And as we wind on down the road

31 10 2013

There are certain pleasures to becoming an old fart.

When I was younger, for example, it was important to be sniffy about music: to hate country music, for example, or to repudiate all hard rock once I became enamored of punk.

I wasn’t wrong, back in the day. Getting all wrought-up about music and books and poetry and politics was crucial to the development of my tastes, and helped me to figure out what and why I liked what I liked, and what these songs and poems and stories meant to me.

I’m a dialectical kinda gal, learning through contrast and movement, so it makes sense both that I embraced a THIS-NOT-THAT sensibility toward music (love rock, hate rock), and then a yeah-it’s-all-right reconsideration.

No, I ain’t running out to pick up any Foreigner records, but I no longer feel the need to reject all that my teenaged self loved.

And so, this:

My sister had Dreamboat Annie, which I thought was the bee’s knees, and Zeppelin, well hell, Zeppelin. Then I Developed Taste, and even if I couldn’t sneer quite as completely at Zeppelin as I did at Heart, well, I couldn’t really listen to them.

Now, though, those taste buds are tired of rejecting tasty bits just because it’s what I’m supposed to do.

Fuck what I’m supposed to do. This is a damned fine rendition of a classic—if you’re going to use a chorus in a rock song, this is how you use a chorus in a rock song—and I happily popped this up to full screen to watch and listen.

