Flashback to the Oughts: 2002

Music often connects to experience in strange, sometimes unpredictable ways, and its capacity to become vividly associated with times and places is, I feel, a given. In this blog, I have recently referred to these flashes of recollection that arise when listening to music from one’s past as “memory episodes,” but I don’t know that I have ever clearly defined what that means or why I think that it happens. As an organizing principle of this series in particular, it seems like that is an oversight worth addressing.

One could argue that recorded music is a phenomenological abomination. A recording tears music from the musical act and flattens it, which results in only half of a full experience for the listener. I theorize that when we listen to recorded music, the untethered aspects of the musical experience latch on to the things we are feeling, thinking, and doing as we listen. Later, if this tethering is strong enough, listening to music can trigger recollections through this association.  As I reconstructed 2002 for this best-of list, my memory episodes were somewhat painful to travel through.



This was the year that I experienced the end of a marriage and desperately sought out a new path for myself.  As a result, my recollections are a jumbled mess of crushing sorrow, indulgent escapism, and, later in the year, self-discovery tinted with desperation.

10. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven: My introduction to the problematic sub-genre “post-rock” also served as the soundtrack to my inner struggle with a friend’s suicide. Its melancholic mood swings still bring back sadness and rage.

9. Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head: Before they became pigeonholed as the darlings of the new adult contemporary, Coldplay resonated with me as a reinterpretation of what was once good about U2. A Rush of Blood to the Head is brimming over with well-crafted melodies and arrangements.

8. Oysterhead - The Grand Pecking Order: Although the material on the album felt a little slipshot at times, listening to Stewart Copeland lock into a groove with Les Claypool made the whole thing worthwhile. Thanks to the influence to Trey Anastasio, The Grand Pecking Order also marks the beginnings of Claypool’s interest in the jam band format, and laid the seeds for his current work with Sean Lennon.

7. Brendan Benson - Lapalco: Benson followed up his criminally good One Mississippi debut with the merely excellent Lapalco. Jason Falkner’s co-writing presence firmly adjoins Benson to the Jellyfish Family Tree.

6. Glass Hammer - Chronometree: A self-aware and somewhat satirical concept album about the pitfalls of reading too much into concept albums. Glass Hammer has made many recordings since this cautionary tale, but it remains my favorite.

5. Happy the Man - Crafty Hands: For a time this year, I was so emotionally devastated that I could barely listen to music with lyrics without twisting their meaning to suit my addiction to self-pity. This mostly instrumental release was in rotation a lot during that time, and actually served to later inspire me to play the Stick, even though there is no Stick on the album.

4. Rush - Vapor Trails: After a significant hiatus, Rush returned to the studio and produced Vapor Trails, which was a great improvement upon its predecessor Test for Echo. Although the album was slightly uneven as a whole, the band’s playing and concept was stronger than ever.

3. Spock’s Beard - Snow: Neal Morse’s final album with Spock’s Beard ended up being a career-defining rock opera with no small amount of religious overtones. Like any rock opera, Snow has its share of filler, but by and large the material is so amazing and is executed with such exhilarating chemistry that this shortcoming can be easily overlooked.

2. Peter Gabriel - Up: In retrospect, there is the nagging sense that parts of this album seemed geared toward radio airplay. These moments are fleeting, however, revealing Gabriel to be at a creative zenith in terms of orchestration and arrangement.

Album of the Year 2002

1. Porcupine Tree - In Absentia: After the relatively polished songwriting approach that Porcupine Tree had been operating with since Stupid Dream, In Absentia represented the first step in a heavier direction. While the guitar riffs were thicker than before, there was no loss of the nuanced melody and texture that had come to be the band’s trademark.

The Year in Rush Part 9: New Uses of Space and Time

As Rush’s timeline lengthened, the distance between their releases got wider and wider, but it wasn’t filled with empty space. In the six years leading up to Vapor Trails, Peart worked through an emotional burden that could have ended his career, an ordeal that is best recounted in his own words. My world radically changed in this gap, as well. The band I was playing in broke up, I graduated, began teaching in public schools, got married, and was subsequently divorced. I was a much different person by the time Vapor Trails was released in 2002. When it was announced, I was, of course, elated, but also skeptical. I had six years to get used to the idea that Rush was done, and after leaving on what I saw as a particularly low note in their catalog, I was uneasy about their return.

Vapor Trails, however, ended up being a compelling entry into Rush's canon. It is, admittedly, a casualty in the “loudness war” that producers were waging in the 00s, but that doesn’t hide the strengths of its distinctive compositional approach. Rush was focusing on creating a singular, synergistic sound to support Peart’s lyricsm, which now carried a noticeable emotionalism borne of experience. There were few guitar solos and noticeably dense chordal bass work from Lee. Traditional structures like choruses and verses were downplayed in favor of a more egalitarian flow from one musical idea to the next.

Most often, this approach worked. The overwhelming majority of the songs on Vapor Trails are gripping, and in some cases, the album’s cacophonous production enhances the vital drive that is a key element to Rush’s finest work. I find the explosive stabs of noise in Peaceable Kingdom to be particularly electrifying.


When they began their support tour, however, the issues of production melted away, and the band’s characteristic energy emerged. When I saw them on this tour, and the ones that followed throughout the decade, I felt that not only were they playing better than ever, but the quality of their sound continued to improve exponentially, as if stage sound had finally caught up to what they had been doing in the studio since the late 70s.

