Notes From Underground - #52Revisiting Michael Penn's "Try" Video

My introduction to Michael Penn came through the video for his song "Try" from 1997's Resigned. It's a pretty mesmerizing video for a lot of reasons, but the story behind it is equally so. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson during the post-production work for his film Boogie Nights (which Penn scored), the video is one long continuous shot down a very, very long hallway. The video is also full of some cameos from actors in the film - probably the most notable being a backwards-hatted Philip Seymour Hoffman in a Planet of the Apes t-shirt. These days, that kind of director and star power would probably get a video noticed, regardless of the song. But Anderson hadn't quite become the well-known director he would after the release of Boogie Nights and Magnolia and neither was Hoffman the household acting name that he would be in the future. Thus, you have a lot of craft going into a product that would be seen by relatively few. Ironically, that's the later part of Penn's musical career in a nutshell.

Penn has always seemed a bit out of place in pop music. Which is odd considering what a superior craftsman of pop he tends to be. 1997's Resigned is his finest hour and is a deftly constructed album. Clocking in at just under 40 minutes, it's a superb slice of classic, Beatles-inspired pop music. But in the mid/late 90s, that wasn't going to win him any huge fans. The album was produced by Brendan O'Brien who also produced one of my other favorite pop albums of the 90s, Matthew Sweet's 100% Fun, so it has everything a great power-pop record should - including an outstanding set of songs. But unlike his debut, 1989's March which peaked at #31 on the Billboard Top 200 chart, Resigned didn't even break into the top 200.

It's clear in a lot of ways that Michael Penn was never meant to play the commercial pop game of artifice and posture. His lyrics were always a little too clever and wordy, his songs and melodies a bit too winding and angular, despite their classicist structure and catchy nature. So in a touch of subtlety on par with the Replacements' video for "Bastards of Young," the video for "Try" becomes a bit of a sarcastic commentary on the very facade of rock video stardom. Where the Replacements refused to play the game, Penn pulls the curtain back on it.

And it's not that we're not aware of these things. The rolling platform on which Penn stands, the boom mic operators and effects people - all of this is part of our willful suspension of disbelief when it comes to videos or films or anything else shot for the screen. We know that those things are there, we just choose to not think that while we're watching the finished product, and we subconsciously let the world the artist inhabits in the video become a product in itself, part of their larger story even in the real world. But it's not often that the artists themselves are as honest about the idea of musicians as actors - about the "Michael Penn" of Michael Penn as it were. My favorite moment is when Penn is making his final appearance on the screen - walking resolutely forward as if he were on a mission from God, unstoppable. He is pelted with gunshots, yet he continues forth. The patches of blank explosives are visible under his white shirt from the get go, so when they begin to explode, it's no big shock. It's all part of the allegory of the video as well.

When we tear through the large paper visage of Penn early on, we're getting at what's behind the process of getting things done. He establishes himself (on the moving platform, the boom mic, the supporting workers) as a contender, he wades through suits and studio executives before tearing down a white-washed, posed paper photo of himself (as if rejecting the coiffed and prepared version of himself the studio wants), establishes himself again (though with fewer lights, a different microphone), through the long-slog of dance marathon contestants (a metaphor itself for the nearly five years it took for Penn to enable Resigned's release) and then after gunshots, storms of both rain and snow, he wades through a small crowd of well-wishers before reaching a door marked '2.' Perhaps as in - now that you've finished the first one, get ready to do it all again.

Penn would release two more albums before retreating into the world of film scoring - a place he doesn't seem too likely to emerge from soon, though I could be wrong. It's been eight years at this point since Penn's last album of new material and the video for "Try" is probably a key to understanding just why that is the case.

Notes From Underground - #51Glen Phillips of Toad the Wet Sprocket

If you're a long time reader of the blog, then you might remember Notes from Underground. The last entry in the series was posted on August 30th, 2008. So it pleases me to re-launch it with an interview with Toad the Wet Sprocket singer and guitarist Glen Phillips. Look for more regular postings in this series for the foreseeable future.

16 years is a long time for a band to take a break from releasing new material, but that's exactly what happened to Toad the Wet Sprocket. After 1997's Coil, the band called it quits the next year and went off in different musical directions. But by 2003 they were back touring - infrequently - as a bit of a nostalgia act, playing a greatest hits set out on tour every few years. But within the last year, something changed and now Toad's first album of new material since 1997, New Constellation, is set for release in September. I sat down with Toad vocalist and guitarist Glen Phillips to talk about the process of coming back around to writing new music with the band, their Kickstarter campaign for the album, re-recording old material for proprietary purposes and why an audience might be understandably hesitant to hear new music so many years later. At the bottom, take a listen to a streaming version of their new single "New Constellation."

J. Neas: You guys have a new record coming out in September - your first since 1997 - and it's called New Constellation. At least since 2003 you guys have been touring back together, off and on, doing things like that. So what was the process of coming back to wanting to write new material together again?

Glen Phillips: It came really gradually. We had gotten together and played shows before, but we would often revert to our old habits with each other and would need to take a long break again. But I think we all hoped it would be something we could return to and enjoy and it just got to a point where we tried it enough times that the new normal seemed to be getting along and having fun. I think we all relaxed about the story of it and just allowed it to be what it was which I guess sounds vague. It just seemed like we could finally pull it off and actually do it right and it wouldn't be painful and we could get through it. [laughs] And it worked. We had a really good time getting the songs together. We're really proud of the work we did. And we just waited long enough to do it right.

And the record is already done. We've actually released it on Kickstarter. We're doing a Kickstarter campaign that lasts just a couple of more weeks. And people who contribute on that, if you do $10, you get to download the album. So a few thousand people already have the record. We're just doing it to the wider public in September. The Kickstarter thing has been going great. We started with, I think, a $50,000 goal and we're close to $200,000 now. So it's been really cool. It's just kind of a handful of people who are really supportive, who really want to help the project along. And the reaction to the record has been really good. People seem to think we did the right thing by waiting. You know, I'm scared when bands that I liked from a long time ago get together 15 years later [laughs] and make another record. Because it's competing with memories and you really can't compete with that. So it really has to stand on its own, but I think we managed to do that.

JN: Was there anything that you or Todd Nichols brought back to the writing process for the band from your experiences writing apart from each other in your solo work and his band Lapdog?

GP: It's hard to say. It's been so long since we've collaborated that I don't have a lot of grounds for comparison. The big new element in the collaborative part of the writing is Dean [Dinning], our bass player. It used to be it was kind of either I was writing or Todd and I would write. Dean is really involved in the collaborative part of the writing now. He and Todd have been a writing partnership for a few years now, going to Nashville. The big difference for all of us was that we were writing, not exclusively, but to a good deal we were writing specifically for Toad. In the past, whatever we wrote kind of had to be somehow siphoned into the world of Toad. For all of us to look at this as one project out of many instead of the totality of our artistic expression made it a lot easier, made it a lot more fun. You could write towards the fact that there were going to be two loud guitars and three harmony vocals. I'm used to writing songs that I have to able to play solo acoustic so it's great to get to go 'oh, counter-melody! rhythm!' and all these things I don't get to do all the time on my own. And so it was great writing for the project.

JN: Is it that it gave you a different experience - in that before the band went on hiatus, you hadn't had an experience writing apart from each other, or at least not much, and so this kind of gave you a comparison in a sense - so now you're a little more comfortable saying 'oh, I'm in Toad writing mode for this' because you've been other places and had other experiences?

GP: Yeah, well and had other outlets more than anything. About half the songs have always been mind and the other half collaborations, so getting to bring it back specifically for Toad instead of having to have everything shoehorned into the band is good. Frankly, the older you get, and maybe it's not even the older, it's something about having a specific manifesto, having a genre, having a specific project - people love the dream of infinite creativity and the blank palette and being able to do whatever you want - but people tend to do their best work, or I do at the very least, when I have constraints, when I have limitations, when I know where I'm aiming. Otherwise I can get kind of aimless. [laughs] I can get a little lost. The best example of that is painters. Picasso was not limited to Cubism. Cubism was a choice he took from other people and explored for a long time. But he could paint a portrait as good as the next guy. It's a matter of choosing your palette, of choosing your limitations and seeing how deep you can go within that. Having that comparison, of being able to bring that back to the experience, has meant a lot.

