Hard Like Algebra

You guys, I am seriously in one of those music-devouring phases again (yes know, hard to believe, but they really are phases, it’s not a constant thing) and the devouring has come from two sources, one of them fairly unlikely.

The real source was a recent Sound Opinions episode, during which they covered their Best of 2008 (so far). This kind of thing always charges me up, and I love listening to Kot and Dero because I typically get turned on to a few things that I want to check out (and also vehemently disagree with them on a few things).

Well, this time around, Dero decided to defend the Red Album.

Yes, that Red Album.

Weezer seemed to have gone from brilliant to totally gone to exciting to bleh, earning themselves one of my favorite music reviews of all time in the process. I had given up on them doing anything worth hearing based on second-hand snobbery from that review (and I will now come clean: I do actually like that “Beverly Hills Song)(though seriously, “We Are All On Drugs?” I am pretty sure that Cuomo singing one of his Harvard papers would have been more interesting), and so it was weird to hear Derogatis gushing about Weezer. Prog-rock and Rush-leanings aside, Dero rarely gushes about stuff that isn’t worth at least checking out.

He started to talk about a song called “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)” and I thought, “oh here we go, pretension disguised as fun, please,” but then he played it and I was like, “who the hell is this?” It starts off sounding like a Modest Mouse song and then goes through about four different versions of the song, including an intro that has about 9 different power chords palm muted in a seemingly random way and a Beach Boys style a capella section and…well, as Dero pointed out, this was a band that used to make complicated songs out of disparate parts, and here they were doing it again.

It’s fucking great.

Another song that he mentioned is called “Heartsongs,” and although that one has one verse too many (the last verse is a bit TOO much), it’s an ode to music that they love that will probably inspire another post ’round these parts. Oh, and did I mention that it sticks in your brain? Seriously, I would have to start another twitter feed called “Weezer earworms” for this one.

Is the whole album great? It seems like maybe not, though actually, I don’t know. It seems like there are some standouts, definitely, but the thing is, those songs are so great that I haven’t really delved into the rest of the album much.

I’m really happy to know that I don’t need to write them off any more though. I always sort of forget about Weezer, but you better believe that nearly every time I spot the Blue Album on a jukebox, I play “In the Garage” or “Surf Wax America.”

Enjoy my first nomination for song of the summer.

****

“The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn),” Weezer

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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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I’m not so great with memorizing things, but somehow music makes such an impression on me that I’ve got a nearly savant-like ability to remember the dates when albums were released. It makes sense I suppose: I’m a musical learner after all, and so it checks that I could remember that that STP album was 1993 and that Soul Asylum one was 1992 and that Flaming Lips album was 2002.

This carries over to mean that I have to filter through what music was playing at the time in order to remember personal dates. So, I know that we were living in the house we built in Marengo because of the fact that I can remember listening to “Black Gold” while cleaning the garage. I know that 8th grade was 1991 because, hello Nirvana (plus Nate listening to Nine Inch Nails from the year before).

So, that means that songs get tied to relationships, of course, of course. There are albums or songs that just naturally end up solidly meaning that person at that time in that place, and there’s nothing I can do about that (nor would I want to, even). I remember how appalled I was when a friend said to me, “you can’t do that you know.” I can’t not do that — I can’t fathom memories not filtered in this way. Maybe that’s another reason why music just means so much.

I’m a veteran of a few long-distance relationships, too, and those songs mailed off to each other, postage to other countries or continents? Even more weight.

This also means, as you might imagine, when a relationship goes south, and stays there, whole albums or songs have to get deleted from the hard drive, figuratively and literally. This doesn’t happen often, though it can be pretty significant.

The Streets’ “Dry Your Eyes” loosely fits in this category.

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