I used to write songs pretty much all the time. But something has happened (aging? fuddy-duddyness?) so that I hardly ever write or even play anything anymore. My guitar leans against the bookshelf, and I probably pick it up 3 times a month.
Last year, my friend Caleb asked if I’d like to try writing a song together. I have never had a lot of success colaborating, but I thought in this case it might work. He came over, we sat down with our guitars and blank sheets of paper, and we stared into space.
We started strumming around, mumbling nonsense lyrics. After a while, we had a chord progression, and then a decent first verse and chorus. But around that point, we realized that we were inadvertently writing angsty 90’s alt-rock. And neither one of us is, honestly, all that angsty. It was like we were writing what we thought a song should be, rather than expressing anything about ourselves.
So, we took a step back and acknowledged that, as dads, we needed to write a dad song. Which we did:
I think it captures our inherent dadness pretty well, and it was really fun to work on!
Here are a few artists that I’ve gotten into in the last couple of months:
Dirty Projectors: I was just going to link to the song Right Now, but really, this whole Tiny Desk concert is amazing:
The Beths: I like every song on the album Future Me Hates Me by The Beths, so I’ll just point out the opener here, Great No One:
Hop Along: About 15 seconds into this song, the guitars kick in, and I love it. Then, at 36 seconds in, they get… plinky. I like the plinky guitars. Is this how people write about music?
Kacey Musgraves: What a voice! I can get on board with this new style of country music.
A year ago, I started this blog to help me keep a New Year’s resolution. I wanted to spend 2018 listening to more music and less politics. I wanted to discover some new (to me, at least) music, but I felt that I had lost the ability to do that. So, here are my thoughts to recap the year.
Some new artists I like and how I found them:
Jason Isbell - browsing around Spotify
Darlingside - recommended by a record store owner (what is this, 1985??)
Superorganism - Tiny Desk concert on YouTube
Everything Everything - browsing around Spotify
Arvo Pärt - recommended by my piano teacher
Oscar Peterson Trio - my friend Curt gave me one of their records
If there’s a lesson from this list, I think it’s this: The secret to discovering new music that you like is to be looking for it. I had to be on Spotify, in a record store, talking to friends, browsing YouTube, with the intention of discovering some new music. That’s it. I expected that algorithms from Spotify or Apple Music (which I also tried) to rule my musical life this year, but they really haven’t. They are useful, but so is digging through the clearance rack at Half Price Books.
Now, there are several things I wanted to post about over the last few months, but since I haven’t done so, I’m going to at least mention them here.
I recorded some covers. I thought it would be fun to record my own covers of some songs I discovered this year. I’ll be honest and say that in the end, I don’t love my versions of these, but I’m posting them anyway. I only got 2 recorded; if I’d done a third, it would have been a pretty embarrassing piano cover of the excellent song “Warm Healer” by Everything Everything.
In college (when I was the most into music), if I recorded a song, I usually liked listening to it (narcisism aside) – I’d typically listen to it over and over for a while. Lately, that hasn’t been the case as much, and I don’t know why. Nonetheless, here are my versions of:
My favorite comedian is Daniel Kitson. He’s British and has not put out any albums, which makes it a little hard to be a fan. He has very few (and short) videos on YouTube, and they are quite old. But he does have several (also old) stand-up recordings on Bandcamp, and the one from The Stand (2005) was the first I ever heard. He stutters, goes on long (sometimes show-length) tangents, starts late and goes long, and is absolutely delightful.
In May, he spent a week hosting a morning radio program on Resonance FM in London. Unlike most of their shows, the live stream of his program was explicitly NOT recorded for people to hear later. You either got up and heard it in the morning, or you missed it. He’s curmudgeonly like that, which I can respect.
I decided I wanted to catch these, but 7am in London is 1am here. So I figured out how to record the live stream and made my own recordings, which I have hosted here (along with an XML file that makes it possible to load the recordings into a podcast app). His talking between the songs is pretty great.