JN: That reminds me of Samuel Beckett. He spoke both English and French, but he was more limited in French. And he chose specifically to write in French because he wanted to limit his ability of expression in order to create a voice for himself in that way - to purposefully limit himself.

GP: That makes sense. I'm friends with Teitur who is a musician from the Faroe Islands and he talks about Faroese, that it's an older language and a very simple language. And when you're writing poetry in Faroese - you would think, as a tiny island, that it's like the Inuit thing you hear about - 'twenty words for snow' - but actually, they have one word for the sea. It's not the sea, the ocean, the deep blue. There aren't metaphorical things. There is one word for that gigantic body of water and it's the only one you can pull out. And writing lyrics, it's like he says, with the limited vocabulary, there's this immense gravity to each word you choose. Whereas in English, you can grab from thousands of synonyms, idioms, you know, you can always run around. With the language, I don't tend to put the reins on, but the music part, it's good to have restrained. [laughs]

JN: Is there a point of comparison, for old fans, between any of the old records and this new one in terms of sound?

GP: Well, it's a hybird. There are a few songs - "California Wasted," "Is There Anyone Out There" - those two definitely could have been on any Toad record. Some of the production is  a little more modern, a little different than what we've done before. But I think it feels like a natural progression. Our records have always been broad compositionally, I think. It's not like we have this one sound we do over and over and over again. There's certainly a thread through it. But certainly our limitations as players - none of us are virtuosos, right - and so, Todd has this very distinct open style, I'm kind of a hand-fisted guitarist, Randy [Guss, drummer] and Dean play together, our rhythm section, in a really particular way. So we can take songs that are kind of far-flung as far as how they are written and somehow bring them back to some center. And I think that nature of Toad, the nature of the vocal blend, the nature of the lyrics, people will find a thread in that. So, I don't think we'll leave anyone in the dust, but it certainly isn't Dulcinea part two.

JN: Since you guys have been back on the road for awhile playing nothing but older material and are now out with new stuff, is there a sense of pressure from the audience to stick mostly to older songs as opposed to playing the new ones?

GP: Yeah. We're playing about five news songs in the new set, which is a generous dose, but not enough to wreck anybody's evening by taking away all of their favorites. But there's always a balance in making a setlist in past versus future. But the thing that is exciting for us is finally have new material. It's always been odd for me returning to Toad because everything else I do is present tense. Everything else I do are songs that I've been writing and there's this response to them. I never thought I was done as a writer, so it was always odd to go back and do a Toad tour after doing other projects and we were playing all these twenty year old songs. I like the songs, but I'm not in that space anymore. I think for all of us to have a portion of the set that is in the present tense makes a huge difference. Makes us feel like a band and that we have something valid to say. And so far, the response to the new songs has been really positive.

JN: Kickstarters are usually limited to 30 days or so, so you recorded the new album first and was the Kickstarter about recouping some of the expenses that went into making that?

GP: Yeah, it's a little bit about that, a little bit about direct distribution, a little about trying to harness the most dedicated fans, the people who are the most interested in it and giving them kind of a reward and hopefully creating a bit of buzz and a story about the record. It's a great model. Even if we come out of this, delivering everything, paying the expenses, paying the taxes and we end up even, and we own a record lock, stock and barrel, and we start that process not in the red, that's an amazing thing. [laughs] Bands don't generally get to do that. So Kickstarter people see the gross and they think 'wow, you're taking it home!' But there's nothing left over. Hopefully you walk out of it and you've at least got your materials down and hopefully you've got a bunch of people who are already talking about the record and are already invested in it. This era is - I don't know that it's the end - but it's the beginning of the end of this whole business that was built on selling physical widgets with music on them, right? The record industry is a hundred years old, it was brand new technology, and the physical widget is gone for the most part and most people find their music for free or next to free through Spotify or Pandora. And so there's a lot of people who may not understand 'supporting the artist,' but for those who do and feel like patrons, they're really buttressing everybody else. They feel more like patrons of the arts, they feel closer to the bands they love and they are more generous with those bands than they used to be. So, I think Kickstarter is a really good way of fostering that relationship - giving more to people and they're giving more back, too.

JN: You mentioned the benefits of owning the record outright - you guys actually went back and re-recorded a bunch of your old tracks a couple of years ago. Can you talk a little bit about why you did that? You're not the first band to do that, others have before because of the problems of not owning the masters, but what was the purpose behind doing that?

GP: Yeah, and it's not a big problem. Sony owns the old records. That's the deal that we willingly signed. And they did a lot of promo for us. The reason we're here now is because they worked us really hard, so we're grateful for the record deal. But since we did break up, and now we're back together and we're no longer on Sony, if you're not really on people's radar, they're not trying to do anything with your catalogue. So if somebody calls and wants to put a song in a TV show, they're in no hurry to call back because you're not a priority. Or they overprice it because they're a huge corporation, and it's easy for them to just give a price and someone goes 'uh, I'll keep looking.' So the thing with re-recording and owning it ourselves is that if someone wants to use "All I Want" now, we can just say 'yeah!' [laughs] and they can use the song. And it's still us performing it and we recorded it and mixed it ourselves and it sounds pretty good. In some cases I think sounds better than the originals. [laughs] It's a great tool to have.

Notes From Underground - #50Steve Foley - 1959 : 2008

You have to wonder how often working musicians pass away without any sort of notice. There are hundreds and hundreds of people who make a living as fill-ins, backups, touring members and session players. They are all, most likely, incredibly competent at what they do, but just aren't famous the way that other artists are. And I couldn't help but think about this when I read about the Replacements' replacement, Steve Foley, dying earlier this week.

As the Replacements were on their last legs following the release of All Shook Down, founding member/drummer Chris Mars had taken off and the remaining band needed a time keeper. Steve had played in numerous Minneapolis bands over the years and was a skilled and talented drummer. He got the nod and filled in for the entirety of the Replacements' last tour, including their final show at Grant Park in Chicago on July 4th, 1991. He continued working with Tommy Stinson in his first post-Replacements band, Bash and Pop, playing on their one and only album, Friday Night is Killing Me. From all accounts Steve was a sweet and genuinely good man and despite struggling with personal problems off and on, his death was accidental and unexpected.

My first encounter with Steve's playing would've been my, sadly, misplaced cassette bootleg of that July 4th, 1991 show. When I first got All Shook Down, I had been mightily underwhelmed by it. So when I heard songs like "Bent Out of Shape," "Someone Take the Wheel" and a few others from that album done live, with a seriously pounding drummer behind it, they lept to life in a way that they still haven't on the record. And Steve's playing with Bash and Pop? That record is one of the best Replacements-related projects, hands down, and his playing is no small part of that.

Outside of the fierce community of Replacements fans and Foley's family, there aren't going to be a lot of tributes. Though he certainly deserves a place at the memorial montage at the Grammys next year, I'm sure he won't be on it. Musicians like Steve Foley, talented, deserving and memorable, but who mostly serve to make other people's work better, don't get any face time. As it is I couldn't even quickly locate a picture of Steve for this article - I had to settle for a Bash and Pop promo photo. It's the fate of people who are drawn to music, who aren't the front men, who are never there to start a band that takes off, who occasionally fill in and maybe land somewhere special for a bit, as Steve did with the 'Mats. Steve worked with many other locally famous and legendary Minneapolis bands, but the Replacements were the biggest of them.

Steve Foley had plenty in his life, undoubtedly, outside of his sometimes-life as a musician, but that's how I know him and that's how I remember him. It's why it saddened me to hear of his loss. Sometimes you're just not sure what to say. You just know something makes you sad.

Thanks, Steve.

Notes From Underground - #49Fair Use Gets Less Obtuse

I know y'all are getting tired of this, but things keep falling into my lap about copyright issues and, well, I find it fascinating. So here we go.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported about a decision in Lenz v. Universal, a lawsuit centering around this video. In it a toddler is shown dancing to the Prince song "Let's Go Crazy" playing on a stereo in the background. The clip is about 29 seconds long. The video maker uploaded it to YouTube and that's where the fun began. Universal Music issued a takedown notice claiming improper use of the song. But they picked the wrong person to muck with. The video maker in turn sued Universal for misrepresentation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), claiming that it should have been obvious that it was a case of fair use and that their issuing of a takedown notice without taking that into consideration was not proper. And today came the decision:

"[A] fair use is a lawful use of a copyright. Accordingly, in order for a copyright owner to proceed under the DMCA with “a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law,” the owner must evaluate whether the material makes fair use of the copyright...

