#features

Early 2015 Album Preview

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impatient

Damn. It’s December? Who let that happen?

It’s hard to believe, but year-end lists are starting to appear. I just saw Rolling Stone’s, which placed the U2 album at #1. OK then. My top-10 is in the works… sort of. I’ve been keeping a list of every new album I’ve listened to in full — first time I’ve done that — and I’ve made a spot in my living room for the albums released in 2014 that I bought on vinyl so I can give them a few extra listens. I’m certain this means they’ll get preferential rankings, but whatever.

While I’m in the process of making lists and checking them twice, I thought it would be fun to preview a few of the albums I’m looking forward to in 2015. You know what? “Looking forward to” is putting it mildly. I’m like a cat staring at a printer, impatiently waiting to grab what comes out. Here’s why:

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Sublime

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Sublime

Many people dismiss the rapture as absurd religious dogma, but it’s not. It’s real. Just ask my CDs.

The great reckoning came the weekend before last, when the room-by-room cleaning, organizing and culling spree Mrs. YHT and I have been conducting to make way for all things baby-related reached the office, where stacks-on-stacks-on-stacks of CDs had been accumulating for as long as we’ve been in the house. During those five years, my vinyl collection grew like crazy, but my CD stash, which included everything from albums bought with my parents’ money in high school to mix CDs burned by college friends in Kazaa’s heyday, went largely ignored. It grew too, but more gradually, like a tree you barely notice until is its roots start cracking the sidewalk. My mom still surprises me with CDs — she’ll mail me things she hears about on NPR and finds interesting — and I love when she does, but I usually upload them to iTunes and listen via my phone. Once they became part of the plastic forest in the back corner of the office, the likelihood of seeing the inside of a CD player again was slim.

CD Rapture

That forest is gone now. It wasn’t easy — I attach sentimentality to physical objects like hapless bugs attach themselves to spiderwebs — but after dragging the whole mess out into the living room and going through it item by item, all that’s left is a nearly full 120-slot CD tower and a few binders and spindles that still need sorting. It was a serious bummer in a lot of ways, but I thought I’d share the process I used in case it’s of use when you’re forced to perform your own deforestation.

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K’naan

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K'naan

[Editor’s Note: What follows is a Night Before Christmas-inspired poem I originally posted three years ago in anticipation of July 4th, though I’ve edited a few lines and made some administrative updates. Happy 4th, everyone!]

‘Tis the Thursday before the 4th of July
and all through my street flags are set out to fly.
We’ve done all the prepping that patriots do,
with this year’s fiesta well within view.
The pig has been ordered, the smoker tracked down,
on loan from the frat guys who live across town.
That porker’s on ice at the butcher, but soon
will make up a feast that lasts all afternoon.
The kegs have been scouted, the charcoal is bought,
the buns, plates and cups all successfully sought.
We’ve even located a table for pong
(hey — just ’cause we’re thirty, that don’t make it wrong).
My team U.S.A. jersey’s hanging with care,
preparing to bare pasty arms and chest hair
with additional feelings of pride for our play
in the World Cup and things that Tim Howard could save.
But something’s amiss … what can it be?
I know that I made sure to R.S.V.P.
Got my camouflage hat and tri-color balloons…
OH SNAP! The music! We need us some tunes!
I need to crank up the Ameri-swag quick,
but where should I turn? Toby Keith is a dick,
and Miley is partying, but who can tell why?
(OK, I’m obsessed with that song, I can’t lie.)
There has to be music that rings pure and true
when I think of the spirit of red, white and blue.
So I scour my iTunes collection, bar none,
leaving no stone unturned, and no song unspun.
And then in the very last place I would look —
the perfectest verse with perfectest hook!
But this just can’t be — a song for the 4th
that’s sung by K’naan, our friend from the north?!?
That’s right — he’s Canadian! Somalian too,
his formative days spent in Mogadishu.
But being a foreigner shouldn’t detract
from the fact that his song “Wavin’ Flag” is jam packed
with the message we’re coming together to send:
That freedom and justice will win in the end.
So raise up your bottles and barbecue tongs
to this most unlikely but fitting of songs
and the two-hundred-thirty-ninth time we can say
“Suck it!” to England! It’s Independence Day!