One day he played a Darlingside song that I emailed to him, so that was cool. And his show was where I first heard the Dirty Projectors song I covered (Swing Lo Magellan).
Other bands: (just dumping my notes for things I wanted to write about at this point…)
Superorganism creates, according to Wikipedia, “internet-age electronically-tinged indie pop music.” The band members met online, bonded over a love of memes, and all (but one) moved into a house in London to create music together. In the Tiny Desk concert below, their lead singer seems pretty bored by all the inflatable whales surrounding her. I guess you can get used to anything.
For my birthday, my friend Curt got me a few records that I have really enjoyed. The one I’ve listened to most is called Night Train, by The Oscar Peterson Trio:
Listening to it on YouTube, it sounds… okay. But on vinyl (and through better speakers than my laptop’s), it sounds amazing (am I an audio snob now? not yet, but working on it…). I like to play it while I’m working, and even if I’m doing something extremely boring and tedious, it makes me feel like I’m being super cool.
Somehow, that led me to this album of jazz saxaphone ballads, The Hawk Relaxes, by Coleman Hawkins:
When I was younger, I devoted a lot more time to deconstructing music, reading lyrics and liner notes, and really getting to know certain artists and albums. I have less time to devote to that now, and if I want music in my day, it is often as a background to the rest of life. These albums both fit that bill well.
It’s only March, but this is already a contender for biggest coincidence of the year.
On February 28, I was in Newburyport, Massachusetts for work. Whenever I go there, I try to visit Dyno Records, a small record shop on a side street off the main drag. This time, I stopped in on my lunch break.
This is the first time I’ve been there since I got a record player, which opened up a huge part of the shop to me. As I flipped through the crates of records, the shop stereo was playing something I’d never heard before, and it was fantastic. Four male voices harmonizing, bluegrass instruments, occasional electronic blips, interesting lyrics… I asked the owner what it was. “That’s the new Darlingside,” he told me. “Isn’t it nice?”
I bought the CD, called Extralife, (and Kishi Bashi’s Lighght on vinyl, which would later barely fit in my carry-on for the flight home!), then picked up lunch and headed back to the office.
That evening, back at my hotel, I listened to album all the way through twice. I googled the band and watched some YouTube videos of them. I followed them on Twitter. I replied to their tweet announcing Extralife with my story of buying it based on hearing it in a record store. They replied, “that’s awesome. thank goodness for good ole record stores!” Which was cool but made me feel a little old. I still think of record stores as a big deal, which they clearly aren’t any more!
Basically, I instantly became a huge fan.
The week went on, and a storm was brewing in the Northeast. I was scheduled to fly back Friday at 1pm, but coworkers were warning me that I might not make it out that late in the day because of the storm they were expecting. On their advice, I called and changed my flight to one that left at 7:25am. This meant I would leave the hotel Friday morning around 4am.
Friday morning (can you call 4am “morning?”) worked out – I drove to Boston, returned the rental car, took the shuttle to the airport, waited in an absurdly long security line, and made it to my gate. I sat down, began to listen to Darlingside on my phone, and tried to work a crossword puzzle.
As I sat, I noticed a group of guys walk by with instrument cases - guitars and a couple of smaller things - covered in stickers. “Some band trying to get off the ground,” I thought (airport pun!) and returned to my crossword. Two minutes later, I noticed they were back, sitting about 4 rows away from me, and they looked familiar. It… was Darlingside!
I recognized them from their YouTube videos. Without thinking much about what to say, I went over to them. “Are you Darlingside?” Yes. “I just got your new album! It’s amazing!” It was a short conversation, but they were very nice, particularly since they had also presumably gotten up at 4am to be there.
I sat back down, unable to believe this had happened. Then, I realized that no one else would believe it either, unless I could get a picture. I thought about trying to take one surreptitiously from where I was sitting, but finally I decided to go back over and ask if they’d mind taking a picture with me. A lady sitting by them kindly took this one for me:
If we look sleepy, well, you know why.
