Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs
Iron & Wine, The Shepherd's Dog
Les Paul & Mary Ford, Best of the Capitol Masters
Neil Young, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
R.E.M., Accelerate
The Ruby Suns, Sea Lion
Blonde Redhead, Misery is a Butterfly and 23
Dave Brubeck, Time Out
Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Okay, enough downer posts from me. In the meantime...
[Brief disclaimer: This is, I think, the last post of this nature. I promise more lighthearted fare next week...]
I was back home taking care of my dad, then dealing with the funeral and otherwise putting things in order, for about three weeks total. (It felt like three months.) When I returned to work last week, greeted by flowers and cards and kindness from my many co-workers, one of them—who has no idea I'm a nerd for music or that I have this blog or used to be in a band or used to run a performance space—offered to make me a mix of cathartic music. She claimed that certain aggressive songs helped her get through similar times. I told her thanks but no thanks: I was in the country music phase of my 12 Stages of Grief Mixtape.
It was just an off-the-cuff joke, but it made me think about my listening habits not just over the last few weeks but the last few months. I've obliquely made mention of it here in the past though hadn't (until earlier this week) come out and said what it was I was dealing with.
I first noticed the way my listening habits were being affected around the beginning of the year. This is the point at which my dad seemed perfectly healthy, though the inevitability of what was going to happen had been made plain by a phalanx of doctors. Because he did not seem outwardly sick, visiting Dad was not a sad experience—we'd go out, barbecue in the back yard, watch sports on TV, do the usual. There was no dwelling on the bad news, no urgent heart-to-heart talks; just laughter and crossword puzzles.
Yet once I returned home, four hours away, I'd find myself gravitating to a certain kind of music. It was hazy, hypnotic, gauzelike, perhaps with some percussive undercurrent. So, a lot of krautrock. Animal Collective's "For Reverend Green" fit the bill in a big way. Of course I wasn't in the mood for happy music, but I also wasn't in the mood for sad music. I wanted some sort of emotionless music. Something that could enevelop me and keep the world on pause or at a distance. I took long walks with this kind of music droning in my headphones, not really seeing the world outside, simply trusting my body to take me down familiar streets.
None of these songs fall into the same genre, yet they all have that sort of enveloping feeling. Sonically they somehow embrace you without feeling comforting.
By this time last month, though, I needed comfort. I coincidentally picked up Andrew Bird's Mysterious Production of Eggs just a few days prior to the call from home, asking me to come up. I listened to the album on the drive up more or less for the first time, easing into it the same way I did Armchair Apocrypha—that is, it felt inviting at first but exhausting by the end. I knew that repeated listens would heal that. Eggs is a slower album; it feels more like Armchair's second half than its first. For my state of mind, I welcomed the lack of faster-paced numbers.
I've already written about why the album turned out to be just what I needed. Dad was declining rapidly; he was mentally sharp but physically spent when I first arrived, meaning I had a lot heavy lifting to do—getting him from his bed to his wheelchair and vice versa. It was an emotionally draining experience, to say the least, and became harder and harder each day. I continued to take those long walks but this time I needed songs that felt more soothing, warmer.
I listened to Eggs and nothing else for at least a week straight. I guess it turned out to be my wallowing record. I'm still listening to it almost daily, though at least now I'm alternating between that and other albums. It helps that I'm back in L.A. again, with my full music collection to choose from and more opportunities to be out, listening.
Thus I unconsciously started mixing country music into my daily consumption. And when my co-worker got me quipping about mixtapes I had a sort of Freudian epiphany—that maybe my listening habits were still being shaped by my dad. He was a huge country fan, mostly bluegrass and 60s-70s style. Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, old-timey stuff.
It's hard for me to get more specific than that, though. Unlike the folky stuff he liked (which I've already written about), Dad's country tastes were exiled to his car stereo. Neither my mom nor his second wife liked it, so he kept it there. I think of his country music tastes as being more personal to him and more mysterious to me. I can't go out and buy the album I know he loved. I just have to guess, and make due with my own meager collection, most of which comes from a fairly brief alt-country phase in the late-90s/early-00s and a spate of downloading over the last few months.
