The Shaming of the True: Kevin Gilbert's Swan Song

 A look back at Kevin Gilbert's posthumous 2000 rock opera, The Shaming of the True

A Tale From The Other Side: A Quarantine Commentary

Interview and discussion on Timmy Sean's 2021 album A Tale From The Other Side, featuring feedback from the artist.

Extended footage with Timmy Sean.

Swimming With The Fish Part 3: Misplaced Childhood

Review and discussion on Marillion’s landmark 1985 album Misplaced Childhood

Relevant Links

Part 1 of this series 

Part 2 of this series

Flashback to the Oughts: 2004

2004 was a year of beginnings that were fueled by equal parts confidence and, if I am honest with myself, delusion. At the end of the previous year, I acquired a Chapman Stick, and the practice that I had been using as therapy started to manifest in some real musical output. Determined to master this non-traditional instrument and use it to somehow subvert academia, I began coursework for a Master’s degree in Ethnomusicology. My studies included jazz improv courses and a seminar in global pop music, both of which began to further diversify my listening.

At the same time, I continued to teach out at Krum. The breadth of these new experiences make connecting the dots between my memory episodes and the reality of the calendar particularly confusing. My propensity to listen to older albums or to let albums simmer for a while complicates matters further.  I’ve had to refer to school records, Amazon shipping statements, and even dates on old pictures to flesh out specifics.  Still, after toying around with my memory and all available information, the 2004 list is, like its predecessors, a good representation of what I was into at the time.



This project is making me realize the extent to which memory episodes resist lining themselves up in neat chronological order.  They seem to arise in vivid flashes as I revisit this music, bringing to mind seemingly random events that must then be categorized.  This all might seem to be more trouble than its worth, but organizing my life story by the music that I surround myself with has, in recent years, emerged as a satisfying narrative in this blog.

10 The Drowners - Think of Me: I continued a steady diet of inexpensive power pop albums throughout 2004, many of which were unremarkable. The Drowners’ Swedish identity provided a unique perspective on the style that was slick and compelling.

9 Muse - Absolution: It has been a rare occasion for me to favorably compare any band to Rush. In 2004, however, I discovered Absolution, which earned Muse that distinction for a time by virtue of its accessible songs, impressive chops, and intense energy.

8 Blackfield - Blackfield: I supported Porcupine Tree’s move towards heavier and more identifiably progressive territory, but part of me missed Steven Wilson's relatively straightforward songwriting on Stupid Dream. Blackfield became the place where I could get my fix.

7 The Decemberists - Her Majesty the Decemberists: I saw The Decemberists in Denton on a lark, without ever hearing a note of their music, one night in 2004. Their show was impressive, and within 24 hours, Her Majesty the Decemberists had the dubious honor of being one of the few albums that I uploaded through ITunes in its earlier iteration.

6 Green Day - American Idiot: I saw American Idiot as the 21sy century Tommy - a punk rock opera of resistance for the Bush administration. Alas, within a few years Green Day would jump the shark with this great album and run it as a broadway musical, but at the time it was quite the statement.

5 The Trey Gunn Band - The Joy of Molybdenum: As I was getting more and more into transcription, I started making more of an effort to find other Stick and touchstyle guitar players that I felt a connection with. Gunn’s style was, and still is, a baffling exploitation of the instrument’s affordances, but his melodicism and conceptual adventurousness makes him one of my favorite players and The Joy of Molybdenum remains my favorite of his solo works.

4. Miles Davis - Kind of Blue: I owned Kind of Blue for decades, but in retrospect, I had never really engaged it beyond mere background music. Transcribing solos from it for an improv class changed all that, however, and provided me with a deep appreciation for the clarity of Davis’ ideas.

3 Brian Wilson - SMiLE: Brian Wilson finally released the long awaited follow-up to Pet Sounds in 2004 with compelling results. The tour that followed provided one of the best live shows I had ever seen.

2. Fela Kuti - Zombie: A seminar in Global Popular Music fleshed out my understanding of Fela and his unique political position. I ended up getting several Fela albums this year, but Zombie remains the best of the bunch.

Album of the Year: 2004

1. Opeth - Damnation: Opeth’s one-off experiment in melodic melancholy would, in hindsight, serve to pivot them from their black metal roots into their current progressive rock incarnation. In itself, however, it remains a unique masterpiece in their catalog.

Anais Mitchell's "Hadestown:" Thinking Themselves Gods

Writing is hard, no doubt. Minds operate in abstractions that precede words, and the human capacity to capture those pre-verbal concepts and arrange them into something as clumsy and concrete as written language is nothing short of miraculous. Capturing musical ideas and impressions, which are even more abstract and ephemeral, is particularly difficult.  For these blog entries, I often struggle to figure out when (or even if) I really “have” enough of an album to write anything meaningful.  For example, I have had at least two aborted attempts to begin an entry for Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown, both of which I shelved because as I began to reify my thoughts with the written word and look at them, I felt like I was missing something. There always seemed to be more to this album, and every time I tried to pin it down, I noticed a new layer of meaning and craft that seemed to deserve some attention.

Initially, I discovered Hadestown at the top of some website’s “all-time best” list (unfortunately, I can’t remember which one), and other accolades from reviews were substantial. My first search on Hadestown brought up this live solo performance of Mitchell performing Why We Build the Wall.  Lyrics are rarely a hook for me, but the layers of meaning folded into this song grabbed my attention.



On its own, Why We Build the Wall is a memorable and profound commentary on the self-sustaining illusion that the poor are essentially “other” in relation to the rich. Within the larger context of Hadestown, however, it takes on a much more nuanced meaning.

Hadestown proudly wears the label “folk opera,” but thanks to the arrangements of Micheal Chorney, the album is far more colorful than the name would suggest. There is a heartfelt and subtle cleverness that brings to mind some of Elvis Costello’s more eccentric collaborations. Like most contemporary pop opera, however, it owes a debt of gratitude to Tommy, and I think Pete Townshend would be proud. Hadestown has clearly defined characters that follow a plot arc, character development, a climax, and a resolution. These characters are convincingly enacted by a great cast of established musicians that include Justin Vernon as Orpheus and Ani DiFranco as Persephone (although I do feel like the voice of Hades, Greg Brown, pays a groaning tribute to Leon Redbone that grows a bit threadbare by album’s end).



The perceptive might have guessed - Hadestown retells of the myth of Orpheus. In this story’s most common form, Eurydice dies and becomes lost in the underworld. Armed only with song, Orpheus travels to the underworld and convinces Hades to release Eurydice, on the condition that Orpheus resists the temptation to turn around to see if his love was indeed following him. On paper, a contemporary libretto based on this well-trod tale might seem pretentious. Mitchell, however, dodges cliché by resetting the story in the Great Depression, opening up a distinctive set of conditions and relationships that capture the fanciful ideals of Greek mythology while shrouding them in the aesthetic of a prohibition-era variety show.



From a purely musical standpoint, Hadestown is incredibly compelling. Its playful use of style and emotion keeps the entire experience serious, but relatively lighthearted. The concept that undergirds the songs that comprise the album, however, is even more unique and well-executed. The abstract, archetypical concepts underlying the Orpheus myth take on a more visceral meaning in Mitchell’s reinterpretation, where rich men take the place of ancient gods, and greed is a force as unrelenting as death itself. After several weeks of regular rotation, the depth of this extended metaphor just hit me today and made me realize that there is much, much more to Hadestown than I had previously thought. I might be listening to this one for quite awhile.