Dawes' "Stories Don't End:" Yesteryear's Rainy Afternoon

It rained for two days after she left. I spent most of my time on a well-worn yellow naugahyde couch staring out the window trying to figure out how what had happened and what I was going to do next. On the third day, it finally stopped raining and, in attempt to find some closure, I wrote a short, desperately worded letter to her. I rolled it up and corked it into one of those small jars she used to inexplicably keep around and went out for a walk in the cool, wet afternoon.

There was a creek that ran through the neighborhood, and it was bloated from the rain. It was my intent to throw my message in a bottle into the current and watch it float downstream. When I found an appropriate bend in the creek, I tossed in the jar, but, rather than bobbing in the waves as I bid it a tearful farewell, it simply disappeared into the stream with an unceremonious "plop.” I never saw it again. No poetry or romance - it was merely swallowed up into the muddy water.

Dawes wasn't around in 2002 back when I struggled to come to grips with my marriage ending, the reality of what had happened, and my delusion surrounding the whole thing. Stories Don’t End\ ended up in rotation earlier this year, however, and its brilliant lyrics reminded me of the way the world seemed when I was emotionally numb and fragile. I don't mean to say that the narratives found on  Stories Don’t End directly map to my experiences. On the whole, it’s not all about dealing with life in the wake of finding yourself suddenly alone (although that situation does come up).



What Dawes does so well, though, is speak profoundly about the paradox that arises as we look for something meaningful and poetic in the world and are instead presented with something we perceive to be mundane. From a different perspective, the profundity often arises when we notice poetry and beauty that is inherently embedded in the mundane.



When that jar slipped beneath the surface on that rainy afternoon, it seemed like a slap in the face, but it soon came to have meaning. I made a few vain attempts at kickstarting a songwriting hobby by mining the experience for lyrical ideas, but I was not, nor have I even been, the type of musician that could adequately capture this kind of humorous realism in words. 

Stories Don't End, however, ruminates on the dissonance that seems to exist between how things are and how they are subjectively seen. Due to my walk that day and the path I took in its aftermath, both positive and negative, I genuinely admire Dawes’ capacity to consistently capture these esoteric feelings in lyrics.  

January/Feburary Roundup: Yourself in Disguise

I try to impart my band students with a sense of self-sufficiency and responsibility, so I felt pretty hypocritical when I could not find my suit for contest. I cleverly went with the contemporary "all-black" conductor look and flew under the radar, but there were several family functions coming up that required formal dress. I would not be able to them dodge so gracefully, so I was going to need a replacement.

A few years ago, this would have been cause for panic and shame. Although I was always considered “the big kid,” between 2006 and 2008 I was looking at almost 300 pounds.  In truth, I'm not exactly sure about that figure because at its worst I was too ashamed to even get on the scale (278 was the highest recorded). Needless to say, I was engaged in an incredibly unhealthy lifestyle, and, as a result, I was incredibly unhappy.

I made some drastic changes in 2008, and have basically continued on a positive path since then. I am now weighing in at a pretty lean 210. Needless to say, going to get fitted for a suit was awesome. For the first time, I had to get a split suit for the right reason - to show off my physique rather than hide it.

I admit that this post rings of self-indulgent egoism, but is also my intent to motivate and inspire. Whatever seems to be standing in the way of you achieving your goals, examine it closely to make sure it is not yourself in disguise.

Oh, and the elephant in the room: where has the blog been? Well, it’s presently on little scraps of paper stapled together and tucked into folders, just waiting to be transcribed and posted. So yes, I’m behind. This post represents my listening from both January and Feburary, so its a little long.  Good playlist, though.  Two albums are unavailable for streaming through the widget:

Aimee Mann - Charmer: Through her past collaborations with Grays contributor and studio contributor to Spilt Milk, Jon Brion, Aimee Mann could also be tied into the Jellyfish Family Tree. These days, she's got what she does down to a science, so if you like introspective, metaphoric pop songwriting, she’s your gal.

Ulver: Wars of the Roses: Ulver is a somewhat dark, gothic band that seem to have a wide variety of labels assigned to their style. They have enough progressive flavor, however, to keep my attention for the time being.

Otherwise, here are some examples from the albums I have been listening to for the past couple of months.

Jason Falkner - Can You Still Feel? & The Bliss Descending EP: Although neither of these albums recapture the fire of Falkner’s first release, they still harbor an astounding amount of melodic and harmonic detail. These are both masterful works by an amazing and effortless songwriter.