That was it. We were on the same flight, but they got off at St. Louis, and the flight continued to Austin. But it was a neat experience, and I’m glad I changed that flight!
When I told this story to my friend Caleb, he surprised me by already knowing who Darlingside was. He had been somewhere (a doctor’s office?), heard a song playing on their radio, and immediately looked it up and bought it. It was a song from their first album. When you hear them, you just have to know “Who is this?”
Here are a couple of my favorite songs from Extralife:
My hipster credibility has wained quite a bit since I became a husband and father, and by and large that’s been a good thing. At the very least, this has kept me from making some unwise facial hair decisions. Nevertheless, I’ve been wanting to get a record player for the past couple of years, and I finally did it. Here she is:
Right away, I ordered Stadium Cake, by Oh Pep! on vinyl. However, it was going to take a while to arrive, so I went to Half Price Books and picked up a $3 copy of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, so I’d have something to listen to once the record player got here. It came on a Friday, the boys and I set it up, and we were all more excited than usual to hear Vivaldi.
There’s something special about placing a physical record on the turntable, watching the needle move into position, and hearing the crackles as it gets ready to start. I get a similar feeling putting a cassette in a tape deck, or inserting a Gameboy cartridge. I would chalk it up to nostalgia, but I never really played records as a kid, so I don’t have nostalgia for them. I just think they’re neat.
We didn’t make it all the way through The Four Seasons. Instead, the kids and I piled into the car and went back to Half Price to see what else we could find. We had a blast looking through the record section – a section that I have never more than glanced at, because there was no point. I told the kids I’d buy them something if it wasn’t too much, so here’s what we got:
Alabama: Feels So RightThe Supremes: A Go-GoDiana Ross
Kaeta wanted a brand new Taylor Swift album that cost $40, so we clearly have different ideas of what “not too much” means. In any case, we came home and listened to Jonah’s Alabama album all the way through, dancing around and really enjoying ourselves.
Before the record player arrived, Jonah asked me why I wanted one. He was wondering what was better about them. But I told him, really, not much is better. New records cost way more, the players aren’t portable, you can’t skip tracks, and you have to flip them over halfway through. I told him I really couldn’t explain why I wanted one, but I just did, and I had for a long time. (Some people say they sound better, but I’m not sure. The only thing that I can say is definitively better is the album art.)
Now, though, I understand it better. As I sat on the floor pouring over the jumbled stacks of vinyl, I realized that a big reason I wanted the record player was so I could shop for records. Digging through piles of records at Half Price was just like flipping through racks and racks of used CDs at Hastings when I was a kid. It’s something I love and miss from the days before everything went digital.
The other reason is indefineable, but my kids got it. If I loaded up that same Alabama album in Spotify and played it on my phone, they would have listened to less than one song before going off to do something else, or I would have tapped “next” through half the songs. Instead, we all hung out together, enjoying the music, commenting on it, dancing to it, looking on the sleeve to see what the next song is called, and so on. So much of the time, digital music is consumed through earbuds, alone. This was communal, and I look forward to getting into it more.
Well, there’s really no contest. The best thing I heard in January was a group from Finland called Steve ‘N’ Seagulls that plays bluegrass covers of metal songs, recommended by my friend Barry (thanks, Barry!). This cover of Dio’s Holy Diver is typical:
Why are they in a boat inside a barn? Yes!
I really like the album Stadium Cake, by Oh Pep! It’s folksy pop music by two women from Australia. I just ordered a record player (which hasn’t arrived yet), and this is the first record I bought to play on it. Here’s the first song I heard off it (on Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist):
Midlake was recommended in the Reply All newsletter recently, and I really liked the album Bamnan and Silvercork. Reminds me of the band Grandaddy (pop melodies, droning synths, slackery vocals).
Botnik Studios trained a neural network on thousands of band names, then turned it into this 2018 COACHELLA LINEUP.
I can’t believe Fanch is headlining. I remember when they were still opening for Megadeck and Digistain. Can’t wait to hear the newest from Boody Quookes, either!
