May 25, 2006

Be Careful What You Wish For

Okay, so you know those health quizzes where they talk about stress factors and events contributing to heart attacks? You know: "If you started a new job, add one point. If you had a death in the family, add 3, and 2 more if it was a close relative like a parent, spouse, or child." Right. That kind. Maybe I'm only making one up (because I couldn't find it doing a half-assed Google search for something like that; perhaps typing in "heart attack stressful events death job" isn't enough), but I'm pretty sure that I've seen these, and all I know is that they suggest you limit the number of such events to as few as possible over as long a period of time. Yes, yes, you're not supposed to love, move away from home, work, get married, etc. Then you'll live forever. However, despite no longer being a teenager--and frankly, never having been one of the ones who thought he was invincible or whatever--I do fully recognize my own mortality, and rather than take another vitamin or schedule a prostate exam, I have apparently wholeheartedly embraced the Stressful Events Vortex as though it were a Sunday morning toilet bowl and I was a frat-boy who found a free case of Boone's Farm late on Saturday afternoon. I got myself married to S, who is now S Blue Shoe. Two days before the wedding I was offered a new job, doing music law work for a firm I have always wanted to work for, and then upon returning, the Missus and I packed all of our stuff (okay, our friends Torrie and K, along with some movers packed it all up), and we moved, and then I accepted the job at the end of the last week. If you add that up, that's 3 Major Life-Changing, Personal World-Shattering, Heart Attack-Inducing Events in the space of three weeks. I'll see you when I get out of the ICU next month some time.

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December 27, 2005

Top Ten

This isn't really a music blog, but in the attempt to get myself back up and running at a somewhat more regular pace, I thought I would add in the ten albums of this year that I found myself hopelessly addicted to at one point or another. This would be my top ten, were it for the fact that I actually had an objective, listened-to control set to mark against, rather than having only bought 12 albums all year. In other words, this is my top ten of albums that I bought. In no particular order: 1. Imogen Heap -- Speak for Yourself 2. John Mayer Trio -- Try! 3. Our Lady Peace -- Healthy in Paranoid Times 4. Ani DiFranco -- Knuckle Down 5. Death Cab for Cutie -- Plans 6. David Gray -- Life in Slow Motion 7. Stereophonics -- Language. Sex. Violence. Other? 8. Coldplay -- X&Y 9. Mike Doughty -- Haughty Melodic 10. Gomez -- Out West

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March 19, 2005

Where to Begin?

Yes, yes, I know how long it's been. And it definitely isn't that I've had nothing to say or no way to say it. I've just had no time. Where the first few months of being a "lawyer" had moments of long hours and punishing schedules, the digital turn from 2004 to 2005 was as though I suddenly was wearing a neon sign marked "Gun for Hire", and hired I was. Put simply, I worked enough in the first two months of the year to take the next one off, and as long as I kept a lesser pace later on, I would have still made target billables and earned what I now recognize to be a very deserved bonus. Of course, this late in March, you can guess that I did not take the month off, and am--with roughly 2 weeks left to go--about to hit target once again. That said, this is an apology for being gone (lame though acknowledging it apparently is), and the one theme that has echoed through my brain of late: Music I got addicted to in the last year. * Death Cab for Cutie - Transatlanticism. That album which started me into an addiction of Death Cab albums, it's got both the pop and the angst and the rockin' all in one little package. You expect geeky indie rock, and you get it, but it's not that hipper-than-thou Strokes garbage. It's quirky, and it's painful, but you want to sing along anyway. * John Butler Trio - Sunrise Over Sea. It just came out in the US on Tuesday, but I got my hands on this about a year ago, and it was one of the most infectious albums I've ever heard. You feel the rhythm automatically, having never heard songs before, and the blues-rock thing, which seems so old is suddenly new again. * Anything by Jeff Buckley - I don't know what happened, but suddenly I couldn't not have everything the man made. Always interesting, and now of course, I wish I'd seen him live before he died. Of course, at that time, I wasn't allowed to go to concerts. * The Postal Service - Give Up. Okay, this is sort of a Death Cab side project, what with the singer being Ben Gibbard, but this just doesn't go away and doesn't get old, no matter how many dozens of times in a row you play it. * Ani DiFranco - Knuckle Down. She went a little weird on us, but this new album of hers, which came out in January is perhaps the most consistently listenable of the last five years, and it's definitely more consistently listenable than most music out there these days. Good good stuff. And lastly, a quick question--what is it with all of the musicians I've loved for years suddenly coming out with Best Ofs? Suddenly, it's as though Pearl Jam, Live, Better Than Ezra, Counting Crows, and others are suddenly old enough to have Greatest Hits albums. Does this mean I got old? Or did they just all lose/fulfill their contracts as I was getting old enough to understand that?

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January 18, 2005

Dance!

He is there on the subway platform, twitching just perceptibly and quickly to music unheard. Yet his pattern seems to match the amateur fingerpicking I'm doing on my imaginary guitar along with Dave Matthews' “Trouble�. In fact as I see more and more white headphones out there, I imagine us all suddenly breaking into synchronized motion, like Rockettes on low-dose stimulants. The subway busker may be providing actual backup music, but we are fed by our technological, external wellsprings of music that prevents the accusation of insanity by reason of dancing to unheard music.

