Author: You Hear That?!?

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

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I started writing YHT shortly after attending SXSW in 2011. Ironically, I wasn’t there for the music. I was part of a group of coworkers who attended the event’s Interactive wing, which wrapped up just as the music festival was getting ready to start in earnest. Boy, was walking through the Austinā€“Bergstrom International AirportĀ on our last day painful. While we were sauntering toward our departure gate, people holding guitar cases were walking in the other direction, bringing the “two ships passing” metaphor to life in an exceedingly unwelcome way. I wanted to be on their boat! I even tried taking mental snapshots of their faces, thinking (either optimistically or naively) that they’d soon be famous as a result of their SXSW performance(s), and I wanted to be able to say “I saw [him/her/them] at the airport at SXSW!”

I’m whining, but the truth is that the Interactive conference was incredible.

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Audrey Hepburn

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I’ve been on an accidental movie chanteuse binge lately. Within the span of a little more than a month, I’ve posted about Karen O’s Oscar-nominated (and unfortunately Oscar-denied) “The Moon Song,” dusted off my dad’s copy of Doris Day’s Listen to Day while working from home, listened twice in a row to Leslie Uggams’ What’s an Uggams? (damn good record, right there), and last but certainly not least, fallen head over heels for a familiar recording I’d never given much thought to — Audrey Hepburn’s version of “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

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Hamilton Leithauser

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What do backup dancers do? Backup dancers make the frontperson look good. They spice things up, they inject energy, they may display incredible talents, but it’s all done in the service of the star. In the video above, Hamilton Leithauser is the star — he takes the stage with a group of gals behind him, someone offstage tosses him the microphone, and off he goes. Lookin’ good. The video goes even further than that, because the first half has Leithauser hanging out in the dressing room before the dancers have even had a chance to slip on their sparkly outfits. Lookin’ meta good!

Could some of this frontman fourth wall breaking have to do with Leithauser’s situation vis-a-vis The Walkmen? With striking out on his own? Is some existential fat being chewed here? Maybe. But there’s another level I just love, and that level is Rostam Batmanglij.

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Hurray for the Riff Raff

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Hurray for the Riff Raff

Quick addendum to Wednesday’s post:

When I wrote about KONGOS, I talked about how the combination of bass, accordion and guitar reminded me of South Africa and Paul Simon’s Graceland, a comparison that was helped along by the fact that I looked the Kongos brothers up on Wikipedia while I was listening to their album for the first time and saw that they had roots in South Africa. Meanwhile, sitting in my drafts folder were the beginnings of my Hurray for the Riff Raff post. I’d listened to Small Town Heroes all the way through (and have been enjoying it a great deal), but I’d forgotten/failed to notice that it employs that same combination of instruments on “End Of The Line.”

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KONGOS

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Kongos

In a recent blog post, Mark Richardson described three different ways music can be processed by the listener:

Some music I hear with my body, I actually receive the sound partly with my body and want to move muscles when I hear it. Some music I hear more with my brain, like I turn over images and consider ideas and so on, itā€™s a cerebral experience. And music… works in a third way, which is that it seems someone wired directly into my nervous system. When I hear it i donā€™t want to move and I donā€™t want to think, I want to sort of sit back and let it wash over me. It feels like an electrical current or something, a wavelength I tune into that makes me very happy.

I didn’t realize it right away, but I have experience with that third way.

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brb

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Sarasota

Heading to Siesta Key to visit some grandparents/get some sun/pray that we don’t come home to a flooded downstairs bathroom. There’s some really great stuff I can’t wait to share with you next week. Here’s a hint. Here’s another. Until then, some Booker T.

Booker T. & the M.G.s — “Sarasota Sunset” [Spotify/iTunes]

The Streets

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The Streets

  1. Volunteered to paint the downstairs bathroom
  2. Found out at the last minute that painting a bathroom involves removing the tank from the toilet so you can paint behind it
  3. Silently observed that this type of oversight is the reason I’m not usually trusted with tasks like these
  4. Removed the tank from the toilet
  5. Painted the bathroom
  6. Went to Home Depot to get a kit containing parts you’re supposed to replace each time you remove the tank
  7. Reinstalled the tank
  8. Flushed the toilet
  9. Cleaned up the resulting flood
  10. Went to bed
  11. Woke up
  12. Went to Home Depot to get a different kit containing parts you’re supposed to replace each time you remove the tank
  13. Reinstalled the tank
  14. Broke something plastic
  15. Went back to Home Depot to replace the broken plastic thing
  16. Watched as the door was locked for the night
  17. Asked iPhone to find a Lowe’s that was open an extra hour
  18. Drove 20 minutes to Extra-Hour Lowe’s, only to learn that E-H Lowe’s was not, in fact, open an extra hour
  19. Questioned entire belief structure and will to live
  20. Went to bed
  21. Woke up
  22. Gave the broken plastic thing to Mrs. YHT, who could get to Home Depot before I could
  23. Retrieved an unbroken plastic thing from Mrs YHT
  24. Reinstalled the tank
  25. Flushed the toilet
  26. Waited
  27. Flushed the toilet again
  28. Waited
  29. Flushed the toilet a third time
  30. Waited, admiring the nice new color of the walls…

The Streets — “It Was Supposed To Be So Easy” [Spotify/iTunes]

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Billie Holiday

[Editor’s Note: Mrs. YHT is not allowed to read this post. If you see her reading it, please feel free to slap the iPhone out of her hands. (Don’t worry — it’s in a pretty sturdy case.)]

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Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr

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Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr

Two people told me — in totally separate conversations — that yesterday felt like Thursday to them. The weird thing is that I felt the exact same way, and I felt it before either of those conversations happened.

My displacement probably has something to do with there being a highly anticipated college basketball game tonight, during which I’ll be ending a self-imposed and sickness-related alcohol prohibition. I’d guess that yesterday felt like Thursday to folks in Richmond because we’re supposed to get some relatively (emphasis on “relatively”) serious snow today. There’s the potential for work/school/life getting canceled tomorrow, so today gets to pretend to be Friday, which, given the weekday pecking order, is a solid upgrade for poor old Hump Day. (Don’t get me wrong — I’m sure Monday would still kill to be Wednesday, even if it had to endure being nicknamed something so undignified.)

I say we go with it. I’m declaring today an unofficial Friday, and I have the perfect musical accompaniment — Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr’s new mixtape.

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Stevie Ray Vaughan

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Stevie Ray Vaughan

There are goodbyes, there are “See you later”s, and then there are the farewells that fall somewhere in between.

Major changes in the way we buy (or, ya know, don’t buy) music have forced us to get used to seeing record stores shut their doors, but BK Music’s closing doesn’t follow that same sad narrative. Sales weren’t tanking. The rent wasn’t going unpaid. BK was a healthy store, offering top-notch customer service and an inviting atmosphere, and its doors facing east on Midlothian Turnpike would still be open today had its landlord not decided (coldly, in my opinion)Ā to use that space for something else. Because BK’s case is so different, and because I know that Bill is planning on opening up elsewhere as soon as possible, I thought about writing a “Whenever a door closes, a window opens”-ish post, one that was heavy on the optimism and light on the retrospect.Ā But focusing exclusively on the future fails to honor the past, and there’s a past that’s definitely worth honoring here.

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