2022 Album Roundup Series: September, Triptychs, and Ecosystems

Some music I was listening to during the Solstice of 2022, including music from:

The Lickerish Quartet - Fables From Fearless Heights (2022) Alex Anthony Faide - Particles of the Infinite (2022) Nilufer Yanya - Painless (2022) Ibibio Sound Machine - Electricity (2021) Lemon Demon - Spirit Phone (2016) Loris S. Sarid - Seabed-Sunbath (2022)

Album Overview Spring 2020: Quarantunes - The Sequel!

Brief impressions on the albums that have been in rotation recently, including:

The Merrymakers – Bubblegun (1998)

Seabuckthorn – Through a Vulnerable Occur (2020)

Flotation Toy Warning – Bluffer’s Guide to the Flight Deck (2003)

LAG I RUN – Vagrant Sleepers (2019)

Tears for Fears – The Seeds of Love (1989)

Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020)

Relevant Links

The Jellyfish post dedicated to Andy Sturmer

Older text post on Seabuckthorn’s Turns

And last year’s post on Crossing

The Jellyfish Family Tree Part 10: Falkner and Johnston at the Mohawk

A anecdote that looks at Jason Falkner’s I’m OK, You’re OK (2007) and Daniel Johnson’s Is And Always Was (2019) along the way.

Relevant links:

Part 2: Spilt Milk at Lunch

Part 4: Falkner Knocks Me Down

Part 7: Falkner’s Mercurial Fortunes

The Jellyfish Family Tree Part 9: Puffy Ami Yumi, Where's Andy?

After several years, I have picked up this series where I left off, with some speculation of the role that Andy Sturmer played on Puffy Ami Yumi's Nice (2003).




To go back for a refresher, the first post is here.
The previous entry is here.

Each post is linked to the next.

2015 Honorable Mentions: The Cold Civil War

I’d love to be able to say that it was a great year, but in retrospect, there were some troubling developments. That’s not to say that is was a bad year for me personally, but it feels like society at large is taking a dark, nihilistic turn. For example, it seems like the American flag flies at half-mast so often that the general public doesn’t even consider why. Our society is riddled with instances of meaningless deaths, and this will not change by the installation of any law or policy. It will only change if we, as individuals, change.

For my part, I rarely post anything political, but looking back at 2015 gives me the sense that this philosophy might be misguided. It’s not that I am without political opinions, or that I think that the opinions of the individual are without meaning. I just don’t like to bare my breast to the knife of trollers. I find them troubling, and I doubt that my viewpoint will change minds fossilized by fear and ignorance.

And maybe it won’t, but we have unlimited channels to raise awareness. Leaving these resources untapped seems irresponsible, so I will take this opportunity to plead the case that more guns will not result in less deaths.  It just doesn’t make logical sense. Guns kill. That is their purpose.

That is not to say that I am against people owning guns. I am against the idea that so many people seem to genuinely think that they need them.  I don’t think, however, that it is the government’s place to confiscate guns, even though it seems to be the only solution to disarming this “Cold Civil War” that the populace seems to think is realistic. It doesn’t put any belief in the individual’s right to make morally correct choices and surround themselves with objects that are truly beneficial to mankind’s progress. Instead, attachment to guns becomes more deeply entrenched as people feel that their right to keep them is taken away.

So I think that in 2016, there should be a movement towards the voluntary surrender of firearms in honor of all the innocent people who have been shot and killed in 2015. The fact that this sounds an unreasonable or impossible request is an indicator of just how big the problem is.  At the very least people should consider that the purpose of a firearm is to kill, not to serve as status symbol. It is my fear that, as open carry policies start today in Texas, this latter standard will be the case. Individual businesses can opt out of this policy, however, and I will actively seek out these businesses in 2016 so that my daughters don’t have to feel like they are being raised in a military state. Despite what the fearful may think, we are not (at least not yet).

My apologies. Although I have considered writing a post on this subject for almost three years, this blog is about music and the topic has not coincided with my listening in any believable way. As the year ends, though, and we look back on the last few albums in 2015 that were in the running for the top twenty, it seems as appropriate as it ever will.

In general, these last five albums were ones that I really wanted to get into the “Best of 2015” category, but just did not have the staying power of the others.  Still great, and worth investigation if they grab your ear.