Dirty Projectors - Swing Low Magellan: The Dirty Projectors have a sound that is both polished and fuzzy, measured and deranged. It is also, in its essence, subtly framed by the classic, which gives Swing Low Magellan an ease that is the trademark of experienced musicianship.

Tame Impala - Lonersim: Its pretty amazing that an album that so clearly identifies with a certain era of music contains sounds that would have been nearly impossible to create in that time. In a side-by-side comparison with Lonerism, the most vivid albums from that high psychedelic period would probably sound brittle.

My Bloody Valentine - mbv: It took me nearly three years to “get” Loveless, so I don’t know that I should comment on mbv after just a few weeks. At this point, I don’t quite see what all of the critical hype is about.

The Format - Interventions and Lullabies: In the early 00's, I had shifted my attention in underground power pop, and The Format would have fit into that paradigm quite neatly. It is somewhat unfortunate that it took me nearly a decade to discover and appreciate their work.

P.O.S. - We Don't Even Live Here: Unlike a lot of hip-hop, P.O.S.'s work seems to get better and better with subsequent listens. I have absolutely no regrets about including it on last year's Top 20, although I think that I might have rated it higher given a bit more time.

Roger Joseph Manning Jr. - The Land of Pure Imagination: For quite awhile after Jellyfish's breakup, the band's members released music that did not always resemble that of the band that defined them. Roger Joseph Manning's US "debut" is the most reminiscent of Jellyfish's original mission statement, and at points almost reaches the heights of their best work.

Frank Ocean - Channel Orange: Ocean seems to be struggling to reconcile Prince's opulent fantasy with Stevie Wonder's street-level reality on Channel Orange. Granted, my encounters with r&b and soul music are pretty much limited to these two giants, but for Ocean to even bring them to mind is quite a feat.

Charlie Parker - Yardbird Suite: The Ultimate Collection: Parker is nothing short of mindblowing. In fact, following his soloing, in which he effortlessly creates a vocabulary of stunning complexity out of thin air, can be exhausting after an extended period.

Genesis – Trespass: The band’s first album as a full-fledged progressive rock outfit predates even Phil Collins’ and Steve Hackett’s contributions to the band. It is perhaps not as memorable as the recordings from that classic prog lineup, but it does have a few outstanding moments that predict the future of the group.

Husky – Forever So: I have had this one in rotation for awhile on the suggestion of several readers. I enjoy listening to it, but it's hipstery folk trappings don't seem to grab me for any length of time.

Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard - Dark Knight Original Soundtrack:  For many reasons, I was very attached to Danny Elfman’s soundtrack to the 1989 Batman movie. Although it is not as melodically obvious, the Dark Knight OST is miles ahead of Elfman’s work in terms of timbral and harmonic complexity.

The Day Begins: "At War With the Mystics" for Breakfast

Two summers ago, I took a Japanese language course, which was horizon-expanding. Last summer, CrossFit was a bit more globally life-changing. This year’s summer project wasn’t as intentionally planned as those at the outset, but it is emerging, nonetheless: roll around on the floor with my baby daughter and try to see the world through her eyes.  As we are discovering that drink coasters have a front and a back and that bubbles don't hurt when they pop, I keep finding the tuneful, psychedelic, but ultimately positive, music of the Flaming Lips to be somehow appropriate.

One evening, I noticed that the Little One seemed to have an affinity for The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song, so we adopted this as our daily breakfast jam. I’m pretty sure that she is starting to sing parts of the song in her own 10 month-old way. It’s pretty cute – even cuter than the hilarious video.



In my opinion, the most classic album by the Flaming Lips is The Soft Bulletin, which I got into through my Aiki Brother (happy birthday, by the way!).This album has its own story for me that I will one day recount, but it is worth mentioning here because its impact made it difficult for me to accept their subsequent releases on their own merit. Even though I loyally purchased all the Flaming Lips albums that followed, for a long time, nothing they did ever seemed as good as The Soft Bulletin. When Embryonic was released in 2010, however, and I saw them play live in Denton that summer, I decided that I had done them an injustice by dismissing their back catalog.

At War With the Mystics is an album that was lost in the fog, so it didn't click for me when it was released.  After using it to announce the day nearly every day for the past three weeks, however, it has become clear that the entire album is permeated with a glorious, cosmic genius that only the Flaming Lips can generate. While it is not quite as streamlined as The Soft Bulletin, it certainly has a succession of amazingly musical moments. Some of these are quite arresting, while others take the form of soft, delicate interludes conjured from layers of acoustic guitar and mellotron. In different listening environments, like the car, where I usually listen to music, these more sensitive sections might have been easily overlooked.