And you, if you’re sneering? You wish you could sing like (D’oh!) Nancy Ann Wilson.

~~~

h/t Bluegal aka Fran at Crooks & Liars


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Listen to the music: It’s as easy to learn as your ABC

9 09 2013

Oy, what a mess.

I have arranged and re-arranged and re-arranged yet again (and again and again. . .) how I organize my cds. When they were still all in their jewel cases they were kept on a homemade cd rack; to find a cd meant scanning the shelves.

I’d always kept the pop and classical & opera cds apart, but went back and forth on where to put the blues and jazz cds, as well as the soundtracks. Sometimes I’d mix them all together, sometimes I’d keep the blues and jazz separate, sometimes the blues stayed with the pop while the jazz occupied its own space.

This was a manageable problem when I had a couple of hundred cds, but as that doubled (and then trebled), I kept messing with the order. I’d create categories (pop-blues-jazz-world music-soundtracks-electronica-compilations) then wonder what to do with a jazz soundtrack (e.g., Kansas City) or electronic world music (Finnish Ambient Techno Chant). At one point I separated out all of the women—which did not work. At all.

Once I got rid of the jewel cases and moved the cds into boxes—I never wanted to do the sleeves thing, both because I wanted to keep the cd “covers” & inserts and because I didn’t want to keep shifting everything every time I added a cd or decided to reorganize—I kept at the rearranging and sorting and segregating, even though it made less sense to do so once I realized it was easier to print out a list of all of my cds than flip through them looking for a particular artist or band.

Still, I kept to a basic schema of pop/blues-soundtracks-jazz and classical (which, of course, did not jibe with the organization of the printouts). The problem with this organization, however, was that I almost never listened to anything that wasn’t pop-blues: it was the bulk of my collection, I knew it best, so when I’d flip through the cds, I’d start with the pop and never go beyond that.

Thus the mess: This past summer I simplified the non-classical side, tossing everything all together. This has been great, actually, as I make my way more-or-less alphabetically through my collection—I hear more in the mix-up—but has temporarily wrecked my record-keeping of this “listen-to-the-music” venture.

It should be (mostly) smoothed out in the next round, but this one? Oy.

100. Patsy Cline, The Patsy Cline Story
101. Eddie Cochran, The Original Eddie Cochrane
102. Bruce Cockburn, Stealing Fire
103. Cocteau Twins, Heaven or Las Vegas
104. Leonard Cohen, I’m Your Man
105. Leonard Cohen, Songs of Love and Hate
106. Leonard Cohen, Songs From A Room
107. Leonard Cohen, Ten New Songs
108. Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head
109. Holly Cole, Temptation
110. Holly Cole Trio, Don’t Smoke in Bed
111. Colleen, the golden morning breaks
112. Shawn Colvin, Steady On
113. Shawn Colvin, a few small repairs
114. Paulo Conte, Best of Paulo Conte
115. Continental Drifters, Vermillion
116. The Coral, The invisible invasion
117. Elvis Costello and the Attractions, My Aim Is True
118. Elvis Costello, All This Useless Beauty
119. Elvis Costello, When I Was Cruel
120. Susie Arioli Swing Band, It’s Wonderful
121. Susie Arioli Swing Band, Pennies From Heaven
122. Louis Armstrong, Pure Louis
123. Chet Baker, my funny valentine
124. Big Chill
125. Big Easy
126. Blue Note Festival, Touring Artist Sampler
127. A Chorus Line
128. Mary Coughlan, After the Fall
129. Mary Coughlan, love me or leave me
130. Mary Coughlan, Uncertain Pleasures
131. Cranberries, Everybody else is doing it, so why can’t we?
132. Creedence Clearwater Revival, Chronicle
133. Baku Beyond, The Meeting Pool
134. Stephen Barry, Original
135. Jane Birkin, Arabesque
136. Ketil Bjornstad and David Darling, The River
137. Ray Bonneville, Gust of Wind
138. Jeanie Bryson, Some Cats Know
139. Bill Charlap, Stardust
140. John Coltrane, Impressions


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So dry your tears and baby walk outside

4 07 2013

It’s the fourth of July!

I know some folks disdain later X as too poppy, but when your pop is as rough and jangly and heartfelt and angry and sad and what-the-hell as this, it should be sung to, not sneered at.

And, y’know, given Exene’s flexible relationship to pitch, it’s the kind of song everyone can sing to and get it right.


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I am thinking of your voice

3 06 2013

I’m not much for happiness (as you may have noticed), but oh, it makes me happy to hear Suzanne Vega on the radio.

Well, it was a segment on Soundcheck about the Suzanne Vega/DNA mashup of “Tom’s Diner”, but still, that counts, right?

(And I have to write “Suzanne Vega”, not “Suzanne” or “Vega”. Suzanne Vega.)

I may have written about this before, but what the hell: I was introduced to Suzanne Vega the summer before I went off to college. It was a presidential election year, and I was doing screamingly boring scut work (something about checking election or registration rolls against the phone book ) for the local Democratic Party. I set up a card table in my parents’ living room in front of the t.v. and switched between CNN (I still have affection for Jeannie Moos) and MTV.

Remember, I am old, so this is still when CNN was new and Turner-owned, and MTV played music.

Anyway, this video came on of this wispy woman with wispy hair with a cool, cool voice singing this song about. . . I don’t know what. Huh, I thought. Not the usual MTV fare.

