#nowplaying

Jason Isbell

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Jason Isbell

I love when my sense of perspective gets messed with. Good art — books, music, movies… whatever — should leave you thinking slightly differently than before you were exposed to it. Take “I Am A God,” for example. There’s a good chance that, if you’ve heard the song a few times, a croissant is no longer just a croissant to you. It’s a threshold. A dividing line. Between two classes of rich people. Between faking it and making it. It’s also a punchline, delivered in a way that makes it hard to take the word at face value anymore (I have to think that people’s patience when waiting on an order of croissants won’t be the same, either).

I don’t know that Jason Isbell intended for it to — and this may be an entirely idiosyncratic reaction — but Southeastern has done something similar, though considerably more uplifting, with the word “down.”

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The Dixie Cups

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The Dixie Cups

I must have run across The Dixie Cups’ version of “Iko Iko” at some point in my 29 years on this planet, but I really listened to it for the first time a few days ago, and I think I’ve listened 15 or 20 times since. It’s totally brilliant. The spareness of the arrangement and the calmness of their voices contrast so nicely with the (literally) incendiary lyrics. It reminds me of how my dad loved that Back to the Future was set in a town called “Hill Valley” — the oxymoronic name creates a sort of void, like the thing cancels itself out and doesn’t actually exist. (He was big on postmodernism in his academic work, and he had a field day with BTTF.)

The crazy thing — ironic, maybe — is that The Dixie Cups’ version of “Iko Iko” almost didn’t exist at all.

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Pokey LaFarge

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Pokey LaFarge

The fact that it’s a first world problem doesn’t make it any less true — coming back from vacation sucks. The better the trip, the harder the fall. I don’t know about you, but I can usually sense with bitter consciousness the spell slipping away in the days after getting back, like watching smoke dissipate when someone turns on a ceiling fan.

If you caught my musical away message, you already know that I spent last week in Greece. (And if you actually listened to that Yanni song I posted — wasn’t it kind of fun?) Mrs. YHT and I took something of a second honeymoon, splitting time between Athens and a pair of islands that were just obscenely beautiful. I mean look at that. It’s unreasonable. It’s the kind of vista that makes you feel unworthy. I bet the seagulls even feel lucky to live there. Leaving wasn’t easy, and memories of the near-pornographic views, the absurd amount of feta cheese I ate and the ocean of pleasure reading time I left behind have made for rough reassimilation.

But sandwiched between yesterday’s serving of “welcome back to the real world” reminders was a momentary reprieve — a lightness when the weight of routine and responsibility was settling back onto my shoulders. It came while I was taking “Central Time” — the lead single off Pokey LaFarge’s day-old self-titled album — for a test drive. For a short time, it felt like the tremendous gravity of everyday life didn’t apply to me. The song ended, and I went back to coming back to things, but that weightlessness felt so real, and it seems to me that there’s more at work here than just a happy-sounding song.

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Pretty & Nice

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Pretty & Nice

I want to talk to you about value.

(No, this is not a first time home buyers’ seminar, and I’m sorry to say that there’s no free timeshare waiting for you at the end of this post.)

I want to talk to you about value because Golden Rules for Golden People, the fantastic new album from Boston-based mad pop scientists Pretty & Nice, strikes me as one of the most valuable albums I’ve ever heard.

So what makes a band’s work valuable? It is, of course, an intentionally broad question, and you could answer it in a zillion different ways. A song that reminds you of the day your son or daughter was born would have emotional value. (I’m told Aaron Copland’s Billy The Kid was playing on the radio when I popped out, which is a tad bit creepy when you consider that my father’s name was Bill.) That first pressing of Meet The Beatles your parents never let you touch has some serious historical/monetary value, while the EDM you blast to keep yourself awake while driving long stretches at night has a very specific, practical value. We could keep going, but you get the point. Circumstances, time, our needs… all these things turn a piece of music into something more than just notes and words.