Beck – Morning Phase: With half of the original Jellyfish lineup serving as backup musicians and some of Beck’s strongest work, excluding this Grammy winner was a tough call. It was just barely nudged out



Deafheaven – New Bermuda: There’s two ways this album could have gone: more of the same that Sunbather had to offer or something totally different. They took the latter route, and although it has all of the emotional impact of its predecessor, it did not distinguish itself as much as I would have liked.



iamthemorning – Belighted: Gleb Kolyadin’s electrifying piano performances drew me to purchase Belighted early this year, and it is undoubtedly one of the more original and satisfying prog releases I have heared in a while. iamthemorning is, however, a duo and the album has some studio musicians filling out the arrangements, and I would like to have heard a more developed group dynamic on the whole.



Tal National - Zoy Zoy: A fantastic, current African pop album, a genre that unfortunately has to contend with the unreasonably long shadow of Fela in my collection. Despite being an adequate listen, Zoy Zoy was not distinctive enough to withstand months of vetting to make the year end list.



Tame Impala – Currents: I advocated strongly for Tame Impala’s previous release, and I do like Currents. It has a perceptible turn away from adventurousness towards commercialism, however, that held me at a distance.

The Jellyfish Family Tree Part 8: Manning's Imagination

After playing the role of sideman and producer for nearly a decade, Jellyfish keyboardist and songwriter Roger Joseph Manning released his solo debut in 2006. This album, The Land of Pure Imagination, showed up in the mailbox early in 2008, probably the result of a somewhat irresponsible Amazon indulgence. Of any of the releases by Jellyfish members after their breakup, it had the clearest relationship to the bittersweet, almost tragic nostalgia that that the band's best work evoked. There were several songs that displayed his significant contribution to the Jellyfish formula, and these were real highlights for me back when I first got The Land of Pure Imagination.

As a whole, though, I viewed the album as inconsistent, a stance that has changed since reviewing it for this project.  The Land of Pure Imagination is perhaps better described as "varied." In the time since Spilt Milk, Manning was involved in countless projects. The Land of Pure Imagination seems to be his intentional effort to coalesce these explorations into an identifiable style. While I'm not sure if these stylistic variances coalesce into a singular style, they certainly hang together as representative facets of Manning's broadly experienced musical identity.

Clearly, The Land of Pure Imagination was the closest that a Jellyfish fan could get to an album of new material, but it was not really a substitute. Manning clearly played an important creative role in Jellyfish’s songwriting and distinctive vocal arrangements, and as a solo artist, his songcraft overflows with similar creativity and conviction.  As a lead singer, however, his angelic voice didn't deliver Andy Sturmer's appealing, subtle angst, but it did imbue his ruminations on lost innocence with tear-jerking credibility.



Because my past recollections of The Land of Pure Imagination were hampered by a misguided concept, my impressions of the album from 2008 were somewhat vague. A conclusion that I still stand by, however, is that if Jason Falkner was the George Harrison of Jellyfish, then Roger Joseph Manning played the role of Paul McCartney. McCartney's solo work, in comparison to the Beatles, was always more saccharine without Lennon's confrontational wit as a counterbalance. The Land of Pure Imagination is similarly beautiful, but in comparison to Jellyfish, well, it's just not quite the same.



It is, however, an amazing, maybe even magical album, and my recent experiences as I have revisited it have largely overwritten the vague flashes of the Dallas 635 turnpike that dance around in my head when it is playing.  As a result, I am placing it in consideration for the "best of 2013" year-end list.  I have also been inspired to put its follow-up, 2009's Catnip Dynamite, on my wish list.  Only one can qualify, though, so we'll see which is the last to stand.

To check out the previous post in this series, go here.
Quite a bit of time passed before I got to the next post, but here it is.

The Jellyfish Family Tree Part 7: Falkner's Mercurial Fortunes

Jason Falkner’s solo debut solidified him as a power pop icon in my book, and his relatively marginal status turned me into a staunch advocate of his work. It’s worth mentioning here that Falkner was also a contributing member of The Grays, and it was around this point in the timeline that I obtained my first copy of their singular release Ro Sham Bo. Creating a family tree based on the comings and goings of this power pop supergroup would also have some interesting results, but it would prohibitively widen the scope of this particular project. I have already dedicated a post to Ro Sham Bo that I am still quite fond of, but I think it would be irresponsible not to directly mention The Grays in any discussion related to Jellyfish and Jason Falkner. .