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November 22, 2004

Pick A Winner

To me it's always seemed like asking someone what their prison cell would have as decoration. The same thing, over and over, forever, will just drive me insane, and no matter how much I adore it now, or adored it 15 years ago, and no matter how many levels there may be to it, there is some point at which one CD, that one Desert Island Disc, would be enough to make me lose my mind. This is a long way of saying that I couldn't tell you what my favorite CD is, or even, what my favorite musician is. To me, music is like food--I've got to have it, and when I don't, I think about it, dream of it, make it myself, if only to remember how I felt. I spent 15 days on Outward Bound once, playing--in my head--Pearl Jam's "Indifference" in the attempt to remember every single word of the song, and then recalling just the right inflections of voice, echoes of guitar, and slides of fingers on strings to make it solid. But the thing about food, as with music, is that while you can return to the food that gives you comfort--grilled cheese, tomato soup, chocolate cake, pick you poison--if you were to have that, and only that, for the rest of eternity, you'd probably ask not to have a choice. Uniformity can breed resentment, and while people in Los Angeles will tell you that upper-70s-and-sunny is the only way to go, sometimes you need a little rainstorm in your life for re-centering; sometimes you need it to be cold to remind you of the joy of sun. For me, there are albums in my life that I can just put on, sing all the way through, and potentially play over and over again, that I am nevertheless loathe to do so because I love them so much, because I worry that they might lose their lustre. I've seen it happen so many times before. One-hit wonders and certain artists whose works have been the subject of my obsessive completism have both been stricken from my regular playlist solely because I over-loved them, like Lenny, or like the stuffed toy that gets worn down to the weave by a little child; they are the Velveteen Rabbits. But since I am aware of such tendencies in myself, I listen to them only in certain contexts, filter out songs one at a time, catch a piece here or there on the radio, but rarely, if ever, pick out the album and listen to it for its own sake, over and over again, so as to truly learn the album. There's little doubt, though, that I have listened to each song hundreds of times; I can hear them in my head when there's silence around me. I don't even know how that's possible, sometimes. That said, sometimes a musician or a CD speaks to you, and like comfort food, warm sweats and bed rest on a blustery, blizzard-day, you have to throw it on just to remind yourself of those feelings, to re-center yourself with a personal, auditory little rainstorm. For those times, there are U2's The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, Pearl Jam's Ten and Vs., Dave Matthews Band's Under The Table And Dreaming, Dispatch's Who Are We Living For? and Four Day Trials, and dozens of other albums which, although I cannot think of them at the moment, counts as part of my favorites, each of which recalls a place and time for me, but which also is a feat of musicianship and recording prowess that makes me hang on each instant of sound. Sometimes you just know--you have to hear that one CD the moment you get home.

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October 18, 2004

You Can't See Me

Why is it that 24 years ago, I decided that John was my favorite Beatle, and to this day, I realize I still like him and all his songs more than the others’? This is most bizarre because although I loved the Beatles, like all good music fiends, I didn’t own one single album of theirs beyond Sgt. Pepper’s (which I received on tape my first summer at sleep-away camp), until No. 1s came out.

Is it because at the age of 3-and-a-little-bit, I was suddenly inundated with John-hysteria and John-mourning and John-memorialization and John-sanctification when Mark David Chapman did the unthinkable and destroyed a legend?

I don’t know. I truly don’t.

Paul, vegan though he now is, social champion though he’s become, and quite the multi-millionaire, always seemed a little too polished, a little too pretty-boy, and a little too pop. He’s the one you could believe had died and been replaced with an impersonator.

George just seemed content with what he was doing. If it was Eastern, cool. If it was a rip-off of another song, oh well, ho-hum, oopsie-daisy, sorry folks, I didn’t mean it.

And Ringo—well, hell. Ringo’s name is enough to be the punchline for a million and a half jokes, none of them particularly good, and though he was apparently a remarkably gifted drummer, technically, no one could get past the Weirdness. He still has a sense for the bizarre and the self-mocking.

But John always seemed a bit more human; more real. He didn’t like where he came from, musically, geographically, or spiritually, and he changed it. He didn’t care that his love might or might not have destroyed the very thing that created him as a hero, and he turned his heroism into calls for social and political change, rather than reveling in the 1970s’ need to unabashedly spoil their musicians.

He was a quintessential New Yorker, though, and that’s perhaps what made me love him before I understood what death had done. He moved to and died on the Upper West Side, and New Yorkers, not usually a particularly loving crowd, embraced and saluted the fallen hero. And I was swept up in it.

John was my favorite Beatle.

And now, listening to my new copies of Revolver, The White Album, and Abbey Road, I find myself going “Ooh. I love that riff” before the vocals begin, and no surprise, I find that it’s John’s high voice that sings the vocal. No matter that it was written by “Lennon/McCartney”—I still love John’s songs the best.

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