it might as well be spring

yesterday was crazy – fire in the fridge, hail pelting from the midsummer sky, sheets of rain and typhoon-force winds snapping my tomato plants and uprooting clark park up into a post-apocalista-flockhart leaf-strewn jungle. today is back to bright blue and breezy midsummer. but two months ago (jesus!..) the warmmother sun erupted for the first time to declare SPRING! and it was a new season like i had never experienced. t-shirt weather should be self-explanatory. this is just like all those other summer mixtapes, except that it's a spring mixtape (which i've also done before of course), it's just that spring never felt this much like what it is, which is, basically, the idealized version of summer...and with the music to match:

(so wake up wake up it's)
T-SHIRT WEATHER!

title: t-shirt weather
date: april 2010

format: cd-r
packaging: just draw a little sunshine t-shirt for the "T" of the title.

1. The Lucksmiths: "T-Shirt Weather"
2. V.V. Brown: "Shark In The Water"
3. Love Is All: "The Birds Were Singing With All Their Might" [love that title]
4. Mariachi El Bronx: "Cell Mates"
5. Sambassadeur: "Days"
6. Title Tracks: "Every Little Bit Hurts"
7. Malachai: "Another Sun"
8. Mayer Hawthorne: "Love Is Alright"
9. Javelin: "Oh! Centra"
10. Daedelus: "Fair Weather Friends"
11. Little Dragon: "Runabout"
12. Grovesnor: "Drive Your Car"
13. Alphabeat: "DJ" "Heatwave"
14. Bonobo: "We Could Forever"
15. Hot Chip: "Hand Me Down Your Love"
[eta:] 16. Tunng: "Hustle"
16. 17. Georgia Anne Muldrow: "Doobie Down"
17.18. Rihanna: "Rude Boy"
18.19. jj: "Voi Parlate, Lo Gioco"
19.2o. Teenage Fanclub: "Baby Lee"
20.21. Vampire Weekend: "I Think Ur A Contra"
21. Joanna Newsom: "Good Intentions Paving Company"
22. Tindersticks: "Keep You Beautiful"

almost all titles from early 2010, except for the opening title track (a new-to-me chestnut), and a couple mild stragglers. a little bit of pretty/giddy/swoony/croony indie-pop, bouncy fun rock, fantastical faux-mexicana, goofball hip-hop, fuzzy-hot electro, crunchy-creamy neo-funk, smooth grooving chill-out, sweet-tooth synth-soul (with some definite overlap among those last four categories), a couple of pure, beautiful love songs, just a touch of full-on diva-house (swapped out alphabeat's "DJ," which has an even more classically blinding groove and belongs to my pet genre of songs addressed to the dj, in favor of the more seasonally appropriate and almost-as-pumping "Heatwave"), and plus the actual world-conquering feel-good real-pop hit of the season (actually, what kind of music even is "Rude Boy"? r&b? electro-pop?), and then a couple of pillowy softies to cushion the comedown.

mmmmmm. this one might just bring a bit of springtime any time of year. (it might be just about time for a summer mix now though...i'll let you know by fall i promise)

***
and then – bonus mix – as april drew to a close, i made this for e, which was initially untitled but then i decided could be called:

our spring is sweet not fleeting
1. baby dee: april day [i know what let's do...]
2. joanna newsom: easy [we could rest and remain here]
3. blossom dearie: they say it's spring [this magic we share together]
4. of montreal: our spring is sweet not fleeting
5. the beach boys: help me, rhonda
6. jj: let go [i'll never be alone again]
7. primary 1: elsa says
8. jens lekman: happy birthday, dear friend elsa
9. jonathan richman & the modern lovers: new england [i might be prejudessed...]
10. adiam dymott: john denver [you and me, driving down a country road]
11. an horse: camp out [a song for the one that i love]
12. paris hilton: stars are blind [let's see what this love can do]
13. javelin: unforgettable super lady
14. georgia anne muldrow: indeed [i love the mess out the children]
15. the mynabirds: ways of looking [it can be easy if you just let it]
16. birdie busch: hey precious [does your heart have a home?]
17. darren hayman: pram town [how could you live anywhere else?]
18. jeffrey lewis: moving
19. the tallest man on earth: honey won't you let me in
20. devon sproule: ain't that the way [fonder and fonder]
21. nellie mckay: the very thought of you [foolish though it may seem]
22. mirah: million miles [lie in the garden and watch the weeds grow]
23. jonathan richman: no más por fun [es libertad, nuestro amor]
24. stephin merritt: one april day
25. tunng: weekend away [let it be beautiful when we sing the last song]
26. low: sunshine [you make me happy]

love and dancing

red is my favorite color. yes is my favorite answer. what was the question again?

click here to download love is the answer as one continuous mp3 (69:16)
click here to download love is the answer as a zipfile of eleven mp3 tracks

meet the new mix. same as the old mix - kinda, not really: it's an entirely re-recorded (except for the very opening bit, and also the intro bit tacked on before that) version of a mix i titled love is the dancer way back in april, now retitled simply love is the answer, with an extra 25% or so new material (including the whole last chunk), and with mostly snappier transitions using my new traktor>garageband method instead of my old actual live djing>garageband method.

not sure how much the fact that i made (remade) it entirely on february 13-15 affected my decision to make the "love" theme substantially more overt - it already had a kind of an uplifiting communal togetherness love vibe going on (i wanted to close with that ub40 all along so i'm glad i final got to include it) - but it's probably less than you'd think. though i suppose this one can be added to my lengthy history of valentine's day mixtapes (and that ain't all of them neither.)

(and it almost might have provided some excellent opportunities for cd packaging options: i was going to snag some post-v's day clearance-sale merchandise and make valentiny packages...however by the time i got to cvs they were already stocking the shelves with easter stuff, and the best i could've done was some generic red envelopes. so i decided to just make my own red envelopes, using a special new design i devised for cd packaging that takes the form of a heart. prototypes are go; i'll keep you posted on how mass-production turns out. (may go a little upscale. decent card-stock. letterpress tracklists?)

Title: Love is the Dancer (Soul Vs. Dancepop, Round 2)
Format: continuous DJ mix [79:15], currently available on CD-R (13 tracks) or mp3 (1 or 11)
Date: original 18 April 2007, revised 13-15 February 2008
Packaging (projected): red card-stock envelope/sleeve in heart-shaped fold-out design, with track titles letterpressed (?) or printed and pasted onto the back.

track list:
1. ross of love is the answer
2. ross of love your body
3. ross of love action (i believe in ross of love)
4. ross of love to love you baby
5. ross of love (stoned)
6. ross with love
7. (i'm gonna steal your) ross of love
8. too much ross of love
9. (loss of) ross of love will tear us apart
10. ross of love was made for two
11. ross of love the one you're with

[cd only bonus tracks:
12. sing our own song - ub40
13. i like love - r. kelly]

okay okay... here are the actual songs on the mix:

(collage of digital passion)
a joy - four tet
it's just begun - jimmy castor bunch
love is the answer - ram
the sound of violence - cassius
4 my people - missy elliott
jacques your body (make me sweat) - les rhythmes digitales
moist - schneider tm
rude - herbert
love action (i believe in love) - the human league
love to love you baby (junior jack mix) - viktor lazlo
fast and delirious - lindstrøm
everybody sings - supersystem
acceptable in the 80s - calvin harris
blackbelt - teddybears
moving truck - radioinactive & antimc
pucker up buttercup - jr. walker and the all-stars
lovestoned - justin timberlake
with love - hilary duff
dragonette - i get around (also a bit of the "midnight juggernaut" mix)
tiger tails - moonbotica
hijack - herbie mann
get physical - margaret berger
too much love - lcd soundsystem
sunshine of your love - spanky wilson
i want you - paris hilton
collarbone - fujiya & miyagi
chic cheer - chic
illegal gunshot - ragga twins
(lack of) love will tear us apart - the honeydrips
take control - amerie
i wanna be your lover - la bionda
i wanna be your lover - prince
love was made for two - data 80
100% pure love - crystal waters
remember love - nôze
love is the answer - cerrone
(love - simian mobile disco)
love the one you're with - the isley brothers

analysis:
there's no great concept at play here apart from the "love" meme, which mostly just relates to the song titles anyway - there's all kinds of love being represented here, which i like - it's just a dj/dance mix. hopefully not too clever for its own good - i really tried to make it, just, straightforwardly dance-friendly. but interesting. there ends up being a lot of genre-jumping, so the transitions aren't always the smoothest, but hopefully that's what keeps it exciting.