A good faith consideration of whether a particular use is fair use is consistent with the purpose of the statute. Requiring owners to consider fair use will help “ensure that the efficiency of the Internet will continue to improve and that the variety and quality of services on the Internet will expand” without compromising “the movies, music, software and literary works that are the fruit of American creative genius.”

Universal had argued that they shouldn't have to consider fair use as it would cripple their response time to potential infractions. The judge said it was malarkey and that the DMCA already required that they "make an initial review of the potentially infringing material prior to sending a takedown notice." Score one for free speech and fair use. This case will undoubtedly be appealed, but for the time being, fair use is fair.

Now, this brings me back to last week's topic. Let's take a minute to define fair use. U.S. copyright law uses a four-tier test for considering fair use which includes:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether it is commercial or noncommercial;

2. the nature of the work (e.g., factual works are entitled to less protection than purely creative works);

3. the amount and substantiality of the portion of the work used;

4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for the work.

Reconsidering Sen. McCain's video that involved the Wayne's World clip, I would argue that it's only the fact that it was a political commercial that brings it into question. What about my "I'd buy that for a dollar" idea? My personal feelings say, if I'm not profiting financially, who cares? Actually, my feelings also say this: if I'm recontextualizing to create a new piece of work, I shouldn't have to have permission or have to pay to use it whether I profit or not. My ideas about that are a bit out in left field, but when I see totalitarian attempts at content control like the aforementioned court case, I don't feel so crazy anymore.

You'll see me use that term, 'recontextualize,' quite a bit when I discuss sampling. Because ultimately that's the key difference between theft and art: giving a piece of art new life by juxtaposing it with different surroundings, thus, giving it a new, different or deeper meaning. It's a tradition of folk music to reuse and recycle both lyrical and musical themes - sampling is the digital age's version of just that.

Notes From Underground - #48The Old Man and the ©

Copyright issues are something I have a lot of heavy opinions about, but not a lot of technical knowledge, which I hope I made obvious with last week's column. (My thanks to Sarah and Sean for weighing in and kicking the kuh-nowledge for me.) So, leave it to me to step right back into the thick of it this week thanks to none other than a little love fest between John McCain and Jackson Browne.

The Huffington Post reported that Jackson Browne has filed a lawsuit against the McCain campaign for using his song "Running on Empty" in an ad for Sen. McCain. The McCain campaign has clarified that it was the Ohio Republican Party, not the McCain campaign, that did this. Regardless, Browne's song was used for a political commercial, thereby implying his endorsement, without his permission.

Unlike the issues I covered last week, namely being free to cover a song without having to get permission to do it, this gets more at using someone's artistic creation as a whole. Just like with a television commercial, a political ad has to have permission to use another person's artistic work because, well, think about it - it implies consent for it to be there and it also implies support. Is Jackson Browne a McCain supporter? Not in the least and thus the lawsuit.

Ironically this doesn't seem to be the McCain campaign's first brush with copyright infringement. They also used a clip from Wayne's World for a video mocking Obama, only to have Mike Myers insist that it be taken down. Finally, a viral video (again mocking Obama) that was set to the tune of Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" has been pulled down by - wait for it - Warner Music Group, one of the great YouTube watchdogs (alongside NBC and, well, pretty much every big entertainment conglomo). Are people in this campaign really that clueless about those rules?

I have to stop myself for a minute and think about this objectively - after all my biggest chuckle is at watching people thwart the McCain campaign on these things - because my general tendency is to sympathize with samplers and culture mashers/grabbers. But then again those people aren't generally using whole products like this. The closest the McCain campaign came was with the clip from Wayne's World - the famous "we're not worthy!" quote. Does it really step over the line to use such a short, though recognizable, sample from an artistic work? I'm thinking about this outside the realm of the law for a minute.

What if I wanted to make a non-political, non-commercial video? Let's say, some video where I wanted the punchline to be the phrase "I'd buy that for a dollar!" When the punchline arrives, I use the audio and video clip of the man from the tv show in the film Robocop saying that line. While that sample is not my creative work, the re-contextualizing of it as part of a completely different piece of work, and the rest of that work, is my original creation. Am I crossing some sort of line to use it without permission?

While you mull over that, head on over to Aquarium Drunkard and check out my piece on "5:05", Paul Westerberg's song that, I argue, is one of the wittier and more fun responses to a copyright issue I've seen in some time. It's a good followup to last week's article.

Notes From Underground - #47Meddling with Medleys

I'm about to open up a big can of worms with this, but here goes anyway:

Copyright laws.

There. I said it. I've had a column about copyright and sampling legalities brewing in my head for the better part of the last year, but just haven't known how to approach it. Then this past week something odd happened. Paul Westerberg's new digital-only release, 49:00, was pulled from Amazon and the other online distributors that were carrying it. Why? The by now somewhat infamous classic rock medley that leads into the last song on the album. Though details are somewhat sparse, it has something to do with copyright issues.

But what, exactly? And this is where I'm going to diverge from actually examining this issue and turning to you, faithful readers, for answers. Here is my understanding of how copyright/royalties work - you can cover anything you want. You don't have to have permission from the author(s), though I think it's often seen as nice, but by no means required. What is required is that either a standard, flat payment for use of the song, or else a chunk of sales persistent with the cover's percentage contribution to the album, is paid to the creators of the song.

Here's where my understanding gets muddy. So, Westerberg covered a handful of pretty famous songs on this medley. And he only charged 49 cents for the album on download. Since he is making a profit, but it's, in theory, smaller than the average physical record (or even download for that matter), could it be that the copyright owners wouldn't have been paid an appropriate amount? And if that's the case, should that prevent him from doing it?

What if he had given away the album for free? Then he's not receiving any direct profit from the covers and therefore has nothing to give the copyright owners. Should he be prevented from using the songs in those cases?

A lot of this is hypothetical, but the limits that are placed on artistic use are draconian at times. Preventing people from profiting exclusively from direct covers of other work is understandable, but the attacks on people who sample or borrow snippets of other songs, musically or lyrically, on the way to creating a unique and different work of art have been intense. If you're creating a different piece of art, building on the context of previous art, you're following in a pretty common folk tradition that goes back some time. But that's for another article.

So, what do you think? Copyright laws protect the use of people's art for purposes they don't want, but if profit isn't an issue, should they be allowed to stop use of their work? Could you argue that there is always profit to be gained since exposure is a type of profit? Leave it in comments.

Notes From Underground - #46Mid-ish Year Mayhem 2008

Well, for the second year in a row I have slipped the hour and missed what is the obvious time for my mid-year Mayhem recap: the end of June. Now here it is nearly August and I'm looking back at the year so far. I think 2007 was a bit strong year for music, but 2008 is no slacker and certainly these two years have put most of the earlier 2000s to shame. Three categories to look at here, so let's get started:

Most Disappointing Releases:

Marah - Angels of Destruction: I don't know exactly why this disappoints me. I guess it's that, despite their pretty solid set of albums, everything since Kids in Philly just feels disappointing. There are some pretty snazzy songs on this album, but then again it hasn't kept me coming back that often. "Wild West Love Song" aside, it's weak by Marah's standards.

The Gutter Twins - Saturnalia: I had super high hopes for the project meshing Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan but again, despite a handful of pretty sharp songs, this album is ringing pretty flat in the long run. The Twilight Singers' recent albums and Lanegan's work with Isobel Campbell are both far more interesting. Not quite on the trainwreck level that Audioslave was in matching a couple of heavyweights, but still really disappointing.

Supergrass - Diamond Hoo Ha: You haven't heard me play anything off this on the show yet, mostly because I've been gone for three weeks during which I nabbed it, but again, it's just a law of diminishing returns. It's not a bad album, per se. Supergrass hasn't made a bad album yet. While some people argue that I Should Coco was their peak, those people are flat out wrong. Road to Rouen was a masterful 'aging gracefully' album that, while not producing any smashing singles like you could usually expect, was a gorgeous, grower album. But here it's back to the rock and..well, it just doesn't work that well. Disappointing, lads. Get back on the road to Rouen. That was a good place to be.

