10 Apr 2012
Sure Thing - Saint Germain
Okay, one more ambient track before we move on. Groovy, bluesy, relaxed, repetitive. Good for programming and parties. I like it, partially because of the fact that it doesn’t tax my brain.
Undress Me Now - Morcheeba
Jessica finally made it out to a Morcheeba show, at the Moore. It was around the release of their album Charango, but I remember that we hadn’t heard it. Either it wasn’t out, or we hadn’t picked it up yet, I can’t remember which. What I definitely remember is that it was very fortunate that we caught this show. Shortly after the band split ways with the lead singer, Skye Edwards, in pretty much the Worst Idea Ever. I don’t care if you have artistic differences and are miserable, it’s your job to suffer through that and keep bringing me more music. I have needs.
I remember her singing this song at the show. She was entirely wrapped up in the performance. When the song was over it was as if she woke up and just then realized what she had been singing. “Undress me now, you know how / Using my mind”. Suddenly she had returned to earth and was blushing and embarrassed. It was adorable.
We Will Become Silhouettes - The Postal Service
There’s something special about The Postal Service. The way the electronic elements blend with Ben Gibbard’s vocals is so… something. Wistful? It sounds nostalgic to me now, but I’m pretty sure it always has.
I remember listening to this album while playing Halo with the boys (Alex, Ben, and Rob). It doesn’t seem like the most obvious pairing, but there’s something about the genesis of this music that works so well for a bunch of programmers playing video games.
I think it was actually in response to Daft Punk, and it was probably two years earlier, but I distinctly remember a car conversation with Rob where he made a critical connection for me. Our generation grew up with Nintendo. The only way to communicate music on this hardware was with glorified bleeps and bloops. What the musicians of the time were able to accomplish with this was actually pretty incredible, but the important point is that we as kids were absorbing this new kind of music slowly, and in an enjoyable context. Those seeds laid dormant for years and years and eventually blossomed into brain receptors that were attuned to things like The Postal Service or Daft Punk. We had never thought of ourselves as being listeners of electronic music, but without knowing it we had been prepared for this since childhood.
I adore this album. I’ve heard it countless times, and it still totally works. It’s simple, and joyful, and just lovely. Except for the last track. I recommend erasing it from existence.
I Know You (Pt. III) - Morphine
Back when I was in college I used Napster to fuel my music discovery. There wasn’t much barrier to trying something new. Then they shut down Napster and that all became hard again. People still did it with torrents and such, but at this point I had a job and a paycheck and didn’t feel comfortable stealing music off the internet. Music is important to me, and when I find something I like I don’t have a problem paying for it. But in this legitimate world how do you discover new music?
Into this situation was born the music subscription. Pay a fixed fee for access to all the music you want. I started doing this when Napster relaunched as a service, and I’ve been doing it ever since (although now with Zune). Under this system there’s absolutely nothing getting in the way of finding new music, which is how it should be.
Another aspect of this newfound access is that I could dig into my back catalog of artists. Despite my love of Morphine I hadn’t really had a chance to listen to their older albums. As soon as I hooked up to the music subscription fire hose I was able to check out everything else they had ever put out.
This song is off of Like Swimming, and it’s amazing. It’s so deep and dirty. Soulful. I love how it rolls into the chorus with those paired sax hits. It’s sexy, sultry, and oh so good.
Chicago - Groove Armada
Through work I got on the Halo 2 multiplayer beta. I had played my fair share of local LAN multiplayer on the first Halo. In the sequel they were doing some pretty revolutionary stuff with how they brought this online, and that’s what I was supposed to be testing.
What does this have to do with music? Well, I had both my Xbox and my Media Center hooked up to the TV. I had a Napster app on the PC that let me stream pretty much whatever I wanted. I figured out a workable setup where I could get the audio from that in addition to the audio and video from the Xbox. I set this up right around the time I got on that multiplayer beta, so the whole time I was playing I could listen to music.
