A week after the fact, but I wanted to add Day Four of the Nashville trip in tribute to the non-country side of the city’s music scene. Apparently, it comes in after LA and New York in terms of the number of bands looking to make themselves a name, and there are more rock and pop than C&W acts here. Tip to up-and-coming groups: relocate to Murdo, South Dakota to ensure yourself a larger share of the local market before you try and move on up.
Because in the ‘local bands’ section at Grimey’s record shop on 8th Avenue South there’s a three-tiered rack full of CDs (and tapes) made by city artistes, which is not necessarily a good thing if you’re in one of the bands (I’d not heard of a single one). “In the end,” said Layne Ihde, the lead singer of Nashville-based three-piece The Ides, “you end up performing to the same 30-50 people every time you play live. And every one of them is in a band too.”
Layne moved to Nashville 12 years ago, “for the music”, and you can judge for yourself how good his band is from its MySpace page. They’ve released an LP and an EP, and have had respectable sales in Japan, which once lead to a Japanese girl inviting them to play at her birthday party…in Italy. They couldn’t make that, and neither have they been able to make it beyond the stage where they play to the same 30-50 people. Not that this means they’re unhappy, or would even consider giving it all up for ‘proper’ careers.
We met at Grimey’s on Layne’s recommendation. It’s not just the best record shop in Nashville (the three-mile walk from the town centre down a long and faceless street making it feel like you’ve earned the right to shop there), it’s possibly the best record shop in the world, run on love and independence. The almost faultless selection of both new and “preloved” CDs are generously priced in the listener’s favour, while bands play live in the second hand section, and the staff hand out free beer.
Last Saturday it was The Dirtbombs, featuring a punk-soul singer, two guitars, two drummers and a fuzzbox bass to shake the shop and the eardrums of all the patrons, most of whom were too young to take advantage of the beer giveaway, or to have heard this kind of music in most of its early incarnations. It was an anthemic, string-grinding six o’ clock warm-up for the evening ahead - perfect grime-time music.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Nashville, Day Three - The Moon And The Songbirds
I was staggering back to my hotel well after 2am on day three when I heard something odd coming from a tree on Church Street – a bird singing. I thought it might be another Nashville downtown gimmick, like the piped country music that seems to come out of the sewers, and the pedestrian crossing beepers, which sound like a sparrow being squeezed to chirp in rhythm. But it was in fact a real live American Robin, not known for being a nocturnal bird, perched on a branch and singing up at the almost full moon.
“There’s a full moon hanging over Nashville/And an empty heart that’s singing down below,” the robin was probably singing. Even the birds are inspired by the moon to be country and western singers here. And although country’s always been dominated by males, it’s had its fair share of songbirds, my own particular loves being Sara Carter, Bobby Gentry and Kitty Wells. And my favourite of them all, who just brought out a four-disc boxed set called ‘Songbird’ that I got for Christmas.
And so I was sitting at the bar of the Station Inn last night - a shack stuck at the end of a dark street, but that’s not a surprise location for a music venue in a city of such fragmented layout. And sitting at a table a few feet away there’s this white-haired older chick who looks distinguished and beautiful and vaguely familiar, but I don’t think any more about it and start to read my recommended Tennessee book, Nick Dawidoff’s In The Country of Country. And 15 minutes later a woman sits down next to me just as the support act, Fayssoux McLean, is about to play and says, “Did you see Emmylou’s here?”
“Oh yes,” I say, all nonchalant. “I saw her earlier.” Because we all know Emmylou on a first-name basis here in Nashville. And when McLean, who looked like a worried soccer mom but who used to back Harris and Linda Ronstadt in the 70s, did perform, the songbird came on stage and did backing vocals on four numbers. Which made it all worthwhile, because neither McLean nor the main act, Peter Cooper, did as much for me as the raucous country bands playing standards for free in the bars on Broadway.
Cooper told us that it was exactly eight years since he’d moved to Nashville. It’s a tough town to impress, and I didn’t think the crowd really warmed to him. His voice sounded too smooth, and his songs awkwardly structured. If it hadn’t been for Lloyd Green on the pedal steel, I’d have ducked out early (Emmylou, wisely, didn’t stay after she’d done her bit for Fayssoux).
But on the encore a well-lived female singer came on to do backing vocals on a cover version (can’t recall what), and she sounded like Bonny Tyler after three packets of cigarettes. I wished she’d been singing all night. Songbird or song-bloke, you’ve either got country or you ain’t.
For me, it’s a case of ain’t. I never made it to the Nashville Star auditions yesterday due to a lingering hangover. I did get as far as taking the travel guitar out of my car and carrying it up to my hotel room, but I haven’t taken it out of its case yet. I’ll just have to come back next year.
“There’s a full moon hanging over Nashville/And an empty heart that’s singing down below,” the robin was probably singing. Even the birds are inspired by the moon to be country and western singers here. And although country’s always been dominated by males, it’s had its fair share of songbirds, my own particular loves being Sara Carter, Bobby Gentry and Kitty Wells. And my favourite of them all, who just brought out a four-disc boxed set called ‘Songbird’ that I got for Christmas.
And so I was sitting at the bar of the Station Inn last night - a shack stuck at the end of a dark street, but that’s not a surprise location for a music venue in a city of such fragmented layout. And sitting at a table a few feet away there’s this white-haired older chick who looks distinguished and beautiful and vaguely familiar, but I don’t think any more about it and start to read my recommended Tennessee book, Nick Dawidoff’s In The Country of Country. And 15 minutes later a woman sits down next to me just as the support act, Fayssoux McLean, is about to play and says, “Did you see Emmylou’s here?”
“Oh yes,” I say, all nonchalant. “I saw her earlier.” Because we all know Emmylou on a first-name basis here in Nashville. And when McLean, who looked like a worried soccer mom but who used to back Harris and Linda Ronstadt in the 70s, did perform, the songbird came on stage and did backing vocals on four numbers. Which made it all worthwhile, because neither McLean nor the main act, Peter Cooper, did as much for me as the raucous country bands playing standards for free in the bars on Broadway.
Cooper told us that it was exactly eight years since he’d moved to Nashville. It’s a tough town to impress, and I didn’t think the crowd really warmed to him. His voice sounded too smooth, and his songs awkwardly structured. If it hadn’t been for Lloyd Green on the pedal steel, I’d have ducked out early (Emmylou, wisely, didn’t stay after she’d done her bit for Fayssoux).
But on the encore a well-lived female singer came on to do backing vocals on a cover version (can’t recall what), and she sounded like Bonny Tyler after three packets of cigarettes. I wished she’d been singing all night. Songbird or song-bloke, you’ve either got country or you ain’t.
For me, it’s a case of ain’t. I never made it to the Nashville Star auditions yesterday due to a lingering hangover. I did get as far as taking the travel guitar out of my car and carrying it up to my hotel room, but I haven’t taken it out of its case yet. I’ll just have to come back next year.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Nashville, Day Two - When Music City Became Soccer City
Any sceptics who think that soccer will never catch on in the United States should have been at LP Field here last night, when 69,000 flag-wavin’, gun-totin’, neck-wobblin’ home fans shunned college basketball and cruising around town in a pickup truck to pack the stadium and fanatically cheer on the US Under-23 team. Traffic was blocked in the downtown district for hours as the patriotic homeboys celebrated sending Uncle Sam’s fledgling kickers off to Beijing in August to take on the might of the totalitarian Communist state in the 16-team Olympic tournament. If there’s one place where Tibetan independence will be achieved, it’s on the soccer field. Woeful Canada, destroyed by three goals to nil, could only complain that they hadn’t been allowed to play on their favoured surface of snow.
