Month: July 2012

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366 Songs 174: Are You Blue Or Are You Blind

There’s something so amazingly “Britpop”-py to the sound of this song, the particular sound of the jangly guitars and the barely present bassline (Poor Paul McCartney, whose bass was so present in the Beatles’ music and so ignored when it came to the 1990s movement so inspired by that band) and the somewhat whiny vocal. But despite all of that, it’s one of those songs that gets damned with faint praise; it’s a “agreeable” and “nice enough” song, you know?

That was always a problem for the Bluetones, in a way; their charms were gentle and you had to be open to them. They were never a band who would force themselves into your heart, but if you were in the right mood and willing to fall for a new old sound, they’d be there with reliable if unspectacular music that felt cosy and comfortable. Listen; this song even has a “ba ba ba ba” bit that anyone can sing along to.

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366 Songs 173: Apple Carts

Still tired, still ready to disappear for the weekend and enjoy my invisibility from the Internet and work for a couple of days (Not that there aren’t songs lying ahead for your enjoyment tomorrow and Sunday, because there are; I really am trying to catch up, I swear), but I thought that this song made for both a nice contrast to “The Puritan” earlier and also an aural description of my state of mind after this weird week of work. Damon Albarn, you’ve definitely had an odd and varied year in terms of releases…

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366 Songs 172: The Puritan

No time to write today, because I’ve made the (selfish?) promise to myself that I’d rather wrap up work in as timely a manner as possible and there’s still a bunch of work left to do. But this song has been going around in my head with increasing regularity over the week, like a slow burn earworm, and so I thought I’d share it with you so it can burrow inside your brains, as well:

“Are we institutionalized by the demands of today?/In our regalia, are we okay?” feels curiously like something John Lydon would have written, decades ago, if he were more humanistic and less angry, don’t you think?

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On A Melancholy Sea

I lose track of people, sometimes. I mean, I knew that already. It’s a result of going to two elementary schools, four middle schools, and three high schools: you lose track of people and you find new people. You know someone for eight months at the most, or however long a school year is, then you make new friends for the summer, and then you make new friends in the fall, and you keep it moving.

I’m good at making friends. I should be better at keeping them.

That’s David Brothers, who remains one of my favorite writers on- or offline; he’s a friend, and so I can’t say that sort of thing to him (I have all manner of talented friends, and I find it really difficult to be sincere in my praise of their talents and work, which is frustrating to me; I’ll gush about them to other people, behind their backs, but in person, my sense of awkwardness gets in the way), but still. He’s writing about the ease of losing friends through no real intent to dump them; just losing track, by accident, and suddenly it’s too late to get back in touch without it being weird. I read that, and I thought, yes, that’s me, I do that all too easily and always feel bad about it. There are some wonderful people out there in the world whom I love dearly, and have let disappear from my life.

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366 Songs 171: I Want To Vanish

Again, a curiously busy day has left me tired, and without the words that I want to write here (Really, just without the time to write those words; the spirit is willing, the flesh would like to not be in front of the computer for a little while today, sadly). No wonder this song comes to mind, especially given the last Elvis Costello song. I found this on a Best Of that I’d received one Christmas, and amidst the usual colors and melancholy of that period, this song stood out in particular, with the lovely strings backing Costello trying his best to make his voice soar. Listening to it again, more than a decade later and almost that long since I’d last thought of it if I were honest, it’s just as resonant, if for entirely different reasons. After all, on a day when your brain is filled with the emptiness that comes from writing stuff for an ever-demanding, never-thankful internet, few things sum up a mindset better than “I’ve given you the awful truth/Now give me my rest.”

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366 Songs 170: The Other Side Of Summer

There’s a running joke here in Portland that the good weather only really gets started after Independence Day. Judging by today’s glorious weather – there’s not a cloud in the sky – I’m tempted to believe them, and so this song has been in my head all day; I may be misremembering, but I’m pretty sure that it’s the first Elvis Costello song that I really knew, as opposed to just hearing and not paying attention to, and it led me to my first Elvis Costello purchase. Looking back, that feels like I was suckered in by some ill-tempered gateway drug, the faux-Beach Boys stylings covering up a happily grumpy song about the downside of showbiz glamor. I still love the bitterness of lines like “Was it a millionaire who said ‘Imagine no possessions’?/A poor little schoolboy who said ‘We don’t need no lessons’?” heading after some traditional sacred cows.

Goodnight, God bless and kiss goodbye to the Earth, indeed.

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What Things Look Like (Wood)

I’ve been re-reading Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly’s Local recently, and oddly one of the things that’s stuck with me the most has been Brian Wood’s design and specifically the use of type. I’m not entirely sure why this is, but I find images like these resonating with me for reasons I can’t even begin to understand, never mind explain:

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How I Spent My First Independence Day As An American Citizen

I spent it working.

That hadn’t been my plan, of course; I had wanted to spend it relaxing and treating the holiday as a holiday, spending it with my wife doing little requiring much effort. The problem was that it fell on a Saturday that year. I worked on Saturdays at the time – in fact, Fridays and Saturdays were the heaviest days of my week by a considerable amount as I ramped up to have enough material to be able to write the majority of the material appearing on the site over the weekend and edit the other material that appeared on Saturday and Sunday – and I had found myself really looking forward for the chance of the day off, and a break from the weekly grind just a little bit. I could spend my Friday prepping for Sunday, instead, and spend my first July 4th as an American citizen doing what the majority of other American citizens would be doing: as little as possible other than relaxing, eating and watching some fireworks.

And then I was told by the site’s editor that that wouldn’t be happening. The way it was explained to me was that, because July 4 was a Saturday, that meant that everyone else on the site (who all worked Monday through Friday) wouldn’t actually get a paid vacation, they’d just get their regular weekend off. And so, in order to make it more fair to everyone, I was told, July 3 would be the paid vacation, and July 4 would be a regular, full day of posting on the site, and a regular, full day of work for me. You know, kind of a “needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” thing.

The additional problem for me – because having to work on what I’d been considering this oddly symbolic holiday considering my newly-sworn-in status wasn’t enough – was that, in order for me to be able to handle a full day of posting on Saturday, I’d have to do prep work on Friday; there was literally no way around it unless I wanted to spend all of Saturday running behind deadlines, hacking out shit in order to have something on the site and, even then, I might not have been able to do it. So, the Friday paid vacation that I was getting instead of actually being able to take July 4 off ended up being spent working, as well.

That was not my favorite July 4, needless to say.

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366 Songs 169: Independence Day

Another song that has little to do with the holiday it’s named for, but it’s been tradition for me ever since I arrived in the US a decade ago that I’d listen to this song on July 4 nonetheless. Clearly, I just like the train-like drums, or the electric piano making this sound like it belongs in the 1970s, as well as the “ah-ah” harmonies in the back, and the wistfulness of Elliott Smith’s “Everybody knows/Everybody knows/Everybody knows/That you only live a day/But it’s brilliant anyway.”

Everybody knows.

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366 Songs 168: 4th of July

I was a big Aimee Mann fan, back around the time of her first solo album. I can remember seeing her live, in Aberdeen during my first year of art school, and just being… smitten, perhaps? Being very wowed by the whole experience, the quieter folky-songs like this, and the more power poppy numbers that ripped off the Byrds so gleefully and openly. Listening to this again, years later, I find myself focusing on the oddness of her voice and how melancholy the song is, how little it has to do with the Fourth of July aside from the wonderful “What a waste of gunpowder and sky” line.