Hard Like Algebra

Today I went to see Ben Kulp play at Scratch PDX, which the organizers bill as “Portland’s Performance Playground.”

Like a lot of performance nights in that vein, Scratch PDX had a range of talent, depth, and quality. Some stuff was pretty *wink wink* but overall, the performers were committed and the audience was generally apt to love what they were seeing.

I’m always fascinated by how the audience for something like this (or really anything) has a core group of regulars. It’s amazing because you think about this shared, communal experience, people going weekend after weekend to see 30 plays in 60 minutes, or, in this case, once a month for the non-summer months of the year to see the community at large perform works of varying polish. I found myself wondering what would happen if I decided to go for a year without listening to or viewing anything that was prerecorded.

[Side note: Ben was great. It was nice to see his first performance ever. It was fun to see public reaction, and see him control what he could and shrug when he couldn't.]

A night like this does two things for me, and I doubt I’m the only one who would say these things. First, it makes me realize there is a community out there for performance, and gives me a bit of a “wow, this was here all along, why have I never gone before?” response. Secondly, it inspires me to make work of my own–and in this case, it reminds me that I’ve got a background and a lot of training in this, and that I could so something worthwhile.

That’s exciting stuff. I’m glad I was there. I might be there next month, if they’d have me, to perform.

Bill Callahan’s “Sycamore” exemplifies the kind of song that completely derails your intention to listen to a full album. I swear, I still fully believe that Woke On A Whaleheart is a brilliant album, but when you put “Sycamore” fourth (right after the stellar “Diamond Dancer,” too) on it, you’re basically asking a listener raised on CD’s to listen to the first four songs on the album over and over.

The song starts out with the looping, swirling, complicated-but-not guitar lick that Callahan comes back to again and again, and then straight into the lyrics:

There’s sap in the trees if you tap ‘em
There’s blood on the seas–if you map ‘em
Christian, if you see your papa–tell ‘im I love ‘im

And he goes from there, short pithy sayings that make you feel so much like he owns his lyrics, like he can pull them off and make them amazing and no one else could. He’s like a one man mythos every time out, and “Sycamore” is no exception.

Other than that, you’ve got the basic drumbeat, understated gospel backing vocals (how often can someone say that?), and lyrics that just continue to somehow be killer and yet not wordy at all. Callahan doing “basic” equals simple that defies you to write something so great. He’s also got the guitar solo that fits somewhere between caffeinated country and the cherry music from Mr. Do!, a man playing guitar that sounds like 8-bit video games…and also, aw hell. Eff the critic-speak.

You know what?  It’s just a damn good song.  A great song.  The one song that I remembered from the time I saw him open for Joanna Newsom to the time the album came out.

Simple, complex, catchy, twangy, clean.

It’s perfect.

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I’ve got about 10000 songs in iTunes, and about ten of them have made the “Perfect” playlist. This is one of them.

image via http://yacht.tumblr.com

I can’t believe that it’s seriously been 15 years since Cobain shot himself.
(more…)

Hey folks!

I’ve gotten more and more interested in using this space for writing about things other than music, in posting online more, and in sharing creative work that I create myself.

In the spirit of such things, I started a tumblr site a few months back, but that wasn’t enough. 

At this point, I’m going to take HLA in more of a generalist direction.  Separating the arts too much has never suited me, really. I still really want this name to be something that I only use for the highest quality stuff I can do–or at least, the posts with the most thought behind them.  I want to write about the things in culture that strike me, and I also want to post things that I make.  I can use my livejournal, my personal twitter, or my tumblr for the rest.

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Now, an announcement is in order:

I am starting a new project this April, and I’m calling it 30 Days in April.

During this month, I’ll be posting something, daily, that I’ve created.  I’m tired of looking back on the seven (seven!) years since I went to art school, or the months since I started renting art space, and wondering why I haven’t been creating.  I’m so crazy about changing this ingrained, habitual pattern that I’ve gotten a daily writing prompts book and even, dare I say it, The Artist’s Way. 

I have been stagnant too long, and so has Hard Like Algebra. This changes today.

I want to thank ya’ll in advance for the support. It should be fun.

While this post admittedly exists a tiny bit to ensure that I have posted something at least monthly, I also haven’t yet had a time to write a post gushing about The Tallest Man on Earth, and he totally deserves the gushing.

So, go check out his Myspace page. You’ll get past the Dylan comparison fairly quickly, and then you’ll be rushing out to go get the fancy-pants limited edition vinyl album. Trust me, you’ll be glad you did.

I’ve been a big fan of Pop Songs since the day I realized that fluxblog* writer Matthew Perpetua had another place on the internet–a place where he planned to write about every single R.E.M. song.

It’s a great site, too. I know that I posted some big ol’ R.E.M. nostalgia not too long ago, and I also know that one of these days I’ll write my big essay detailing how Up and Monster are not the Death of Good R.E.M. like so many critics/fans think. I also know that it takes a special kind of fan to tackle this kind of project, so my hat goes off to Perpetua.

Anyway, shortly after he finished the project–running out of “every song on every R.E.M. record that existed as of March 2007″–Michael Stipe contacted him and essentially said, “hey, I’ll answer some questions, whatcha got?” which must sort of be like getting a call from Bill Clinton or a letter from Bill Gates.