Then the next day or later that week, the vid played again, and I thought, I gotta write this down, and probably got her name (since I did track down the album) but mis-wrote the song title as “Marianne on the Wall.”

It was, of course, “Marlene on the Wall”, and I never again saw that vid on MTV.

Well. I loved loved loved that album, and loved her cool, cool voice. It’s by no means a spectacular voice—I had no trouble singing along to all of the songs and while I can carry a tune I can’t toss it in the air—but there was a knowingness to it, and a kind of intense detachment. She’s paying attention, she might even get sucked in, but she can still see, she can still sing.

None of my friends were into her music, but that was all right: they hadn’t been particularly into Supertramp or the Jam or the Violent Femmes and yet we still somehow all managed to get along. I saw her by myself at the Union in Madison and then later (I think with a friend) at First Ave in Minneapolis.

She lives in New York and gigs about town, but I haven’t gone to any of her shows. It’s less that my ardor for her music has cooled than that my ardor has cooled, generally.

But I still remember when the mere mention of a favorite artist could lift me out of my shoes.


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Listen to the music: I live by the river

12 05 2013

When I was young and pure I thought less of musicians who didn’t write their own music nothing of musicians who didn’t write their own music, and was skeptical of covers.

Okay, sure, if they’re putting out a live album, maybe then it was okay to cover a song, but on a new disk of ORIGINAL tunes, well, they best be original, bestn’t they be?

Then I got old and things got “complicated” (read: all my standards went to hell) and while I’m still biased in favor of the singer-songwriter model, I’ve moved from bare tolerance of to wistfulness for covers.

Wistfulness might be the wrong word: it’s more that I wish pop musicians dealt with covers the way jazz musicians do, as ways to take apples and turn them into oranges or mountains or the sea. John Coltrane turned that little slip of a song, “My Favorite Things”, into a classic, fer pete’s sake, which, even given my love for all things Sound of Music, is a helluva thing to have done.

Still, there are a few songs which I don’t think should ever be covered because there is no way to top the original version: The Clash’s “London Calling”, Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?”, and Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”. (I used to have more on this list, but, y’know, old and lax and all that.)

There are plenty of great covers, even of those songs which were great in the original. If Patti Smith’s “Because the Night” (Springsteen) doesn’t put you on the floor, I have to wonder what exactly is pulsing through your veins, and Tori Amos’s version of Eminem’s ” ’97 Bonnie & Clyde” so creeps me out I can’t listen to it through headphones.

Some versions are a lot of fun—Billy Bragg and his band did a great version of Dee-Lite’s “Groove Is In the Heart” for an encore at a First Ave show years ago, and I like the B-52’s “Downtown”—and some are sad: Peter Gabriel’s solo-piano cover of his own “Here Comes the Flood”. Placebo’s “Running Up That Hill” works because they take Kate Bush’s lush original and strip it down to bony need. Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris kill just about everything on their Western Wall: Tucson Sessions, but I particularly like “The Western Wall” (Rosanne Cash) and “Falling Down” (Patty Griffin).

(Patty Griffin is one of those singer-songwriters, like Leonard Cohen, whose music is more well-known in their cover versions than the originals. And no, I’m not going to get into a discussion of which version of “Hallelujah” is best, because, jesus, that’s such a magnificent and magnificently overwrought song that you’d have to be a real bonehead to screw that one up—and if there is a boneheaded version out there, I don’t want to hear it.)

Some songs are well-covered even if they don’t top the original. Eva Cassidy’s “Songbird” is lovely, but so, too, is the original Fleetwood Mac song. Jorane’s “I Feel Love” is very good, but largely because Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” is great; ditto with Talking Heads’s and Al Green’s “Take Me to the River”. And while I’ve heard and liked a fair number of Cindy Lauper’s “Time After Time,” with the exception of Cassandra Wilson’s treatment, I like the original best.

Cassandra Wilson: she is the queen and empress and goddess of song interpretation. Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm” is an amazing song, and his jangly original hits all the bitter-sweet spots. But Wilson’s turn at this song turns it into longing promise, broken and fulfilled. Wilson shows you how to do covers: Pick the songs well, and make them your own.

That sounds so easy, doesn’t it? Given all of the lame covers out there—and by “lame” I mean, “uninspired, insipid, money-grubbing”—however, it apparently is not. For every Natalie Maine’s grabbing hold of “Mother” (Pink Floyd), there’s some limp Tom Petty wannabe with a country-smooth blanding of his cranky originals.

No, if you want to do more than just punch the song ticket, you have to reach down, grab the guts of the song, rip it out of the throat of the original, and make your own meal of it. Nina Simone did that with Billie Holiday’s (okay, actually Abel Meeropol’s) simmering, aching “Strange Fruit”, turning her low voice to ice as she drops the song to cold fury. The irony in Holiday’s song becomes harrowing in Simone’s. It’s the same song, and a new song.

That’s a successful cover: the same song, and a new song.