That's okay though. I'm not really listening to this stuff to continue wallowing. For the most part I'm skipping past the aching ballads, opting instead for the upbeat numbers. Those are the kind of tunes Dad liked, I know that much. Right now, me too.
Planning a funeral is a strange experience. A day after my dad died, my brother and sister and I were sifting through photo album after photo album in order to make a slide show for the service. On one hand it was therapeutic—it allowed us to look back on a lot of happy memories—but we were under deadline. We had two days to put the show together and set it to music. So, the whole thing felt both like a distraction and an annoyance; immensely important and absurdly unimportant.
We had to pick a song or two that would add up to about five minutes; and the total time would therefore limit the number of photos we could use. That meant whittling the image selection down from 300 to a little less than 100. When you're trying to show the full spectrum of a man's life, 85 or 90 photos feels slight. Even more difficult was the song selection. It had to come from Dad's collection in order to have the right resonance, and of course it had to have the right meaning for a funeral. It's tempting to use a song that wallows in an I'll-miss-you sentiment, but that didn't fit Dad. He was positive, didn't linger on sad times. We thought maybe a song about growing up, becoming a man, might fit the imagery of a young boy growing into a grandfather—going to Vietnam, traveling across Europe in a camper with his wife and two small children for a year, working the same job for 30+ years, and ultimately remarrying and rediscovering his religion in between.
But we had limitations. The song(s) couldn't be too short nor too long, and couldn't be just any song. I remember when my grandmother died fifteen years ago and they played "Wind Beneath My Wings"—the right sentiment, I guess, but what the fuck: Bette Midler meant nothing to my grandmother nor to my family. It was just filler at a funeral. Think about your funeral: would you want filler?
My dad had a smallish collection but he loved what he had. Mostly he liked bluegrass and 70s folk, with a little bluesy rock thrown in for good measure. We narrowed it down to four or five contenders:
"So Far Away from Me," Dire Straits. Dad was a huge Dire Straits fan, and Brothers in Arms in particular. This album and Graceland are probably the two most-played household albums of my childhood. So the song worked from the standpoint of meaning something to my dad. It's also five minutes long, so the perfect length. My sister asked me, "What's this song actually about?" I told her I had no idea, except that every single lyric that isn't "so far away from me" is nigh-on unintelligible. So it has that going for it. Of course as soon as I said that my ears picked up a line about making out on the telephone. "Maybe people won't notice that line." Anyway, the overall mood of the song wasn't quite right: medium tempo the whole way through with no real shifts between verse, chorus, or bridge.
"Angel Band," Ralph Stanley. Dad loved everything on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. Many of the tracks were songs of his own boyhood. One night he and I were driving in a car with his mother and he put the soundtrack on and she just started singing along with nearly every song. But no, it wasn't right. Maybe it's just me, but these songs that essentially say "I'm tired of the earth and I am ready to go to heaven" just aren't what you want to hear when someone has actually just gone to heaven.
"Brand New Day," Van Morrison. Like "So Far Away From Me," the song is half-unintelligible and its subject matter is vaguely meaningless—lots of sunlight references, meaning it could have a decent metaphoric resonance. And the mood was somber yet hopeful. (Though I don't personally have a high tolerance for Van Morrison, I tried to suppress that feeling.) But like the Dire Straits song, it just wasn't a perfect fit. We'd be settling if we chose this song.
"Fire and Rain," James Taylor. My brilliant wife picked this out as she thumbed through Dad's collection. She comes and gets me, eyes pink from crying, and says "What about this one?" The song comes on and Taylor softly laments,
Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone
Suzanne the plans they made put an end to you
I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song
I just can't remember who to send it to
And so I start to tear up too. "Well, it works," I said. "But is it too emotionally manipulative?" "Maybe," my wife says. (Reason #842 I love her: she doesn't call me out for getting all High Fidelity about my funeral song choice; rather, she's totally High Fidelity with me.) But then my sister heard it and said this. Small problem being it was only three minutes long—too short.
"Photographs and Memories," Jim Croce. Thus we came to Jim Croce. Like Taylor, Croce was a staple of our household growing up, and his songs certainly hit the right emotional buttons. This one was a bit too literal—playing as we look at photographs and memories—but it worked. It was also two minutes long and paired well with the Taylor—the right length, the right tone. We were set. Unfortunately Dad's version of this song was on vinyl; I had it on my iPod but we couldn't transfer it over to the computer with the Taylor song. So we went to iTunes and downloaded it—or thought we did.