If you don’t believe the effect that soccer fever has had on Nashville these past two days, then here are just a handful of the song titles I’ve picked up while walking down the street and hanging around the bars:
I Saw You Cheatin’ On Me At The Guatemala-Honduras Game
God Is My Referee (And Jesus Is My Coach)
Daddy Couldn’t Buy Me A Ticket To The CONCACAF Olympic Qualifying Tournament
That 4-5-1 Formation Left Me Lonely On The Bench Again
Hard Player, Soft Heart
Where Were You When My 10-Dollar Cleats Split At The Seam?
While I Was Playing Soccer, You Were Scoring Goals With Another Cowboy
Jesus Stopped Me Simulating
Honky-Tonk Full Back
It Ain’t Right Watching Chris Albright Without You At My Side
The Things We Used To Do Before You Met Freddy Adu
Speaking of Freddy Adu, I spotted the young US midfielder together with striker Jozy Altidore checking out the footwear in Boot Country on Broadway yesterday lunchtime, taking advantage of the shop’s offer of buy one pair of cowboy boots, get two free.
“Jozy and I have always had a bit of a country thing going in the locker room,” Adu said as he tried on a pair of tan Nocona Kangaroos with a medium round toe. “I’m more into the raw early mountain stuff and the post-war honky-tonk deal. Little Jimmy Dickens’ Take An Old Cold Tater (And Wait) always reminds me of sitting on the bench at DC United hoping for playing time. And it’s a big comfort for me again at Benfica now.
“As for Jozy,” Adu confided as his team-mate went to the back of the store to try on a Montana Silversmith belt buckle, “he’s really into The Judds and Tammy Wynette. You know, that soapy commercial stuff from the 70s that sent Nashville’s reputation down the pan? He says Stand By Your Man is inspirational in helping him pick up his mark when he comes back to defend on corner kicks…”
Altidore returned at this point and there was an awkward silence, and the pair was last seen heading to the Ernest Tubb Record Shop where Adu planned to pick up a Merle Haggard boxed set. No one can deny that placing the Men’s Olympic Qualifying Tournament here has been a huge success on every conceivable level. Soccer City Nashville will never be the same again.
If you don’t believe the effect that soccer fever has had on Nashville these past two days, then here are just a handful of the song titles I’ve picked up while walking down the street and hanging around the bars:
I Saw You Cheatin’ On Me At The Guatemala-Honduras Game
God Is My Referee (And Jesus Is My Coach)
Daddy Couldn’t Buy Me A Ticket To The CONCACAF Olympic Qualifying Tournament
That 4-5-1 Formation Left Me Lonely On The Bench Again
Hard Player, Soft Heart
Where Were You When My 10-Dollar Cleats Split At The Seam?
While I Was Playing Soccer, You Were Scoring Goals With Another Cowboy
Jesus Stopped Me Simulating
Honky-Tonk Full Back
It Ain’t Right Watching Chris Albright Without You At My Side
The Things We Used To Do Before You Met Freddy Adu
Speaking of Freddy Adu, I spotted the young US midfielder together with striker Jozy Altidore checking out the footwear in Boot Country on Broadway yesterday lunchtime, taking advantage of the shop’s offer of buy one pair of cowboy boots, get two free.
“Jozy and I have always had a bit of a country thing going in the locker room,” Adu said as he tried on a pair of tan Nocona Kangaroos with a medium round toe. “I’m more into the raw early mountain stuff and the post-war honky-tonk deal. Little Jimmy Dickens’ Take An Old Cold Tater (And Wait) always reminds me of sitting on the bench at DC United hoping for playing time. And it’s a big comfort for me again at Benfica now.
“As for Jozy,” Adu confided as his team-mate went to the back of the store to try on a Montana Silversmith belt buckle, “he’s really into The Judds and Tammy Wynette. You know, that soapy commercial stuff from the 70s that sent Nashville’s reputation down the pan? He says Stand By Your Man is inspirational in helping him pick up his mark when he comes back to defend on corner kicks…”
Altidore returned at this point and there was an awkward silence, and the pair was last seen heading to the Ernest Tubb Record Shop where Adu planned to pick up a Merle Haggard boxed set. No one can deny that placing the Men’s Olympic Qualifying Tournament here has been a huge success on every conceivable level. Soccer City Nashville will never be the same again.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Nashville, Day One
There’s a five-piece band on the tiny stage of the Full Moon Saloon on Broadway, meaning that there are more people in the band than there are in the audience. They seem to be playing power country. That’s not an actual genre, but on the ten-hour drive to Nashville I thought about a few things, and one of those things was that every band in the world should have its own unique category, even if it just means juggling around the concepts. Because southern soul gothabilly is a genre waiting to happen. To someone.
The lead singer is the kind of bloke you’d want stepping out of his pick-up truck to help you fix a flat tire when you’ve broken down on a rural road. He’s reassuringly country, with a deep voice and an approachable face. The pedal steel player is the youngest in the band, and leans moodily over his instrument – maybe it hurts to be good on pedal steel and only have four people come to watch (three of whom are clearly connected to the band, making me the only genuine, in-off-the-street punter). He looks like the quiet, surly kid brother a team-mate would bring along to make up the numbers on a Saturday afternoon. Then during the game he starts yelling at his team-mates and the referee, and gets sent off for fist-fighting an opponent.
“Cowboys add class to barroom brawls,” says a sign on the wall. Yet a lot of people in Nashville shun cowboy hats for the turned around baseball cap – that all-pervasive head accessory that doesn’t keep you warm, doesn’t keep you dry, but lends you the special demeanour of a human being whose brains have been shaken out of his ears. Our audience is trebled when several college students walk in donning this unique headwear, adding the sweat shirt with a college name in block capitals (UNIVERSITY OF STUPIDGRIN), baggy jeans, and a perpetually operated cell phone to take pictures of everyone with their arms around everyone else, holding bottles of beer. Yes, they bought bottles, even though Shiner Bock was on tap.
They swell the numbers, but ignore the band. A heavy gal in a top that’s showing me more than I want to know comes round with a bucket for tips, because there’s no cover charge in this joint. “Any requests, put them on the back of a hundred-dollar bill and we’ll see what we can do,” quips the singer. Their CD costs five dollars, but I have two dollar bills, so can decently avoid having to take it home.
On the bar is a flyer for Nashville Star, the televised open audition for the C&W version of American Idol. “One dream. One country. One Nashville Star.” I just have to show up with my travel guitar tomorrow between 10 and 6 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, the country and western theme park built on the edge of town. And I’ll need to write a country song in the next 24 hours. “I’m Britpop indie-country, actually,” I’ll explain to the judges. “This song’s about how I quit my job, but because there was no refund on the hotel I’d pre-paid to come to Nashville for the CONCACAF Olympic soccer qualifying tournament, I ended coming anyway to try and become a country star instead.”
That will have them weeping so hard they’ll forget to listen to the song and I’ll make the callback stage on the strength of hotel heartbreak alone. Before long I’ll be packing them in at the Full Moon Saloon and starting a classy brawl with anyone in a baseball cap drinking beer from a bottle.
The lead singer is the kind of bloke you’d want stepping out of his pick-up truck to help you fix a flat tire when you’ve broken down on a rural road. He’s reassuringly country, with a deep voice and an approachable face. The pedal steel player is the youngest in the band, and leans moodily over his instrument – maybe it hurts to be good on pedal steel and only have four people come to watch (three of whom are clearly connected to the band, making me the only genuine, in-off-the-street punter). He looks like the quiet, surly kid brother a team-mate would bring along to make up the numbers on a Saturday afternoon. Then during the game he starts yelling at his team-mates and the referee, and gets sent off for fist-fighting an opponent.
