I Paid Rent This Week

Which leaves me seventeen dollars in my wallet until my next payday. I’m GANGSTA AS SHIT.

This is the yummiest song I’ve heard in a long time. Kristoffer Ragnstam hails from Gothenburg, Sweden, and his single “Swing That Tambourine” is the most ass-kickingest, rock-n-rolling little tune to come out of Sweden since, I dunno, insert your own ABBA joke here. Yuck.

But I totally have a boy-crush on “Tambourine.” The pulsating rhythm of the verse, the epic lead guitar licks, the breakdown drums of the pre-chorus, god that chorus that CHORUS, and the guitar solo hitting every single note just where and when it should be hit. I even love the little touches, like how the background vocals during the chorus clip EVER so slightly. This is going near the top of my end-year list for coolest song.

Sorry about the short post today, but I shall return with longer rants and raves just for your listening pleasure!

Kristoffer Ragnstam – Swing That Tambourine

I Confess, I Digress

I talked to my sister last night. A rare occurence, but one that’s becoming less so. I’m happy about that. Anyway, I was telling her what was going on in my life: work, a breakup that just happened, the subsequent movings out/in, and the fact that I found out yesterday I have viral conjunctivitis. So not only am I under quarantine, but I can’t even take antibiotics to get better sooner! Yahoo! And my sister, never one for subtlety, replied, “Man, Matt, you’re just a mess, aren’t you?”

And so I was reminded of my first year in Richmond. I hung out at the Village Cafe at least three nights a week, drinking coffee and soaking up the atmosphere until they closed at two in the morning. The jukebox they had in there, right next to the phone booth, was really something to write home about – it had something for everyone in every mood. That winter, when I was dealing with shit in my life, I dropped out of school and spent days wallowing in self-pity. But every night, I’d drag myself to the Village, have a dozen cups of coffee, pop a few dollars in the jukebox, and play this old Tom Waits album they had lying around. Apparently this album, “The Early Years,” collects a few sessions he did back in 1971 before he was, well, the Tom Waits we all know and love and try to imitate before we end up in a coughing fit (cf. “Hoist That Rag”). This is closer to John Prine’s stuff, but it’s damn good to sit around a city diner late on a winter night, keeping warm by drinking shitty coffee and listening to “Goin’ Down Slow.”

But I’m a bit older now, and barely wiser, and I’ve met Loudon Wainwright III, and so I’m more likely to listen to his music now. You probably know him best as Rufus’s father, but he’s an amazing songwriter in his own right; one of my favorites ever, actually. He bounds from tragic to hilarious, usually within the same song, and no matter what kinda mood I’m in his stuff always makes me feel better. Plus, his lyrics and sense of wordplay are really unmatched by anyone I’ve ever heard. He’s also one of the rare singer-songwriters whose live shows are eons better than his recordings. You might have to do some archaeology to find his albums, but it’s really worth it; he still tours, too, and comes through Virginia about once a year. Wainwright is also amazing because he’s been making albums for 35 years and still produces stuff that’s on par, if not BETTER THAN what he wrote back in the 1970s. Beat that, everyone except Bruce Springsteen. So here’s something from his 1986 LP “History.”

See you hep cats tomorrow!

Tom Waits – Goin’ Down Slow

Tom Waits – Hoist That Rag

Loudon Wainwright III – I’d Rather Be Lonely

Joanna Newsom Saved My Life

Where the hell am I supposed to start when I’m writing about Joanna Newsom? I suppose I can start from the beginning, from the first time I heard her music.

I was living in a really awful apartment that I would love to tell you all about sometime, but it was one of those sleepy southern summer afternoons where no one’s really doing anything. I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, when I heard this faint music coming from my roommate’s bedroom. It was soft, soothing… was it a guitar? Banjo? The woman’s voice was primal – one of those “shouting down from the mountain” voices that are relegated to the “O Brother” soundtrack and the “white ethnic Appalachian folk” genre. But I listened to it and felt like a child again – all the magic in the world, in music, was there in that song. And then it was gone, almost as if in a dream; and I wasn’t really sure afterwards if it had been a dream or not. I didn’t bother asking Sam what the hell that song was for a few months, since I assumed it had all been something I half-dreamed anyway.