Jason Falkner released his second solo album Can You Still Feel? in 1999.  The album boasted a step forward in terms of production, undoubtedly due to the presence of Nigel Godrich. His production made the entire experience far more textured than its predecessor, perhaps overly so. I think that the effort to polish these tracks buffed out some of the grit that made Presents Author Unknown so engaging. In any case,  Can You Still Feel? still retained the vast array of musical nuance that is Falkner’s stylistic trademark. At times, the wider production expands his work to nearly symphonic proportions.



As was the unfortunate trend among Jellyfish-related projects, Can You Still Feel? did not get much push from the record company.  Like many artists in the late 90s, Falkner lost his recording contract due to weak sales which, like many artists, were the result of poor record label promotion - the most common and infuriating catch-22 from that era!  Probably discouraged (speculation, of course), he faded a bit into the background as a solo artist.  The astute, however, could catch his name popping up on various projects as a producer and performer.  Despite taking a step back from the spotlight, he did have a short-form solo release in 2004 in the form of the Bliss Descending EP.

At that point, I don’t think that Falkner was trying too hard to break into a larger audience.  Bliss Descending was quietly released to those that were paying attention. Where Can You Still Feel? was Falkner’s most overt attempt at a big studio record, Bliss Descending was quite its opposite. The songs were not lacking in their usual level of detail, but Falkner’s performances were more casual than they had been, and the production was somewhat informal. This laid-back, relaxed approach opened up an introspective side of Falkner that actually served Bliss Descending rather well.


The woes and disappointments of being an immensely talented and hardworking musician during the late 90s and early 00's were undoubtedly very frustrating for Falkner.  This was a transitory time in popular music, when record company dominance was slowly giving way to the more recent independent artist models that we see today.  For Falkner, the future probably seemed very unclear, if not bleak.  He would not release another full-length album for awhile, and his strategy for keeping himself afloat in this chaotic period would make it even longer for that record to become readily available in the States. I tried to stay aware of Falkner's career, but there was activity amongst other branches in the Jellyfish family tree that would garner my attention.

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The Jellyfish Family Tree Part 6: Cookin' With Beck and Mraz

Because Brendan Benson was never actually in Jellyfish, I set a somewhat daunting precedent when I included him in this series. Jellyfish’s members have contributed their talents to numerous projects, and to take them all into account might stretch this project on almost indefinitely. Although I have often used the presence of Jellyfish members to guide my listening choices, there are many albums that they have co-written or played on that I simply have not heard.  There are, however, some that have become favorites.

In the late 90s, Jellyfish and Imperial Drag keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning was a studio contributor on Beck’s Mutations, and was also a member of the performing band during the tour to support the album. Mutations is the release in which Beck revealed just what a chameleon he is. For artists like David Bowie, Madonna, and Prince, reinvention was a matter of course. Beck’s identity shifts were never quite as dramatic, but they were no less jarring. After the ramshackle hobo pop of Mellow Gold and the genre-bending whiteboy funk of Odelay, Mutations, a relatively atmospheric and somber offering, was a bit of a surprise.


When Mutations came out, I was already a fan of Beck. When I discovered that Manning made significant keyboard contributions to the album, however, it reframed the entire listening experience. By this point in his career, his experiments with The Moog Cookbook, a series of tongue-in-cheek parodies of 70s keyboard albums, solidified his status as the go-to torchbearer for classic keyboard sounds. Mutations has a somewhat retro feel to it, and undoubtedly Manning contributed greatly to this sound.

I did not follow the Moog Cookbook, but I did get into one of Manning's analog keyboard experiments.  In 2000, he, along with collaborator Brian Reitzell, released Logan's Sanctuary, a soundtrack to an imaginary sequel to the 1976 film Logan's Run.  I was particularly interested in this release because it featured a couple of collaborations with Jason Falkner that were pretty good, but overall its stylistic relationship with Jellyfish was tenuous at best.  