“Cowboys add class to barroom brawls,” says a sign on the wall. Yet a lot of people in Nashville shun cowboy hats for the turned around baseball cap – that all-pervasive head accessory that doesn’t keep you warm, doesn’t keep you dry, but lends you the special demeanour of a human being whose brains have been shaken out of his ears. Our audience is trebled when several college students walk in donning this unique headwear, adding the sweat shirt with a college name in block capitals (UNIVERSITY OF STUPIDGRIN), baggy jeans, and a perpetually operated cell phone to take pictures of everyone with their arms around everyone else, holding bottles of beer. Yes, they bought bottles, even though Shiner Bock was on tap.
They swell the numbers, but ignore the band. A heavy gal in a top that’s showing me more than I want to know comes round with a bucket for tips, because there’s no cover charge in this joint. “Any requests, put them on the back of a hundred-dollar bill and we’ll see what we can do,” quips the singer. Their CD costs five dollars, but I have two dollar bills, so can decently avoid having to take it home.
On the bar is a flyer for Nashville Star, the televised open audition for the C&W version of American Idol. “One dream. One country. One Nashville Star.” I just have to show up with my travel guitar tomorrow between 10 and 6 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, the country and western theme park built on the edge of town. And I’ll need to write a country song in the next 24 hours. “I’m Britpop indie-country, actually,” I’ll explain to the judges. “This song’s about how I quit my job, but because there was no refund on the hotel I’d pre-paid to come to Nashville for the CONCACAF Olympic soccer qualifying tournament, I ended coming anyway to try and become a country star instead.”
That will have them weeping so hard they’ll forget to listen to the song and I’ll make the callback stage on the strength of hotel heartbreak alone. Before long I’ll be packing them in at the Full Moon Saloon and starting a classy brawl with anyone in a baseball cap drinking beer from a bottle.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Sticker Sickness
When I was nine years old, I would occasionally be granted the massive privilege of a sleepover at the Harcourt Brothers (names changed to protect the virtues of a small town dynasty), who were as close as you could get to pre-pubescent hip in early 70s Lincolnshire. They were the first to get Chopper bikes, and they had rich half-sisters in Canada who’d send them money that they accrued in a savings account. We would regularly hear from the brothers how many hundreds of pounds they were racking up, with interest, and be scorned for suggesting that they might blow some of it on, say, a mass visit to Arthur’s Tuck Shop. They may not have actually used the words ‘retirement fund’, but they were definitely implied.
The Harcourt Brothers didn’t just collect money. Another benevolent relative would send them valuable coins which, they assured us, had never been touched by a human hand. These coins were locked away somewhere in case some non-believer in the importance of limited edition currencies took it upon themselves to slap a fingerprint on a virgin surface. A wise move, because I must admit that I would have been severely tempted. Meanwhile, we could see their stamp collections, but they had to be handled with extreme care, an earnest expression, and the odd declaration of spurious awe. But what I liked best of all among their hoarded treasures were the stickers.
Some of us find it hard to save money (we spend it), or collect stamps (rather than soak them off the envelope, dry them out, then carefully fix them in to a designated book, we chuck them out). Some of us also find it hard to see a sticker without peeling off the back and sticking it somewhere, as the inventors of stickers intended. ‘Stickers stick’ is the centric principle of stickerdom. Especially for a nine year old. But the Harcourt Brothers possessed the strength of character to resist that temptation. They coveted piles of unstuck stickers. They’d let me look through them, but although I begged pleeeeease, they wouldn’t let me have any spares. They weren’t a charity. These boys were investors in adhesive-backed futures.
Every year I went to the Lincolnshire Show and ran from tent to tent collecting free stickers. I didn’t care if they advertised tractor tires, pig feed or the benefits of five portions of potatoes a day - I’d grab them and run, and when I got home I stuck them down, mostly on to a cupboard in my bedroom, which was eventually covered entirely in stickers, with neither theme nor form. The idea of preserving them in a stack and keeping them for some unknown future purpose was as unthinkable as being given a tube of Smarties and being told to keep them until my fortieth birthday.
I was reminded of my free-sticking habits last week when reading ‘Swap Yer! The Wonderful World of Football Cards And Sticker Albums’ by Rob Jovanovic, a compact and delightfully pictorial history book that delivers on its title. It had me reaching for my still incomplete Panini sticker albums of the late 1970s. And the reason for their incompleteness? Instead of using my doubles for swaps, I would just stick them somewhere else. On my pencil case, on my cupboard (which started to acquire second and third layers), on my radio, on my school bag, or on any available surface that wouldn’t garner me a crack around the head for spoiling the paintwork.
I looked on EBay to work out the chances of getting the last eight stickers I need to complete my Football 78 album. It seems that the Harcourt Brothers weren’t the only hoarders. There are people who have been sitting on their swaps for 30 years, resisting for nigh on three decades the urge to peel the back off and stick them. This is of course good for my chances of eventually filling the Football 78 album, but a pitiful reflection on the characters of the EBay vendors. Upon discovering the items in an old shoe box they should have ripped off the backs and slapped them on to the nearest desk top or household item. That is, if they had been even half way human.
But no, like some seedy pornographer, they lined them up on a table side by side, took photographs of them, and then put them up for sale on the internet. And they didn’t even have John Hickton (Middlesbrough, Football 78 sticker number 258) or Irving Nattrass (Newcastle United, 265) for sale. Bloody sticker sickos. As Captain Beefheart would have told them - lick my decals off, baby.
The Harcourt Brothers didn’t just collect money. Another benevolent relative would send them valuable coins which, they assured us, had never been touched by a human hand. These coins were locked away somewhere in case some non-believer in the importance of limited edition currencies took it upon themselves to slap a fingerprint on a virgin surface. A wise move, because I must admit that I would have been severely tempted. Meanwhile, we could see their stamp collections, but they had to be handled with extreme care, an earnest expression, and the odd declaration of spurious awe. But what I liked best of all among their hoarded treasures were the stickers.
Some of us find it hard to save money (we spend it), or collect stamps (rather than soak them off the envelope, dry them out, then carefully fix them in to a designated book, we chuck them out). Some of us also find it hard to see a sticker without peeling off the back and sticking it somewhere, as the inventors of stickers intended. ‘Stickers stick’ is the centric principle of stickerdom. Especially for a nine year old. But the Harcourt Brothers possessed the strength of character to resist that temptation. They coveted piles of unstuck stickers. They’d let me look through them, but although I begged pleeeeease, they wouldn’t let me have any spares. They weren’t a charity. These boys were investors in adhesive-backed futures.
Every year I went to the Lincolnshire Show and ran from tent to tent collecting free stickers. I didn’t care if they advertised tractor tires, pig feed or the benefits of five portions of potatoes a day - I’d grab them and run, and when I got home I stuck them down, mostly on to a cupboard in my bedroom, which was eventually covered entirely in stickers, with neither theme nor form. The idea of preserving them in a stack and keeping them for some unknown future purpose was as unthinkable as being given a tube of Smarties and being told to keep them until my fortieth birthday.
I was reminded of my free-sticking habits last week when reading ‘Swap Yer! The Wonderful World of Football Cards And Sticker Albums’ by Rob Jovanovic, a compact and delightfully pictorial history book that delivers on its title. It had me reaching for my still incomplete Panini sticker albums of the late 1970s. And the reason for their incompleteness? Instead of using my doubles for swaps, I would just stick them somewhere else. On my pencil case, on my cupboard (which started to acquire second and third layers), on my radio, on my school bag, or on any available surface that wouldn’t garner me a crack around the head for spoiling the paintwork.