This song is completely linked to the “Ivory Tower” map from that game. As it grooves along I can see myself running around in that space. The song and the environment and the game just all fit together for me. It’s one of those crazy tight links that I keep talking about here - personal but undeniable.
06 Apr 2012
Paper Tiger - Beck
Beck went through a serious breakup, and he wrote an album. There is no denying the impact of one on the other. Gone is the manic spread of tunes from the previous albums. In their place is solid cohesive songwriting. This is the ultimate breakup album. Thankfully you don’t need to be going through epic heartbreak to appreciate it.
This song is probably one of the least depressing of the lot. I mean, it sounds borderline uplifting. Tonally, not lyrically, that is. The whole album is a pit of crushingly depressing lyrics. So it feels a little odd to single it out this song, a relative outlier, to represent the album. But it’s just so damned good I can’t bring myself to put anything else in its place.
I apparently get off on depressing music. Too much happiness and I start to get suspicious. So naturally I love this album.
Teardrop - Massive Attack
Apparently most people know this song as the instrumental intro theme for House. Yeah… no. I can’t even imagine this song without the vocals. I mean, I’ve seen House. I just get disoriented and keep waiting for the rest of the song to kick in.
As great as the song is, I’m putting it on here for the album as a whole. It was a recommendation to me by Francis. Jessica was very confused when I mentioned this, because she already owned the album. Had for years. And somehow I’d missed the whole business.
The album fit in so well with my other M’s: Morphine and Morcheeba. Deep, dark, and lovely.
Clarity - John Mayer
This song is a fantastic album opener. It starts out sparse and gentle, slowly adding elements. It feels like waking and opening up to the day. It takes a full minute to put it all together, but even then it doesn’t overpower. It’s relaxed. The thing I love about this song is how it comes out of the bridge at 3:18. Restraint, horns, and then the wall of sound hits. It gets me every time. Perfection.
I’ve already gone over my introduction to John Mayer. I felt some betrayal at the overproduced Room for Squares. Plus I could do without Mayer’s pop crush image. Jessica and I went to a concert of his at the Paramount and were overwhelmed by the large number of swooning young girls. Mayer was too, apparently, and openly mocked them from the stage. Sadly it seemed to go over their heads. They weren’t so into his jazzy instrumental indulgences with balding accompanists; they just wanted to hear how their bodies were wonderlands. Gag.
Heavier Things was still pretty poppy, but less so than Room for Squares. This thankfully proved to be a positive trend that would continue with the following albums.
Lebanese Blond - Thievery Corporation
I think Jessica and I first came across this via some sort of compilation. From there we dug in dabbled with The Mirror Conspiracy and The Richest Man in Babylon. There’s definitely a fusion of a wide range of elements happening here. Latin, Indian, African… the album just kind of stirs them altogether into some sort of super chill soup. Because of that it’s hard to develop strong opinions about any track in particular. The whole experience is rather ambient. Not really challenging, just there and… listenable.
It feels weird to punctuate this list with music that feels a bit like filler to me. But it’s what I was listening to at the time. I think I needed some ambient filler. As I mentioned before, that sort of music is of particular use to us programmers. Sometimes you need music that doesn’t make you think, but keeps you driving forward.
Epoca - Gotan Project
This is such a lovely blend of old and new. Tango music met electronica, and a beautiful thing was born. But I don’t know if I have more to say about it than that. Yes, it grooves, it moves, it’s hip… but it’s destined to stay in the background. It fills a certain kind of need. Party music. Something to put on so that there’s not nothing, but it’s not something that’s going to invade and derail you from whatever it is you actually want to be doing.
04 Apr 2012
Buena - Morphine
Oh “Buena”. So aptly titled. This song starts with such powerful elements, rolled out one at a time to slowly increase its hold on you. And when it stops it just drops you on the floor, ravaged.