Most Surprising Releases:

Drive-by Truckers - Brighter Than Creation's Dark: Why was a really awesome album by one of my favorite bands a surprise? Two reasons. Jason Isbell and A Blessing and a Curse. The former left the band and with him went, honestly, my favorite songwriter of the bunch. The latter was their really unsatisfying prior album. So after that, and then Jason taking off, I wasn't sure what to expect. But Brighter Than Creation's Dark is every bit as sharp and powerful as the Truckers have ever been. Its sole problem is that it's too long. I could probably pick a few songs off that I would've dropped - not necessarily because they're bad - they're not - but because of the album length. 19 songs is a whale of an album to swallow. But when the songs are as amazing as "3 Dimes Down," "The Righteous Path," "The Purgatory Line," "A Ghost to Most" and others, you don't mind quite as much.

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - Real Emotional Trash: This may be another one that you wonder why it's surprising. Here the answer is Face the Truth. The first Malkmus solo album was full of poppy, catchy goodness, but that album has reflected nothing of the rest of his work since. I enjoyed Pig Lib, but haven't returned to it or Face the Truth that much at all. This is Malkmus' best post-Pavement work without a doubt and his band is at the peak of its powers. God bless him for picking up Janet Weiss. She needed something important to do after Sleater-Kinney passed and she's got it. No offense to Quasi, Janet.

Paul Westerberg - 49:00: This is a surprise just all around. Out of the blue, Paul Westerberg releases his first album since 2004's Folker and it's one track, 43 minutes long, the songs fading in and out like a radio station, ragged, lo-fi and fantastic. Not to mention you can get the track for 49 cents from the online retailers that are carrying it. Following his accident with a screwdriver that cost him the use of a hand for a year, there was some question as to when, if ever, he would return. The answer is in this one track. 49:00 is just as enjoyable as his Stereo/Mono return in 2002 and just as unexpected. Sure, I'm going to have to break out the mp3 editing software just to get tracks to play on the show, but for an album this good, I don't mind.

Best Releases:

This is a short list - no real explanations - of the albums I've seen as the best so far this year. No particular order, so no fair using this to peek at my end of year list. Make your comments or leave your own best in the comments. Let me know if you think I'm missing something obvious.

The Whigs - Mission Control; Jim White - Transnormal Skiperoo; Citified - The Meeting After the Meeting; Drive-by Truckers - Brighter Than Creation's Dark; Black Mountain - In the Future; Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago; Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - Real Emotional Trash; The Black Angels - Directions to See a Ghost; The Roots - Rising Down; Alejandro Escovedo - Real Animal; Julie Ocean - Long Gone and Nearly There; Fleet Foxes - self-titled; Portishead - Third; Silver Jews - Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea.

J's Indie/Rock Mayhem returns this week as does normal blogging activity. I've got Sean Coon from the dotmatrix project coming by to talk about everything that great local group is doing for local music as well as playing some of the live music that the monthly concerts have been recording and talking about this Thursday's show. Until then, take care!

Notes From Underground - #45Singled Out

Maybe I was a sensitive child.

But I pin it all on "California Dreamin'" - the song that showed me that music didn't have to just be happy or sad, black or white. It's a song of melancholy and hope, desire and frustration, longing and self-deprecation. Though for me, it wasn't the lyrics, but the harmonies that seered themselves into my brain. The way the chorus would refuse to resolve itself in major chords, but preferred to traffic in minor ones, leaving the listener unsettled and unsure, was undoubtedly what made me fascinated with the song.

I hold the Mamas and the Papas responsible for my sincere love of music. "California Dreamin'" is the song I remember most consciously, most early in my life. There were songs I would sing along with on the radio, but none that made me feel like it did. I still don't know that I fully understand it.

The lyrics are troublesome. "I walked into a church / I passed along the way / and I got down on my knees / and I pretend to pray." Why does he pretend? Why does he bother? Is he there simply to hide from the cold, or is there something larger drawing him in? The preacher "likes the cold." Because it drives wayfaring strangers through his doors? Because it reminds him of just how far away from hell, or even from God, that he is? It's a song about compromise ("If I didn't tell her / I could leave today") and self-doubt. About questioning and bargaining. It's a song about being inherently human and young and fragile and frightened.

I know what the things are that drew me in about the song - both initially and now that I understand it a lot more. I forget how young I actually was when my mom bought me that cassette of songs that included "California Dreamin'," but I do know the song had a strange charm over me that hasn't abated over the years.

What did it for you? What pushed you into the open arms of music and never let you back out? What song, album, artist, vision, moment, etc. culled you from the crowd as one of music's select band? Most all people like music, but only some eat, sleep, breathe and devote great chunks of their waking hours to it, in one form or another. And odds are, if you're reading music blogs, you're one of those folks. So where did it start for you?

The Mamas and the Papas - "California Dreamin'"
(from If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears ; MCA ; 1966)

Notes From Underground - #44Memorial Memories

It's Memorial Day weekend and that means the annual celebration of one of America's most patriotic moments - the Coca Cola 600. NASCAR. You heard me.

Well, at least where I'm from that's all that you remember about Memorial Day weekend. Mostly because of the traffic. I grew up a mere ten miles or so from the Charlotte Motor Speedway (now the Lowe's Motor Speedway) and, thanks to family members who worked for the Reynolds tobacco company, went to a 600 or two in my day as well. Still of great amusement to me is the moment when they drop the green flag. Sitting on my parents back porch, the kitchen television brought out so it's watchable in the screened confines of the deck, by the time they reach the second turn on the television after that flag drops, you can hear the dull roar come sailing over the trees from those miles away. Nowadays I just think of it as the pair of weekends (the Winston All-Star Race, as it was formerly known, is the weekend before) that I don't go visit my parents in order to avoid the hellacious traffic.

But despite not being a big NASCAR fan anymore, it's still a big cultural part of my upbringing. I know what it's like to pull for a driver (Bill Elliot) and to hate one with every ounce of your being (Dale Earnhardt). I know the excitement of the final laps, of standing on your feet to see the race back to the stripe that last time. And I have an inkling of the drive and passion that the drivers feel when they get in their cars every week to go at it. So this week, I thought of the Drive-by Truckers' "Daddy's Cup," one of the most eloquent songs about racing I could ever imagine.

Admittedly I know nothing about cars. Seriously. I mean, check the oil, check the air pressure, sure. Anything else? I could probably suss it out with a manual and a lot of help, but aside from gas mileage, my interest in cars is virtually nil. When I got my last computer, I took the hard drive out of the previous one and hooked it into the new computer to facilitate file transfers. That was about the closest I've gotten to the feeling people probably have when they work on cars.

So how does Mike Cooley manage to turn a song about growing up in a racing family, and all the tedium of working on and fixing a car that that entails, into an engrossing and emotional song that causes me to..sympathize..with the characters? Cooley's narrator has a dad who raises his son to do what he failed to do - to live vicariously through his potential. But he imparts a sense of perseverance in his child. Despite the fact that the song focuses on finding a deep love for stock car racing - something I don't feel personally - it makes connections. The universal in the personal. The mark of a good writer, for sure.

So I ask: what other pieces of art are there that you, for one reason or another, don't have any reason to find a personal connection with, but have affected you in an unexpected way?

By the way, just so it's clear, my hatred for Earnhardt extended to one and one moment only: the pass in the grass. I'm still sore.

Drive-by Truckers - "Daddy's Cup" (live at the 40 Watt)

Notes From Underground - #43Randomocity

Time for another installment of Randomocity. It's like a whole extra radio show every week that we do this. I tired of doing this every third week, so we're up to once every five. Seems safe enough.

A reminder - Click on the 'Play It' link at the end of each commentary and you can listen along with me. Sort of.

Here are the rules: 1) can't spend any more time typing than the track is long; 2) have to type based on my own knowledge - no consulting the internets for confirmation, so if I put my foot in my mouth, so be it; 3) no skipping tracks - even if artists/albums repeat, no skipping.

Let's go.

#1 Bill Hicks - "Confession Time" : From Rant in E-Minor. My computer seems to love bringing up Bill Hicks, which is fine, but it does it a lot in random mode. This is Bill's bit about the show C*O*P*S and how it represents both the most base form of entertainment on television. It includes a bit of baiting of poor-white stereotypes, but it does include one of my favorite lines at the end. - Play It!