I looked on EBay to work out the chances of getting the last eight stickers I need to complete my Football 78 album. It seems that the Harcourt Brothers weren’t the only hoarders. There are people who have been sitting on their swaps for 30 years, resisting for nigh on three decades the urge to peel the back off and stick them. This is of course good for my chances of eventually filling the Football 78 album, but a pitiful reflection on the characters of the EBay vendors. Upon discovering the items in an old shoe box they should have ripped off the backs and slapped them on to the nearest desk top or household item. That is, if they had been even half way human.
But no, like some seedy pornographer, they lined them up on a table side by side, took photographs of them, and then put them up for sale on the internet. And they didn’t even have John Hickton (Middlesbrough, Football 78 sticker number 258) or Irving Nattrass (Newcastle United, 265) for sale. Bloody sticker sickos. As Captain Beefheart would have told them - lick my decals off, baby.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Back To The Kitchen Of Obscurity
No doubt to the dismay of my multi-million readers, this blog’s been living a white lie for the past year. Its title gives the impression that I am a stay-at-home Dad who cooks, irons, shops and does the kids’ homework for them while they pretend to understand my (Queens of the) Stone Age method for calculating long division. But until last Friday I was something different – a stay-at-home journalist.
After an eleven year career break, I resumed the perennially dubious career of hackery-pokery, as editor of and contributor to a football website. The conditions suited me well – I could work from home, setting my own agenda, writing about something I think I’m supposed to love, tied to colleagues only by a Monday morning conference call, during the course of which I usually swept the floors while saying “yeah” and “uh-huh”.
However, in my zeal to make up for eleven years out of the business, I took it all too seriously and achieved burnout after just 13 months. Also, something got broken that couldn’t be fixed, and my previous professional verve evaporated overnight into a hollow existential void wherein echoed the question, “Exactly why the fuck am I writing a piece about the Colorado Rapids’ off-season signings?”
Some people have expressed surprise that I quit my job. That’s because they didn’t realise I’d gone back to work in the first place. When I told them I’d quit working, they assumed Frau Indie-Pop had thrown me out. “Were you so bad at the shopping?” Having to explain that I’d actually resumed my career and now I’d jacked it all in again somewhat blunted the impact of my dramatic decision to get back in slack.
Frau Indie-Pop was suspicious too. Was this going to be like my recent decision to retire from playing football that lasted exactly two weeks? On top of that were all the grand proclamations last year about how happy I was to be working again. Followed by all the declarations this weekend about how happy I am not to be working again. Given this time scale and my history of vacillating enthusiasms, I should be taking up a 90-hour-a-week CEO position at a top blue-chip company in around 24 hours (offers notwithstanding).
“My stepson’s worried because he’s 16 and he doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life,” a friend told me on the phone today. How we laughed. Wait until he’s 42 and still hasn’t got a fucking clue. How could you ever trust someone who thinks they have a clue what they’re doing with their lives?
And another question, in counter-response to those who have asked me why I quit. Why not? Who in their right mind doesn’t want to quit working? Never mind walking the streets in your underpants barking quotes from Leviticus in Latvian dialect – the only true rule of an individual human’s insanity should be his or her willingness to stay in the job.
So it’s back to slouching around Safeways at a decent pace instead of muttering curses at pensioners standing in the middle of the aisle peering at the instructions on the soup cans as they try to work out if cream of broccoli will knacker up their intestines for a day. “Out the frikkin’ way,” I’d seethe before. “I’ve got to get back and check my e-mails to see who Real bastarding Salt Lake picked up in the waiver draft.”
Now it’s: “Cream of broccoli? One of my favourites too, sir. Beautiful out again, eh?” Which it is.
After an eleven year career break, I resumed the perennially dubious career of hackery-pokery, as editor of and contributor to a football website. The conditions suited me well – I could work from home, setting my own agenda, writing about something I think I’m supposed to love, tied to colleagues only by a Monday morning conference call, during the course of which I usually swept the floors while saying “yeah” and “uh-huh”.
However, in my zeal to make up for eleven years out of the business, I took it all too seriously and achieved burnout after just 13 months. Also, something got broken that couldn’t be fixed, and my previous professional verve evaporated overnight into a hollow existential void wherein echoed the question, “Exactly why the fuck am I writing a piece about the Colorado Rapids’ off-season signings?”
Some people have expressed surprise that I quit my job. That’s because they didn’t realise I’d gone back to work in the first place. When I told them I’d quit working, they assumed Frau Indie-Pop had thrown me out. “Were you so bad at the shopping?” Having to explain that I’d actually resumed my career and now I’d jacked it all in again somewhat blunted the impact of my dramatic decision to get back in slack.
Frau Indie-Pop was suspicious too. Was this going to be like my recent decision to retire from playing football that lasted exactly two weeks? On top of that were all the grand proclamations last year about how happy I was to be working again. Followed by all the declarations this weekend about how happy I am not to be working again. Given this time scale and my history of vacillating enthusiasms, I should be taking up a 90-hour-a-week CEO position at a top blue-chip company in around 24 hours (offers notwithstanding).
“My stepson’s worried because he’s 16 and he doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life,” a friend told me on the phone today. How we laughed. Wait until he’s 42 and still hasn’t got a fucking clue. How could you ever trust someone who thinks they have a clue what they’re doing with their lives?
And another question, in counter-response to those who have asked me why I quit. Why not? Who in their right mind doesn’t want to quit working? Never mind walking the streets in your underpants barking quotes from Leviticus in Latvian dialect – the only true rule of an individual human’s insanity should be his or her willingness to stay in the job.
So it’s back to slouching around Safeways at a decent pace instead of muttering curses at pensioners standing in the middle of the aisle peering at the instructions on the soup cans as they try to work out if cream of broccoli will knacker up their intestines for a day. “Out the frikkin’ way,” I’d seethe before. “I’ve got to get back and check my e-mails to see who Real bastarding Salt Lake picked up in the waiver draft.”
Now it’s: “Cream of broccoli? One of my favourites too, sir. Beautiful out again, eh?” Which it is.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Death Of The Compilation CD
I must be growing up at last. Last year, for the first time since 1993, I didn’t compile a tape or CD of my favourite music of the year and send it out to friends and family as a cheap (not to mention illegal) present, hoping in return to receive praise for my incredibly broad and sophisticated taste in music.
The truth is, I didn’t have the time. The missing compilation also coincided with my first year in almost full employment for over a decade. I remembered what it is that you do with your spare time when you’re working – sleep, eat and then sleep some more, while dreaming about good intentions. I am no longer the bloke who instantly replies to e-mails and then sits impatiently tapping his fingers on the desk waiting for a reply and wondering, “What on earth can they be doing that’s stopping them from immediately responding to my request for an MP3 and full track listing of that rare Blue Orchids live bootleg?”
I also found out what happens when you get into the habit of doing something for years and the suddenly stop it, unannounced. The answer is, nothing.
A couple of weeks ago, for example, I was out with two friends from my football team who always receive a copy of the SAHIP annual compilation. One of them even bothers to listen to it and tells me his favourite tracks. The evening passed pleasantly enough, but without any mention of the void on their shelves in the section labelled ‘SAHIP Compilations, 1994-2006.’ Finally I mentioned it and they just laughed, slightly nervous in case I was going to pull a wad of CDs out of my pocket. I’m more than half sure that the friend who doesn’t normally comment on the CD had no clue what I was even talking about.