I had been listening to Cure for Pain for awhile by this point. But I have a specific memory of gifting this song to Rob in the middle of the computer science lab. I’m wearing headphones, grooving on some Morphine, and Rob’s sitting next to me. I hand him the headphones and queue up this song. I can see it washing over him in waves. After about a minute he’s taking off the headphones and demanding to know what it is he’s listening to and how he can get more.
“I hear a voice cry out… you want something good.”
“I think it’s time for me to finally introduce you to the Buena…”
Bubble Toes - Jack Johnson
It would have made sense for me to discover Jack Johnson through his work with G. Love, but that’s not how it went down. It also feels like something Dan could have put in front of me as a guitar showcase around the same time as John Mayer and Monte Montgomery. But it’s probably more simple. Jessica heard it on the radio, picked up the album, and eventually put it in front of me.
What really connected for me was the unrelenting chillness. There’s an undeniable rhythm to his vocals. This song in particular highlights it around 2:00. Yet despite this the sound always manages to stay relaxed. It works incredibly well.
The runner up here was “Flake”. Great song, but it doesn’t capture the vocal quality that really caught my ear in “Bubble Toes”.
Ghosts - Dirty Vegas
I graduated from college and got a job. With this came something called a paycheck. Those are handy for paying rent and utilities and such, but they can also be used to buy stuff. So it was that after getting some essentials out of the way I bought myself an Xbox.
The Xbox had this nifty feature where you could rip music to the hard drive and use that as a soundtrack in certain games. Racing games in particular seemed more likely to support this feature. These games also happened to be something that Jessica and I could play together. I remember us dabbling with Project Gotham Racing, Rallisport Challenge, and especially Quantum Redshift (because racing games where you can shoot the guy in front of you are inherently more awesome).
The games had their own music. In fact I believe the first time I heard The Chemical Brothers was in PGR. But it was so much more awesome to drive along to your own music. One of the few discs I put in there was Dirty Vegas, and to this day when I hear those songs it makes me think of these games.
I had thought “Days Go By” would be the obvious pick here, but listening back on the album “Ghosts” actually better captures this time for me.
Star Guitar - The Chemical Brothers
I was going to put “Star Guitar” in as an honorable mention for the previous story. But then I listened to it again and decided, f-that, it gets its own entry.
I remember jumping through some serious hoops to get this song and put it on the Xbox just because I thought it’d be awesome to drive to. It involved getting the song a la cart, then burning that to a disc, then ripping it again onto the Xbox. When I finally got it in there, I was totally right. I remember happily zipping around in a virtual Mini Cooper S with “Star Guitar” driving me forward. But I don’t remember how I got the idea that this was a good idea. It could have been a suggestion from Francis, but I’m not sure.
As far as I’m concerned the song was invented for this sort of pairing. I mean, have not you seen the music video? It resonates with me on a fundamental level. Seriously, it feels like childhood. Riding in the car, bored and staring out the window, listening to music, my eyes and my ears finding hidden connections. It’s still true today, as I commute on the bus. But now I get a bit more emotional about it, feeling that the connections I see are part of some sort of cosmic transcendental truth.
Last Nite - The Strokes
There’s something about The Strokes that sounds like they’re saying “Screw you mom, I’m gonna be a rock star!”. Not in an angry way, but in a teenage optimism sort of way. It’s earnest and detached all at once. It’s like they care more than anything in the world, but also don’t want to let you know.
At the same time this music sounds to me like something both old new. The vocals are… distant. But perfectly paired. It somehow makes them even more present. The musical structure is so incredibly simple, not overly produced, and just… good.
Simple. Good. Love it.
02 Apr 2012
I-76 - G. Love & Special Sauce
The first time I heard G. Love I wasn’t ready for it. Despite the title Yeah, It’s That Easy was not an easy album to relax into. I know that Jessica tried to start me on “Willow Tree”, but I didn’t connect with that song. She was trying to pick a track with fewer of the hip-hop elements. But for me the pace didn’t feel right - it left too sloppy to me (at the time). The same idea is done better on the album in “Lay Down the Law” and “Take You There”, which are both great songs.