#2 Slim Dunlap - "Ain't Exactly Good" : It was hard for me to write much about that Bill Hicks bit because I hadn't heard it in awhile, but now Slim, I can talk about. This is from The Old New Me, which I think I reviewed awhile back here on the blog. Slim always gets kind of dismissed when it comes to members of the Replacements because of his taking the place of the sainted Bob Stinson. I always think it's silly when people talk about Replacements reunions - no one ever mentions Slim. He's still alive, you know, and a great, great guitarist. I'd love to see the 'Mats back out with Slim on lead. Maybe that's just me. Slim's solo records aren't revelatory in any way, but they're an awful lot of fun and there are a handful of songs on each one that are truly superb. - Play It!

#3 Guided by Voices - "Of Mites and Men" : From Earthquake Glue and, you know, I've always enjoyed GBV, but haven't spent a ton of time listening to them. I bought this album when it came out and there were good songs on it and this song is pretty catchy and nice - like a lot of Robert Pollard's best work - but I haven't listened to it enough to even recognize this song. Maybe I should become a GBV fanatic for awhile. Ah, when that guitar riff comes back up after the bridge - man, that's a nice moment. Hard hitting, short, a good rock song. - Play It!

#4 the Flaming Lips - "Bad Days" : This is from the Providing Needles for Your Balloons EP which was released after Transmissions from the Satellite Heart. This song would get re-recorded for Clouds Taste Metallic, but there's not much difference between this one and that one. I'm going to say right now, as I have before, that this is my favorite era Flaming Lips. Am I a bad person that, as much as the period in their career from The Soft Bulletin forward has been awesome for them a pretty remarkable one, that I just don't think it's as fun or as enjoyable as this era. This was where they finally got a hold of the incredible racket they'd been creating on their early records and harnessed it into a controlled derangement for the first time. So, for me, it's all about that mid-late 90s stretch of records. I'll include The Soft Bulletin as I see it as the link between the two eras, but yeah. I love this song - like great circus music from a weird, weird circus. - Play It!

#5 Outkast - "D-Boi (Interlude)" : Hmm, a sketch from Speakerboxxx. Boring. Skip it.

#6 the Replacements - "Skyway" : The new slate of Replacements re-issues (look for my reviews next week) will again raise the 'what's the best 'Mats album' arguments. If I'm feeling somewhat contrarian and, frankly, honest, I'll say Pleased to Meet Me and "Skyway" is one of the reasons why I think that. It's one of Westerberg's finest moments, hands down, and it's just so beautiful and hopeless and self-deprecating and infectious. This is what great music is all about. - Play It!

#7 Scott Walker - "Jolson and Jones" : Oh, here we go. This is the kind of random, bizarre stuff I love to pop up. This is from Scott Walker's latest album, The Drift. If you haven't heard this thing, hang onto yourselves. If you can imagine Walker's over-emotive crooning mixed with what, honestly, is close to industrial/noise atonal musical accompaniment. It's like Walker is hearing a melody that is just escaping the rest of us. It's a fascinating record just because of that. His singing, already a truly unique entity, is even more unsettling set above the sounds on this record. Look, there's a song on this album, "Jesse" I believe, that has to do with Elvis Presley's twin who died in the womb or something? Jeeze, the horns at just before the 3 minute mark on this song sound just like a man moaning. I really thought that was Walker for a second. I was going to be really impressed. I'm still just...forget all that Halloween music I usually play in October. I'm just going to play selections from The Drift each week leading up to Halloween and that ought to take care of it. "I'll punch a donkey in the streets of Galway." This is genius stuff. - Play It!

#8 Television - "Friction" : After all seven and a half minutes of that, I needed this. I will forever and ever be amazed by Television. This song especially - I had a late period understanding of this song. It comes in the bridge as the guitars and everything rush back for the final verse. The bass does a little jolly dance across the guitars and sends everything plummeting back into the verse. With Television the focus is always either on Tom Verlaine or Richard Lloyd, so it's incredibly easy to overlook their immaculate rhythm section - Fred Smith and Billy Ficca. Give the bass a listen in this song. It's as melodic as anything else. What a debut album. - Play It!

#9 Midnight Oil - "Arctic World" : During my interview with Patterson Hood, we went up the street from the Cat's Cradle to get dinner and when he sat down in my car, he had to move my copy of Diesel and Dust. He immediately commented on what a great album it was and we got to share a moment extolling the virtues of this album. Midnight Oil is a truly gifted band and there's a stretch of about four or five albums in the middle of their career that are pure amazing music. This is definitely one of them. This is one of the album's slower moments and one of Peter Garrett's best vocal performances. - Play It!

#10 Josh Rouse - "Under Cold Blue Stars" (live) : I don't know if this is a bootleg or from a radio EP that I have, but either way this is Josh Rouse back in the Under Cold Blue Stars era, which is probably still my favorite of his albums. Although just earlier today I was thinking of some music from his first album. His albums have grown increasingly..sort of meh for me. He still writes great music, it just doesn't quite pierce me the way it used to. There are so many songs on Under Cold Blue Stars that are affecting - probably "Women and Men" is the one that always nails me the most. His live bands are always excellent at turning his album material into a warm and living, breathing creation on stage as evidenced by this performance. - Play It!

Notes From Underground - #42: Mother's Day

Musical Moments with My Mother, Martha:

1. My young childhood is filled with moments of my mother singing. Whether it was what she sang when she came to wake me up in the morning for school ("Good morning to you, good morning to you...") or when we were in the hammock in the backyard ("Swinging, swinging, way up in the sky..") or just randomly throughout the day ("Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money..."), my mind is still full of these moments. They impressed on me, subconsciously, a sense of the world as music, as something that could be sung and explored and poetically explained. I would sing along to songs in the car on the way to school - I recall having a fondness for "Beat It" - or would even become fascinated with other songs I heard. My mom bought me, unexpectedly, a cassette of songs from the 1960s because it contained a song I had become really fascinated with - "California Dreamin," a song I still find eerily gorgeous in a way that few pop songs ever are.

2. My mom plays piano. She learned when she was younger and, for my entire life, she would every so often sit down at the piano in our living room and play. She tried once, very valiantly, to help me learn to play. I didn't latch onto it. I took three semesters in college as well and anything I learned has gone away from disuse. But seeing her sit down at the bench, seeing her play and sing, seeing the obvious and sincere enjoyment that she got from it, was a life lesson in itself. Eventually I would pick up the alto saxophone in 7th grade and go from there. Guitar would be not long after. There was always encouragement from both my parents, (I don't think dad could ever get enough of me playing "Ode to Joy" on my saxophone) but in her example was more than enough encouragement to learn and do whatever I wanted to with music.

3. When I got older and began my journey into obsession with pop music, she never discouraged me from owning something. When I was initially relying on my parents to buy me CDs, she would go with whatever I wanted, even, as one time I remember, if it had a parental warning label on it. If I wasn't walking around the house or at school using inappropriate language, I can only assume that she knew better than to worry about it. Besides, this is the woman who bought me a copy, unsolicited, of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun. Ideas were important, not necessarily the way they were conveyed.

4. Whether it was playing in bands, coffee shops or in high school musicals, I was always supported in my musical endeavors. From middle school band concerts, to the Battle of the Bands that my first band, Loman, was in, from my roles in high school theatre productions to my playing solo acoustic sets in coffee shops downtown, my parents were both always there. They would come down to hear me play in the coffee shops especially, an always fun evening where it was my role to fill up three hours with music. I would play lots of originals and lots of covers. My parents both seemed to really enjoy my cover of the Ramones' "The KKK Took My Baby Away," and I was even solicited to play it at gatherings. Mostly by dad. Mom had a better sense of not embarrassing me - that was dad's job. But this encouragement, undoubtedly, is what leads me to bring my guitar into my classes and play - mostly quirky songs that I write to summarize stories or to explain concepts for my students - but an impact of that influence of the love of sharing music.

5. Mom reads my blog. She'll comment, over the phone and not in the comments area, about posts I wrote. She even listens to the podcast of my radio show, mentioning artists she heard that she likes. She continues to be supportive of my musical endeavors, even as they've changed shape over the years. From listener, to performer, to critical listener, she's always there.