For all their well-publicized musical experimentation, stuntwork, and overall weirdness, ultimately, the Flaming Lips are deeply musical, and can embed a simple song within a stunning atmosphere of musical grandeur. The spectacle of their live performance similarly juxtaposes larger-than-life imagery against intimate songcraft, and was what convinced me of their genius.  The Flaming Lips' unique brand of psychedelia somehow avoids being too derivative of Pink Floyd and other past masters.  It is distinctly their own, and really must be seen to be believed.



Overall, At War With the Mystics is a richly textured soundtrack to a morning spent with the Little One.  While advocates of the disproven "Mozart Effect" might take exception to my choice of music, there is a playfully creative demeanor at the core of the Flaming Lips musical concept that I hope my Little One will one day find inspiring.  For now, I happily accept her exclamation "YAYAYAYAYA" as a request to sing.

The Wondermints Shine on Brian Wilson's SMiLE

I used to fumble around Amazon quite irresponsibly, and sometimes, for better or for worse, a CD would just appear in my mailbox.  I would immediately rip these offerings into the MP3 player I began to use around this time, too, and I was pretty disciplined about keeping it updated with my latest acquisitions.  I soon felt naked walking to UNT campus without 300 albums floating around in my backpack.  In 2005, when The Wondermints’ Mind if We Make Love to You unexpectedly showed up, I had hardly listened to it when, on one particularly pleasant fall afternoon, this incredible ditty cut through the fog. I don't think I have stopped singing it since.



If you’ve followed the blog at all, it is no secret that I am an advocate of progressive rock, but I hope that I don’t come across as insular. Prog is attached to an obvious (perhaps adolescent) technical virtuosity that I connected with at a particularly impressionable moment in my life, but I deeply admire the similar and perhaps more subtle virtuosic potentials of melodic rock and power pop. In the hands of lesser musicians, pop songwriting can come off as bland and formulaic, but The Wondermints have "that special something." Although there are great individual performances on Mind if We Make Love to You, they always stand in service to the enthralling melodies and harmonies that saturate each song.



The now-ubiquitous influence of The Beatles, particularly during their studio period, makes it easy to take for granted the kind of genius that is involved in album like Mind if We Make Love to You. In the 60s, bands were scrambling to keep up with Lennon and McCartney's innovations, and very few could compete. The Beach Boys stepped up to the plate, however, when they released the masterpiece Pet Sounds in response to the Beatles sprawling artistic vision.  The album was so ambitious that it cracked the foundations of the band.  Smile, the eccentric 1966 follow-up to Pet Sounds and Brian Wilson's legendary "teenage symphony to God," was so orchestral (maybe even progressive) that the Beach Boys refused to complete it, sending Wilson into a decades-long depression.

Although the Wondermints have not released any new material in quite awhile, they have remained active, particularly as collaborators with a recovered Brian Wilson. Wilson resurrected the Smile (now rendered as SMiLE) project in 2004, and keyboardist/singer Darian Sahanaja played a role in piecing together and arranging the incomplete segments. The final result, in which the Wondermints acted as Wilson’s backing band, revealed Wilson’s distinctive creativity and vision, as well as Sahanaja's talent.  The band was subsequently absorbed into the immense, but necessary, 20-piece SMiLE touring group. I was fortunate enough to see Wilson on this tour, and I distinctively remember him referring to Sahanaja as his “musical director.” Not a shabby designation, considering Wilson essentially played the same role in the band that produced some of the finest pop music of the 60s.



The live performances of SMiLE garnered some attention, and brought the brilliance and imagination of Brian Wilson into the awareness of the 21st century audience. As amazing as SMiLE is, however, I find that I revisit Mind if We Make Love to You more often. It’s a go-to album that reminds me what it is that I like about consistent, well-crafted songwriting.

Syd Barrett Part 2: An Odd Bike and a Raw Octopus

Judging from my previous post, you might get the idea that back in the day, I wasn’t too impressed with Syd Barrett. You’d be right. Although I never got rid of my copy of Barrett, until last November it has been in my collection for nigh on twenty years with virtually no play. At the time, it cemented my prejudice against Pink Floyd’s pre-Dark Side catalog. Sometime around 2004, however, when YouTube was new, I happened across a DIY video for Bike (a video which sadly no longer seems to exist - although it was almost as silly as this one).

Immediately, this tune burrowed its way into my ear, so I decided to take Barrett’s pre-breakdown work with Pink Floyd for a spin around the block and try to accept it on its own terms. I bought Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and thought it was quite good, but unfortunately, 2004 was the beginning of a bad period for me personally.  Very little new music was making any kind of lasting impression. By no fault of its own, Piper at the Gates of Dawn got put on the back burner.

