Five discs of Steve Reich works for roughly $40 comes out to $8 per disc. That alone is reason enough to get the "specially-priced" boxed set Phases: A Nonesuch Retrospective.
Sure, you could squabble over what was included or excluded — no Clapping Music? — but Nonesuch had already released a comprehensive set of Reich recordings in 2005. The composer celebrated his 70th birthday in 2006, and the label compiled Phases to commemorate the occasion. It serves more as an introduction to the composer for new listeners, and for the bargain-minded, it’s a real deal.
I’ve admired Reich for years, and I own some of the recordings included in Phases. But I can’t say I’ve explored his works as thoroughly as I would have liked. This set gave me the opportunity to fill in some gaps.
Much ado was made of Harry Connick, Jr. back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He was simultaneously hailed and derided for being the next Frank Sinatra, having scored commercial success with albums of jazz standards.
In the mid-’90s, Connick ditched that bread and butter by releasing a pair of rock albums — She in 1994, Star Turtle in 1996. I’m not much an adherent to the great American songbook, but Connick looked like he was committing career suicide at the time, and I wanted to hear what it sounded like.
A "Harry Connick, Jr. rock album" didn’t turn out to be Pat Boone crooning metal hits or Garth Brooks indulging a rock alter ego. Rather, Connick turned to the music of his youth.
She is a showcase for New Orleans music, that mix of rock and funk emblematic of the town’s party atmosphere. "Between Us" pretty much sold me on the album. A smooth song with a nice beat, "Between Us" gave the sense Connick’s cool voice was absolutely at home.
The list of bands I should be listening to will always be longer than the list of bands I am listening to, and the older I get, the further back in time I’m reaching on the former list.
The Replacements is a band I should have been listening to when I was growing up. At one point, I owned the final two Mats albums on cassette — Don’t Tell a Soul and All Shook Down (although All Shook Down was pretty much a Paul Westerberg solo album credited to the Replacements.) I liked Don’t Tell a Soul but not enough to turn me into a Replacements fan.
I noticed in the last six months, the opening riff of "Talent Show" became an earworm — I’d hum it or hear it in my mind out of the blue. On a buying spree that netted both R.E.M.’s And I Feel Fine and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ The Very Best, I threw in Don’t You Know Who I Think I Was? with them. It’s both shocking and exciting to discover something on which I missed out.
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.
When I was growing up, my siblings and I had this competitive rule — if one of us bought an album by a particular artist, that person had dibs on the rest of that artist’s catalog.
That meant my oldest sister had a lock on Andy Gibb, my brother put dibs on Sting and Madonna, my other sister had first crack on stuff I don’t even remember, and I was left to my own devices with Duran Duran and Eurythmics.
By the time we entered college, that exclusivity rule started to loosen up. Our individual tastes solidified to the point where our tastes would rarely even interact. There were, however, a few instances of exchange.
My sister took to Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream, whereas I thought (and still think) the album sucks. My brother absolutely took to Sinéad O’Connor’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, whereas I thought it wasn’t as good as The Lion and the Cobra.
On a recent nostalgia binge at the music store, I bought a bunch of CDs I previously owned in other formats. Some of those titles are artifacts from that long-ago lockout. In other words, albums I probably wouldn’t have listened to because my siblings were "into them".
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.
Back in January, I was presented a gift certificate for turning around an impossible deadline. Back in December, I failed to make use of my eMusic quota. Back in November, I recorded an album for NaSoAlMo that got me listening to a lot of minimalism.
All these events culminated into a 54-hour playlist currently loaded into my Winamp player.
A few other events got me on an acquisition frenzy. The Advocate did not reprise its Top Indie Music Artists of the Year list for 2006, so I have to do my own research. (Ugh. Work.) And Jpopsuki has had some really great stuff loaded up in the last few weeks. Huge offerings of Hamada Mari, TOE and Onitsuka Chihiro? Coolness!
So I haven’t really been starving much where the listening is concerned.
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.