Happy Mother's Day, mama. Thank you for all those moments and the many more to come.

Notes From Underground - #41A Cassette Valediction: Part Two

I never want to own a car without a cassette player.

That may sound like a hyperbolic statement - especially since it's becoming less and less likely that even my next car purchase will have a tape deck installed, let alone all future ones - but you have to see it from my perspective. The first car I drove on a regular basis was a 1988 Chevrolet Suburban, dual exhaust diesel. A friend of mine called it 'the Beast.' When I purchased my first portable CD walkman, I bought an adapter kit to hook it up to the stereo in my Suburban. It promptly blew out a few fuses. I took that as a sign. That car was made for cassettes.

So whether it was those Replacements bootleg cassettes that the most randomly kind person ever in the world gave to me (ask me that story sometime) or Toad the Wet Sprocket's Dulcinea or any other number of tapes I owned, they were the permanent soundtrack. My friend Andrew would often hijack my player when he was riding shotgun. He was perpetually in possession of some sort of tape to put upon me. My first listens to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five came through those tinny speakers. So did my first listens to Highway 61 Revisited.

I won't defend cassettes when it comes to sound quality. But for those of us who came of age with them, there's a feeling about them that is similar to the way people feel about vinyl versus digital music. A commenter on the first part of this series noted that tapes offer a level of complexity/duality that CDs can't, and I think that's why cassettes have felt like the stylistic link, in some ways, from vinyl to CDs. Cassettes offered the portability and versatility that CDs would while maintaining the aesthetic feel of vinyl with two sides to each record. The dip in sound quality was an obvious setback - cassettes offered neither the clarity of CDs or the warmth of vinyl, so from that perspective, they lose.

But they were also the first major commercial format to give control to the listener. Blank cassettes offered us a canvas in a way that hadn't been done before. Who had a vinyl pressing machine in their house? Or how easy to use or non-formidable was a reel-to-reel? People make arguments about the digital-download age bringing about the destruction of the album, but couldn't an argument be made to trace the beginnings of that process back to our ability to make mix-tapes? It was a lot more complex to make a mix tape than a mix CD, but it was still the chopping and screwing of whole pieces of art into new collages.

Until recently I had not thought that much about cassettes. There are two of those cassette holder drawers (you know, the ones with fake wood paneling) that sit here along with the vinyl records and CDs. I listen to tapes off and on in my car, but I listen to CDs or the radio more often. But there's something magical when I pop in that copy of Come On Feel the Lemonheads and the first notes of "The Great Big No" come out of the speakers, somewhat awash in a vague compressed hiss that only a cassette provides. That hiss is as important as the pops and crackles of vinyl and it will always bring a smile to my face.

Notes From Underground - #40A Cassette Valediction: Part One

"Got your tape and it changed my mind / Heard your voice in between the lines..Now I'm falling in love too fast / With you and the songs you chose..I've been living in your cassette / It's the modern equivalent / Singing up to a Capulet / On a balcony in your mind.." - Semisonic ("Singing In My Sleep")

"I spent hours putting that cassette together. To me, making a tape is like writing a letter - there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again..You've got to kick it off with a corker, to hold the attention..and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch..and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and ...oh, there are loads of rules." - Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)

In thinking about cassette albums that I've adored over the years, tapes that I listened to time and time again, I couldn't help but think of mixtapes. Labors of love - works of art. Slavish devotion to the belief that great, whole truths can be discovered with the right combination of music. I often get giddy thinking of my weekly radio show in terms of creating an entirely new mixtape every week.

And when I say tape, I mean tape. I've been given and have created some great mix CDs in my day. But they're never as satisfying. It's almost like they're less work, less sweat, less thoughtful. Cutting and pasting is infinitely less personal than outlining playlists, pressing the record and pause buttons, the actual process of having to listen to the entire tape while you're creating it.

I grew up, and so did most of you, in an age where cassettes were a standard format for music. We also grew up in an age where the only way you could copy an album for someone was via cassette. You had to put the other tape on, or cue up the record, or press play on the CD, hit record on the other tape, sit back, and enjoy. But mixtapes - collections of various songs, a playlist created solely by us - they were even more refined. It was as if we were designing our own 90 minute (or 120 if you sprang for the longer tapes) radio show. Living and dying by the sacred segue. Finding or creating connections between songs and artists that no one else would ever have put together. We were creators of art, whether we knew it or not, incorporating the words and work of others in order to manufacture our own, divinely inspired masterpiece.

And how many tapes did you make for someone you were smitten with? How long did you agonize over which songs to include? The right song combination would surely win his/her heart, no? Don't make it too obvious - you can't give it all away. But if he/she is smart enough, they'll hear "your voice in between the lines" and see exactly the proper amount of woo and restraint that is an earmark of an excellent potential dating partner. You savvy devil, you.

On the radio each week, I live for a good segue. When I pull one off, admittedly, I do a little dance around the room. That enjoyment comes from being a mixtape fanatic. There's something so right about creating an album of material that didn't exist previously. The Twilight Singer's "Esta Noche," with its European-dial tone rhythm, leading into Blondie's "Hanging on the Telephone," the telephone's ringing cuing the song's propulsive start? That's the ticket. Now, follow them up with the Replacements' "Answering Machine" and you've got yourself a killer trio and the beginning of a great 'telephone' themed tape. Not to mention they ought to flow quite nicely into one another.

There are people out there trying to preserve the spirit and soul of the mixtape in the completely digital age. Muxtape is a website that lets people create digital mixtape collections for anyone to peruse and listen to - and purchase the individual songs if they like. Not a bad adaptation of the process - mixtapes were all about getting you to love certain songs, after all. (Hello, Chameleons' "Swamp Thing!" Howdy, the Wallflowers' "Murder 101!") But I can't help but feel the 'album' feel of the mix tape is missing, even if it's easy to listen to the songs that way.

One of the more user-unfriendly things about cassettes was also one of the things that make mixtapes so especially breathtaking - the fact that it was awfully difficult and time consuming to get to one, specific song. Therefore, you listened to the whole thing. You got to know that mixtape the way you would a real album - anticipating its highs and lows just like any other album. The digital age in music has begun the slow and painful process of destroying the 'album' as a creative concept in more ways than one.

As I mentioned earlier, my mixtape-making jones has largely been sedated by having a radio show each week, but it's still there. But I'm probably going to make a Muxtape site of my own pretty soon and will probably make my fair share of mix CDs in the coming years. The urge to create with the voices of others is an unavoidable one for fans of pop culture. The art is malleable and if we can craft a form that fits us, that speaks for us where we sometimes don't have the words ourselves, then we will find a way to do so.

Mix It Up:

The Twilight Singers - "Esta Noche" (from Blackberry Belle)

Blondie - "Hanging on the Telephone" (from Parallel Lines)

The Replacements - "Answering Machine" (from Let It Be)

--

In the comments, leave some of your favorite mixtape songs of all time. Your favorite opening tracks? Your favorite combinations of songs? Favorite closing song? Lay it all out.

Notes From Underground - #39I Prefer 'Skilled Artisan' Rat

There was a long, long time where I refused, flat. out. refused to sell any music I had purchased. Doesn't matter if I hated it, doesn't matter if it was listened to just a few times before being located in a book of CDs and left there for eternity. What if I wanted to listen to it again? Huh? What would I do then? And in some cases, my righteous trade/pack-rattedness was dead-on. I wouldn't have finally understood the Jayhawks' Sound of Lies if I hadn't held onto it. I wouldn't have had those eureka experiences with the Stooges' Fun House, Wilco's Being There, Public Image Ltd.'s Second Edition and so on and so on. Sometimes music comes into your life at just the right moment. Sometimes, it's years early. How will you know unless you hold on?

Then the music started piling up. With nearly nine years of DJing put away (and five or six years of fandom before that), you collect a lot of stuff. My reasons shifted from wondering if I would ever figure a record out to "I know I'll play this on my show some time." I feel like half the spontaneity of my show is taking huge books of CDs up there, pawing through them and having light bulbs go off when I see that Toad the Wet Sprocket live acoustic EP I haven't played in years or that Pulp "Trees" / "Sunrise" single - the one with the Fat Truckers remix of Sunrise on it, not the other one. You get the picture.