But long story short, one night I held him hostage in front of his computer and demanded that he tell me out who that woman singing was. I didn’t give him much to go on – just that it was a girl by herself, it was a quiet song, and that she was accompanied by a stringed instrument that wasn’t a guitar. An hour or two later (what can I say? Sam has a rather large collection of solo women singing quiet songs) we stumbled upon this:

Joanna Newsom – Bridges and Balloons

Okay. Now listen to it with your eyes closed. Now listen to it again.

I ran out and bought her album “The Milk-Eyed Mender” at Plan 9 Records, and played it incessantly for months afterwards. It was the perfect accompaniment for my life in Richmond then – whether a refuge from the dark of winter mornings, the biting winds sweeping through the streets, my walks around the Fan when spring came and trees and flowers bloomed, and again through those achingly hot days down at the river and the endless summer nights where it seemed my friends and I were the only people in the world.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened the plastic wrap on the CD, expecting to see this crazy old lady picking at a harp in her cabin in the middle of nowhere, and instead I find she’s a cute tiny college girl from San Francisco:

Needless to say, I spread the Gospel of Joanna everywhere I could, making everyone I knew sit and listen to her music. Most people responded as strongly as I did, though my mother was an exception; she said that Newsom’s voice was too dissonant, that it was like it was like try to hear the melody when listening to Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane play together. And I said, “Mom, it’s okay that you don’t like Joanna Newsom because you explained with a total badass jazz reference.” My mom’s pretty cool like that.

Anyway, it was around a year after I bought “Mender” that Newsom released her next album “Ys”. I was expecting the quiet folk of her first album, and so imagine my surprise when I took my first listen and heard seventeen-minute, rambling epics backed by a full bloody ORCHESTRA. It’s an intimidating listen, and it’s honestly kind of scary for me to still listen to, but as much as I love “Mender” I’m glad that Newsom is still moving and progressing as a songwriter. “Ys” is, at times, a little too much for me to wrap my head around, and I have mixed feelings about Van Dyke Parks’s string arrangements, but this is an astonishing record, though in a very different way from “Milk-Eyed Mender”. Joanna Newsom is one of those musicians where I have absolutely NO idea what she’ll do next, (and I’ve heard that she’s written a few songs with Bjork, droooooool) but I’m looking forward to her next project, as challenging as I know it will be for me as a listener.

Joanna Newsom – Emily

Got a Box of Love

When it comes to art, there is a sharp division between the concepts of ability and talent. Anyone, I repeat, ANYONE can hear the most beautiful music in their head, see the most beautiful painting, envision a scene in a play or book; anything is within anyone’s reach. But the difference between people who don’t create art and those who do is that artists have the ability to take whatever is in their minds and transform it into something that other people can experience. Doing that is the biggest challenge I face with my own music, and I’m sure that others run into the same difficulties. It takes a lot of time and effort, and discipline. Many times I’ll record a song, get frustrated that it’s not as great as what I heard in my head while I was writing it, and toss it out.

So artists who have the ability to do this flawlessly just stun me. I wrote about Passion Pit’s “Sleepy Head” in a recent post, and when I listen to the song, I know that what I’m hearing is exactly what Michael Angelakos heard while he was writing the song. I am humbled when I listen to this, knowing that when Angelakos recorded this song, he said to himself, “Let’s put a handclap right THERE. Throw in a run on the glockenspiel at THIS measure.” It’s staggering, how someone can dissect the noise in their minds so flawlessly and easily.

So the music in this post is all going to be songs that provoke that reaction in me. It may not even be music I particularly care for, but what they all share is the flawless transposition of their creators’ ideas into something that everyone can experience, and that is what makes my favorite music truly transcendent.

The first song I present for your listening pleasure is “Leviathan, Bound” by Shearwater. This song is terrifying and beautiful, and I love that the ID3 tag of this mp3 lists the genre as “dark water.” The strings strike somewhere deep within my psyche, and the piano, harpsichord, glocks, and the little hint of tremolo guitar all layer on top of each other, enhancing but mirroring each other’s sound. The harmonies just — give me chills. This is, sad to say, the only song by Shearwater I’ve heard, and I know that the indie press is loving all over this, so maybe I’ll try to hear a little more of their stuff. Holy crap, was that a harp I just heard? This song rules.

