Author: Graeme McMillan

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366 Songs 265: How Does It Feel To Feel

One of the classic ’60s garage songs, there’s something so magnificently sludgy about “How Does It Feel,” in either of its versions (There are two, the UK and US mixes; I’m not entirely sure how that happened, nor why the US mix is the more feedback-laden and psych-rocky of the two). Of the two, I by far prefer the UK version – the one above – which is more tuneful, for me at least; there’s a strange focus on monotone in the American version that I can’t quite get my head around, even though I love the feedback and distortion on the lead guitar.

Lyric-wise, this is a mess of a song, the kind of sloppy psychedelia that people make fun of, but to complain about the words feels like missing the point. As the title suggests, this is a song that you feel; it’s the entire thing that you have to experience in one, and then make decisions based on that – the sludge, the simple “Woah, man, like the world” of the lyrics, the thuggish harmonies. It’s a song that literally asks you to not separate it into component parts, but let the whole just wash over you.

(Worth remembering: 1990s shoegazing band Ride did a cover of this, and managed to make the whole thing sound depressingly bland:

It’s so close, and yet so far…)

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366 Songs 264: Good Intentions Paving Company

The title took me some time to get, I shamefully admit.

Perhaps I was confused by the sprawling epicness of the song, which spirals all over the place both aurally and emotionally, which is one of the things I kind of love about it. When I first heard the song, I was put off by Joanna Newsom’s nasal vocals, which sounded to me like someone doing a weird, cruel impression of Joni Mitchell, but was compelled by the song nonetheless; even if I didn’t like the vocals, I liked everything else, I thought. And yet, the more I listened to the song – I found myself playing it over and over again – the more the vocals grew on me, and the more I realized that I just liked everything about it. This sounds like something very much out of time, and yet timeless, something that should’ve been released decades earlier when its shapechanging and sense of humor would’ve been more in tune with the times but influential and adored ever since. And then I kept on listening.

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I’m Back On Top And I’m Missing You, Baby Baby Where’d You Go?

Just the other day, I was thinking to myself, I haven’t had a popular article on Time’s Entertainment Blog for awhile. Have I lost “it”? and then, today, I look and see this:

So, here’s the funny thing: The #1 story? That’s mine. The #10 story? That’s a story from a year ago that I linked to in my story that apparently resonated with people. Look at me, resurrecting traffic for long-forgotten material! I feel inordinately smug about that.

In any case, here’s this week’s Time story, about the Moonlighting Curse and why it’s a myth. And, because I was out of town last week when it went live, here’s last week’s story, too.

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366 Songs 263: Lava

A favorite band from 1996, where their very American Radio-friendly sound (they’re British) stood out amongst all the Britpop debris still flying around. I remember loving their harmonies – which, yes, they could easily reproduce live – and being amused to discover that the opening line to the song is apparently “And I/Fucking/Give/Up” stretched to avoid getting edited for the radio. There’s a joy in this, and a defiant lack of cool, that there was no way that I could fail to listen when it first came on the radio. Power Pop with ridiculous lyrics and violent choppy guitars? I’m in.

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My First Attempt At A Public Debut

After thinking about zines and early days of writing yesterday, I’ve been thinking about my public writing debut. Years before Fanboy Rampage!!! or professional (paid!) writing, or even Tears Before Bedtime – the blog that introduced me to my wife and brought me to America, fact fans – I wrote for the student newspaper of the university my art school was attached to. I can’t remember why I thought it was a good idea, or how it all came together; all of that has disappeared in the mists of my memory. All I remember was that Andy Barnett, my best friend and partner in many many crimes at the time, and I somehow ended up in the situation of writing multiple things for the monthly newspaper for a couple of years. There was a column that was pretty much a collection of odds-and-ends, a tongue-in-cheek horoscope column, a comic strip about some event or other that either Andy or myself had attended at some point in the previous month (Something very clearly indebted on my part to Kyle Baker and Evan Dorkin’s Critics At Large strip from Reflex magazine in the ’90s, looking back on it – Andy had never seen those strips, I don’t think? – Like, embarrassingly indebted) and a “How To Dance Like A Britpop Celebrity” guide, too. Looking back, a bunch of material to come up with on a regular basis, but I remember loving the whole thing, especially the knowledge that people read what we were doing. Weirder, people recognized Andy (and, very occasionally, myself) because of the self-portraits in the strips; it was like being a very minor celebrity, and very compelling for an early 20-something as I was then.

Somewhere, I’m sure, I have copies of this stuff. I should scan some in and put it up on here, to embarrass myself.

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A Pox On Your Sales And Your Novels!

[I]f you fail to keep our promise, may other writers anticipate your plots, may your publishers do you down in your contracts, may strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints and may your sales continually diminish. Amen.

That’s part of the initiation ceremony British mystery writers had to go through in order to join the wonderfully named Detection Club in the 1930s, written by Dorothy Sayers and available here. You can learn more about the Detection Club here.

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Made By Hand, Made With Heart

A reason for me to go visit Floating World sometime soon: David Brothers has a zine of his fiction available there. I’ve been thinking a lot about zines and zine culture recently – I often train a lot of my wanting to be a writer to being zine-culture-adjacent back when I was in art school, and have found myself thinking about digital books as modern zines and what to do with that over the last few days – and found David writing about the experience of physically putting the zines together to be weirdly nostalgic:

At this point, I’ve got the cover, I’ve got the guts, I’ve got a stapler, and I’ve got no idea how long it’s going to take to put this thing together. Luckily, I’d been slacking on watching TV, so I just caught up on Louie, Black Dynamite, and Children’s Hospital while I folded. 25 doesn’t sound like a lot, but boy does it feel like a lot of work when you’re in the middle of it and half done.

For the degree show part of my bachelors’ degree, I made up 100 copies of five different booklets of me writing and illustrating stories (I wrote and illustrated a bunch throughout the final year of that course, and then picked five to mass produce for the final show, with the idea of selling them for… crap, I can’t remember how much. Cheap, anyway); I remember having to trim and staple all of the books over a couple of nights as the show approached, with everything lying on the floor of my bedroom and me staring at it all as the night went on and my deadline-driven insanity only got worse.

One day, I should see if I have any of those booklets left. I know I brought a bunch with me when I moved to the US a decade ago, but I’ve moved around a lot since, and have lost a lot of stuff across that time.

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366 Songs 262: I’m Dreaming

I was thinking about Mitt Romney’s latest, jaw-dropping, gaffe this morning when I found Randy Newman’s contribution to the 2012 political season, and… Well, it fits, somehow. Musically, it’s later-period Newman, definitely (Listen to the way he starts to rip himself off in terms of melody on the piano in the bridge), but lyrically, it’s spot-on in terms of parodying the mindset of voters who’d rather have any President as long as he’s not black: “I’m dreaming of a white President/Just like the ones we’ve always had/A real live white man/Who knows the score/How to handle money or start a war/Wouldn’t even have to tell me what we were fighting for.”

I like it when musicians take advantage of technology to rush-release music as social commentary. More big-name musicians should do this more often, if you ask me.