Then last week I was in England seeing the very family and friends who for years have been taking delivery of the personal anthology. Again, silence. When I mentioned it, one recipient was kind enough to say that he relied on the CD to have some vague idea of ‘the current scene.’ But I’d be lying if I said he’d fallen to his knees and begged me to get burning in order to re-enrich his meagre cultural existence.
The chief emotion was relief – on my part, that I won’t ever have to bother doing this again, and on their part, because I won’t be badgering them for detailed opinions, track by track. No longer, when they innocently enquire what that song is on my stereo, will they have to absorb the accusation, “What do you mean, you don’t know what this is? It’s track 13 on the 2003 compilation CD - ‘Cutters, Dealers, Cheaters’ by Janet Bean and the Concertina Wire, you fekkin’ idiot.”
I mean, how can people not know that? Such ingrates. It’s almost enough to make me spite them by doing one after all. Maybe I’ll wait until the end of this year when their guard is down. Merry Christmas everyone, and oh, big surprise - 2007 and 2008 double compilation CD! Let me know which tracks you liked the best, eh? By New Year, at the very latest.
The truth is, I didn’t have the time. The missing compilation also coincided with my first year in almost full employment for over a decade. I remembered what it is that you do with your spare time when you’re working – sleep, eat and then sleep some more, while dreaming about good intentions. I am no longer the bloke who instantly replies to e-mails and then sits impatiently tapping his fingers on the desk waiting for a reply and wondering, “What on earth can they be doing that’s stopping them from immediately responding to my request for an MP3 and full track listing of that rare Blue Orchids live bootleg?”
I also found out what happens when you get into the habit of doing something for years and the suddenly stop it, unannounced. The answer is, nothing.
A couple of weeks ago, for example, I was out with two friends from my football team who always receive a copy of the SAHIP annual compilation. One of them even bothers to listen to it and tells me his favourite tracks. The evening passed pleasantly enough, but without any mention of the void on their shelves in the section labelled ‘SAHIP Compilations, 1994-2006.’ Finally I mentioned it and they just laughed, slightly nervous in case I was going to pull a wad of CDs out of my pocket. I’m more than half sure that the friend who doesn’t normally comment on the CD had no clue what I was even talking about.
Then last week I was in England seeing the very family and friends who for years have been taking delivery of the personal anthology. Again, silence. When I mentioned it, one recipient was kind enough to say that he relied on the CD to have some vague idea of ‘the current scene.’ But I’d be lying if I said he’d fallen to his knees and begged me to get burning in order to re-enrich his meagre cultural existence.
The chief emotion was relief – on my part, that I won’t ever have to bother doing this again, and on their part, because I won’t be badgering them for detailed opinions, track by track. No longer, when they innocently enquire what that song is on my stereo, will they have to absorb the accusation, “What do you mean, you don’t know what this is? It’s track 13 on the 2003 compilation CD - ‘Cutters, Dealers, Cheaters’ by Janet Bean and the Concertina Wire, you fekkin’ idiot.”
I mean, how can people not know that? Such ingrates. It’s almost enough to make me spite them by doing one after all. Maybe I’ll wait until the end of this year when their guard is down. Merry Christmas everyone, and oh, big surprise - 2007 and 2008 double compilation CD! Let me know which tracks you liked the best, eh? By New Year, at the very latest.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Why Are Planes Full Of Boring American Guys?
I hate to deal in stereotypes, but there’s a certain kind of white-skinned, white-haired American gentleman of a certain age (55 and upwards) that I strive to avoid if at all possible. He’s a BAG (Boring American Guy), and he wants to talk to you because…well, just because he can and he’s nothing better to do. To exercise his tongue and fill the air with the kind of questions that make you stretch for the strychnine as a happier alternative to heaving your vocal chords into a quasi-courteous response.
I was on a plane from Frankfurt to Washington DC at the weekend, and I was thankful to be two seats away from a classic BAG. In between us was a bloke who’s my kind of air passenger – one who clearly doesn’t want to talk, at all. He had his headphones in, and his magazine open, right from take-off. We reached an unspoken No Small Talk pact right at the point of our initial curt, barely grunted greeting.
But the BAG two seats away didn’t get the message. My neighbour was reading Modified Mustangs magazine (“The Performance Magazine For Mustang Enthusiasts”). The BAG tapped him on the arm, and my neighbour turned off his music.
“You got a Mustang?”
“Yeah.”
“A friend of mine’s got a Mustang! Not sure how many horse power it is though.”
Silence. My neighbour turned his music back on, closed his eyes, and pulled his hood down over his head. About an hour later, the persevering BAG tried again.
“How many horsepower’s your Mustang?”
My own answer would have been, “About one, I think, not that it’s any of your fucking business,” but Mustang guy managed to dredge out a few answers until the conversation shortly after died a second painful death, the BAG now nursing his new knowledge about the power of a car he’s never seen, belonging to a man he’ll never know.
Around this time a meal was served, and across the aisle my youngest daughter duly ate her portion. When I leaned across to talk to her, the ominously perky voice of a male retiree came from the seat directly behind me.
“Say, is that you daughter?”
Oh Christ. Another one, but louder and smilier. “Erm, yes.”
“She’s a real good eater. She ate that whole meal up. Does she always eat that well?”
“Erm, not always.”
“Where you from?”
It’s hard to have a conversation with your back to someone, strapped into a seat, when you’re trying to read a book. Every time I thought we’d finished and put my head back down, the BAG chimed in with a new query. I know now that the Boring American Guy sitting behind me on the plane on Sunday was once stationed at a Royal Air Force base somewhere I’ve never heard of near Portsmouth, and that he now lives in Frederick, Maryland because his wife does something or other there. Once we’d exchanged that and a whole load more astonishing information, our new friendship petered out.
I know airlines are all cutting costs nowadays, but now that everyone knows there’s no smoking on board planes, can’t they just modify the No Smoking lights to read No Small Talk? Yes, and we’d still need to keep them on for the whole flight. In an emergency you could press a button that would make the light blink, and then a stewardess could come and issue a BAG-gagging order. Any persistent offenders would be arrested upon landing (preferably bundled to the ground and then silenced with a secure muzzle) and given a lifetime flying ban.
Soon there’d only be Miserable British Gits flying. There’d be peace at last above the clouds, just like in heaven.
I was on a plane from Frankfurt to Washington DC at the weekend, and I was thankful to be two seats away from a classic BAG. In between us was a bloke who’s my kind of air passenger – one who clearly doesn’t want to talk, at all. He had his headphones in, and his magazine open, right from take-off. We reached an unspoken No Small Talk pact right at the point of our initial curt, barely grunted greeting.
But the BAG two seats away didn’t get the message. My neighbour was reading Modified Mustangs magazine (“The Performance Magazine For Mustang Enthusiasts”). The BAG tapped him on the arm, and my neighbour turned off his music.
“You got a Mustang?”
“Yeah.”
“A friend of mine’s got a Mustang! Not sure how many horse power it is though.”
Silence. My neighbour turned his music back on, closed his eyes, and pulled his hood down over his head. About an hour later, the persevering BAG tried again.
“How many horsepower’s your Mustang?”
My own answer would have been, “About one, I think, not that it’s any of your fucking business,” but Mustang guy managed to dredge out a few answers until the conversation shortly after died a second painful death, the BAG now nursing his new knowledge about the power of a car he’s never seen, belonging to a man he’ll never know.
Around this time a meal was served, and across the aisle my youngest daughter duly ate her portion. When I leaned across to talk to her, the ominously perky voice of a male retiree came from the seat directly behind me.
“Say, is that you daughter?”
Oh Christ. Another one, but louder and smilier. “Erm, yes.”
“She’s a real good eater. She ate that whole meal up. Does she always eat that well?”
“Erm, not always.”