If you have been following the blog regularly, you know that I have had a rekindled interest in Pink Floyd’s early work and, consequently, Syd Barrett’s limited solo catalog. I got The Madcap Laughs for Christmas and, as Stringtapper suggested, it is a stronger overall effort than Barrett. What I find most startling is the impact that Barrett had on Pink Floyd even after his departure. While his former bandmates were experimenting with the excesses of progressive rock on Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma, Barrett was writing songs that, despite the withdrawn state of his mental collapse, were profound enough to influence Pink Floyd’s future work. Listening to tracks like Dark Globe, Barrett’s influence on Roger Waters’ later songwriting seems obvious.



Although it is more consistent than Barrett, The Madcap Laughs has a bit less studio polish. For me, it is difficult not to view it as a set of demos for a Pink Floyd album that was never meant to be. Its raw nature, however, masks deeper musical concepts. On the surface,  Barrett seems to sporadically drop and add beats in his songs, much to the chagrin of drummer Jerry Shirley. Listen to the rhythm section struggle to keep things straight about thirty seconds into Octopus.



Initially, I thought that Barrett could simply have cared less about things like a backbeat and standard phrasing.  It just sounded like mistakes.  When I returned to Piper at the Gates of Dawn on a road trip this weekend, however, I noticed that this erratic metric sense is pervasive in the music he wrote even before he was triggered. In fact, Bike, the song that turned me on to the album, features this irregular rhythmic concept in virtually every verse. Without getting too analytical, it seems that Barrett makes the entire structure of the song subservient to the natural rhythm of the lyrics, and it is so deliberate that it makes me question just how erratic his performances actually were on The Madcap Laughs.

On a final note, I have gained a much greater respect for Piper at the Gates of Dawn in my more recent encounter with the album. The simple act of drawing boundaries on the songs (i.e. knowing the difference between Matilda Mother and Lucifer Sam) allowed me to see its creative breadth. It’s a fantastically varied work that miraculously coheres under Barrett’s obvious charisma, and although it doesn’t sound like the arena rock that characterized Pink Floyd in the 70s, it has had its own profound influence. I leave you with one of the only clips I found of Barrett playing live.



There's a longer version of this clip available where the rather dour gentlemen you see at the beginning interviews Barrett and Waters, demanding for them to explain just why they are so darn loud.  The only answer he seemed to accept was "we like it that way."

"Challengers," a Marathon, and My Gratitude

In late 2008, towards the end of the “Carrollton period,” I was in the process of fundamentally redefining myself. As a part of this general life overhaul, I participated in the Dallas White Rock Marathon. I was part of a relay team, so I only ran seven miles, but considering the general state of my physical and mental health not six months before there was a lot to be proud of. My contribution probably did not do much to make us more competitive, but I think it is safe to say that our team’s overall goal was more about strengthening the friendship between us than making good time.

As I walked to the base of Reunion Tower, I was still humming the tune from the car: Challengers by the New Pornographers. I was introduced to this band in the morally ambiguous days of Napster and later I bought the quirky and sometimes angular Twin Cinema on a rainy weekend in Boston. The more musically exuberant and lyrically introspective Challengers was in regular rotation at this time, however, and it just happened to be what was playing as I participated the weekend of the marathon.




Most groups wear their influences on their sleeve, cobbled together into an often clearly identifiable patchwork, but the New Pornographers obscure their influences in stratified layers. They have some vague stylistic associations with Cheap Trick, David Bowie, the Cars, and Genesis (pop period), but overall, the New Pornographers coalesce these styles into their own densely melodic approach. There is hardly a second of Challengers that passes without some sort of addictive hook thrown in the mix somewhere.

Despite this complexity, The New Pornographers write memorable, singable tunes with slightly ambiguous but vivid lyrics. Although vocal duties are shared within the group, having Neko Case in this band is like hiding a weapon of mass destruction. Her vocal delivery invariably breathes a unique life into the New Pornographer’s lyrics, and her songs danced on the edge of my consciousness all afternoon. When the event was over I returned to the car exhausted. Challengers started right where it left off at the base of the Tower, though, reifying the satisfaction and solidarity I felt from a day well spent in the company of friends.



Participating in the White Rock Marathon with the people on my team ended up being very special and important to me personally. Very often, I unfortunately don’t recognize the importance of these kinds of moments until they are long gone. As I relistened to Challengers this afternoon, it brought that day back somewhat, and I wanted to take this post express my gratitude to the people who were involved. Even if you don’t think that you did anything, you did something, and for that I thank you.