Despite his experimental side, Manning was always able to keep one foot in the pop realm.  Several years later, I became a fan of Jason Mraz's sophomore release, Mr. A-Z.  This album came to have special meaning during the Carrollton Period.  It will one day deserve its own posting, but I have to mention it here because I remember quite clearly being inexorably drawn to the funky analog bass sounds in Geek in the Pink.  I was hardly surprised when the liner notes revealed that Manning contributed keyboards to the track.



Again, Manning's resume has done nothing but grow rhizomatically since his days in Jellyfish - far beyond my ability to keep up.  Although he has played keyboards on numerous albums with a variety of artists, he remains a transparent contributor that, paradoxically, always lets his unique character shine through.  Undoubtedly, there will be fans who implore me to include their overlooked favorites, and I hope they will. Most likely, these suggestions will make their way into rotation in the near future.

To review the previous post in this series, hit me up here.
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The Jellyfish Family Tree Part 5: A Flashback for Benson

I posted last year about my history with Brendan Benson’s catalog, but I left out a tidbit of information that only now, within the context of this Jellyfish project, gains relevance. It is true that I discovered his debut quite accidentally and purchased it sight on scene, but here's the "LOST" flashback: When I cracked it open and began checking out the liner notes, I was stunned to find that several of the songs were co-written with Jason Falkner.  By 1997, Presents Author Unknown had already earned Falkner a spot in my all-time greats list, and listening to One Mississippi with an ear for his influence undoubtedly contributed to my adoration of that album. Benson became another of my power pop favorites, and I have loyally followed him ever since.



As far as continuity, that criminally underviewed post on Benson would probably make more sense as the next entry in this Jellyfish-related series, but I'm addressing his most recent release in its stead.  In truth, it’s been awhile since Falkner’s name has appeared in Benson’s liner notes, and his most recent release What Kind of World does bear Falkner’s influence, but not so much his direct input. I still hear its traces floating around in Benson’s songcraft, but the album’s darker setting evokes Benson’s interactions with Jack White more readily than Falkner’s vivacious energy. Regardless, Benson does have ties to Jellyfish through Falkner, and as such, deserves a dedicated branch on the their Family Tree.

Virtually every release from Benson since One Mississippi has been immediately rock-solid for me, but my experience with What Kind of World has been a bit different. Although it exhibits the same great songwriting and slick wordplay found on all of Benson’s releases, its relatively somber approach was a bit perplexing, and not just initially. It was a while before I became comfortable letting go of the carefree aesthetic of his past work. Certainly, the video for Pretty Baby reveals a very dark, and somewhat disturbing, interpretation of the song’s lyrics that did not fit with my preconceptions of Benson’s work.



Still, I never quite closed the door on What Kind of World.  It kept finding its way back into the player, and I began to notice traces of Benson's freewheeling past in several songs - instances that were somehow eclipsed by the album’s more solemn moments. It took a little adjustment to smooth over these extremes. As always, however, Benson proves to be quite adept at infusing each of his albums with a definitive, unifying character.  The disposition of that character is a bit more moody on What Kind of World, but it is still defined enough to bring the album together as a singular experience.



Because it follows My Old, Familiar Friend, which might be my favorite album from Benson to date, What Kind of World has a lot to live up to. In the end, however, like all of Benson’s releases, it is a phenomenal entry into the power pop canon.  It is also a very recent manifestation of the long-term influence that Jellyfish continues to have in that genre, as well as my own listening interests.

The previous post in the Jellyfish Family Tree is here.
To skip to the next one, you have but to click here.

The Jellyfish Family Tree Part 4: Falkner Knocks Me Down

Although the sign on my door said “Assistant Band Director,” I was taking an indulgent moment to cling to my past career as a rock star, and for that fleeting moment, I was feeling pretty confident. The refrain from Radiohead’s Street Spirit (Fade Out) was dying away in the speakers, and I had nailed it on piano by ear in the first run-though. I was actually quite impressed with the elegant simplicity of the song and, emboldened, I put in another favorite: Follow Me from Jason Falkner’s 1996 release Presents Author Unknown. As seemingly simple and catchy as the song was, I thought that I might have similar success.  I was dead wrong.