in fact, this might as well be considered soul vs. dancepop, round 2 (the long-awaited rematch!), though it's a little closer to funk vs. electro-pop. electronic wins of course, but that's not the point - what's actually going on, by process of deduction, is disco discovery. you get yr funky-disco (herbie mann, chic), yr discoey-funk (jimmy castor), yr digital disco (moonbotica, herbert i guess), yr "french touch" filter-disco (cassius, nôze), yr "cosmic"/"space"/"beardo"-disco (lindstrøm), yr disco-punk (supersystem), yr disco indie-pop (fujiya+miyagi), yr disco-covering italo-disco (viktor lazlo), yr disco-sampling contempo-disco (paris hilton), yr latter-day "not disco" actual-disco (crystal waters) and finally yr straight-up no-holds-barred honest-to-god disco (cerrone)... and i didn't even really mean to do like that! and that's not even counting the sometimes-so-called "queen of disco" (m. berger, whose inclusion here is closer to electro.) then there's also some stuff that's not really disco at all, which was apparently acceptable in the '80s. whatever.

low; yo

low have quietly, slowly, gradually (well, you know how they do...) become one of my very favorite bands.

saw them last night, and that really clinched it - made me start to love them and relate to them as people, beyond the already strongly personal affinity i feel for their music.

(even though i'm not a very melancholy person like that might suggest; even though - and despite what i've said in the last post about my generationally-based difficulties accessing mid-90s indie - i didn't even really listen to them until four or five years ago, already almost a decade into their career.)

i saw them before, last year, in the sanctuary of the church in the dead of winter (an apt time for low - now it's not, but the lingering cold was fitting.) but this was better - maybe because i wasn't in the middle of a fight with angela; or because the church basement, though less evocative, is more intimate; or just because of how much i've been loving drums and guns.

they played a lot from it, including key highlights "belarus" (very minimal, with ambient loops and that keening high octave harmony), "dragonfly" (the prettiest one - addiction metaphor), "in silence" (which i hadn't noticed as much until hearing it live, but has been in my head since) and "murderer" (which seems to take the perspective of a religious terrorist, by my reading anyway - closed the set - slightly less intense than the album, actually.) and of course "breaker" - the single, if that means anything - which they did twice, first in the organ-and-handclaps ("you don't all have to do it, but some of you should - it's fun!") version from the album, and then in a more rocked-out and menacing encore.

[also of note - show opened with "cue the strings," lovely lilt from destroyer; first encore. by request, was "violence" - which i recognized but couldn't quite place as the opener from long division - amazing how they can say so much with so little, and then, nicely, by my suggestion and gentle prodding, but then taken up by the crowd in general, the first song of theirs i ever loved, "in the drugs."

there was some amusing - just slightly tense - banter between alan and mimi, about the lighting on his face (she said "it fits you" and he demanded to know what she meant), and later an attempt at a sort of open discussion on any topic of interest to the crowd - alan seemed to be suggesting legalizing marijuana as roundabout semi-solution to the crime problem; compared notes on disillusioned mayors - ended when mimi asked "what about disillusionment and marriage?" but they were in good humor. alan's funnier than you'd think.]

the new album is more anxious and bitter - more political, though obliquely enough that you can't exactly call it that - than anything they've done before. it's most similar to trust in that respect, but even starker and sparer, with a reenvisioned sound palette centered around glacial, quietly menacing drum loops and little snatches of ambient guitar noise. but there are still those ineffable, ethereal harmonies, low's sonic quintessence, all the more haunting and disarming when set in contrast to the foreboding music beneath them. (it's telling that the opener, the devestatingly bleak "pretty people" - devoid of harmonies - is the hardest song to listen to.)

they didn't do "hatchet," the lightest (and most atypical) song on the album, and probably my favorite (this revelatory article/interview calls it a "dance song," which may be going a little far) - i didn't really mind (not sure it would have gained much from the live setting) - but somehow just seeing them gave me a new perspective on its lyrics, which i've been puzzling over. (i guess i'll just post my thoughts there on songmeanings, so read it there if you like.) the beatles and stones references there made me think about yo la tengo (mostly "tom courtenay") (hey, have you seen that video? it's really good.) (actually, this review calls the song "yo la tengo-esque," which i guess it sort of is.) (and come to think of it, "hatchet" is in the title of my fave song from the new ylt album too.)

---

it's not like i hadn't thought of them in conjunction before (their albums are next to each other on my cd shelf, for one thing), but i'm not sure i'd realized how almost uncannily parallel those two bands are. the obvious: both are trios consisting of married couples - drummer-wife and guitarist/writer-hubby - one jewish, one mormon - with third-wheel bassists (though they originally started as quartets), from and strongly associated with small unlikely cities (hoboken nj and duluth mn.) both have been around for a really long time, have earned a tremendous critical reputation for consistency and quality, with similar but distinctive musical approaches (one more eclectic, the other more minimalist) that have developed and mutated only very gradually throughout their careers, and both have remarkably devoted fans who presumably collect their countless endless eps and ephemera (oddly enough, both have released christmas eps.) they're both noted for being fairly low-key and unassuming, personally as well as musically, and tend to underplay their considerable instrumental chops (the guitarist/de facto frontmen, specifically.)

they both released defining, consensus-pick albums late in their careers - and i can hear the heart beating as one and things we lost in the fire are very likely the first albums i heard by each, though their respective follow-ups (and then nothing turned itself inside-out and trust) were the first that i fully explored, digested, owned, and loved. (i've come to appreciate and eventually care for ichthbao and twlitf too, though for a long time i could only really connect with them as far as their first halves - it's taken patience to make it all the way through to their ultimately crucial, sweet closing tracks.)

picking up used copies as i come across them, i've gradually worked my way through much of their back-catalogs - indeed, i have exactly three earlier lps by each (which still leaves a lot more ylt albums, but only one - the beautifully titled curtain hits the cast - by low.) i actually purchased the three most recent low albums new and full-priced, around the time of their release (there are very few bands for whom that's true) - in ylt's case i got summer sun as a promo, although like the great destroyer, it was something of a critical disappointment which i wholeheartedly embraced (actually to a much greater extent, on both counts.)

there's something of a divergence after that in terms of my personal relationship to the bands. i publicly declared my love for yo la two years ago - as i'm doing now for low - but although i still stand by the things i said there, i've gotten a little distanced from them since. you know how you fall out of love with bands? not just letting your affections gradually wane, but having something diminish them more actively, acutely. it's happened for me most markedly with beck, and also elvis, sad to say - for both personal and musical reasons. not quite saying that's what's up w/ ylt - but there was something symbolic in my walking away, 20 (very enjoyable! so bad decision?) minutes into their p4kfest set, to go watch spoon (who also let me down a little bit - they've got a good shot to make it up though, with their forthcoming.) i was also underwhelmed by their live show in '04 (though i loved it in '02), but the scarier bit is that i've really been kind of turned off by their "return to form" [i am afraid of this album title], which sacrifices the satisfying cohesion of their previous two (unexciting, maybe, but still the only ylt lps i truly love.)

low, meanwhile, like i said, have subtly, gradually revealed themselves to me in the last few years - i've had much less difficulty connecting with their earlier work (i can live in hope, their 1993 debut, is in the running for my favorite), and now that i've caught up with them, i've enjoyed watching their style finally blossom and mutate in more dramatic, overt ways. and, clearly, their newest is far from a disappointment.