K’naan — “Wavin’ Flag” [Spotify/iTunes]

My Answer to Question #26

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Remember when the video above was on People.com? I do. I loved it. Even though I went to the University of Richmond, I love the Peppas. They do a killer job, whether they’re serenading NASCAR fans in the rain or ratcheting up the excitement at the Siegel Center, and the added touch of pumping Miley Cyrus’ voice in through the PA before blasting the chorus one more time is just outstanding. I get goosebumps when I watch that video — I really do.

Don’t get me wrong — I enjoy Richmond’s pep band. Just this past season, I had the chance to take my mom to her very first live basketball game, and I made sure to brag about how our pep band’s director is David Hood from No BS! Brass Band. I even pointed him out, like you would a local celebrity or athlete who is poised become a big deal out of town as well. Plus, the recent Robins Center renovations have them repositioned in the center of the student section (they used to be tucked away in a corner at court level) — an improvement that vastly increases the band’s atmospheric influence. Will that result in a “Wrecking Ball”-type video in the future? With Hood at the helm, I wouldn’t rule it out.

So why am I talking about pep bands? A couple days ago, UR’s athletics department sent me a survey asking about the experience I had at the games I attended last season, and while I was most excited to complain about the food, everything changed when I got to this question:

Survey Question

They didn’t ask for a blog post, but they’re gonna get one.

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Tournament Album Coverage

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cat couch

If you’re a YHT regular, you might have spent some small portion of the last few weeks asking yourself “Hey, why hasn’t he said anything about March Madness? He loves the tournament…” You’d be right! Last year I did a two–part “Tournament Album Coverage” post, and the year before that I celebrated a VCU win by creating a crude mashup of six “Black And Yellow” remixes playing simultaneously. (It still makes me cringe, then laugh, then cringe some more. There’s treble, there’s too much treble, and then there’s my “Black And Yellow” mashup.)

It’s not that I haven’t been watching. On the contrary — I got to binge-watch on the first Friday of the tournament — aka Basketball Christmas — and like last year I listened to records the whole time, but it wasn’t quite as upbeat this time around. My billion-dollar bracket was knocked out of contention by the very first game on Thursday, then Duke was upset by 14-seed Mercer in the very first game on Friday afternoon, killing my personal rooting interest and taking my bracket out of contention in my family’s pool (I had Duke losing in the final game). Just like that, my hopes were dashed, and the weekend hadn’t even started yet. I wondered whether I’d feel like watching at all on Friday evening.

Then I came up with a plan.

Instead of letting my disappointments ruin Basketball Christmas, I decided to put my vinyl collection to good use by throwing myself the most comically depressing pity party I could muster while rooting for every favored seed — no matter how far my bracket had them going — to lose. It was way more fun than it should have been.

Here are the covers to prove it:

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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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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) 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. 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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You Watch That?!?

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The clip above is from When the Song Dies, a documentary short I learned about from my father-in-law. I wish I could embed the whole thing (you can watch it here), because it’s well worth the 15 minutes. Though music does play a part, the story is much bigger, focusing on cultural mortality and how, when the last person who knows a tradition or song dies, that thing is lost forever. It’s a brutal thought — as true and scary as thinking about your own death. Imagine that you’re the only one in your family who knows the melody to a song that’s been passed down from one generation to the next, only there’s no next generation to teach it to. That’s the situation in which some of the documentary’s Scottish subjects find themselves.

I’m not sure if the director was thinking about this when he was working on the short, but I found myself wondering if this type of cultural death is, itself, dying.

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Top 10 Albums of 2013

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Countdown gif

It’s customary to start year-end lists by chewing some fat about how making them is strange and difficult work, and in general, I find that these intros can be exceedingly skippable. Everyone knows that album rankings are subjective (even when they’re created on behalf of a publication or website), and no one needs to be reminded that the list maker didn’t listen — and couldn’t have listened, of course! — to every single thing that came out in the preceding 12 months. You don’t share Santa Claus’ knack for bending the space-time continuum. Understood. But before I get to my Top 10 albums, I would like to share a quick story about how I came up with my list, and how Beyoncé helped me find meaning in this whole strange and difficult exercise.

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