Our next selection is a Stevie Wonder song – the closing track from his 1972 masterpiece “Talking Book.” Now, some might accuse Stevie Wonder of having an edge in being more deliberate with his musical ideas (I’m tempted to make an awful pun here and call them “innervisions”), since his sense of hearing is understandably enhanced. Either way, this song is as close to perfect as I think most of us will ever come. I’m a huge sucker for layers and layers of harmonies, especially when they’re all interweaving vocal lines, and every note, every breath, every syllable of this song is perfectly realized and executed.

Random interjection: When I worked at a museum up on Broad Street, my walk to and from work was about half an hour, and I’d bring my mp3 player with me. I was working my way through Stevie Wonder’s string of beautiful albums from the early 70s that I don’t think ANYONE will ever match, and when I got to the end of “Talking Book” and hit this song, I said, “Aww, crap, I’m never gonna get all the way through these albums,” because I immediately listened to “I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will be Forever)” over and over again (and over again) for about two weeks straight.

The third and final song for you all is “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is out to Get Us!” from Sufjan Stevens’s “Illinois” album. This album is one of my favorites of all time, ALL TIME, and you need to buy it immediately. It was hard to pick just one track from this album to single out, but this is my favorite at the moment. I’m playing it right now, as I’m writing this, and I can’t really think of any words to come close to how beautiful and wonderful and perfect this song is, so I’m not really going to try. Just listen to it on repeat as many times as you can stand – I first heard it almost three years ago and I still hear something new every time I hear it. I know that this is exactly what Stevens heard in his mind, and it kills me that he can pull this off so flawlessly. Sufjan Stevens, you damn talented bastard.

So have fun, get lost in these songs, and let me know when you come back out again. I just found out today that I will be internetless for about two weeks, and I’ve just promised that I’ll be updating this daily! I’m trying to write as many entries in advance of me losing the modem on Thursday as possible, and I already have a few days’ backlog, but it might not be EVERY day that I talk to you. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, because there’s SO much music I need to tell you about!

Shearwater – Leviathan, Bound

Stevie Wonder – I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)

Sufjan Stevens – The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!

And The Livin’s Easy…

It’s August, and yet I feel like summer just started. Richmond’s getting hot hot hot, and even the river is bathtub warm. But the dog days are undeniably here, and so, just as with every other August, the search for the “Song of the Summer” starts up again.

Summer songs are an odd breed – they don’t have to be objectively good (and are often quite bad), and though they can be from any and every genre, they all have to have that indescribable summery vibe. I remember 10 years or so ago (holy crap, I’m old) when the Powers That Be decided that the song of Summer 1999 was Len’s “Steal My Sunshine.” (The Youtube comments on this song sum up how I feel about it: “I feel dumb for even looking this up.” I don’t really remember it being THIS bad, but then again I was 13, so my taste was pretty awful. New Radicals, a much better band that came out around the same time, though still a one-hit wonder, seem a lot less dated.) In 2006 that song was Lily Allen’s “LDN.” And last year, it seemed to be Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls.”

(Note: I tried to post the video for “Steal My Sunshine” here, but it’s so bad that even Youtube said “no way.” Look it up if you’re feeling masochistic, want to see a brother and a sister get a little too close for comfort, and you really feel like having the dulcet tones of “L-A-T-E-R THAT WEEK” haunt your nightmares for a few days.)

So what makes a song a Summer Song? Well, there seem to be a few criteria: It needs to be in a major key, have a very simple chord progression (“Steal My Sunshine” follows bVII-IV-I, and “Beautiful Girls” I-vi-IV-V), and the lyrics should be pretty brainless.

Random interjection: When I was young my family would go to Bethany Beach every summer, and when we left home in Woodbridge we’d listen to whatever on the radio, but when we got to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, the undeniable sign that we were going to THE BEACH, my parents would put the Beach Boys‘ “Endless Summer” in the cassette player, and we’d rock out on that until we got to the hotel. We never listened to that tape any other time of the year, and so those early Beach Boys songs represent to me the epitome (not epidemy, as I’ve seen it spelled) of summer music – music made for a specific time, a specific place, and more powerful evoking those memories rather than being evocative in and of itself.