Some of the stuff is pretty amazing, too. Check it:

2. There is a song on Green called “untitled” what was your thoughts on a possible title at the time? Was there a working title for the eleventh untitled song from Green? I heard it was So awake, Volunteer. Any others?

at the time it was really cool to have unlisted, ‘hidden’ tracks for the fans, and that was ours. Its untitled because we just pretended like it didn’t exist. I really wrote it to my Mom and Dad, from the road. We basically toured the entire 1980’s and I didn’t see my family much.

What’s amazing to me is that all throughout, we’re left thinking about what it must be like to be Michael Effing Stipe, but with this anvil of humanness smacking us on the head–”I didn’t see my family much.” So little that he wrote a song to them like some of us might write postcards. Under it all, these dudes are people, after all.

The answers to the questions are collected as Ask Michael Stipe. Much like the blog itself, these entries have me rediscovering individual R.E.M. songs all over again. Awesome.

*btw, fluxblog looks a lot different nowadays, eh?

For the next week-or-so I will be posting as an official blogger for PICA’s TBA blog.

My first post is up here.

Cheers!

I’m not really sure how much John Darnielle might enjoy hearing it (though I suspect that he wouldn’t mind, since he’s another of those wonderful hi/low culture is bunk people that I adore), but it totally makes sense, in my head, anyway, that a direct line can be drawn from “A Long December” by the Counting Crows to The Mountain Goats’ “This Year.”

This isn’t just because of the “two syllable adjective/plural monosyllable animal” naming similarity, though I certainly have a giddy smile about that realization as well.

Here’s the thing: The first time I heard “A Long December” I was in college, a freshman, dating the first girl I ever seriously dated, who was, not coincidentally, the first girl I ever dated that felt music as deeply as i did(that sort of deep feeling about music marks most of my serious relationships, perhaps an entirely different post). Soon thereafter, I began when I judging the entirety of the year on whether or not the line “maybe this year will be better than the last” rang true. The first few years I definitely had enough angst that I kept hoping that, indeed, the new year would be better than the last. It felt like an accomplishment when, in fact, I eventually reached a year when I didn’t need to judge my years this way anymore.

“This Year” lays out a similar challenge–a line that can be used as a litmus test, a way to stack up the past year and compare it to the present (or perhaps, near future). “I am gonna make it, through this year, if it kills me,” Darnielle sings over and over, the chanted mantra-maniacal refrain that the abused, determined teenager in all of us relates to. As I’ve written elsewhere before, this song was a turning point for me–the centerpiece of an album that taught me I could still be crushed by music, coming during a time when I was reinventing myself, re-examining what it meant to be me, reconsidering any choices I had made, a quarterlife crisis “ready for the bad things to come,” a time in which I certainly understood “twin high maintenance machines.”

For this year, at least, I feel challenged, and full of growth, and just well, in general. There’s not enough angst that makes me spit in the near future’s eye to tell it that “I am gonna make it, through this year, if it kills me.” I recognize the fragility inherent in this statement, that I’m content and that I don’t need to look at this year that way–and perhaps that fragility is precisely what resonates so deeply to me about both Duritz’s words that note, “I cant remember all the times I tried to tell my myself/To hold on to these moments as they pass” and Darnielle recalling a scene that “ends badly as you might imagine/in a cavalcade of anger and fear.”

“It’s gonna take you people years to recover from all of the damage,” Darnielle’s voice raises to the heavens later on in The Sunset Tree, again taking a unit of time and giving it more meaning than perhaps the rotation around the sun deserves. This is a natural, universal marker, and I’m glad that he shares it with us.

Counting Crows, “A Long December (piano version)”

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The Mountain Goats, “This Year”

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Work and life are interesting lately, though I should point out that I’ve been listening heavily to a few albums.

It also amuses me to no end that David Allen keeps popping up on my last.fm artist list. God bless audiobooks.

Anyway, here’s a quick post that will hopefully spawn some discussion.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the most recent Iron & Wine album, the Shepherd’s Dog, for two reasons, really:

1. Erin likes it, which means that she picks it when it is her record player turn; this has made me pay attention to it more, and
2. I’ve been wondering why it was just sort of overlooked by me since I bought it. Why didn’t I check this one out much?

At any rate, today I realized that the song that she likes most (as she would say, Her Jam) and the one that (so far) I enjoy hearing most couldn’t be more different as far old Iron & Wine’s formula goes. I then figured, what’s better than asking the internet something?

NOTHING.

So here you go! Let’s compare these two tracks, and discuss a)which one you like better and b)why. Hate ‘em both? Mention that, too! In a future post I’ll talk about my own take on differing tastes here.

Exhibit A: White Tooth Man

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Exhibit B: Resurrection Fern

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P. S. I&W’s record label mispelled the album as “the Shepard’s Dog” on the downloadable-cuz-I-got-vinyl tracks. Funny, that.

HELLO!

WE INTERRUPT OUR REGULARLY (UN)SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING TO POINT OUT THAT JOHN DARNIELLE IS BLOGGING AT POWELLS.COM ALL WEEK.

THAT IS ALL.

THANK YOU.

GOOD DAY.