Within the first twenty seconds, Falkner left me and my remedial harmonic piano vocabulary in the dust. I fumbled helplessly as it fiendishly twisted and turned through inversions and secondary dominants, and I simply could not keep up. By the song’s end, I wasn't even convinced I knew what key it was in, and what little confidence Radiohead had granted me had been shattered.

Falkner came to my attention on the suggestion of my friend Paul, the drummer for The Days, when I was playing with Fletcher.  I was not teaching regularly until after my stint as a semi-professional musician had ended, though, so I must have had  the album for quite awhile before this episode made me realize just how sophisticated it was. It ended up becoming an album that easily rivals Jellyfish’s original releases in terms of my esteem.



After this humbling piano encounter, I decided that I needed to examine the album further on a more familiar instrument, so I began to run through its tracklist on bass. This still took a little bit of note-taking. I began to realize that, despite being quite accessible, all of Falkner’s songs simmer with vast nuance just below the surface. Additionally, like on almost all of his solo work, Falkner plays virtually every instrument on Presents Author Unknown. The dedicated listener can find dozens and dozens of incredible compositional twists and masterful performances littered across the album’s short span.



There were lots of rumors in the Jellyfish fan base as to the details of Falkner’s split from Jellyfish, but they all seem to agree that, despite contributing an irreplaceable guitar voice to the group, he was an underutilized talent. In retrospect, I don't know that there was a good solution for incorporating him into the band. With a little imagination, I could imagine a couple of songs from Presents Author Unknown reinterpreted within the strict structures of Jellyfish’s identity, but overall, Falkner’s work has too much personality on its own to fit into Jellyfish’s retro-pop mission statement. Listening to Presents Author Unknown, it’s quite obvious to me that that he was that band’s George Harrison: a sparkling, innovative songwriter in his own right that simply did not have the space to shine between the interpersonal pressure of his bandmates.

Like many of these albums on the Jellyfish Family Tree, I have not listened to Presents Author Unknown in several years, and its exuberant energy and impossibly sophisticated songcraft still blows me away.  It is a criminally underrated power pop masterpiece that I would gladly put on my short list of desert island albums.

To go to the previous post in the project, click here
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The Jellyfish Family Tree Part 3: Getting Into Imperial Drag

Jellyfish deliberately used the familiar melodic and harmonic conventions of yesteryear as a nostalgic vehicle for expressive musicianship. That band cratered under the weight of its own talent, but a few years later, keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr. and touring guitarist Eric Dover reconvened under the name Imperial Drag. Although this project was stylistically different from Jellyfish, it operated under a similarly constructed identity. Instead of recalling The Beatles and other late 60s/early 70s pop groups, however, Imperial Drag’s image scaffolded on the conventions of T. Rex and glam rock.

I was not aware at all of Imperial Drag’s relationship to Jellyfish, at least not at first. Sometimes an album’s artwork catches my attention, and their debut, with its shiny foil star and rainbow bolt, jumped off at me from a record store wall display. The back cover was no less attention-grabbing, as it showed two teenage girls with imaginary Imperial Drag fan club schwag all over their room, fondling their vinyl copy of the album. In the late 90s vinyl was considered to be completely dead, so in the context of the Imperial Drag’s cultural climate, this reference carried quite a bit of weight. Overall, the album looked like a prop from “That 70s Show.”

I ended up buying Imperial Drag purely out of curiosity, but I was won over by the band’s compelling songwriting and impressive musicianship. It wasn’t until I started looking at the liner notes that I put the pieces together.

Imperial Drag had a low-key hit from this album in the mid 90s characterizing the orgiastic sexuality that is part and parcel of late 70s nostalgia. Although not all of their lyrics are so obvious, rarely do two stanzas go by in any given song without some sort of innuendo or double meaning sneaking in. Sex looms so large on Imperial Drag that it’s hard to tell if its presence is tongue-in-cheek or if Eric Dover has a somewhat perverse side.



The album was sorely, but predictably, overlooked, which stands as a testament to the myopic nature of the late 90s music press. The little attention that they received for the album as a whole was generally negative, perhaps because it existed in a time when esoteric, folkish genuineness was more valued than clever semiotic play. In any case, the search for “The Next Nirvana” was so blinding that many great bands were left in the dark to fend for themselves. Imperial Drag ended in a flash and its members, again, split off into various projects.



