My friend Omar mentioned Tracy Chapman’s self-titled debut album and encouraged folks to "[t]ake it out and pop it in the CD player. It’s still as good as you remember."
What I remember was using the album as a means to get through a summer reading assignment back in high school. The fall semester of my senior year was going to start, and I didn’t know I was supposed to be reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath beforehand. So I sped-read through it with Chapman playing in the background.
Yup. It was the perfect soundtrack.
Chapman was a radio staple in 1988, but I get the impression the Honolulu DJs abiding by the corporate playlists would have preferred to spin something else. My family didn’t really warm up to Chapman’s husky, trembling voice either. I bought the album on vinyl. When CDs finally took over, I opted not to upgrade.
Then Omar had to say the album was as good as I remember, and it made me realize that, in reality, I did like the album. Not as much as 10,000 Maniacs’ In My Tribe or the Sugarcubes’ Life’s Too Good, but I didn’t dislike it either. (Funny how all three of those albums are on Elektra.)
So in January, I bought a used copy of Tracy Chapman, the album, to see if my teenager ears had failed me. It was like listening with brand new ears.
This review was supposed to be about Patty Griffin’s most recent album, Children Running Through. I’m familiar with Patty Griffin, master of the slow-burning, introspective folk song, but I hadn’t yet heard Patty Griffin, the rocker.
Then I got Children Running Through on eMusic, and I was struck by the more uptempo songs on the album. She sounds really good letting loose. Flaming Red has the reputation of being Griffin’s rock album, so I gave it a shot. I like it better. In fact, it just might be my favorite of hers.
Griffin has a big, powerful voice. Her minimal debut, Living with Ghosts, felt jarring because that voice tended to overwhelm the sparse environs of the music. As spellbinding as her quieter works are, the big rock gestures of Flaming Red make for a more suitable setting.
"I came to find out none of that shit was even true," she spits out on "Change", with a lot of fire behind the expletive. Even more sobering is her dramatic use of the word "faggot" on "Tony", a more literate, less cryptic version of Pearl Jam’s "Jeremy". In Griffin’s hands, these loaded words hammer the point of the story.
"Hey Tony, what’s so good about dying?" she sings. "Think I might do a little dying today/Looked in the mirror saw that little faggot staring back at him/Took out a gun and blew himself away." I choked when heard that line.
In April, I hit the half-way mark between 30 and 40. One thing I like about getting to this age is how less seriously I take things.
When I was 18, I thought Julee Cruise’s Floating Into the Night was a moving, haunting listening experience. When I was 28, I thought the album was just part of a silly phase, where I tried to be precocious about "getting" the whole David Lynch thing. (Twin Peaks, anyone?)
So I bought the album on cassette. Then I bought the album on CD. Then I sold the cassette because I don’t listen to cassettes anymore. Then I sold the CD because I was laid off and needed cash. Now I own the CD again, and I’m enjoying it all over.
Perhaps it’s nostalgia. More likely, it’s an appreciation of the judgment I had when I was younger.
Because Floating Into the Night is a haunting album, and it did move me. And that isn’t anything I should dismiss.
If Chris Butler isn’t the most literate songwriter of our time, he certainly is the wittiest. Stephin Merritt’s deadpan sounds dowdy next to Butler’s whimsy.
And Butler is nothing if not brave.
He set the record for the longest pop song in the world — according to the Guiness Book — for "The Devil Glitch", a 69-minute tune with an impossibly long chorus. His 1997 album, I Feel a Bit Normal Today, contained songs bordering on theatrical. But his most daring achievement to date is The Museum of Me, Vol 1, an album recorded entirely on vintage consumer recorders.
We’re not talking White Stripes studio revivalism here — we’re talking about finding the early century equivalents to the Walkman which taped Michelle Shocked at the Kerville Folk Festival in the mid-1980s. We’re talking wire recorders and aluminum cylinders.
In an interview with Tape Op magazine, Butler sought these devices out not because they sounded good but because they sounded bad. The moment he recorded a song on an old cylinder, he created instantly vintage music — something that sounded old and scratchy and from another time.
Patty Griffin’s 1,000 Kisses was one of my favorite albums of 2002, and I couldn’t quite warm up to 2004’s Impossible Dream. So I’m no stranger to her music.
Living with Ghosts is one of those albums that seemed to be referred to in hushed reverence, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I wasn’t expecting a demo tape.
Had I done my research, I probably would have found out. Griffin recorded her debut album for A&M Records with producer Nile Rodgers. The label didn’t like it, and Griffin wasn’t comfortable with it either. So instead, she re-recorded the vocals on her demo and released it as her debut.
I intentionally ignored Supercar’s albums before Futurama.
Futurama was such a watershed listening experience, I didn’t want to tempt fate by exploring the work that led up to it. Besides, it would be a mighty expensive endeavor to do so.
It wasn’t until the band broke up in 2005 that I felt safe to start exploring the music that came before Futurama. I could live with the expense of a back catalog so long as there were no future catalog to compound it.
Ever listened to an album by a band that was so good, you bought other albums by the same band, thinking they would all be good? Wasn’t it disappointing when they weren’t?
That was the fear which fueled my reluctance to explore the string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich.
Kronos Quartet introduced me to Shostakovich’s Quartet for Strings, No. 8, and it rocketed to the top of my favorite classical music works on first listen. (Kronos’ Black Angels is an essential album for anyone who wishes to explore the repertoire of the 20th century.)
I loved the Eighth Quartet so much, I didn’t want to spoil it by potentially being disappointed by the other 14 quartets in his catalog. Of course, I would turn out to be wrong.
I call any disc that contains Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas Nos. 14, 23 and 8 as a "piano student album".
Those three sonatas — the "Moonlight" (No. 14), the "Appassionata" (No. 23) and the "Pathetique" (No. 8) — are standard repertoire for any degree-seeking music major concentrating on piano performance. And more than likely, you’ll find all three pieces offered for budget prices by every major classical label.
I bought the Vladimir Ashkenazy disc because it was on sale.
I caught Eluvium at SXSW 2005 when I showed up early for mono’s set at the Temporary Residence showcase.
Sole member Matt Cooper alternately performed on electric guitar and piano. Although the long, fuzzy pieces he created with his pedal effects screamed "post-rock", it was his piano pieces that caught my attention.
They aren’t anything complex or technically challenging, and they’re really only a few steps above Enya in terms of harmonic adventurousness.
Back when I worked at a record store, the news of an artist’s death made my coworkers and me speculate on how much a spike we’d get in selling that artist’s CDs.
György Ligeti passed away on June 12, 2006, and I contributed to that spike a few days afterward. I asked the classical expert at the store where I worked for some recommendations, and I ended up with a Sony disc of string quartets and duets and a disc of piano etudes.
With 20th Century classical music, it’s far too easy for living composers to wank in the guise of dissonance. I listened to a lot of modern classical music back in college, and as high-minded as that art world can be, it’s no more immune to mediocrity than rock music.