“Where you from?”
It’s hard to have a conversation with your back to someone, strapped into a seat, when you’re trying to read a book. Every time I thought we’d finished and put my head back down, the BAG chimed in with a new query. I know now that the Boring American Guy sitting behind me on the plane on Sunday was once stationed at a Royal Air Force base somewhere I’ve never heard of near Portsmouth, and that he now lives in Frederick, Maryland because his wife does something or other there. Once we’d exchanged that and a whole load more astonishing information, our new friendship petered out.
I know airlines are all cutting costs nowadays, but now that everyone knows there’s no smoking on board planes, can’t they just modify the No Smoking lights to read No Small Talk? Yes, and we’d still need to keep them on for the whole flight. In an emergency you could press a button that would make the light blink, and then a stewardess could come and issue a BAG-gagging order. Any persistent offenders would be arrested upon landing (preferably bundled to the ground and then silenced with a secure muzzle) and given a lifetime flying ban.
Soon there’d only be Miserable British Gits flying. There’d be peace at last above the clouds, just like in heaven.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Top 20 Albums, 2007
This year’s top 20, in words, with albums 21-40 in lazy list form. People who haven’t been paying attention always say it’s been a bad year. People who buy more CDs than they ought to always say it’s been a good year. I think it’s been a very, very good year.
20. Dan Wilson – Free Life. If this had been available on eight-track cassette in the early 1970s, would my Dad have been playing it in his car alongside Abba and the Carpenters? It’s really that straightforward – a singer-songwriter writing well-crafted songs to sing along to. In the back, the kids sing along too. Nothing not to like about that.
19. The Innocence Mission – We Walked In Song. The reason that The Innocence Mission exist is to provide an aural definition of the word ‘gorgeous’ in the musical lexicon. They haven’t changed their sound in almost two decades, and there’s no reason for them to. Only their sudden conversion to an industrial goth-noise outfit would prevent me unquestioningly buying their perfect and elegiac discs for another 20 years.
18. The Watson Twins – Southern Manners. Imagine two artistically talented twin sisters from the US south making guitar-based music, and I bet you know what this harmonic-Americana eight-song CD sounds like before you’ve even heard it. On its cover the twins pose in silhouettes as a simulated vulva, overtly suggesting a tempting surface of beauty that doesn’t disappoint once you’ve immersed yourself inside. I am enamoured.
17. Laura Veirs – Saltbreakers. Another unsung singer who effortlessly stamps her own identity on successive albums of bitter-sweetness all draped in intricately acoustic guitars. Looks like a librarian, sings like a nightingale. Or a "nattingale", as she so charmingly warbles.
16. Feist – The Reminder. Mrs Stay-At-Home Indie-Pop latched onto Feist after seeing her on Saturday Night Live, and she was all set to buy this until I pointed out we already had it at home. Tsk, she only needed to pay attention a little to the vast pile of CDs by the stereo with the invisible ‘2007’ marker. I sometimes wonder what working women do with their spare mental space. They should stay at home, bake cakes, raise the kids, and make wonderfully dreamy, singalong music like Feist.
15. Tracey Thorn – Out Of The Woods. The first Tracey Thorn solo album, A Distant Shore, came out in 1982, and I used to listen to its solo acoustic meanderings while staring out my bedroom window hoping that the girl from three doors up would walk past, think I was deep and sensitive, then snog me. With Everything But The Girl intervening (between the two Thorn albums, not me and the girl from three doors up), it’s taken a quarter of a century for her second, but amazingly (seeing as EBTG have been, to my ears, largely dull) it’s been worth the wait. Left alone, she’s still an outstanding songwriter, even if now the backdrop’s all R&B arrangements and enhanced production values. So, none of the scratchy guitar and whiny voice that leant her first disc its fresh-girl genius, but a worthy follow-up, even if it’s all grown up.
14. Maria Taylor – Lynn Teeter Flower. A second sweet slice of what I’d happily call cake-shop pop if it wasn’t stranded so high up on the banks of the mainstream by the vagaries of misled taste. If the world was a just place, this kind of music would be going gold. Go on, try it. Honestly, cake’s really good for the soul.
13. Jesse Sykes And The Sweet Hereafter – Like Love, Lust And The Open Halls Of The Soul. No one seems to have heard of Jesse Sykes, yet every time I play her records, people ask me for her name. Her lisping, whispering voice creeps into ears and rests there like a transient and benign underground pleasure you know might just wake up one day and kill you from within. Not that I can think of any better ways to die.
12. Kristin Hersh – Learn To Sing Like A Star. This one had the benefit of a release early in the year, otherwise I’d just have filed it along with all the other mostly stunning Hersh albums on the shelf -- some peoples’ genius you end up taking for granted. But with the benefit of iPod shuffle, it just kept coming back, and getting better and better, and all the paranoid frenzy alternating with soothing bedtime threnodies came through with its usual depth of emotion and sheer, shocking brilliance.
11. Au Revoir Simone – The Bird Of Music. Every year needs a lo-fi, home made electronic album composed by unlikely musicians who just sat down and started harmonizing for the hell of it. Player instructions: start the drum machine, press a synth button, then sing along. Listener’s instructions: sit back and enjoy. Just occasionally, as on this disc, it works almost perfectly.
10. Steve Earle – Washington Square Serenade. One of those discs I bought because it was another Steve Earle album, and I usually buy the new Steve Earle album because I just feel that I ought to. That’s not the best reason to buy a CD, but this time it worked, with this being his best since the mighty collaboration with the Del McCoury Band a few years back. Could be that his sixth marriage, to country singer Alison Moorer, has given him an inspirational kick aside from misery and litigation. ‘City Of Immigrants’ is vibrant, political and celebratory singalong all in one.
9. Rilo Kiley – Under The Blacklight. Pristine pop. You start off hearing all kinds of semi-familiar tunes from songs you think you know but can’t quite pin down. You end up not caring, because the crystal clarity of Jenny Lewis’ vocal and all that backs her up make you play this disc on multi-repeat. How can a song sung by a woman about a man being seduced by a precocious 15-year-old sound so breezy and innocent?
8. Wilco – Sky Blue Sky. I can never quite grasp Wilco or why people, myself included, tend to deify them. I wouldn’t know where to start in their catalogue of achievement while trying to convert a reluctant listener. I couldn’t, off the top of my head, sing my favourite refrain off ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.’ Yet if I could only take the CDs of one band on an east-to-west coast road trip, they’d be Wilco’s. I could listen to them for four days and four nights and still find something new in every song. At least I reckon I could. I should try it sometime and see.
7. Iron & Wine - The Shepherd’s Dog. A beefed up sound was definitely the way to go for the bearded wonder that is Iron & Wine. There’s the same quasi-mystical aura that surrounds his songs, but there’s more effort to build them up, take them places, and fade them out again. One review I read complained some of the songs went on too long, but for me these songs could meander on their hypnotic way for hours, provided I was in the mood for sitting back, shutting my eyes, and staring at the dark in a world of breathy vocals and weaving guitars.
6. The Shins – Wincing The Night Away. ‘Phantom Limb’ is song of the year, and the problem with producing a song so magnificent is usually that the rest of the disc can struggle to stay in touch. Mostly the distance is close enough to make this a successful, if more expansive and more ambitious, follow-up to previous triumphs. The words are either dead profound or they’re nonsense - either way, I haven’t a clue what these songs are about, but it really doesn’t matter. In pop, context is king.
5. Robert Wyatt – Comicopera. Wyatt shifts our ideas of perceived musical normality and allows us to receive sound across new waves. The crown prince of atonality resides in the town where I was born (Louth, in Lincolnshire) and I like the idea of all this weirdness being conceived in the air where I screamed my first complaints. At times playful, weirdly flat, and jazzy, but mostly just on its own perfectly tempered wold of nasal beauty altogether.