Getting into Imperial Drag was one of the first steps I took as I began to follow Jellyfish’s members. Although Roger Joseph Manning has been extremely prolific, I have not followed Eric Dover after the band’s demise. I do know that he went on to play and sing in Slash’s Snake Pit, and also performed as a side man for Alice Cooper. In researching Imperial Drag, I also found that he has a new project called Sextus, which I have not examined too closely as of yet. Perhaps in the near future.

The previous post in this series is back here.
You can see where it goes next right here.

The Jellyfish Family Tree Part 2: "Spilt Milk" at Lunch

In 1993, I took a hiatus from my undergraduate studies and moved back to Austin.  By this point, I had listened to Bellybutton hundreds of times, and I was fortunate to pick up a promo copy of Jellyfish's follow-up.  There was a lot that I liked about Spilt Milk.  It had the same amazing songwriting, and in terms of its production, it was a major step forward from Bellybutton. Initially, however, I did not connect with it in the same way as I did its predecessor, mostly, I think, because I did not share it amongst a circle of friends. Coming from the close quarters of Bruce Hall and its denizens to living at home with the fam, I had relatively little time to hang out and listen to music with a close community of people.

I did notice, however, through my fellow Blockbuster Music employees and the friends I did periodically hang out with that year, that the microcosm of Jellyfish fandom in Bruce Hall was not alone.  Inexplicably, however, the band remained the secret favorite of dedicated music connoisseurs only.



I also think that their lack of success also took a subtle toll on the band.  The sublimely dark commentary on "life as we know it" that pervaded Bellybutton was replaced by a somewhat more cynical and sarcastic undertone on Spilt Milk. Additionally, there were some significant personnel changes.  There was now a dedicated bass player and background vocalist in Tim Smith, but Jason Falkner, who played guitar and sang backup on the first album, left the band to pursue his own solo career.  A close look at the liner notes indicated that Jon Brion provided backup vocals and guitars on Spilt Milk, so in my mind, he was the “new” guitarist.  In reality, however, he clearly was not considered to be stepping into Falkner’s shoes as a full member, and instead, guitarist Eric Dover joined the touring lineup.  In other words, Jellyfish's roster was less inclusive, but the band's sound expanded.  This inverse relationship led me to think that the band had simply become a studio project.



All of these factors set me slightly ill at ease, but still, I put Spilt Milk in regular rotation while I was working at Blockbuster Music and advocated for it at every turn.  At one point, the staff was offered promotional wristbands to this funny little thing called South by Southwest. In light of the spectacle SXSW has become, its relative scale was almost humorous. Just a few clubs were participating, but In retrospect, I did not really take advantage of the access that $25 wristband granted me. I picked it up quite casually, with the sole intention of seeing Jellyfish for free at Liberty Lunch.

Austin music history reveres Liberty Lunch, and granted, a lot of amazing music happened there. It was the site of my very first live gig ever, so perhaps I should revere it, as well.  In my memory, however, it was pretty much like a lot of mid-level music venues. It was a little dank and smelly, with picnic tables for furniture. In any case, seeing Jellyfish there was probably the last time I went before it was torn down in the late 90s and a thankless high-rise apartment building was plopped on its gravesite.

I was a bit dismissive as the band took the stage, but I immediately noticed that the rumors were true: drummer Andy Sturmer was indeed the lead singer, and he did indeed play standing up at the front of the stage. Awesome. I was taken aback, however, as keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr. walked away from his keyboards to play guitar for All is Forgiven , a surprisingly cacophonous opening statement. My initial incredulity gave way to awe, however, as, softly and precisely, the backup vocals made their first entry.



(Quality on the above vid is a little spotty, and its not from the Liberty Lunch gig, but we're lucky to have access to anything Jellyfish twenty years down the pipe.  Hopefully, you get the idea)

It was one of a handful of times in my life where my idea about what was musically possible instantaneously expanded. I simply could not believe my ears. I craned my neck to see if anyone had a finger on a keyboard or a foot on a pedal to trigger a sample, but all I saw was four mouths effortlessly singing. Their voices were so precise and blended together so seamlessly that they cohered into an instrumental life of their own, carrying as much weight as single musician on a guitar or keyboard.