That said, Golden Rules has me thinking about a totally different kind of value. Something more objective and less ascribed. Something inherent in the recording itself.

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No BS! Brass Band

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No BS! Brass Band

No day makes me feel luckier to be living in Richmond, VA than Monument 10K day.

I know I wrote something similar this time last year, but I can’t resist trying to put the experience of running in this past Saturday’s event into words.

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The Shouting Matches

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The Shouting Matches

I love analogies, I think in analogies, and there’s one in particular I’ve found to be extraordinarily useful. It has (and hasn’t, if you know what I mean) to do with sand, and the notion that the tighter you try to grip a handful of the stuff, the more the grains run through your fingers. Not the most sophisticated metaphor in the world, but it illustrates quite nicely how, in certain situations, the best results come when we set aside our instinctive need to control the external world through force.

[Waiting to continue until the urge to make an Iraq War comment passes… almost there… OK, let’s move on.]

I’ve bumped into a pair of music-related reminders of the sand-containment axiom lately, and they’ve led me to the conclusion that side projects are wonderful exemplars.

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Mavis Staples

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A while back, maybe six months ago, I spotted an album cover on the wall at Steady Sounds, and the image totally invaded my consciousness:

A head, either disembodied or perched atop a person who’d been buried up to the neck… an afro… dirt… straw… screaming…

Seriously creepy stuff. Not unseeable. I was struck by its brutality, but also by the fact that it seemed mysteriously important, like it was glowing in some barely perceptible way. (Does that ever happen to you? Don’t certain covers just seem to vibrate with significance?) I was intrigued, but I didn’t know anything about it, certainly not enough to justify buying the thing, so I left it there. Looking creepy. Glowing slightly. 

Fast forward to present day, and I’m seriously pissed at myself for not buying Maggot Brain when I had the chance.

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Villagers

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Villagers

I’ve said it before, but it’s been a while, so I’ll say it again… I love listening instructions. Having someone tell you what music to try is great, but even better is being told the how, where and when, as well. That’s just what Villagers frontman Conor O’Brien has done with his latest album, {Awayland}. On the Villagers website, he lists the following instructions…

Maybe try it on headphones first, without interruption. I hope you enjoy.

Truth be told, by the time I saw his note, I was already 3/4 of the way through the album, and I was indeed listening through headphones. This barely qualifies as coincidental, given that new music is almost always debuted this way, for me and, I’d guess, for a lot of other people. But the second part — the “without interruption” corollary — that’s a bit more interesting, because I’d had the very same thought mere moments after I clicked play on NPR’s First Listen of the album. Almost immediately, I felt the need to hunker down for the full-album experience, despite being 30 or so minutes away from reading O’Brien’s instructions. Now that’s a coincidence worth digging our teeth into.

So why’d that happen? Why did I instinctively know that {Awayland} would be a great cover-to-cover read?

[cue Carrie Bradshaw voiceover]

Why would one album be better suited for uninterrupted listening than another?

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Kurt Vile

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Kurt Vile

It’s been years since I last saw Waking Life. Too many. I’m not a big re-watcher of movies, which doesn’t help, but Waking Life is a different animal. More exercise than entertainment, the assemblage of shaky vignettes provides psychological circuit training — a few existential squats here, some metaphysical crunches there — and while it’s yet to produce a crystal-clear, life-changing epiphany, it never fails to make the world seem a little bigger. Less restrictive. Like washing your mental blue jeans in reverse, if that makes any sense at all.

While it’s been ages since I set aside 99 minutes for the Waking Life workout, I’m finding that the 9-minute opener of Kurt Vile’s new album, Wakin On A Pretty Daze, offers a pretty effective proxy.

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Y.N.RichKids

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I’m so excited. At long last, I finally have an excuse to post this song.

It’s been roughly 7 months since “Hot Cheetos And Takis” took the interwebs by storm, and all this time, I’ve been waiting for the right moment to shine my own little light on its wonders. And thanks to Wednesday’s train wreck of a dinner, that time is now.

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