4. Brandi Carlile – The Story. Need a seat on the underground? Try hitting the high notes when you’re listening on your iPod. Passion and pop rolled into one, with more than enough edge to stop songs that could, in the hands of the wrong producer, have lapsed into AOR. Or maybe it is, and that’s what I’m into nowadays.
3. Magnolia Electric Co. – Sojourner Boxed Set. Most boxed sets are compilations, live sets or outtakes. There are very few that are effectively quadruple albums of entirely original material, plus documentary DVD, wrapping paper and forged medallion. On top of that, the quality of its slow-burning melancholy is maintained pretty much throughout, and Jason Molina’s fixation with earth’s orbital muse stands as the most productive man-to-moon relationship in musical history. Ache to Z.
2. The National – Boxer. Vocals that range from a murmur to a growl, backed by a band never short on ways to accentuate the mood within the melody. The National Sound is a national asset that deserves its own listening booth at the Smithsonian.
1. The New Pornographers – Challengers. With more hooks than a hardware shop, this deserves the year’s best album award for its consistently strong songs and its peppy pace. Makes you move, makes you want to sing, deludes you that you’re young. Empowerment pop of the highest order.
The rest:
21. Jens Lekman – Night Falls Over Kortedala
22. Band of Horses – Cease To Begin
23. Dean & Britta – Back Numbers
24. Mary Gauthier – Between Daylight And Dark
25. Thurston Moore – Trees Outside The Academy
26. Anjani Thomas – Blue Alert
27. Josh Ritter – The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter
28. PJ Harvey – White Chalk
29. Ryan Adams – Easy Tiger
30. Evan McHugh – From The Second Chair
31. Jeremy Fisher – Goodbye Blue Monday
32. Caribou – Andorra
33. Over The Rhine – Trumpet Child
34. Zap Mama – Supermoon
35. Oliver Mtukudzi – Tsimba Itsoka
36. Sonia Leigh – Run Or Surrender
37. Richmond Fontaine – Thirteen Cities
38. Bright Eyes – Cassadaga
39. Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
40. Lucinda Williams – West
Other Years: 2006, 2004
20. Dan Wilson – Free Life. If this had been available on eight-track cassette in the early 1970s, would my Dad have been playing it in his car alongside Abba and the Carpenters? It’s really that straightforward – a singer-songwriter writing well-crafted songs to sing along to. In the back, the kids sing along too. Nothing not to like about that.
19. The Innocence Mission – We Walked In Song. The reason that The Innocence Mission exist is to provide an aural definition of the word ‘gorgeous’ in the musical lexicon. They haven’t changed their sound in almost two decades, and there’s no reason for them to. Only their sudden conversion to an industrial goth-noise outfit would prevent me unquestioningly buying their perfect and elegiac discs for another 20 years.
18. The Watson Twins – Southern Manners. Imagine two artistically talented twin sisters from the US south making guitar-based music, and I bet you know what this harmonic-Americana eight-song CD sounds like before you’ve even heard it. On its cover the twins pose in silhouettes as a simulated vulva, overtly suggesting a tempting surface of beauty that doesn’t disappoint once you’ve immersed yourself inside. I am enamoured.
17. Laura Veirs – Saltbreakers. Another unsung singer who effortlessly stamps her own identity on successive albums of bitter-sweetness all draped in intricately acoustic guitars. Looks like a librarian, sings like a nightingale. Or a "nattingale", as she so charmingly warbles.
16. Feist – The Reminder. Mrs Stay-At-Home Indie-Pop latched onto Feist after seeing her on Saturday Night Live, and she was all set to buy this until I pointed out we already had it at home. Tsk, she only needed to pay attention a little to the vast pile of CDs by the stereo with the invisible ‘2007’ marker. I sometimes wonder what working women do with their spare mental space. They should stay at home, bake cakes, raise the kids, and make wonderfully dreamy, singalong music like Feist.
15. Tracey Thorn – Out Of The Woods. The first Tracey Thorn solo album, A Distant Shore, came out in 1982, and I used to listen to its solo acoustic meanderings while staring out my bedroom window hoping that the girl from three doors up would walk past, think I was deep and sensitive, then snog me. With Everything But The Girl intervening (between the two Thorn albums, not me and the girl from three doors up), it’s taken a quarter of a century for her second, but amazingly (seeing as EBTG have been, to my ears, largely dull) it’s been worth the wait. Left alone, she’s still an outstanding songwriter, even if now the backdrop’s all R&B arrangements and enhanced production values. So, none of the scratchy guitar and whiny voice that leant her first disc its fresh-girl genius, but a worthy follow-up, even if it’s all grown up.
14. Maria Taylor – Lynn Teeter Flower. A second sweet slice of what I’d happily call cake-shop pop if it wasn’t stranded so high up on the banks of the mainstream by the vagaries of misled taste. If the world was a just place, this kind of music would be going gold. Go on, try it. Honestly, cake’s really good for the soul.
13. Jesse Sykes And The Sweet Hereafter – Like Love, Lust And The Open Halls Of The Soul. No one seems to have heard of Jesse Sykes, yet every time I play her records, people ask me for her name. Her lisping, whispering voice creeps into ears and rests there like a transient and benign underground pleasure you know might just wake up one day and kill you from within. Not that I can think of any better ways to die.
12. Kristin Hersh – Learn To Sing Like A Star. This one had the benefit of a release early in the year, otherwise I’d just have filed it along with all the other mostly stunning Hersh albums on the shelf -- some peoples’ genius you end up taking for granted. But with the benefit of iPod shuffle, it just kept coming back, and getting better and better, and all the paranoid frenzy alternating with soothing bedtime threnodies came through with its usual depth of emotion and sheer, shocking brilliance.
11. Au Revoir Simone – The Bird Of Music. Every year needs a lo-fi, home made electronic album composed by unlikely musicians who just sat down and started harmonizing for the hell of it. Player instructions: start the drum machine, press a synth button, then sing along. Listener’s instructions: sit back and enjoy. Just occasionally, as on this disc, it works almost perfectly.
10. Steve Earle – Washington Square Serenade. One of those discs I bought because it was another Steve Earle album, and I usually buy the new Steve Earle album because I just feel that I ought to. That’s not the best reason to buy a CD, but this time it worked, with this being his best since the mighty collaboration with the Del McCoury Band a few years back. Could be that his sixth marriage, to country singer Alison Moorer, has given him an inspirational kick aside from misery and litigation. ‘City Of Immigrants’ is vibrant, political and celebratory singalong all in one.
9. Rilo Kiley – Under The Blacklight. Pristine pop. You start off hearing all kinds of semi-familiar tunes from songs you think you know but can’t quite pin down. You end up not caring, because the crystal clarity of Jenny Lewis’ vocal and all that backs her up make you play this disc on multi-repeat. How can a song sung by a woman about a man being seduced by a precocious 15-year-old sound so breezy and innocent?
8. Wilco – Sky Blue Sky. I can never quite grasp Wilco or why people, myself included, tend to deify them. I wouldn’t know where to start in their catalogue of achievement while trying to convert a reluctant listener. I couldn’t, off the top of my head, sing my favourite refrain off ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.’ Yet if I could only take the CDs of one band on an east-to-west coast road trip, they’d be Wilco’s. I could listen to them for four days and four nights and still find something new in every song. At least I reckon I could. I should try it sometime and see.