not that it's a competition. but i have been thinking in terms of the entertaining stylus "versus" features - which would be appropriate for these two. if i wrote one at this point, i'd obviously give low the edge, which might not be quite fair. (ylt's best shots: more lovable bassist - and better side projects, i'm assuming; possibly better album covers although their last may have screwed them there; better song covers by default, since although low have many lovely ones to their credit ylt are basically the kings and queen of cover songs.)

the thing is, their differences are almost as striking as their similarities, which makes them seem more like negative images of one another than mirrors. it's in their affect. low are somber; restrained; lugubrious; spiritual. yo are playful; direct; ebullient; worldly. both have undeniable beauty - but it's like light and dark; heaven and earth. there's some exaggeration here, of course - there are spaces in both for joy and sorrow, and each may at some point take on the qualities i've ascribed to the either - but in terms of the overwhelming, general quality conveyed by their music, the contrast is unmistakable.

yo la tengo's recent retrospective was titled prisoners of love - arguably a more appropriate title for low (theirs - three discs of rarities rather than a more scattered putative 2cd "best of" plus bonus disc was called a lifetime of temporary relief), but suitable for both. because earth and heaven can be prisons or sanctuaries, it's all in how you view them. it all boils down to love - sacred and profane; as you will - and maybe the distance is not so great.

SxoxoxSW

PART THREE

[PART TWO] [PART ONE]

oh man, that's how i feel about my life sometimes...

day three was, like, perfect. as far as concert-going goes, non-stop thrillz - bam bam bam from show to show. so i'm going to dispense with the narrative flow.

Rjd2 [at p4k party, emo's]
in case you haven't heard, Rjd2 is no longer a dj or an electronic-producer dude. Rjd2 is now a prog-funk hard rock band. at least, that's what it seemed from this set, which included full-on band renditions of "since we last spoke," "exotic talk" and maybe a few others from swls, along with new material with a similar energy (but more singing.) some deadringer selections too ("horror" and "ghostwriter") but these required rj to get back behind the sampler to trigger the vocals. it makes some sense - rather than make sample-based music that sounds like a rock band, why not just have a rock band? the answer is that rock bands are often boring. this band wasn't - they're funky and hard-rocking and pretty technically great (at least the drummer) - but i wonder if i might have felt differently if i wasn't familiar with the more unusually-flavored original versions of their jams. either way, fun to rock out with them that afternoon

menomena [ditto]
they're not much more than a normal-ish indie rock band, but they are a very nice indie rock band, and i'm very happy to have seen them in action. hard to say what exactly it is about them, but their music stands out as being enjoyable without being identifiably all that different from any number of other (fine, but unexceptional) indie bands. another very cool drummer, with a pretty unique steez (more part-oriented than groove-oriented, but still groovy enough.)

girl talk [ditto]
i felt kinda bad - this crowd was not going to be whipped into a hedonistic dance frenzy like last time i saw him (or probably any other night-time club show he plays.) i did my best, but to be honest the set wasn't quite as inspiring as it could have been either. still, it's like impossible not to have a great time watching/listening to greg do his thing, and this was no exception. he played "c'mon 'n ride it" but didn't come down into the crowd to start an actual train until later on in the set. towards the end, he dropped his (underwhelming) "let's call it off" remix, and announced "peter bjorn and john are in the building!" - but how much cooler would it have been if they came out to do the vocals live?

i didn't take this picture, or the next one, but they were taken by somebody very close to me (the entire front two rows seemed to be photographers)
sorry, my camera died!

amy winehouse at the fort (fader/levi's party)
she was apologetic - she hadn't realized the venue would be so big, or she would have brought her full band (which somebody told me later was actually the dap-kings. pretty crazy, i wonder when/where they rehearsed. oh wait - whoa - apparently they were her band on the album too. why didn't i know that?) instead it was just her and a very suave-looking guitarist (duh, it was binky, in a silky purple shirt), doing laidback acoustic readings of her songs. which still fail to make much of an impression, except for "rehab" of course (but even that i don't think is that great. i'm kind of confused about why the album is getting such glowing press, even though it's cool that we may have a bona-fide [relatively-straight] soul hit on our hands in 2007.) still, the lady can sing. and hey how about that hair, and that makeup! and those tattoos! (look here for a better shot of amy's left arm tattoos, which was actually taken from closer to my vantage point, just at a different show.) her style's pretty intense, but it's also pretty damn wtf, no?

they told sigrid that their sweatsuits are now extremely smelly

datarock [ditto]
hell yeah. actually, not too much to say, but they put on a great show. all the faves from the album, and even the ridiculous ones (like "night flight to uranus") came off very sharp. some silly guys. after their set, "(i've had) the time of my life" came on the speakers, and they made us all sing it into the microphones.

nellie mckay [at exodus]
there are some good pictures from this set here. no way i would have been able to take anything like that - i barely even got to see what she was wearing (hey, nice shirt.) it's no great mystery why there was a lot of talking going on during this set: nobody could see her! the stage is very low at this venue, and she was sitting down, at an upright piano. before the set started, matthew and i were standing in the middle of the crowd, chatting with a chatty floridian ex-new yorker about the xpn world cafe, the three-penny opera, why pretty little head is nellie's coming-out album, and the all-important question of which is your favorite pipette ["if she were a man," she said, it would definitely be the "classic ice blonde" (that's gwenno i think) and she was mystified about why her husband and their drooling male friends all preferred rose (as do i)].

but shortly after nellie started playing, we moved upstairs to the way back so at least we could actually see her. everybody else was still out of luck though - "we can't see you!" somebody shouted after the first few songs. "oh, well...i can't see you either," she responded. "maybe it's better that way, for both of us!" i'm not sure why i never realized before that she sounds (her speaking voice anyway) exactly like judy garland. though what she says is a lot brattier. anyway. so, she did "cupcake" and "lazy river" and a couple others from the new one (but not "columbia is bleeding," which i'd say is probably the highlight, nor "beecharmer" of course.) also "suitcase song" (yaay!) and "david." (i did shout out "i want to get married!", but if she heard me she probably didn't take me seriously.)

best part was the closing medley of "doggies and kitties": jumping back and forth among "yodel" (is that right?), "the dog song," "pounce," and "ding dong," in a way that really showed off her piano expertise and smart little theory-head, as she modulated around with little impromptu interludes and laughed at herself for messing up the words (i forget what the typically self-deprecating line was that she fumbled and then added "apparently" as an aside.)

still a goof; still a lovable goof. (was she really using sheet music?)

________

marit larsen


marit larsen


MARIT LARSEN!

[at, um, uncle flirty's]

whooosh!

okay, well, i'm still waiting on nan to send me the photos of marit that i took with her camera, but i guess i'll go ahead and write about the experience. this is the only halfway decent photo from that show that i can find online - but i have better ones, just be patient. thanks nan! (videos coming soon too.)

well i got to the venue when foxy finn irina bjorklund was still playing - was very glad to catch her last four or so songs. she and her band played rootsy cosmopolitan folk, mostly in english, and a couple of chanson-style numbers in french. she has a very appealing sort of casual sophistication - wearing an antique-looking lightweight yellow dress, sitting down to perform (she pulled out her saw for the last number) like she was playing on a back porch somewhere, with one shoe on and one bare foot (hmm, looks like that's a trademark/habit of hers) - and of course the french numbers only added to her sultriness.

and then it was time for marit's set. actually it took a while for her to go on, as there were some technical problems - the doorlady later told me that a fuse had blown in the [electric] piano, which was a recurring problem at that venue because of the demands of converting the voltage for the european equipment. meanwhile marit was in the corner by the stage, pacing and occasionally stretching...

now, my excitement for seeing her had been mounting throughout the week (since tuesday night when i found out she would be appearing), and especially after the previous night with the other marit, i was hoping for a similar experience (friendly post-set interaction, free cd? - wasn't really expecting on another dance contest and t-shirt), except better because i actually know and love miss larsen's music and would therefore have more to say to her.