Queen was well-known for their vocal prowess, but I’m not sure that, even at the height of their arena-rock prowess, they could have reproduced what Jellyfish did in Liberty Lunch that night. It was readily apparent that their individual and group musicianship far surpassed the genre in which they were playing. Once I appreciated the incredible virtuosity of Jellyfish’s touring lineup for the Spilt Milk, tour, and the fact that they could match the sound of their studio work in a live setting, it reframed the album as a recorded piece.  Bellybutton was the album the broke the band for me, and is still probably my favorite, but today that distinction is only by a narrow margin.

Within a year, the band had quietly broken up and the various members spread out into the music underground.  All of them stayed active, however, and for music fans willing to do the research, it is quite apparent that the incredible musicianship that represented Jellyfish has had a far-reaching influence.  I chased them from one project to the next, which led me down a musical path that I am still following today.

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The Jellyfish Family Tree Part 1: "Bellybutton" at the Root

Looking back on the time after I graduated from high school and began my undergraduate degree, I can clearly see how I tried to cling to my life in Austin while a new one stretched out before me in Denton. I traveled with alarming regularity on the weekends, and tried to maintain a career as a record store employee over longer breaks. During my first summer break in 1990, I got a job working at the Hasting’s at Barton Creek Mall. Predictably, I discovered a lot of music during that time. Jellyfish, a band that was brought to my attention by a fellow employee and working musician, was one such discovery. Although their debut Bellybutton seemed like a retro-pop curiosity at the time, in the long term it became hugely influential on me.



Just for context, when Bellybutton was released, 2 Live Crew’s lewd and ultimately substandard rap had created a McCarthyesque witch hunt for profanity and lewdness in popular music. Jellyfish’s album cover, if examined closely, is a naked female body covered in what looks like blue gel toothpaste. When I purchased my copy of Bellybutton back then, it was folded to hide the perhaps more socially sensitive areas of the cover art. I have not seen this in subsequent pressings of the album. Bellybutton found its way into my CD stacks at the end of that summer, and subsequently went back up to Denton with me when I returned to the dorms.

Aside from being located across the street from the music building, Bruce Hall was lacking many amenities back then. Truthfully, we were secretly proud that there was no air conditioning, and that there was one centrally located TV for the entire dormitory. We were often left to ourselves for entertainment, and listening to music was a pervasive social activity. By this time, I had acquired a decently idiosyncratic collection of CDs, so when people would congregate in our room to hang out I prided myself on having a constant supply of offbeat tunes.

Although I was pushing a lot of King Crimson in those days, when Bellybutton found its way into the player, it quickly became the favorite of many. The sunny exterior of Jellyfish’s songs harbors a dark, bittersweet lyric narrative, and for nearly two years, this incomprehensibly well-crafted juxtaposition kept Bellybutton in rotation as it was requested by a seemingly endless queue of people living in my wing. It started with my roommate, but very soon, anyone coming to hang out asked me to put it in. I listened to Bellybutton over and over, and in all those playings, it never really got old.



Instead, the more I listened to it, the more deeply it affected me. As I slowly understood the meaning of Bellybutton, and also saw its meaning unfold to my friends, I realized that it harbored more than dark commentary, but a life-weary angst that belied the age of its members. Concurrently, the harmonic and melodic complexities of the album seemed to have a nearly endless depth which, I would find out later, the band could render live with consummate ease.



Over the next decade, I found that I was not alone. Although Jellyfish never rose far above a cult following, they inspired a whole wave of underground power pop in which I, for a time, also swam. Their career as a band was regrettably short-lived, but their albums and the albums that their members made in subsequent years drove my musical interests throughout the 90s. Just by keeping track of what Jellyfish’s members did after the band's demise, I came across some amazing music.

Earlier this year, I did a retrospective on Rush’s catalog. The length of their timeline lends itself well to this sort of coverage, and as a whole, I think that it represents the role that Rush plays in my overall musical concept. In their own way, Jellyfish played a similar role, but their catalog is so small that a similar retrospective won’t do them a similar justice. Therefore, for this new project, I plan to recreate my ascent up the Jellyfish family tree, and hopefully shed light on a succession of albums that bent my ideas about what were possible in pop music.

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