Which brings me to my nominee this year: Gotye’s “Learnalilgivinanlovin.” It’s cheating a bit, since this album was released two years ago in his homeland of Australia (and I’ve been grooving on it for around a year and a half). But it’s seeing worldwide release this year, which means it’s in contention, so THERE. I love Gotye’s style on the entire album (make sure you also hear “Heart’s a Mess”), but this song is super killer sweet. It’s everything I love about Phil Spector’s stuff without the waving a gun at the Ramones craziness.

I’m loving the soul revival that’s going on in Britain and Australia right now, and even though Gotye’s album “Like Drawing Blood” is all over the place with genres and styles, this is really, really fun. If you find yourself in downtown Richmond and you’re in my neighborhood, you might hear this blaring at full blast out my windows.

So what’s your Summer Song of Twenty-Oh-GREAT?

New Radicals – You Get What You Give

Lily Allen – LDN

Sean Kingston – Beautiful Girls

Gotye – Learninalilgivinanlovin

The Unstoppable Power of Passion Pit

This is Passion Pit. His real name is Michael Angelakos and (in a neat segue from my last post) in concert he plays with four other guys, but on record it’s just him. Passion Pit’s debut EP is coming out in September, but already Pitchfork and the rest of the online world is shitting themselves over his (their?) single “Sleepy Head.” This is completely with good reason.

“Sleepy Head” is three minutes of pure joy, combining the otherworldy euphoria of Sigur Rós and the electronic collages of bands like MGMT that are all the hot stuff right now. The record kicks off with a sped-up clip of Jack Kerouac, which is never a bad thing, and then jumps immediately into a mish-mash of autoharps, drums, pitch-shifted voices, handclaps, and I don’t know what the fuck else. The vocals are pure indie, maybe a little too much for my taste, but that’s forgivable in the face of the eye-melting awesomeness of the whole track. The most amazing thing about this record to me (and I’m going to be writing an extensive post about this in the next few days) is that one man heard this in his head and then was perfectly able to transpose it into a tangible, listenable form. Well, I’m ranting right now, so I’ll stop, but I’ve been listening to this song on repeat all morning. You should too, and you should do it NOW, so you can say you were into Passion Pit before he (they?) hit it big.

Passion Pit – Sleepy Head

Sigur Rós – Sæglópur

MGMT – Time to Pretend

A Confession:

I am a musician. I’ve been a solo act for a few years. In the studio, I’m in a playground of overdubs and harmonies and whatever the hell else I want to add. But live, I’m restricted to only what I can play at one time; one guitar, one voice, occasionally a harmonica or a stomped tambourine, but that’s it. It’s always uncomfortable to go back and forth between the studio mindset and the live mindset in terms of what I can and can’t do in each environment. Some musicians find a backing band to play with live, some record with a band but perform solo. But then there are the few who skirt the line between both. Howie Day (before he became another John Mayer clone) would play around with loops, echoing voices, guitar licks, and percussive banging, swirling around to make a one-man symphony.

And then there’s Busdriver (aka Regan Farquhar), a rapper making noise unlike anything I’ve heard before. It’s not just that he’s able to bring a full sound to a solo performance, but also that he’s BLISTERING live. Find some videos of him online, or even better, go to one of his shows – he writhes around the stage, while he not just raps with one of the fastest, smoothest flows I’ve ever encountered, but also fiddles with dials and drum machines and it’s just amazing how one man running around pressing buttons can be so fascinating live. Plus his music’s pretty awesome, too – he moves through different time signatures as if they were water, and though his instrumentation sounds a bit like Dizzee Rascal (self-described “ghettotech”), some of his songs sound more like The Knife in that my mind is always half a beat behind the music. A very fun and busy listening experience – check him out if you ever have a chance.

Busdriver – Casting Agents and Cowgirls

Dizzee Rascal – Sittin’ Here

The Knife – We Share Our Mother’s Health