but it wasn't until the moment i saw her in person that i fell in love with marit larsen. in <3. is gorgeous - not necessarily in a dramatic, striking way (like striking you over the head), but like a perfectly sweet, fresh-faced twenty-two-year old girl you might meet where you can't quite believe how delicate and soft and exquisite her features are. and tiny too, so delicate she would almost seem fragile if there wasn't so much sparkle in her smile and life in her rosy cheeks. (you'd never call her a porcelain doll - she'd just roll her eyes and laugh - but it would be a warm, easy laugh, wrinkling her little freckled nose.) it's cliche but the photos just don't do her justice, certainly not the wavy-haired, styled-up press photos, which tend to subdue her brightness (and her smile) in trying to present a more mature, moodier marit. maybe her soft, glowing vibrancy can't be captured in a moment's stillness, but i'm hoping my attempts will fare somewhat better, being from that shining night - with her simple, girlish dusky-purple dress; gold barrettes holding back her lengthy, straighter hair and looking somehow fairy-like - and taken through my smitten eyes.

well. i just bounced around quietly, enjoying my giddiness, while i waited for nan to arrive and the set to start (which happened in that order.) finally the band took the stage - seven pieces including cello, banjo, several guitars and keys - there was a fair amount of swapping around throughout the set - and launched into "only a fool." at this point it's harder to recall to mind than the impression she made visually and physically, but her musical performance (and the band's) was simply outstanding as well. truly - i was of course expecting to be excited by it, but i think that even anyone unfamiliar with her music would have been impressed. it's no surprise that she's a very professional performer (she's a ten-year veteran after all), but it was especially touching to see how much fun she was clearly having on stage. she displayed ample chops on guitar, mandolin, piano, and harmonica, and sang beautifully, reinvesting familiar lyrics with heartfelt meaning. there was one fabulous new song (apparently called "steal my heart" - the line that sticks in my memory is "if you're going to break my heart, break it like you mean it.") otherwise she hit most of the highlights from the album, including of course "come closer" and the moving "solid ground" (on piano.) no airing of "under the surface," and no "don't say you love me" as i was hoping - it was a short set - but, after a spirited run through "don't save me," she closed with possibly the most exciting cover she could have chosen; "my boyfriend's back." with a spot-on, energetic folk-rock rearrangement - retaining the hand-clap rhythm but fleshing out the stop-starts with a rootsy gusto.

meanwhile i was dancing my fluttery little heart out, at least to any song for which it was the slightest bit appropriate, and mouthing/singing along with many of the words. there was a good eight or ten feet between the edge of the stage and the bulk of the crowd, and while it would have been completely awkward to stay very close to the front with all of that distance, i hovered in the forward portion of that gap, sometimes hugging the speakers along the right side of the space. so, well, it would have been practically impossible for marit not to notice me, since she more or less had to look at and past me to see the rest of the crowd, but i definitely felt us making eye contact for much of the set - especially on "come closer" (it was all i could do not to take the titular instruction literally), which is sort of a perfect song for shy eye-contact flirting, shaking our heads at each other knowingly on the "will it keep you warm at night?...(i don't think so)" clincher-line. i mean, who knows - it was mostly beautiful self-delusion, of course - but i was having fun with myself, anyway, and marit certainly seemed to be having fun as well, and i imagine some piece of that came from seeing how gleeful her music was making me.

anyway, she played eight or so songs and that was it - the sizable audience applauded appreciatively and we few giddy fans in the front clapped and cheered, but it was hardly a crowd capable of demanding an encore. still, i think her set found a very welcome reception. i was sort of too busy being smitten to pay much attention to anybody else, but i did say hello to the two other people up front who had been singing along and being excited (and joining me for a bit of dancing, though not much.) they turned out to be true marit superfans - they'd met through the fan forum on her website, and they clearly knew all sorts of things about her and her band. they'd come extremely prepared - they had posters for her to sign, presents and letters to give her, and had in fact made contact with her before, so she'd known to expect them. thanks to them, i was able to go to her dressing room (well, it was just the pool room in the back of the bar, reserved for the bands), just by sort of tagging along as they were trying to get in to give her the presents.

it was more than a little bit awkward - i'd been feeling particularly awkward since i'd initially tried to give marit a hug after she got off stage and was going around shaking hands - ordinarily i would have asked first, but i was still caught up in the rapport we'd been developing in my head while she was presumably too busy focusing on her performance to notice. she accepted the hug, of course, but it was still a bit uncomfortable - what i hadn't accounted for is that she is a good deal shyer than she seemed on stage. she's friendly and certainly polite, and she smiles a lot, but she's definitely reserved. but i have to say it was exacerbated by the two superfans, who seemed like they'd be pretty socially awkward even in a completely comfortable situation - which this certainly was not - and i'm sure me popping and tagging along didn't help much either. (after all, they are internet message-board denizens, who aren't known for their social ease - at least one of them self-identified as obsessive, and they both made comments to the effect that it was very surreal experience since meeting marit had been a long-time dream of theirs.)

by the way, you can read their accounts of the evening's events on the maritlarsen.com forum: scroll all the way to the bottom here for matt's ("Fanboy") indepth retelling; and here, scroll down past his blurry photos - that's him in the first five - for the same with sarah's ("SSrb1098") additional comments. for some reason they think my name is frank - look earlier in the thread for some of their initial gushing and first mention of me as "that guy jumping around in circles with things falling out of his pockets" (hey, it was only one thing - my camera.) i've registered on the board (as "Maritricious!") but i've not been able to bring myself to post yet.

so, anyway, we went back to the band room, and i mostly just stood there while matt and sarah alternately gushed and apologized for gushing too much. marit was certainly touched but also amused by the whole thing, saying that of course she didn't mind, that it just meant they liked her music a lot, which is the important thing to her. they gave her the presents - a lovely necklace, a stuffed texas longhorn (that makes noise), and wha twas apparently a scented candle (i only saw her smelling it, didn't see what it was) - and had her sign the posters. i didn't have anything to give her or take as a souvenir (i'd meant to snatch the setlist - which i usually don't care about - but i was distracted and sarah got it) but i did get a bit of (slightly more modulated) gushing in, and i also got to tell marit that "my boyfriend's back" is my karaoke song - and she said it's hers too! and that's why she insisted on having it in her set. so that was nice. it was all very nice.

i'll have more to say about marit later on (her name's pronounced something like MAH-reet, by the way - though i didn't really realize that at the time and may or may not have said it incorrectly when i was talking to her.) i've been listening to her album a bunch in the past week (and i finally ordered an actual cd copy of it), and i have some new opinions to spout about it. but i'll hold off for now, because this has gone on plenty long enough.

________


what happened next? well, i went by stubb's BBQ to try to get in for BDB and GBQ, but they had stopped selling tickets (even though there was plenty of space inside.) i went by antone's to try to get in for antibalas and the dap-sharons - no luck there but i had a lovely time waiting for an hour or so on the cash line ("optimists line," as i'd taken to calling it) in the warm night air, soaking in the loveliness of what had just happened, and chatting with my linemates lucinda, a former philadelphian who insisted that i wasn't in texas, i was in austin, and [never told us her name], a piano grad student at nyu, about struggling-artist life. if i had had my wits together i would have realized i could make the most of the $20 i'd spent on the nellie ticket and go back there to catch peaches (probably could have gotten in too.) but i didn't, so i just wandered back to scandinavia (er, uncle flirty's) and watched some of who i thought were grand island but now think might have been reykjavik.

whatever it was didn't really pique my interest, so i continued to wander along sixth street (a continual enveloping performance in itself - closed to traffic for the duration of the festival and mobbed every night with all sorts of interesting characters), taking it all in. i turned down an unlikely street and caught the strains of what i thought was maybe just a small, informal hip-hop show, not an official part of the conference, until the mcs started chanting "it's the pack!" indeed it was - just kicking off their set at the beauty bar patio. it's a small venue, but there was still room for me if i wanted to pay $15.