~~~

77. Kate Bush, The Whole Story
78. Cake, Fashion Nugget
79. Camera Obscura, Underachievers Please Try Harder
80. Kate Bush, The Sensual World
81. Camera Obscura, to change the shape of an envelope
82. Vinicius Cantuarias, Vinicius
83. Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Come On Come On
84. Neko Case and Her Boyfriends, Furnace Room Lullaby
85. Johnny Cash, American Recordings
86. Rosanne Cash, 10 Song Demo
87. Rosanne Cash, Interiors
88. Rosanne Cash, Rules of Travel
89. Rosanne Cash, The Wheel
90. Eva Cassidy, Songbird
91. Eva Cassidy, time after time
92. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Murder Ballads
93. Exene Cervenka, Old Wives’ Tales
94. Charms, Pussycat
95. Chop Chop (eponymous)
96. Clannad, Bamba
97. Clash, London Calling
98. Clash, Combat Rock
99. Clash, Super Black Market Clash


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And you give him these keys, I don’t need them no more

18 03 2013

Michelle Shocked has lost it.

I saw her at the Guthrie, back in the day, a solo performance supporting Short, Sharp, Shocked. My memory of her is hazy, but she sounded good. She always had that strong, pure voice.

Well, at a show in San Francisco this past Sunday, she decided to substitute a politico-religious rant for a second set. Given Shocked’s lefty following, this wouldn’t have led to any reaction stronger than rolled eyes had she not said that same-sex marriage is a sign of the End Times and she worried that ministers would be forced at gunpoint to marry queer folk.

Then she told the audience to tweet that she said “God hates faggots.” At which point the audience began to leave.

A Seattle venue has canceled an upcoming gig, and, according to a commenter at The Stranger‘s coverage of the story, other clubs are shutting her out.

I don’t know what to think of this. I do remember reading an interview with her a loooong time ago (my first year of grad school), in which she talked about sabotaging her own studio session if she thought her record company were taking advantage of her, and of her triumph in taking less money from the company than they offered. Which I thought was odd.

(Maybe I misread her words, maybe I’m misremembering them, but while I liked her music her intensity made me wary. In any case, she seemed distressed at the prospect of fame.)

Anyway, a number of commenters at both the Yahoo and The Stranger stories seem more saddened by what they speculate is a mental breakdown than pissed off. I guess that could be seen as a compassionate response, but I’m not entirely comfortable attributing religious fervor or a political conversion to mental illness: it is possible to change one’s mind without losing it.

Still, whatever the cause of her change, I feel badly for her. I don’t know if she sabotaged herself on purpose, as a way to escape being “Michelle Shocked”, or if she didn’t know what she was doing, or if she sincerely thought a concert was the best place for a sermon, but the damage is  done.

~~~

h/t Kelly O, Line Out


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Listen to the music: What would we do without you?

29 01 2013

Kate Bush is still putting out records, right?

I mean, I know she was never one to crank out the albums, but every coupla’ years she would drop a tankful of tunes and Kate being Kate, that was usually enough to get me through.

Then again, I didn’t really start listening to Kate Bush until, mm, The Whole Story/The Sensual World, so it was pretty easy for me to say, No hay problema with the lente of the songs: I could simply dig through the back catalog and satisfy myself with those.

And Kate Bush is satisfying, because her songs were always kitted out with weirdness (the aro0-roo-roo in “Hounds of Love”) or literary allusions (“Cloudbusting” and Wilhelm Reich) or literary weirdness (Heathcliffe! It’s me, Cathy! I’ve come home/It’s so cold, let me in-a-your window-oh-oh).

And why the Pause for the jet? Why not?

She’s heartbreaking too, but often with an undertone of menace: in “Hello Earth” she warns the sailors and life-savers and cruisers and fishermen out of the sea and “Mother Stands for Comfort” of the worst kind. Oh, and the threat of “Experiment IV”:

Music made for pleasure,
Music made to thrill.
It was music we were making here until

They told us
All they wanted
Was a sound that could kill someone
From a distance.

Of course these lyrics would be surrounded by the most gorgeous sounds.

I thought I had all of her cds prior to Hounds of Love, but I don’t see any on my “stolen/not replaced” list. Hm. I wonder if I had them on vinyl. . . .

Anyway, while I thought I had the cd (The Red Shoes) after The Sensual World, apparently not. The gods of Wikipedia tell me there were three cds released in the 2000s, but I don’t know any of them. If I ever get around to buying music again, I should probably consider those.

My favorite Kate Bush tune? I dig most of them, but the one that stoppers out the rest of the world? Jig of Life. The fiddle, the drums, the, um, obscure lyrics, the DRUMS, the incantation at the end—c’mon, is it really such a surprise?

The only thing missing is a jet.