So yesterday my parents brought me the huge unearthed mass of CD cases I had stored at their house. It was a noble and back-breaking gesture on their part to respond to my whim of wanting them. And now, with the ability to re-sell actually in my hands, I'm doing just that. And I'm finding it a lot easier. Sure, it could be because I can always make a digital copy (and I do) so that the music can clutter my hard drive (and it does) instead of my shelf space (it does that, too), so I'm not really losing the music.
Anything even remotely super important to me is kept. Yes, I'm parting with my CD copy of Toad the Wet Sprocket's first album, but that's mainly because I have a vinyl copy with the sleeve signed by Glen Phillips. Yes, I'm selling my copy of Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels on a Gravel Road and Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, but that's because both were reissued with generous bonus material in the last two years and I had already re-purchased them. For those same reasons, I'm parting with the entire Replacements' CD Twin/Tone catalogue. Those are being reissued later this month and I plan to buy them as well. So even in learning to let go, I'm really only learning to clutch even harder.

I'll get to the used store to sell them and, perhaps, they'll refuse to take certain things. I can see it now, as if it were a short scene for the stage:

[Bells ring as Intelligent Music Listener (IML) enters establishment to sell CDs. He wears a monocle. Surly Clerk (SC) waits behind the counter.]

IML : "Yes, my good man. I am here to sell some fine musical items to your establishment in exchange for American Dollars, which I hear are quite the rage."

[The Surly Clerk stares.]

IML : "Yes, well, I shall peruse your fine wares while you look these items over and prepare the offer. Shall we say, ten minutes?"

[The Surly Clerk stares. The Intelligent Music Listener walks away. Ten minutes pass and he returns. Several CDs have not been accepted and he peruses them while the clerk prepares his money.]

IML : "I say, old boy, why did you not take this Noise Addict album? They were a ripping little band."

SC : "No one wants to buy that. Who are they?"

IML : [looking slightly shocked] "Well, I mean, they were the band that Ben Lee was in before striking out on his own."

SC : "Didn't he date Claire Danes?"

IML : "What does that have to do with music? Look, it was produced by Brad Wood, even - a mainstay of 90s indie-rock. He produced Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville also."

SC : "Liz Phair? That chick who did 'Extraordinary?' Why would I care about someone who produced that?"

[Intelligent Music Listener's monocle falls out of his eye and shatters on the countertop. He leaps across the counter and soundly chokes the clerk.]

- FIN -

They let you blog from jail, right?

Notes From Underground - #38Randomocity

Warm up the seats, junior, 'cause after a bit of a hiatus, Randomocity is back. Doing it every third week started to tire me out a bit and it was less fun. But, after taking six weeks off from it, I think I can ease myself back into it. Plus there's tons of new stuff to possibly come up. Which means my computer will thwart me with things I've heard a million times.

A reminder - Click on the 'Play It' link at the end of each commentary and you can listen along with me. Sort of.

Here are the rules: 1) can't spend any more time typing than the track is long; 2) have to type based on my own knowledge - no consulting the internets for confirmation, so if I put my foot in my mouth, so be it; 3) no skipping tracks - even if artists/albums repeat, no skipping.

Let's go.

#1 Seven Mary Three - "Cumbersome" : You are freakin' kidding me. I didn't even know I had this on my computer. Seven Mary Three is one of those bands that I assumed would have their 15 minutes in the 90's alt-rock sun and then disappear. But they, along with Better Than Ezra and those sorts of bands, have proved surprisingly resilient. It's really quite interesting. They've sort of built up a cult following of sorts. This was, of course, their only really big commercial radio hit. 'Cumbersome' is a cumbersome word to sing and I have always found the chorus to this song to be irritating. It just seems like a songwriter trying to show off vocabulary skills without any real knowledge for how well those words fit into lyrical poetry. If I remember, the name of this album is American Standard, which I always remember as the name of a brand of toilet. I'll leave it there. - Play It!

#2 Camper Van Beethoven - "Beautiful Child" : This is from a great little rarity. CVB, holed up somewhere recording, trapped by snow, decided to re-record the entire Fleetwood Mac Tusk album. Their version of "Tusk" is pretty awesome and really the whole album is pretty great. Fleetwood Mac is a band I had to be won over to over a long time. I used to eye all "classic" rock with a mightily suspicious eye. Don't trust any music over thirty and all that. Shut up. I know I owned the Stooges' Fun House which predated this album by a number of years. I didn't say I was a smart adolescent. I'm enjoying this. It's a beautiful song and their version is pretty lovely. I'm just going to let this play. Ironically, not far above this on my playlist, Calexico's "Not Even Stevie Nicks." - Play It!

#3 Willie Nelson - "Whiskey River" (alternate version) : This is from the really stellar collection of Willie's three albums for Atlantic - Shotgun Willie, Phases and Stages and a live album. It's well worth it if you don't own a lot of Willie's albums from this period. Right after he finished these three, he left Atlantic, and Nashville, and recorded Red Headed Stranger which is just a completely brilliant album. This is a pretty funky version of this song. Great keyboards and Willie's amazing guitar punctuations. Willie is such a great anomalie in American music. Standing outside of the mainstream, yet firmly within it, making his own rules about recording and just endlessly inventive and enjoyable. I'll just rave on and on about this. - Play It!

#4 The Darkness - "Bald" : From One Way Ticket to Hell...and Back! My computer likes to torture me by bringing up things I've focused on recently. I just played the Darkness on my show last night, but granted, this is from their second album. People didn't fall for it the way they did for their first. And yeah, the second time around the Darkness' sound isn't as novel. But there are some great songs on this album. The title track. Oh, and "Knockers," with its amazingly awesome chorus. This song has a lot of potential, but it just doesn't take off like it should. The chorus is great, but the rest of the song is just a little underwhelming. I can see people calmly pumping their fists during the verses though. That's good. - Play It!

#5 The Replacements - "I Will Dare" : How young are you? How old am I? Let's count the rings around my eyes. How smart are you? How dumb am I? Don't count any of my advice. Meet me any place or anywhere at any time, now I don't care, meet me tonight. If you would dare, I might dare. Call me on Thursday, if you will. Call me on Wednesday, better still. I ain't lost yet, so I gotta be a winner. Fingernails and cigarettes, a lousy dinner. How young are you? Meet me any place or anywhere at any time, now I don't care, meet me tonight. If you would dare, I will dare. Cute Peter Buck's mandolin solo. How young are you? How old am I? Let's count the rings around my eyes. How smart are you? How smart are you? How dumb am I? Meet me any place or anywhere at any time. Now, I don't care. Meet me tonight. If you would dare, I will dare. - I love that fingernails and cigarettes line so much. Westerberg is the master of those types of lines. - Play It!

#6 The Rain Parade - "Talking In My Sleep" : This is from the Explosions in the Glass Palace EP I think. This was recorded after Dave Roback left the band to wonder off into the paisley colored wilderness. Even though Dave was gone, this was still a really fantastic album. My getting into the Rain Parade was the complete accidental result of me going off on a chase after a 'genre' of music. I read about 'the paisley underground' and was completely taken with the name and the description. So I hunted down the various bands. These guys and the Dream Syndicate are the ones I've fallen the most in love with over time. Though someone in Aquarium Drunkard comments today mentioned Game Theory, another of the bands from the movement. This all just sounds like it's about 20 years removed from its time of the early 80s. 20 years earlier, obviously. [ed. note - and here to find I put my foot in my mouth. This is from before Dave Roback left the band - in fact it's the lead track from their debut, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip. I guess I'm used to listening to my beat-up vinyl copy and this sounded too clean. My bad. - Play It!

#7 The Mountain Goats - "Maybe Sprout Wings" : From Get Lonely. Darnielle's really amazing documentation of relationship dissolution. I didn't spend a lot of time listening to this album the year it came out as I was going through one of those of my own, but its songs are really harrowing and beautiful. He's really been on a roll since Tallahassee, but especially since The Sunset Tree. Man. The chords between the end of the chorus and the beginning of the second verse. Haunting. - Play It!

#8 Mclusky - "KK Kitchens, What Were You Thinking" : See? This is from The Difference Between Me and You Is That I'm Not On Fire. I just played something off of this last night. Velouria, snap out of it! The nice people want to hear different music. I do too. I mean, this song is relentlessly amazing as is just about everything Mclusky put out, but still. Badass. That's all I can say. - Play It!