i decided to just stand outside the tent and watch for a while from near the entrance, where i had a clear view of the stage. after a few numbers i wandered on, not really engaged, past a series of venues on 7th and then back to stubb's to sit for a few minutes and listen to a couple of the good bad and queen's lovely mellow numbers ("kingdom of doom" and i'm not sure what else.) then i headed back to the beauty bar, still in a bit of a daze, thinking i might be able to catch the pack closing their set with "vans" (the stuff that i'd heard had been disappointingly conventional-sounding compared to that whispered, bizarro mini-masterpiece of skeletal hyphy.) (hmm, this is kind of interesting - article about "vans" and product-placement censorship.)

no such luck - the pack had evidently just finished their set, but the federation were starting theirs (sort of surprising that these names weren't already taken, eh?), and this time i actually stood and watched, along with a san franciscan fellow with a captain's hat who showed up soon after. they were fun - hyphy's supposed to be about being hyper and getting stupid, and though their outfits and general performance style was more or less standard hip-hop, they did do some goofy dancing and arm gestures and so on. they finished up with three songs in a row that i knew from my hyphy-downloading binge a while back - the so-so "18 dummy" and "i wear my stunna glasses at night" (or whatever it's called), and the genre-defining (i assume) "hyphy," which is really pretty great. mostly it was just nice to see a performance in a different style from pretty much everything else i'd seen at the conference - although to really appreciate the show i should have been inside the tent where it seemed like there was some serious dancing going on.

actually they might have kept going after that, but i went back to meet matthew where we had parked our bikes twelve hours earlier. we recounted our divergent evenings (he'd seen the watson twins, andrew bird, perry farrell, badly drawn, and good bad) over goodflow oj at kerby lane, then biked the rest of the way home in the wide, wide empty streets.

the wedding present

(...are not on this mix)

Title: Marriage is HOT and so are you
Format: CD-R
Date: 29 February 2007
Packaging: wooden AOL-disc box (my last one!) stripped and recovered in white construction paper, with typed tracklist on the back and magenta-sharpied title. (placed on the gift table at <3heidirob<3's wedding reception. box also including a copy of the revised gold star for robot boy and a burn of love, pain, and the whole damn [crazy] thing for the happy cupple.)

[eta: revisions for 2008 edition]
1. be my husband - nina simone
2. be my wife - david bowie
3. the marriage - billy bragg
4. the marriage - cex
5. (today i met) the boy i'm gonna marry - darlene love
6. (today i met) the girl i'm gonna marry - the nation of ulysses
[+ marry me – suburban kids with biblical names]
7. marry me - dolly parton
8. let's pretend we're married - prince
9. let's get married - al green
10. i wanna get married - nellie mckay
11. i just wanna make love to you - etta james [cut]
12. shack up - banbarra
13. earn enough for us - xtc
14. mushaboom (postal service remix) - feist
[+ when we get married – the dreamlovers]
15. let nothing come between you - warren zevon
16. wedding march - gary lucas
17. ban marriage - the hidden cameras
18. the day - they might be giants
19. big day - xtc
20. dracula's wedding - andré 3000 feat. kelis
21. a) the wedding (lindstrøm and prins thomas remix) - annie [moved to end]
b) stay with me ('75) - lemon jelly
[mixed by ross of love]
22. neat little domestic life - of montreal
[+ the little things you do together – company]
23. guide for the married man - the turtles [cut]
24. when i say wife - jonathan richman
25. yes i do - solomon burke [cut]

this is a long-in-the-planning, short-in-the-doing re-working of a cassette mix made for rebecca about a year ago (?) called ceremony, matrimony, alimony, which had nineteen or so of these songs (some in different versions) and a handful more besides. basically i took out all (or most) of the songs that present marriage in a negative light - which also happened to be almost all of the ones that take place after the marriage actually happens (lyle lovett's "she's no lady," the fiery furnaces' "single again," ry cooder's "married man's a fool," - obv. the canon of cheatin' songs canon runs long and deep) (i kept bragg and cex's more generalist skepticism, but not whiskeytown's "matrimony") - and also the clutch of songs about friendship that ended the original tape. a few more recent discoveries, some acquisition fortuosity, and voilá.

turns out to be a pretty darn swell listen. (never mind that it breaks rules 1, 2, 3, and 4, willy nilly.) it's up there with the most stylistically diverse compilations i've ever done, spanning blues, jazz, folk, country, rock, punk, funk, soul, hip-hop, and techno (and perhaps"pop" though, interestingly, not really in the strictest sense) but somehow it doesn't seem overly scatterbrained to me. i like that a decent number of iconic figures weigh in (nina, david, dolly, prince, al), and generally the diversity of perspectives.

obviously, i had some fun with the track sequencing. (like we get to imagine simone and bowie as a couple, which isn't so far off, and darlene love and ian svenonius.) (to get full mileage out of the "boy i'm gonna marry" resonance, i could have used tmbg's "lucky ball in chain" - but that's clearly poor form and taste.) "dracula's wedding" is probably the most questionable inclusion (thematically - it'd be more at home on a halloweeny mix.) "guide for the married man" is an utterly ridiculous song, with approximately zero actual content to the lyrics (i think the story is they wrote it as the title song for a film without knowing anything about the film) but it's hard to resist. (though for the most part the scope of this mix ends at the wedding ceremony.)

so there's that. i defy y'all to listen to it and still want to argue about marriage not being hot hot hott. as i wrote in the note to the newlybirds, "some songs about love, sex, domesticity, and, well, marriage, 'cause i guess that's what you've got to look forward to." sounds good to me. much love to r+h and b+e and all those other marryin' fools out there. and more love love lo--o--ove comin' riiiiight up.....

a marriage made in arts non-profit heaven

i do know a fair amount about jazz - at least, a fair amount considering that i'm a pop-obsessed, indie-rock-bred music blogger. and i've got some things to say about it - but i know they're going to get bigger and hairier than i feel like dealing with right here and now, so i'm going to try to limit my scope to this perfectly lovely jason moran album, and more specifically to this song:

6 milestone Y jason moran and alicia hall moran

it was an easy valentine's choice, because it's an artistic collaboration between husband and wife, and it doesn't get much more romantic than that. alicia, who wrote the tune, sings as the "jazz wife" (as jason puts it in the liner note, "musing about the whereabouts of her traveling husband.") there's a nice little self-contradiction in that she's not actually sitting home and waiting, she's participating performance.

back when she was just alicia hall, she wrote a rapturous treatise on love as the "soul of genius" for the liner note of moran's 2002 solo piano album modernistic: "listen and you will do more than sense his genius - you will hear his life." [she also says that "it is the element of love that ciphers the query on genius"... but i'm not going to go there.] along these lines, "milestone" might be construed as not just about their marriage (presumably) and a function of their partnership, but actually literally constituting their marriage.

certainly, more broadly, it's a stylistic marriage of jazz (his milieu) and classical (hers), through the juxtaposition of classical vocal technique and a jazz quartet setting, with his pianistic approach containing aspects of both traditions. of course, in the contemporary art music world this recording absolutely inhabits and exemplifies, and very probably in their respective artistic careers, the boundaries are hardly that well defined. there are other elements of classical and academic music throughout this "jazz" album: in the nostalgically respectful reading of carl maria von weber's "cradle song," in the self-conscious avant-gardeism of "break down" and "artists ought to be writing" (both of which sample the voice of art theorist adrian piper, and, for me, resonate strongly though probably unwittingly with the work of the books, similarly intellectually-inclined musicians who tend to travel in rather different circles), and in the minimalist compositional structure of "RAIN" (a piece inspired by african-american slave culture.)

moran's piano-playing itself (at least as i've experienced it) tends to reside fairly far from the fluid, earthy vernacular we're used to hearing from more traditionally-oriented jazz pianists.
still, it doesn't feel overly clinical or dispassionate. there's plenty of personality discernable even in the less conceptually-anchored pieces, and the intellectual components of the album are nicely tempered by a distinct, sentimental emotional aspect. this is significant - it lends "milestone," for example, a warmth and tenderness that's mostly absent from don byron's similarly-minded but rather glib album a fine line. [a fine line is a sort of conceptual record about arias and lieder, for which byron collected melodies from the likes of roy orbison, puccini, and leonard bernstein, setting them for various small jazz ensembles, some instrumental but in several cases with a classically-trained vocalist.]