~~~~

54. Bjork, Homogenic
55. Rory Block, Gone Woman Blues
56. Blondie, The Best of Blondie
57. Bjork, Vespertine
58. BoDeans, Love & Home & Sex & Dreams
59. Boukman Eksperyans, Yodou Adjae
60. BoDeans, Go Slow Down
61. Boukman Eksperyans, Libete (Pran Pou Pran’l!)
62. David Bowie, The Singles 1969-1993
63. Billy Bragg, Talking With The Taxman About Poetry
64. Billy Bragg, Worker’s Playtime
65. Billy Bragg, Don’t Try This At Home
66. Brazilian Girls (eponymous)
67. Breeders, Pod
68. Billy Bragg, Going to a Party Way Down South
69. Breeders, Last Splash
70. Broken Social Scene, You Forgot It In People
71. Brother Sun Sister Moon, The Great Game
72. Broken Social Scene, We Hate Your Hate
73. Carla Bruni, Quelqu’un m’a dit
74. Jeff Buckley, Grace
75. Kate Bush, Hounds of Love
76. Butthole Surfers, Electrilarryland

Putting these in the order in which I listen to them as opposed to a straight-alpha is a pain in the ass. The point is to listen to these in a manner in which I otherwise wouldn’t—hence the A-Z ordering—but having already stated my minor listening deviations (breaking up bunches of the same artist), I think I can go back to just listing what I’ve listened to and be done with it.

I mean, I want to be meticulous but not, y’know, uptight. . . .

I’ve also decided to start mixing in some jazz. My jazz cds are currently separated from my pop cds, but as I listen to them, I’ll integrate them into the whole.

And while I may end up inserting some classical into the listening mix, the cds will remain in their orchestra seats.

1. Geri Allen, The Gathering
2. Geri Allen Trio, Twenty One
3. Anderson, Crispell, Drake, Destiny


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Listen to the music: Just call me Joe

26 11 2012

Where’d Joseph Arthur go?

I coulda sworn I had a cd or two by the guy, but I look at my list of pop music and stolen pop music and he’s nowhere to be found.

Did I own him, then get rid of him? It’s just possible that before I left Somerville I sold or gave away some cds that I didn’t listen to, and thus removed him from my database, but.

But, goddammit: Did I really erase him from everything?

Dammit. Maybe he wasn’t stolen, maybe I bought him post-burglary, then got rid of him pre-Brooklyn, so there’s no record of him ever having graced my collection.

It’s not so much that I miss him—I remember a distinct “eh” upon listening to [pause while I look this up] Big City Secret—but that I’m unhappy that I’m messing with my own memory.

Shit, I do this with books, too: My database is only for current books, not every book I’ve ever owned.

That’s fine, actually, that I don’t obsessively track everything I’ve ever had (just the books and music I do have. . .), but, jeez, this is how I end up gaslighting myself.

Hmpf.


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Listen to the music: No I don’t want to hear it

13 11 2012

Four hundred and sixty.

That’s how many cds were stolen, four hundred and sixty: 407 pop, et. al., and 53 classical. Of those, I replaced 276 of the stolen pop, and 22 of the stolen classical—which means of course, that 131 pop and 31 classical were not replaced.

I’m no longer exactly sure how my cds are arranged—since they’re now all in my wine-box bureau, i.e., hidden away, I’m much less likely to rearrange them by various genres—but it looks as if my jazz, classical, traditional, and perhaps soundtracks are separated from the pop, blues, and electronica stuff.

