a lot i'd like to include that i didn't end up getting to in time. but hopefully what's here was, is, or will be of some interest to at least a few people, whether it's in some music you might not have heard before, something you didn't know about cottage cheese, or the not-quite-mean-spirited banter with the evil angel on my shoulder. i had fun doing this. i wrote some things i'm proud of, dug up some things i hadn't heard in a while, found some things i hadn't heard before, and found room for both dan hill and a japanese metal band. every couple months i'll give a look and see what links have gone dead, and replace 'em with fresh ones. if i do something like this again somewhere down the road, it'll be on a much smaller scale...more of an occasional one-shot thing, like, "here's a song about an existentialist caterpillar i heard last sunday." so i've got one last chance to change someone's life. i'd best pull out the big guns. here's a piece of crap maroon 5 song warped into something hilarious through the use of old-school computer technology. watch / listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZGgymGg0Ns 131231 ... the evil angel on my shoulder it's so…beautiful. (single tear) 131231 ... e_o_i It is the last of 335 songs! I doubt I can display such a range of knowledge and genuine appreciation, but I feel compelled to follow sporadically in your metaphorical footsteps. Thanks for the music and maybe take up something with a less metronomic schedule? (I didn't know what a metronome was called for a long time. I called it a ticky thing.) Anyway, this will be a page worth revisiting for present and future blatherers. Live long and prosper. 140101 ... e_o_i (You can also join radio_80hd. Anyone can join, even without the benefit of high definition disorder. It'll be a low-definition environment, especially when my descriptivity falters.) 140101 ... raze replacements for a few dead links: #293 "try again" is gone, so here instead is "travelled" from the album "indelibly stamped", which has less roger hodgson but more nudity on the cover: http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Travelled/3ZC8sn?src=5 #294 http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9bpm0_heartsrevolution-薔薇と彼女の王子-the-rose_music #321 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGo4RdXm3jA #334 "bolivia" is gone, so here's "face on breast" from the same album: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT0MGSfJYIA 140122 ... raze a few more replacements for links that have gone dead. #315 "rocket usa" is over here now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHl3o4L7cW8 #316 and bobby is here: http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/What+Good+Am+I/4fnSbi?src=5 #331 and "it hurts me too" is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0ZlWK-b_KY 140401 what's it to you? who go blather from