it is extremely pertinent that artist in residence is an album of material culled from three separate commissions by prominent arts organizations; which is to say this music is fundamentally borne of the institutional, non-profit arts world. i take the "in residence" of the title to suggest that moran is a resident of that community, and in a more permanent sense than the phrase usually indicates. this isn't to say that he or this record are entirely divorced from a/the more "pure" jazz community: especially these days, there's an awful lot of overlap.

whether that overlap is a good or bad thing for jazz (as an art form? as a cultural tradition? as music?) is an open question - without attempting to address it, i would hazard that it opens up certain possibilities while limiting others. in some ways moran seems to be doing something analogous to how i described matmos vis-a-vis contemporary electronica a few posts down - that is, he's taking a conceptual approach to his parent genre - or maybe better said, using (in his case) jazz as a tool to explore concepts outside of its normal ken - in a way that, while technically remaining within the parameters of the jazz tradition, challenges those parameters to the extent that he sometimes seems to be more properly situated on the outside looking in.

"how can an abstract jazz artist say clearly how they feel and make an audience understand?" in his liner note, moran poses this question and asserts that this work "centers around exploring possible answers to the question." adrian piper provides one possible answer in her sampled speech - "artists ought to be writing about what they do" - and moran takes this to heart, offering a fair amount of explication in the booklet. but there are bound to be even more satisfying answers out there as well. his choice to cover the "negro national anthem" hints at another possibility, one based as much in culture resonance as it is in intellectualism. regardless of how adequately he feels he's been able to address these concerns, it's pretty clear that he's got a firm awareness of something which is vital to remember in the highly theoretically convoluted context of contemporary arts institutions - that to be intellectual doesn't have to and shouldn't mean to be unemotional or impersonal, and that art can and should strive to be both.

rudie got soul

would you believe that these two men are actually the same size? one of them only looks taller because of the mystical transformative optical power of wisdom, music, and transcendental love.

i don't know much about reggae. even though i generally enjoy listening to it, i've never made it a point to really investigate it. indeed, i feel like i still have a ways to go in clearing up some misconceptions i have about it, such as my sense that it completely predated the american r'n'b/rock/pop [from the late '50s/early '60s, as i know it from oldies radio], developed independently of it [until it was suddenly revealed to the rest of the world by bob marley in the '70s], and therefore belongs more properly to an "authentic" or "folk" tradition (like bluegrass, gospel, and folk) unlike the more individualistic (and, obviously, commercial) art forms of pop, r'n'b, etc. [this is, of course, a false dichotomy as well as faulty historiography, although it's not entirely groundless oversimplification.]

but i did have an idea about reggae recently, which is that it could be construed as a subcategory of r'n'b, and more specifically, as a form of soul music. considered this way, it suddenly becomes a lot more interesting to me. the direct impetus for this idea came from listening to this cd, which contains two of toots and the maytals' early '70s albums. i was familiar with some of the songs, especially "pressure drop" (which is mostly what made me decide i needed to own the albums), but i don't think i was prepared for the full magnitude of greatness on display here...it might be some of the most essential music i've ever heard. anyway i can't stop smiling whenever i put it on. it's reggae, but pretty hard to deny it's soul too.

so i've been trying to figure out what to do with this (hardly revolutionary, but still significant) connection. who else made music like this? bob marley, for instance, is fairly soulful, but his music never struck a chord with me in quite this way (though i should probably check out some of his earlier stuff.) i think i need somebody to explain what roots and rocksteady mean, exactly. (and bluebeat?) maybe wikipedia will do it. (hmm, sez that the maytals play "a unique, original combination of gospel, ska, soul, reggae, and rock"...well that's not helpful!)

in the meantime, i'm checking out this album, widely and unanimously raved about as a classic, albeit one that almost nobody knew about for over two decades. at first i was underwhelmed, because it just sounded like typical, dubby reggae to me. (and, well, because it didn't sound very much like soul.) perhaps i should have expected as much - turns out i actually already had one of the tracks from it on the lee perry arkology box which i've intermittently enjoyed but probably never made it all the way through. upon repeated listens...i am growing to appreciate it more; there is some lovely subtlety to the production, and some of the songs are growing on me (that was probably the biggest disappointment on first listen.) it's clear that the primary emphasis here is not on pop song structures, memorable melodies, or emotional vocal performances (elements that i'm especially interested in these days, be they in '60s soul, '70s power-pop, and '00s dance-pop) - though there is, naturally, plenty of rhythm. of course, this is from 1977, by which time soul music itself had basically dried up, and/or developed into other things.

more relevant to the issue at hand, though maybe something of an exploratory cul-de-sac, i've picked up this fantastic compilation. it demonstrates a very strong reggae-soul bond, to the extent that the music it contains - despite being the work of jamaican ex-pat musicians, is far more readily identifiable as funk and soul than as reggae.

7 i believe in music Y bob and wisdom

this track is a pretty good exampe - it's actually one of the three or four most reggae-like cuts on the cd, but what it most resembles is muscle-shoals-style gospel-soul. (there are only two tracks that i would call relatively straight reggae.)

it's also stunningly beautiful; both the musical performance and the lyrical message. it made me melt a little the first time i heard it (standing alone waiting for the subway.) i like having this message on valentine's day, because i think it's important for the holiday to be able to be about generalized, universal love, as well as just romantic love. interestingly, on the evidence of these three reasonably diverse cds, romantic and sexual love would seem to be a much less common topic for reggae than they are for soul, rock and pop. (i was considering including the deathly funky anti-war burner "love is the answer," by ram, instead of this one, but that will just have to wait...)

anyway, "music is love and love is music" is as good an explanation as any as to why ross is "of love."

and: "people who believe in music, they're the happiest people i've ever seen." 'nuff said.

let's get {u} into this co ntry

"i've got a U-shaped hole inside me/it gets deeper by the day," says keith rban, country-music-star-turned-celebrity-husband. n.b. that, evidently, the hole is not U-sized, as presumably your size is reasonably constant.

so i kind of can't stop listening to this keith urban album.

er, this one:
which "crazy" thing was that again? actually, this might have been an appropriate title for a concept album about gnarles barkley (which would surely be more interesting than st. elsewhere.) as it happens, the emphasis is very strongly on the first item in that list: above all else, this album's most salient quality is that it is vehemently, brazenly, wholeheartedly in love. crazy in love, you might say. that's probably why i wanted to write about it on valentine's day.

there is one song called "used to the pain," but the pain in question turns out to be that of "givin' in to love," so it's sort of a red herring. otherwise, apart from the handwringing, backwards-looking "stupid boy" [the only lyric on the album in past tense - and, notably , one of the few not written by urban] and "raise the barn" [a southern pride anthem, but of the anti-bush variety ("the boss man don't seem to care"), whose list of red-state institutions includes dixie cups, paper plates, and what's apparently referred to as the "cotton-eyed joe"), every single song on here is dedicated expressly to explaining just how much keith loves you, wants you, needs you, is going to take care of you and support you and not let you down, etc. etc.

and, you know, he's earnest and ardent and reverent and self-confident, but he's also sensitive and considerate and clearly has a sense of humor and knows how to have fun... and basically he's just so big and strong and compassionate and manly, gosh, he kinds of makes me feel like a teenaged girl. of course, unfortunately (for that girl) (or maybe not), "you" in this case is not actually you, but nicole, or as the liner thanks put it: "my wonderful wife - you brought out the sun and the colors and you are SO love - can you hear it? you resonate through my heart and this album. joyous spirits chasing butterflies are we." awwwwwwwww!