The night before the service my brother realized that we hadn't downloaded the Croce version, but rather some sort of studio musician knock-off. Unacceptable! Into the middle of the night my brother tried to search out a worthy replacement. He landed on Ry Cooder.
I'd forgotten about Ry Cooder. But his albums were certainly played all the time in our house. I knew Cooder's versions of "Blue Suede Shoes" and "All Shook Up" before I knew Elvis's. We settled on his cover of "Stand By Me," from 1976's Chicken Skin Music. It still paired well with the Taylor and also was the best testament to Dad's character through the years—not to mention was a somewhat more positive song, a nice tonic to "Fire and Rain"'s melancholy, without being inappropriately sunny.
Ry Cooder, "Stand By Me"
Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs
Chris Bell, I am the Cosmos
The Byrds, Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde
The Lovin' Spoonful, Anthology
Neil Young, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
Air, Moon Safari and Talkie Walkie
And a lot of miscellaneous country music.
As my post from a ten days back might imply, I've been away from my computer and completely out of the loop on all the Very Important Topics happening in the bloggysphere. Today I'm catching up on a few.
Nicholas Rhombes is writing a book called A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, 1972-1984, and today he asks himself, "why write about punk?"
I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with the fine granularity of punk: it is music subtracted from, as opposed to something like disco, which is music "added to." At its best, it is distinctive for what it reveals when things are taken are taken away, things like over-production, overdubbing, expertise. There is an over-precise distinctiveness to punk, which makes it both absurd and alluring at the same time. Punk organized itself around the denial of excess. In America, especially, this amounted to critique, whether intended or not.
Setting the Woods on Fire gives us a second installment on the roots of country-rock. Part I was one of the most essential blog posts I've read all year; I haven't had a chance to check out Part II in depth yet but Paul's got a great track record.
If there is a poster child for the phenomenon of blog-driven tastes, it may well be Destroyer. Just when I thought discussion of Dan Bejar had finally been exhausted, along comes a thoughtful post from Ryan Catbird, with a followup from Chromewaves and a parallel back-and-forth between Zoilus, Radio Free Canukistan, and Zoilus again.
Andrew Bird, & the Mysterious Production of Eggs
I bought this album less than two weeks ago. Picked it up at Amoeba along with four other CDs. A week or two before that I went to the library and checked out nearly twenty discs. And somewhere in that time I also downloaded an album's worth of random mp3s and some friends have YSI'd me some albums too. Yet this is the only album I've listened to this week.
This has been an unreasonably difficult week. One of those weeks that comes along and punctures your big picture and renders all your daily complaints and aggravations meaningless. Whatever time I've had to myself (it hasn't been much), I've put on this album. Something about not already knowing it, but knowing Bird, makes it comfortable and alien at once, and I kind of need both right now. Something that isn't so difficult to find a toehold or to understand, but something that doesn't bring its own memories and associations with it.
I haven't really processed all the lyrics yet. Just the melodies, the quality of Bird's soft-spoken voice, the overall mood and tone of the album. Who knows what the fuck the songs are about; that's a mystery to solve some other time. All I know is that the feeling of this record is perfect; melancholy yet soothing, a hint (just a hint) of anger or frustration (or am I just projecting?), coated in lush melodies fit for a relaxing Sunday morning. I feel like I barely know this album, yet it will be something that has meaning for the rest of my life.
Just think: if record stores didn't exist, neither would Mingering Mike. Head over to PAPressblog to learn about Mike and to catch up on what he's been doing lately (including a video interview). Then, go to a record store!
Philip Glass, Glassworks
Peter Morén, The Last Tycoon
Neil Young, Everyone Knows This is Nowhere
The Ruby Suns, Sea Lion
Elvis Costello, Armed Forces
Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam
Cat Stevens, Greatest Hits
A helluva lot of R.E.M.
Andrew Bird, & the Mysterious Production of Eggs
Chris Bell, I am the Cosmos
The United States of America, s/t
Okkervil River, The Stage Names