It took some warming up, but I did eventually fall for G. Love. It wasn’t a vocal style I was accustomed too, and at first it sounded abrasive. But over time I could really feel how much fun they were having with the music and I started having fun too.
After some deliberation I chose “I-76” to represent my entry point into G. Love. But it was hard, because this album is all over the place. This song does a good job of introducing a number of the musical styles without overwhelming you. It’s got the rhythmic vocals, but also the dude harmonies, and a general overall playfulness. It was part of the bridge I needed to get into the album, and the band in general.
Reckoning - Ani Difranco
Ah, at last an Ani album to fit in with the rest of what Jessica and I were listening to. This one has such a strong point of a view, a deliberate feeling. And it really comes across in this, the title track (well, one of the two title tracks) of Reveling/Reckoning.
The horns. Oh my god the horns. When they come in it completely changes the character of the song. It jumps from melancholy to uplifting immediately. The guitar and vocals sound cold and alone in the beginning, but there’s this undeniable warmth that the horns bring that transforms everything at 1:13.
Those parts later where the horns are walking up the scales really remind me of Bar Kokhba. And then there are parts where I can hear a bit of Chicago in this. I didn’t think about these connections at the time; this is something I say now listening to it in close proximity to the rest of my musical journey. It’s nice to see the context compressed like that and understand why I had particular affinity for certain songs.
This album changed Ani from something just Jessica listened to into something we would really listen to together. It’s a magnificent collection of sound and feeling.
So Far Away From You - Dire Straits
Every summer Jessica was away for one reason or another. Road trip, camp, whatever. This was of course on top of the fact that we lived far apart in the first place. We needed an anthem to get through it all, and this song was it. “Tired of making out on the telephone…” Yep, this was the one.
Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag - James Brown
I hit college at the same time as the likes of Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament. It was a new era, where multiplayer gaming was becoming so important that developers were releasing games with no singleplayer component at all. This was happening at the same time that I moved off of a dial-up modem and onto the blazing speed of college ethernet. Mind. Blown.
Some other kids in the dorm were playing this game Half-Life, so I decided to check it out. In addition to its own multiplayer, Half-Life also had a vibrant mod community. After sampling many of them I eventually stumbled across one called Science & Industry.
But first let me back up and explain something. There was nothing like a centralized gamertag back then, so whatever name you were known by was whatever you typed in. There was nothing to prevent you from changing it as much as you wanted. You could pick a name that matched your mood… or whatever song you were listening to at that particular moment.
At the time I was starting to listen to a lot of James Brown. And on one fateful day while I was listening to “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”, I popped down the in-game console and typed “/name PapasNewBag”. That same day, on that particular server, I met two guys (Whiplash and Cadaver) in charge of development of this mod. Turns out they had inherited it from the original creators, and they were in a bit over their head. In particular, they badly needed programming help. We talked some then, and more later after I’d earned their trust, and before too long I had taken over primary development of the mod. It was a turning point in my life.
Getting to know a new community meant I needed to keep a consistent face. So my habit of constantly changing my name had to stop right then and there. It stuck at the song I was listening to at that one point in time.
Good times
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger - Daft Punk
I started listening to Daft Punk during that same summer when I first started working on Science & Industry. Functionally and thematically the music was perfect suited for the large amount of programming I was doing. You need something driving, light on distracting vocals, and maybe even slightly repetitive. You know, like Daft Punk.