point being, i guess, that this is easily the most thematically unified album i've listened to since, well, paris. which is exciting for the albumist in me. and also it's refreshing to hear someone who's so unabashedly happy and self-assured about love, and keith makes it convincing and genuinely moving; partly because of his acknowledgment of light and dark shadings, but largely because of the dogged consistency of his theme, no matter how brilliantly unsubtle and over-the-top it admittedly is.

of course, all of this is so effective because it's evident not just in the lyrics, and the vocal delivery, but in the music itself, which is similarly, fittingly, passionate, earnest, dynamic, often bombastic, frequently playful, and just plain great enough to make you want to believe anything he says. i've almost forgotten to mention that this a mainstream pop-country album, for whatever that tells you; it's also the first such album i've ever paid attention to, much less loved. so i can't speak from experience for the rest of the genre, but i can say that while melodramatic lyrical sentiment and music to match are perhaps to be expected, here at least they absolutely feel earned - which is to say, i guess, not entirely melodramatic.

it's hard to discuss this record in terms of country music, not just because i'm pretty unfamiliar with modern country (though obviously not with its reputation in various circles), but because it doesn't sound especially country to me. i'd say its most pronounced country attributes are its glossy, big-sounding production values and an occasional, slight twang in urban's voice. there are some fiddles and pedal steels and whatnot, and some of the songs have more typically country grooves - but none of that is any more overt than on plenty of "rock" albums. ryan adam's gold comes to mind, for instance, as a more strongly country-sounding album (and that's far from adam's most country-influenced album.)

the observation that (at least some) modern country is just mildly inflected pop-rock is not news. nor does it bother me - indeed, the idea that nashville has become a refuge for rock songwriters no longer relevant to the rest of the pop milieu makes the notion of getting further into country all the more intriguing. it seems evident that at this point "country" is defined more significantly by its consolidated artistic community than by its musical characteristics (and also, of course, as a marketing category) - but that's also something i don't know much about. (though it's a very familiar trope; artists being categorized by social position rather than music.)

all i can say for now is that this album has huge pop hooks and big rock guitars and varied, inventive production, and as much emotional heft as pretty much anything. lead single/opening track/exhibit a "once in a lifetime" is a straight-up power-pop nugget that should make frank kogan stop saying that john shanks does all of his best work with ashlee and lindsay (if things were different, i'd suggest that mr. shanks put keith in touch with ash, who last i heard was looking for someone to catch her when she falls.) the first six tracks are solid rock gold - then there's the brooding ballad "stupid boy," the album's lengthy centerpiece and biggest single to date (though one of the least interesting cuts, to my mind.)

in the latter portion things get even more varied (and somewhat more country), with the slightly creepy anthem "god made woman," which starts with a choir (thom jurek says it "celebrates -- not objectifies -- women" - i'm not quite convinced that it's not doing both) and the groovy two-step "tu compañia" (which is not actually latin-flavored, though it tricks me into thinking that - even though there's nothing in the lyric to suggest this, i imagine it as being adressed a different woman from the rest of the album...but that's just not possible, now is it?)

my favorite tracks, the ones that have been constantly rotating in my head for a few weeks now, are "faster car" - the album's funkiest and most rocking moment and possibly its best pop chorus - the driving "i told you so" (as in "i won't say..."), whose rhythmic cadence, especially in the big stompy bits after choruses, makes me think of talking heads' "road to nowhere" (even though it's probably supposed to make me think of celtic jigs), and the sweepingly romantic "i won't let you down." that one's on the mix:

11 i won't let you down Y keith urban

it has my favorite single moment on the album, the break-down-and-build-back-up after the bridge (starting at 2:41, or 37:26 on the mincecast), when the huge production gives way to just bells and plinky piano under the beginning of the chorus hook, and then the rock band bursts back in. i can't hear it without thinking of jon brion.

okay, i think i've gushed enough. i still don't quite know what to make of the way this album has clearly struck a chord with me. obviously one thing it suggests is that i ought to explore contemporary country further, as i would like to do and had already intended to get around to at some point. i'm just not sure where to go next, exactly. also i'm a little worried that i won't find anything to live up to this - thom jurek (who's clearly as excited by this album as i am) calls it "something that hasn't been heard in the country genre in this way before." but, you know. i'll figure it out. here's another picture:

valentine's passed

o valentine's. like any holiday, or i guess any annual occurence, it can end up as much about the past as the present, a familiar, evenly-spaced milemarker for easy reference. there was the valentine's that i saw beck at maxwell's (and lost some love for him), and the valentine's that hannah and i broke up, and the valentines i made for rabi. well, as it happens, those were all the same year (two-thousand-and-three, wouldn't you know, maybe a harbinger for that sea-change year of years.) i'll tell you more about that later. then there was the one when ester and i had watched american splendor and played poker, and then one when i was in sri lanka - i can't remember whether i had flowers sent or not. in high school i recall making blue-green chocolate chip cookies and passing them out with hugs, playing "my funny valentine" with brushes on the cookie tin.

in my senior year of college, i made little 3" cd-rs valentines for maybe eight or ten of my loves, each with customized artwork and a personally tailored (and non-overlapping!) little thematic mix. (i remember: movies for lillie, boys for ester, frenchyness for laura, tic-tac-toe for kat) they are destined to go undocumented, or at least not fully, but with hope they are still being enjoyed. (like some other things, those were inspired by rabi's 3" valcds from the previous year - i've still got mine somewhere.)

well, a year ago i quietly made this little mixtape for myself. it was the post-post after-the-fact realization of a concept i'd come up with maybe even a year earlier, when i still might have needed the catharsis; at this point i made it more from a sense of obligation to my past and to the idea. i guess it's a similar sense that inspires me to put it here now. anyway the titular "past" is that aforementioned '03 massacre, or more properly its aftermath, and i parlayed uncertainty about how/why to apostrophize the title into a not inappropriate ambiguity.

Title: a ghost of valentine's past
Format: 60-minute cassette
Date: 7 february 06
Packaging: labelled in lower case with a blue pen; short enough to fit on the front of the card.

side one
["she said always remember never to trust me..."]
your ex-lover is dead - stars
let it die - feist
pearl - new folk implosion
summer's gone - aberfeldy
a little bit more - jamie lidell
if not now, whenever - the books
the delicate place - spoon
modern girl - sleater-kinney
the suitcase song - nellie mckay

side two
a fond farewell - elliott smith
this time it will - jeff hanson
out of time - blur
when the angels play their drum machines - hefner
the only answer - m. doughty
dearly departed - daedelus
love love love - the mountain goats
if you ever need a stranger to sing at your wedding - jens lekman
there will always be - adem

so. it tells its own story well enough, which may or may not be mine. if nothing else, it presents a certain image of my listening habits at a certain point. (if i made it last february, i'd certainly been saving up many of the songs for close to a year; i know at one point "i summon you" was slated for this, but then it was deployed to october instead.) as you might expect: these songs are so sad and beautiful.

around the same time, but later, and delivered belatedly as i recall, i made this; not so much a valentine's mix as a valentine in mix form, for angela:

Title: The Vulpine Valentine
Format: 90-minute cassette, plus extra bonus 90-minute cassette ("Bonus Beats Me")
Date: February 2006
Packaging: construction-paper-covered slip-case (formerly a condom box) with a heart and banner on one side and a lovestruck fox on the other (see below), containing two cassette cases, with the tracklist of the primary mix in typewriter and colored-pencil rebus-style drawings on pink index card.