Although many of my memory episodes connected to previous Rush albums were of the people that I shared the actual listening experience with, their post – 2000 material brings contemporaneous experiences as a music teacher to the surface. Vapor Trails, for example, will always remind me of moving percussion equipment around the campus of Texas State University during All-State Solo and Ensemble contest in 2002. Additionally, the cultural impact of Guitar Hero had a positive influence on Rush’s relevance, and I sometimes engaged in critical discussions with students about Rush’s newer releases. In 2006 I went so far as to assign one of my jazz band drummers, who was musically studious but academically ineligible, to write a written review of Peart’s playing on Snakes and Arrows.

He pointed out, quite correctly, that overall, Snakes and Arrows has a noticeably relaxed feel. More subtly, however, the prominent appearance of the "Hemispheres chord" in the introduction of Far Cry indicates an intentional move to evoke nostalgia for the devoted fan, a strategy that extends into the song’s attendant video, as well as the album as a whole.



Although in some ways, Rush was self-sampling on Snakes and Arrows, their relaxed and confident playing is also reified in the album’s formatting. It is a unique mélange of songs and freestanding instrumentals that is unprecedented in the band’s catalog. Some of these tracks are quite short. In the distant past, these tidbits would have found their way into Rush’s extended work as connective tissue between larger ideas, but on Snakes and Arrows they find a life of their own as standalone compositions. 



As Rush and I grew up together, I often wondered how they would be able to maintain their intensity in a believable way as the years passed. Snakes and Arrows is a perfect example of what a mature version of the band I loved since I was a teen would sound like. More than any other album it is a culmination of everything Rush had done up to the point of its release. Its intensity is tempered by an unperturbed self-assurance that kept my passion for the band alive as a devout, if cautious, fan.

This fervor makes tomorrow a particularly exciting day, then, because Rush’s newest album, Clockwork Angels, is going to be released. There is the opportunity to hear nearly this entire album online, but I have tried to keep myself in the dark as much as possible to preserve the experience. Of course, my willpower has cracked a couple of times, and what I have heard has only whetted my appetite. The final entry for this project will be a review of Clockwork Angels, and I hope that I can be patient enough with myself to reserve judgment until the excitement of new Rush material dies down – just a little.

The previous post in the series is right here.
The next, and last (?) post is here.

Wilco and the Magician's Circle: Reminiscing on the 4th

On July 4^th I was wearing a shirt that, on any other day, would have been ridiculous.  The left half of my chest was covered with a blue, star-spangled field, while the rest of the shirt had vertical white and red stripes.  Back in the day, when I played live, I used to wear this as a stage shirt.  These days, it only comes out on July 4^th, and I can always count on getting salutes from passers-by when I have it on - or at least incredulous glances.  We were coming to join my friend and his wife (aka the Best Man and the Minister) at the pool, and this collared hyperpatriotic nightmare threw them off so much that they did not recognize me at first.  I assured them that I wore the shirt satirically.

I happily shed it in the heat, though, and my wife and I joined them in the water for a relaxing afternoon of catching up.  Our conversations wandered through dubstep, chaos theory, moving, childbirth, the structure of Indian ragas, dojo politics, and gossip both meaningful and meaningless.

There was a jam box tuned in to some satellite radio station providing the ambient accompaniment to the flow of our conversation.  It would occasionally spit out a tune that was familiar to someone, but a particular song pulled me out of the conversation, not just because it’s a good song, but because of the associations it brought back. 

It stopped me in my tracks because I had not heard or even thought of Wilco in many years.  Heavy Metal Drummer is from an album called Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which was a critically acclaimed and generally trendy album to be into in 2002.  I was living in Denton at the time and hanging with a very close circle of friends, many of whom are still very dear to me. 

One guy, the Magician, I unfortunately don’t see so much anymore.  He moved on for job opportunities, but when we were close he and his wife used to have the whole crew over for dinner and a movie.  I particularly remember laughing uncontrollably at reruns of Mr. Show when it was released on DVD.  The Magician was an avid fan of Wilco, and, despite my uncontrollable slide back into obscure progressive rock, he convinced me to check out Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.  I borrowed his CD, burned it, AND made a tape copy (yes, tape!).  I promised myself that I would one day purchase a full CD copy. 

Eventually, I got a new car with a CD player and my tapes became obsolete.  I finally threw them out, but I did take the time to put Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on my Amazon list.  It has been sitting there since 2005. 

My 4^th of July poolside encounter brought back that time so viscerally that I immediately came home and finally made good on my promise.  Coming back to the whole album after almost a decade, I can say that it has held up exceptionally well, and lives up to its hype.  Ultimately, Wilco’s songs are melodic and tuneful, but also incredibly imaginative and subtly complex.  There is something special and possibly classic about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and it would be a shame if it were sort of lost in the shuffle during the music industry’s struggle to reorganize in the early 00s.

Several of the people that we were sharing our 4^th of July with were also in Magician’s circle back in the day.  I mentioned how Heavy Metal Drummer reminded me of that time, and we all, as a group, stared blankly off into the horizon for the briefest of moments.  If anyone was watching us, they probably would have missed it, but it was there.  It was almost as if, for a split second, we were all going back and reliving it.  In actuality, though, I think that we were having a reverent moment of silence for a set of dearly cherished experiences that had long since passed.