7. Iron & Wine - The Shepherd’s Dog. A beefed up sound was definitely the way to go for the bearded wonder that is Iron & Wine. There’s the same quasi-mystical aura that surrounds his songs, but there’s more effort to build them up, take them places, and fade them out again. One review I read complained some of the songs went on too long, but for me these songs could meander on their hypnotic way for hours, provided I was in the mood for sitting back, shutting my eyes, and staring at the dark in a world of breathy vocals and weaving guitars.
6. The Shins – Wincing The Night Away. ‘Phantom Limb’ is song of the year, and the problem with producing a song so magnificent is usually that the rest of the disc can struggle to stay in touch. Mostly the distance is close enough to make this a successful, if more expansive and more ambitious, follow-up to previous triumphs. The words are either dead profound or they’re nonsense - either way, I haven’t a clue what these songs are about, but it really doesn’t matter. In pop, context is king.
5. Robert Wyatt – Comicopera. Wyatt shifts our ideas of perceived musical normality and allows us to receive sound across new waves. The crown prince of atonality resides in the town where I was born (Louth, in Lincolnshire) and I like the idea of all this weirdness being conceived in the air where I screamed my first complaints. At times playful, weirdly flat, and jazzy, but mostly just on its own perfectly tempered wold of nasal beauty altogether.
4. Brandi Carlile – The Story. Need a seat on the underground? Try hitting the high notes when you’re listening on your iPod. Passion and pop rolled into one, with more than enough edge to stop songs that could, in the hands of the wrong producer, have lapsed into AOR. Or maybe it is, and that’s what I’m into nowadays.
3. Magnolia Electric Co. – Sojourner Boxed Set. Most boxed sets are compilations, live sets or outtakes. There are very few that are effectively quadruple albums of entirely original material, plus documentary DVD, wrapping paper and forged medallion. On top of that, the quality of its slow-burning melancholy is maintained pretty much throughout, and Jason Molina’s fixation with earth’s orbital muse stands as the most productive man-to-moon relationship in musical history. Ache to Z.
2. The National – Boxer. Vocals that range from a murmur to a growl, backed by a band never short on ways to accentuate the mood within the melody. The National Sound is a national asset that deserves its own listening booth at the Smithsonian.
1. The New Pornographers – Challengers. With more hooks than a hardware shop, this deserves the year’s best album award for its consistently strong songs and its peppy pace. Makes you move, makes you want to sing, deludes you that you’re young. Empowerment pop of the highest order.
The rest:
21. Jens Lekman – Night Falls Over Kortedala
22. Band of Horses – Cease To Begin
23. Dean & Britta – Back Numbers
24. Mary Gauthier – Between Daylight And Dark
25. Thurston Moore – Trees Outside The Academy
26. Anjani Thomas – Blue Alert
27. Josh Ritter – The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter
28. PJ Harvey – White Chalk
29. Ryan Adams – Easy Tiger
30. Evan McHugh – From The Second Chair
31. Jeremy Fisher – Goodbye Blue Monday
32. Caribou – Andorra
33. Over The Rhine – Trumpet Child
34. Zap Mama – Supermoon
35. Oliver Mtukudzi – Tsimba Itsoka
36. Sonia Leigh – Run Or Surrender
37. Richmond Fontaine – Thirteen Cities
38. Bright Eyes – Cassadaga
39. Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
40. Lucinda Williams – West
Other Years: 2006, 2004
Monday, November 12, 2007
Great Suburban Traditions No. 7 - Cocktail Hour
You have to say one thing in suburbia’s favour. It’s so fucking dull out here that every day at six o, clock, without fail, you’re dying for a good stiff drink.
Just think. The day’s behind you, and you’ve accomplished nothing besides getting half way through the laundry, buying some groceries, successfully managing the school run, drinking scads of coffee (and peeing it out again), and thinking vaguely about some much more fruitful, creative and rewarding projects that you’d rather be doing instead, but are currently putting off until the next decade.
Ahead of you lies the evening, when you’ve got dinner to make, and home to stay at. This could further involve activities as pulse-pumping as finishing off the laundry, watching a broadcast program on the highly popular electronic medium known as television, or trying to read a book or a magazine before falling asleep in the process.
In between, though, is cocktail hour. There’s no getting around the fact that this is the best moment of the day out here on Quiet Street. That keen rush of want, round about 1800 hours, is almost as delectable a hit as the first swig of the drink itself. It comes with the acknowledgment of the need - which is an integral part of knowing, recognising and ultimately enjoying your own weaknesses - followed by the decision on whether to succumb or defer the pleasure for a further 24 hours.
Either way is fine. Give in, and you get the drink. Resist, and you can allow yourself the brief and deceptive comfort that you are not, really not, in any way alcohol-dependent. This makes the following day’s cocktail hour all the sweeter. If you’re in that rare suburban club that can hold out until Thursday (otherwise known as The Big Fat Liars’ Society), then good luck to you and all, but you should know you’re severely missing out on suburbia’s greatest reward.
The ironic thing is that in US suburbia there’s rarely a bar (or anything else useful) within walking distance. One of my great schemes that I’m putting off until next decade is a chain of impromptu roadside suburban cocktail stands, open between 5.30 and 7 only, to be called something like The Shot Of Life. They should do roaring trade, and by the time every street’s spoilsport puritan has called the cops, we’ll have packed up and left.
This would require people to leave their houses, talk to their neighbors, loosen up, and publicly take part in something considered to be detrimental to one’s moral, mental and spiritual health. In the rest of the world it’s known as ‘drinking.’ Here it would be a revolution. Until then, we remain the silent majority, serene and satisfied for an hour each evening as we gratefully knock back our fool’s medicine.
Just think. The day’s behind you, and you’ve accomplished nothing besides getting half way through the laundry, buying some groceries, successfully managing the school run, drinking scads of coffee (and peeing it out again), and thinking vaguely about some much more fruitful, creative and rewarding projects that you’d rather be doing instead, but are currently putting off until the next decade.
Ahead of you lies the evening, when you’ve got dinner to make, and home to stay at. This could further involve activities as pulse-pumping as finishing off the laundry, watching a broadcast program on the highly popular electronic medium known as television, or trying to read a book or a magazine before falling asleep in the process.
In between, though, is cocktail hour. There’s no getting around the fact that this is the best moment of the day out here on Quiet Street. That keen rush of want, round about 1800 hours, is almost as delectable a hit as the first swig of the drink itself. It comes with the acknowledgment of the need - which is an integral part of knowing, recognising and ultimately enjoying your own weaknesses - followed by the decision on whether to succumb or defer the pleasure for a further 24 hours.
Either way is fine. Give in, and you get the drink. Resist, and you can allow yourself the brief and deceptive comfort that you are not, really not, in any way alcohol-dependent. This makes the following day’s cocktail hour all the sweeter. If you’re in that rare suburban club that can hold out until Thursday (otherwise known as The Big Fat Liars’ Society), then good luck to you and all, but you should know you’re severely missing out on suburbia’s greatest reward.
The ironic thing is that in US suburbia there’s rarely a bar (or anything else useful) within walking distance. One of my great schemes that I’m putting off until next decade is a chain of impromptu roadside suburban cocktail stands, open between 5.30 and 7 only, to be called something like The Shot Of Life. They should do roaring trade, and by the time every street’s spoilsport puritan has called the cops, we’ll have packed up and left.
This would require people to leave their houses, talk to their neighbors, loosen up, and publicly take part in something considered to be detrimental to one’s moral, mental and spiritual health. In the rest of the world it’s known as ‘drinking.’ Here it would be a revolution. Until then, we remain the silent majority, serene and satisfied for an hour each evening as we gratefully knock back our fool’s medicine.
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