"a term - is't endearing?" (side one)
1. my angel rocks ))<>(( back and forth - four tet
2. angela - john vanderslice
3. she's an angela - they might be giants
4. thank you for sending me an angel - talking heads
5. good weekend - art brut
6. let me go home - camera obscura
7. heartbeat - annie
8. what i'm trying to say - stars
9. flowers - cibo matto
10. secret heart - feist
11. ways + means - m. doughty
12. love is an arrow - aberfeldy
13. l'amour et la morte - (the real) tuesday weld
14. if you find yourself caught in love - belle and sebastian
+ cheese grater - ed's redeeming qualities
"everytime i see you it's happy something" (side two)
1. every time she turns around it's her birthday - manitoba
2. digital love - daft punk
3. sleep like a dream - tears in x-ray eyes
4. good dreams - superchunk
5. she goes to bed - jason falkner
6. pillow - capitol k
7. here in the night - kelley polar
8. in a star orbit - rebecca gates
9. sleep late my ladyfriend - harry nilsson
10. sunday morning - margo guryan
11. sunday kind of love - etta james
12. in the lost and found - elliott smith
+ easy to love - edith frost

mmmm... a very nice mix, i think. it hits that balance of songs chosen for being appropriate to the mix but also for just being fantastic songs. which is to say that just about all of the songs are both. this tape also tells a little story, over its two sides - which is also our story ("good weekend," more or less) - about going out dancing, going to sleep, and waking up. there's also the part at the beginning about angels, and a group of songs about saying "i love you," which is a pretty good subject for a song.

here's the fox, by the way:

the second cassette ("Bonus Beats Me!") went a little something like this:

FRIENDS OF MINE - of montreal/FOLDING DIRTY LAUNDRY - radioinactive+antimc/ONE CEX - cex/YOU (BETTER LET ME LOVE YOU x4) TONIGHT - richard x f. tiga/JUST CAN'T GET YOU OFF MY MIND - spinners/JULIE (RMX) - jens lekman/ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES - los lobos/DISTORTED ANGEL - elvis costello+attractions/(THE ANGELS WANNA WEAR MY) RED SHOES - hem/WALK AWAY RENEE - billy bragg/UPSIDE DOWN - yo la tengo/NO SKY - guided by voices/RAZORBLADE - the strokes/WALK AWAY - franz ferdinand/NOW AND SLEEP - daedelus/I BUILT THIS CITY (MICHAEL MAYER MIX) - baxendale/NO FUN - vitalic/U DON'T KNOW ME - armand van helden/SUGAR (GIMME SOME) - trick daddy f. ludacris + cee-lo/TAKE CARE OF BUSINESS - danger mouse and gemini f. j-zone/WE GOT PANACHE - princess superstar/I'M A SLUT - bis/SUBURBIA - pet shop boys/SIDE STREETS - st. etienne/ON THE WAY TO THE CLUB - blur/PUNK AS FUCK - american analog set/SNOW - jesse winchester/SNOW SHOWERS - trembling blue stars/THIS LITTLE UKELELE - stephin merritt

this was a much looser and obviously wide-ranging mix that only lives up to the promise of "beats" about half the time. a couple "significant" songs; the rest just whatever seemed like a good idea. the first part of side two (basically all the techno and hip-hop stuff) was one of my earliest attempts at live-to-cassette continuous-mixed djing, and was done on the fly and i think in one take. [i only regret not putting "our little angel" instead of "distorted angel" (because it's a really nice song that i haven't already used on a bunch of mixes, and maybe other reasons), and maybe i regret using that dm+gemini song, although i guess it's interesting that danger mouse and cee-lo are sequenced together like that.]

so. none of these are just straight-up valentine's day, love-themed mixes. and neither is the li'l mix/podcast i put up yesterday that you're probably (hopefully?) listening to now, which is probably called "genrephilia" (it's not called "this boombox loves you," that's just a message from the boombox.) it might seem like it, and it is in part, but it's doing double duty in order to set up a series of posts which i guess is commencing with this one (though the others will be different) about various things i've been listening to and thinking about, but mostly about genre, that fave bugbear of mine, each of which will take up one of the songs from the 'cast as its "keynote," if you will. in the order listed, which is to say the reverse order from the mix. (just to make you more confused, though it will all come out right in the end.) i'm being a cock-eyed optimist by saying this, but i'll hope to get them all or mostly up by the end of this weekend. let's just assume that, unlike christmas, the valentine's season starts on the day itself and extends for a while after.

most of my mixes, like most pop songs, are already basically about love anyway. which makes sense; it's both practical and fun, with lots of interchangeable approaches to the same few familiar situations. recently, both gold star for robot boy and liquid crystal slivers are overtly love-themed, the former prob'ly more appropriate for valentine's, as the latter's somewhat somberer. [v's day is about happy love, i'm pretty clear - not necessarily happy romantic love, especially if you haven't got it at the moment; in that case you can substitute broader, general, elemental, humanward love. which happens to be the special province of mr. ross of love.]

if i had made a lovey-dovey mix, it probably would have wanted to have some of the songs from those, and the others documented above - it just would have been somewhat boring and redundant, generally - and certainly some of the things from this next, which still contains most of my favorite love songs despite being five years old now (!) [lately i've been thinking "you send me" might be the ultimate.] it's not a mixtape, although it has become one; it was a radio broadcast that we have a cassette recording of. it's sort of embarrassing to listen to, not just for the usual reasons but also because i think i'm being obnoxious and a little bit nasty towards alyssa in our bantering. hopefully i'm not like that anymore.

Title: Reality is Lubricated, special Valentine's edition
Format: two-hour radio show (also on 120 minute cassette)
Date: 14 February 2002

tracklist courtesy of reminced archives:
Oooweeoooh! Oooh! Oooh! [i.e. "Welcome to Tokio Otis Clay" by Clinton; our theme music]
“Grandpa” Myron (Mike) “The Moose” Cantor - As Time Goes By

Blur - Tender
XTC - I’d Like That
Björk - Like Someone in Love
[flubbed announcement - mic set on cue] [radio silence]
Paul Simon - For Emily, Wherever I Will Find Her
[apology to the listenerhip, repeat of set rundown]

The Old 97’s - Question
The Beach Boys - God Only Knows
The Kinks - Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy

The Fairways - Close to Me
The Pixies - La La Love You

The Sam Cooke - Medley: Try a Little Tenderness/(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons/You Send Me (live)
Prince - Kiss
[clarification from Alyssa about it being a song about sex]
Randy Newman - Falling in Love
[A n ODE to WSRN]
Joni Mitchell - A Case of You
Plastic Fantastic Machine - Love is Psychedelic
Jeff Magnum - I Love How You Love Me

Joe Jackson - Be My Number Two
R.E.M. - At My Most Beautiful
Pain - One-Legged Girl
[a little show here for people from Alyssa]
Kings Of Convenience - I Don’t Know What I Can Save You From
Pizzicato Five - Baby Love Child

The Moldy Peaches - Anyone Else But You
[apology to all the non-{Moldy Peaches Fans} in the audience]
The Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)
Joe Henry - Scar
The Shins - New Slang (When You Notice the Stripes)

Buddy Holly - True Love Ways
The Yo La Tengo - The You Can Have it All
Jonathan Richman - When She Kisses Me
Ella Fitzgerald - Something’s Gotta Give
Chet Baker - My Funny Valentine
The Big Star - I’m In Love With A Girl
[Alyssa's declaration of love]

Nat King Cole - The Very Thought of You
Billy Bragg - Valentine’s Day is Over

so that's that! somehow, amazingly, neither that show nor any of the tracklistings i posted above include the elvis costello rendition of "my funny valentine," which is an absolute staple of the season for me. me being me. (as is listening to that billy bragg song on the 15th.) ["mfv" is admittedly sort of a silly song (in particular the lyrics to the middle-eight) - but it's still great.]

however... it is on "genrephilia"!:

12 my funny valentine Y elvis costello

so there you go.

genrephilia

12 my funny valentine ♥ elvis costello
11 i won't let you down ♥ keith urban
10 lovestoned/i think that she knows ♥ justin timberlake
9 pictureloved ♥ isolée
8 ["yours was the face on the tip of my tongue"] ♥ panda riot
7 i believe in music ♥ bob and wisdom
6 milestone ♥ jason moran and alicia hall moran
5 with love ♥ charles tolliver big band
4 i got you babe ♥ etta james
3 stay after summer ♥ margaret berger
2 yes! you love me! ♥ acid house kings
1 love goes on! ♥ the go-betweens
0 happy valentine's day ♥ outkast
-1 collage of digital passion ♥ the exposures / jan jelinek