Hooray For Earth - Surrounded By Your Friends
I’m unsure if there is a word for the feeling of half melancholy and half content joy. If there is, this song makes me that.
Wussy - Jonah (live on WNKU)
This song has been playing on repeat in the back of my head for a couple of days. There’s something heartbreaking about the line ‘we could get to know each other in the backseat of your van tonight’. I can’t help but think someone should have screamed ‘stop! it’s a bad idea! there’s a bad moon on the rise…or something!’ Not sure if any Wussy song doesn’t have at least some ominous undertones though.
Eels - In My Dreams (live on Letterman)
Piano version. The album version is more meditative, but the combination of E’s baritone and the characteristically sparse beat still lulls you into a trance.
Bluetip -
resistentialism) and listen to Bluetip because Jason Farrell also seemed to be as frustrated with everything as I was. If the best thing that happened to you all day was making the yellow light, you’re not having a good day. If I’m lucky, the writing sample I’m working on will make that damn light.
Autloux - Turnstile Blues (live on Kimmel)
New tour dates. Psyched.
August 26th @ Bowery
August 28th @ Music Hall of Williamsburg
August 29th @ Maxwell’s
Wussy - Maglite (in a RV)
I’ve had a love for mid-tempo, upbeat rockers since high school. My predilection for their lazy backbeats is akin to every crush I’ve ever had on the cute, but nerdy girl at school. The one who only had to take off her glasses and let her hair down to blossom into Ms. America, yet never did. Those girls always gave me the sense that there was more to know and, for whatever reason, she was hiding her true potential. A mid-tempo rocker hits me the same way. If they only just sped up or slowed down a little bit, or if they put a little more energy into it, we’d really know what they were getting at. Instead, they set the tempo at ‘stroll’ and come in just above lazy. And I can’t get enough of it, as if at any second something could happen. Like watching cars nearly collide in slow motion.
Thom Yorke - Follow Me Around (live, 2009)
A tad different than most of the versions of this song floating around. Knowing that this song will never end up on a proper album, overly eager fans (like myself) can at least find solace in getting to watch the progression and the melody evolve as Thom continues to play it live. Speaking as a songwriter hobbyist, you do get sick of playing the same thing, even if it takes a “final” form on a record. Occasionally I wonder if other kinds of artists feel the same about their work. Do painters repaint an image even after it’s framed? Do sculptors ever recast and reshape a bowl? Or is the malleable nature of music unique in this way? Bands cover songs all the time, giving them totally different treatments without losing the essence of the piece, but artists working with other mediums can generally only pay homage to another’s work without committing plagiarism. I guess it comes down to how temporary music is; a song only exists while it’s being played and you can never hear an entire song all at once. It exists only as a memory, being reshaped by the listener’s mind until the next time it’s heard. Without a physical form, an audience can’t help but create their own interpretation. A dance piece is similarly ephemeral. It’s physical form exists only as the artists performs it. Even a visual or audio recording can’t capture the whole piece because its parts are more than a moment. A painting, a photograph, and a sculpture all capture a defined point in time, but a song or a dance are a series of points strung together. Theater has both a physical and written form, so it does cross the boundary somewhat, but what would Hamlet be if he decided to make up with his Uncle? You can change even a major melody, but you can’t change a major plot point.
As a songwriter (as in someone who write songs, but making no qualitative judgment), I have a biased opinion, of course. Regardless, I still can’t shake the feeling that songs stand alone from other art in their ability to change and be molded without losing the core of what they really are, something other art can, at best, only marginally claim.
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