So, had my collection not been pilfered, I would have already listened to:

1. Dot Allison, Afterglow
2. American Music Club, Mercury
3. Laurie Anderson, Mister Heartbreak
4. Laurie Anderson, Home of the Brave
5. Laurie Anderson, The Ugly One With the Jewels and Other Stories
6. The Band, The Last Waltz

I would have been able to replace all of these from the used bins while I was living in Montreal, but for whatever reason, I chose not to.

Right after the burglary, I was mad to rebuild my collection exactly as it had been, title for title, whether or not I had listened to or even much liked the lost cd. After awhile, however, I relaxed, and while browsing for the gone-away cds would also be on the lookout for new (used) discs that I wanted more than the old-used discs.

I do remember that I wasn’t terribly impressed with Laurie Anderson’s Mister Heartbreak, and while I liked Dot Allison’s cd, there were always others that, on my scavenges, I found more interesting. I can always get that later, I thought.

Yes, I did have renter’s insurance, but there was a limit as to the dollar amount of the cds they’d replace. I bought extra coverage, but it still wasn’t enough to pay for everything. (I’m not complaining: my insurer dealt with me quickly and didn’t contest any of my claims.) Anyway, that my coverage was limited meant that I couldn’t just stroll to the HMV and load up on [outrageously high-priced] new cds.

That was fine, actually, as I preferred with both cds and books* to prowl the used shops. I’m not much of either a shopper or a hunter, but my atavistic impulses emerge at the challenge of trying to find what I want in the bins and on the shelves.

Then there is the added thrill of coming across something that just looks. . . intriguing, and taking it home for the hell of it. Sure, that can happen at a new-goods store, but it seems that kismet is more likely at a hodgepodge kinda joint.

So while I didn’t  replace 162 of the cds (although there are a few I couldn’t find and still pine for), I did end up finding room for hundreds of cds I might not have otherwise.

On the whole, I’d rather I hadn’t been burglarized, but with the music, at least, the loss led to something more.

*Oddly, not one of my books was stolen. I wonder why that was. . . .


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Listen to the music: Banjo on my knee

12 11 2012

Okay, so I happen to be listening to the Be Good Tanyas sing “Oh, Susanna” when I wrote the title to this post.

No, I don’t have a banjo.

I do, however, have a guitar, an Epiphone by Gibson, purchased, mmm, back in the 1990s at Aabe’s Music in south Minneapolis. It’s black and nice and the back of the neck is curved so that my wee hand can cup it and my wee fingers can squeeze all of the strings on the fret.

Not that my wee hand has cupped the neck any time recently.

I took lessons when I first got the guitar, and. . . never made it out of a Mel Bay’s beginner’s book. I did learn some chords and could play (badly) a few Beatles’ tunes, a Suzanne Vega song, and parts of a few Indigo Girls’ songs.

I stopped, started, stopped, started, stopped, started, stopped. My guitar was tucked in my closet until a few months ago, when I said, Self, time to start again.

I did not.

As I was circling Prospect Park today I wondered why I didn’t just give up and give the guitar away. It’s been years and . . . honestly, did I think I was ever going to get good enough that practicing was more fun than frustrating?

Why not? Why not believe I might start yet again, and that even if I stop again, one of these start-agains will lead to me. . . playing, actually playing the guitar?

Why not believe I can have a life in which I am always trying to play the guitar?

I keep trying to breathe; there must be more than one way to breathe.

~~~

13. Laurie Anderson, Life on a String
14. Marc Anthony, (eponymous)
15. Arcade Fire, Funeral
16. Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
17. Joan Armatrading, Classics
18. B-52’s, (eponymous)
19. B-52’s, wild planet
20. B-52’s, Cosmic Thing
21. Susanna Baca, espiritu vivo
22. Susanna Baca, eco de sombras
23. Back From the Grave, Vol. 8
24. Eryka Badu, Baduizm
25. Eryka Badu, Mama’s Gun
26. The Band, Greatest Hits
27. Be Good Tanyas, Blue Horse


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