#9 Del Amitri - "Driving With the Brakes On" : There we go. Thought this would've been a perfect end to this, rather than next to last song. This is from Twisted. Justin Currie and Del Amitri are brilliant at these sort of pop songs. Wistful, wandering, reminiscent and gorgeous. Currie is a consummate lyricist. When he nails a turn of phrase, he really nails it. He's good at it in a way similar to how Paul Westerberg is good at it. This album was Del Amitri's biggest here in the U.S. thanks to "Roll to Me," their whimsical pop confection for the album. And that video with them in the baby strollers. - Play It!

#10 Glen Phillips - "There Comes a Time" (live) : Is my favorite part of this the guy shouting at the beginning? I think so. That or the low level of talking underneath it all. That has to be tough for solo acoustic artists to play in bars and such where so many people are going to stand at the back and talk. If it's a loud rock band, no one notices it. When I saw Michael Penn back in '03, he was having a similar problem at South by Southwest. He actually got rather fed up. To be fair, he was playing in a huge venue (Jay Farrar was on next, followed by the Yardbirds with Slash) for the festival and anyone who cared was up front and center. I don't know if Glen was getting irritated with people. I haven't listened to this bootleg in awhile. Meanwhile, I like this song. Even though his most recent solo records have really rolled over into the adult contemporary mediocrity I was afraid it would, his solo shows are a great exercise in good songwriting. He's also a master of great covers. I played Billy Bragg on the show last night and, aside from his albums with Wilco, the first time I heard his work was Glen's cover of "Levi Stubb's Tears." Good stuff. - Play It!

BONUS: Fountains of Wayne - "Revolving Dora" : Oh, why not? This was one of the songs from Traffic and Weather that, when I thought I was disappointed with the album, became increasingly stuck in my head. The song's title pun is rather hideous, but man that chorus (the whole "turning out to be / immune to gravity" bit) is really sharp and hummable. When they jam on it for just a bit towards the end, it's lovely. Long reign power pop. - Play It!

Notes From Underground - #37If It's a Crime, We Hang Side by Side

The last two weeks here on Notes From Underground have been pretty heavy. I mean, bringing in Alfred, Lord Tennyson to make a point? Sheesh, this is supposed to be a pop culture blog, right? But there are connections to be had all over the place and if I didn't bring in every bit of seizable knowledge I had in order to comment on some of this stuff, well, as Goethe said, I'd be living hand to mouth. But it's time to relax just a bit.

We of the pretentious nature like to talk about our 'guilty pleasures.' I'm beginning not to like this phrase because it implies that your reasons for liking something aren't valid. Whenever I would be asked what my guilty pleasures were, the answers I'd come up with were artists and/or songs that I, honestly, could mount a decent defense for. These are things that I would honestly jump into the mix to defend. Is that so crazy?

Now, I'm going to make this short and sweet this week in order to get back to what I should be doing, but I want to know what some of your so-called guilty pleasures are and, truthfully now, why you honestly think they are good. What's so great about them?

I can't put up links to these songs just yet (sadly - I'm away from home and, thus, away from my collection), but here are two of my big ones and a brief explanation of why they're good:

Hootie and the Blowfish - This isn't just a defense of their Cracked Rear View debut (and its impossibly perfect opening song, "Hannah Jane"), but of their second and third albums as well. If you were going to ask me to name my favorite Hootie and the Blowfish album, it'd be their sophomore effort, Fairweather Johnson. I really, honestly think it's a great power-pop record filled with nods to rock and roll, country, blues and more. "Tucker's Town" is a brilliant song, as are "So Strange" (with the lovely Nanci Griffith on backing vocals) and "She Crawls Away." Even their third album, Musical Chairs, is filled with lovely moments, even though it would be their last album that would make me pay any attention. They are the Everyband done good in every sense of the word. And look, I saw them live back in 1996. I went to see Toad the Wet Sprocket, who was opening, and in the midsts of the ubiquitous "Only Wanna Be With You," Hootie paused and then shot off into a great version of Son Volt's "Windfall." Something smart was going on behind all that pop goodness.

BBMak - "Out of My Heart" - It was hard to get away from BBMak's "Back Again" from their first album. I loathed it, couldn't stand the sheen on the song, was repulsed by it all. I was watching MTV one day and stumbled into a video with one of the sunniest, poppiest, cheeriest songs I'd heard in ages. The harmonies were gorgeous, perfectly splayed across the chorus. I couldn't believe what a note-perfect pop song it was. Then the credits came at the end of the video. BBMak? You've got to be kidding me. Thus, my endless love for the song "Out of My Heart" from their sophomore (and final) album Into Your Head. Which, by the way, is exactly what the song does. It gets into your head and doesn't. freakin'. leave. Ever. These guys knew what they were doing and this is exactly the kind of pop that you don't hear anymore. As much as I hated them for their irksome covers of the La's "There She Goes" and Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over," Sixpence None the Richer's "Kiss Me" is an example of this type of pop song that you just don't see anymore. It could be that guitar pop hit its peak in the late 90s - come to think of it, that's the last time Semisonic had any commercial traction. But still. This is one 'guilty pleasure' that I will gladly defend.

Leave yours in the comments and I'll see you all back here on Monday for the Now Departing review.

P.S. I have always had a soft spot for Rick Astley, thus the picture of him at the top. I wish people would rickroll me. I'd love it every time.

Notes From Underground - #36Don't Look Back (Sort Of) - Part Two

"He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth." - Goethe

"'I am half sick of shadows,' said The Lady of Shalott." - "The Lady of Shalott", Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Q: How many indie kids does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: 5. 1 to change the bulb and 4 to stand around talking about how light bulb's new work isn't as good as his earlier stuff. - Anonymous

Last week I discussed a commercial versus artistic approach to looking at pop music. Knowing that all of us contain a little of both (and some decidedly more of one than the other), the ultimate answer came down to 'everyone's got their opinion and who are we to criticize?' But that's quite unsatisfactory for so many reasons.

Goethe's quote (thank you, Sophie's World) is a reflection of how isolated pop music sometimes seems. So many examples of it seem to float in a netherworld, neatly tucked between certain genre titles. It's a rare breed that seems to pull from more than one direction at once, and it's those artists who seem to stand a larger test of time. Maybe that's why so much commercial music seems so poor. Music can't drawn on three thousand years of influence, but they could at least draw on a larger portion of the 20th century.

There are plenty of music listeners who embrace commercial music with no thought to its placement within the larger context of popular music as an art movement. They embrace pale imitations of great works, cycled and recycled and watered down in order to create a profit. But on the other end of this lies a problem as well.

If you're reading this blog, odds are you express something more similar to the Lady of Shalott's statement. "I am half sick of shadows," she says in Tennyson's poem, and that very neatly sums up a lot of our feelings as 'observant' listeners. We're tired of music that seems slipshod and ramshackle, barely coherent if even acknowledging its musical predecessors.

This sneering gesture leads to jokes like the one above. Pretentiousness is easily lampooned. Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Miniver Cheevy" focuses on this type of present-bashing, but also points out its danger. Cheevy is so caught up in admiring an idyllic past that he is wasting away his present. Pining for the days of yore, Cheevy dismisses all of the modern day in search of medieval grace. The Lady of Shalott, too, is so mired in a vision of harmonious past times that she ultimately brings about her own demise by being so enamored of it.

Are we selling ourselves short in both directions? Who is happier - the sneering bourgeoisie with their high-horse views of art or the clamoring rabble who listen to most anything produced? Again we're at a junction where it seems either side is correct. It's just about how you personally feel.

How do we, as listeners, drive this? Do our tastes, broad or narrow, drive a certain aspect of market-art? Certainly on big radio, but what about in smaller circles? Are there people 'cashing in' on small trends and niches? And ultimately how do we answer these questions?

Defining art has been a struggle. I want to consider things like "Fountain" art, but hold off on doing the same for Nickelback or Soulja Boy? Is that fair or right? As much as I have welcomed the open definitions of what 'music' is (thank you, John Cage), why do I shy away from the more obvious and base examples of the art form? Should I feel bad? Should people who only listen to commercial radio feel bad?

I've ended with more questions than I started.