This song in particular was perfect. One of the things I was working on for the game was a new cybernetic implant system. I wanted to flesh out that part of the fiction to give new alternatives to weapons or device development. I wanted players to be able to become faster and succeed through raw agility. I wanted them to become stronger and overwhelm with in-your-face melee proficiency. For me this song, that development time, and the end product are all completely intertwined.
| When the development team played against the other clans we called ourselves the “Six Million Dollar Men”. So, in tag form, I was “-smdm |
papasnewbag-“. Except when we were being inclusive of our UK members, and wore it as “smpm”. Anyway, I think you can see how this song was such a good fit. |
30 Mar 2012
Neon - John Mayer
I discovered John Mayer as a guitarist first. Yes, he was a singer/songwriter too, but for me it was his acoustic style that initially caught my attention. I scoured Napster for all sorts of bootlegs of his guitar work. Some of them were live recordings, some were apparently from this album. On Napster the metadata was always screwed so it was hard to know these things.
Shortly after this he released Room for Squares, which was so overproduced compared to what I had heard from him so far that it made me sick to my stomach. It wasn’t until he redeemed himself with his next album that I was truly able to forgive and return to Room for Squares to pick out the goodies.
“Neon” is a great track to demonstrate what initially caught my ear. The riff in this song is incredibly powerful. And it comes across far stronger here than it does with the full wall of sound from Room for Squares.
When Will I - Monte Montgomery
It was definitely Dan that pointed me to Monte. We were playing a lot of guitar together, and sharing recommendations of awesome artists we came across. He said something along the lines of “OMFG, this will blow your mind”. I’ll probably never find the bootleg live recording of “When Will I” that did exactly that. I remember that it ended with a stunned silence and then someone saying “holy shit” before the recording cut out. The album recording doesn’t do hit the same highs, but it’s all I’ve got after my hard drive with all those Napster MP3s failed. And it’s still pretty damned good.
Gravel - Ani Difranco
So Jessica listened to a lot of angry female vocalists. It’s similar to how she loves books and movies where everything ends in beautiful tragedy. Later I would be exposed to many other different sides of Ani Difranco, but in the beginning it was mostly just the angry stuff.
I have two memories related to Jessica’s Ani mix tape. The first is her singing along to this song in the car, a bit too emphatically for my tastes. I mean, you really don’t want your girlfriend singing “I abhor you” in the car with lots of ambiguous pointing. Sure, it also turns into “I adore you”, but that whole love/hate blend wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.
The second memory is an argument. She’s not wearing her seatbelt, and is refusing my pleas to put one on. I now have a vested interest in her safety, and mild discomfort is not an acceptable excuse. She’s not budging, so I escalate. I take this cassette tape, her Ani mix, out of the stereo and threaten to throw it out the window if she doesn’t put her seatbelt on. She tries to call my bluff, and I chuck it. It’s lost forever.
I don’t think I’ve ever lived that one down. It was one of her favorite mixes. But I did eventually get her to start wearing her seatbelt.
I was really conflicted about what track to nominate here. I had a pretty intense reaction to “Fuel” as well. It’s this crazy rhythmic poetry… something. It’s music, but not in any conventional sense. And it’s very powerful. But in the end the image of that mix tape laying in the gravel somewhere won out.
White Ladder - David Gray
I had gotten so used to Jessica introducing me to female artists that when she first played “Babylon” by David Gray I thought it was a female vocalist. She made fun of me for quite a while after that.
We went to see him at Bumbershoot. We don’t go anymore, because it turns out all the other people at Bumbershoot are colossal pushy assholes. But I do remember that David Gray evening show fondly.
I love the B-side of this album. Basically from “Silver Lining” on there’s this lovely cohesive stretch. I don’t know why they felt the need to include a second version of “Babylon” at the end of the album, because otherwise the close would be perfect. When you can finish off with an album that has “Goodbye” in the title, you should.
Into The Mystic - Van Morrison
There’s something about this song that seems to capture the maturing relationship between Jessica and me. We were relaxing into the more serious thing we’d arrived at. I was getting along better with her parents. For some reason this song sounds like that time to me, but I can’t pinpoint any specific reason why. It’s sure a great song though.