My buddy Jon Meek did some studio work on the new As Cities Burn record Hell or High Water. He played keys on at least one of the tracks, and I think that's awesome.
So here's my plug. As Cities Burn has been a solid band for several years, even when they were starting out as a hardcore, or dare I say, screamo (ugh) band back in the first part of the decade. Since that time, they've relentlessly toured the country and honed their sound to become one of the better indie rock outfits around today. I saw them live in the Fall of 2008 at Red 7 in downtown Austin, and they were incredible. Jon Meek has been involved in several outstanding musical projects, sadly none of which took wing because of circumstance, and is a master of keys. I mean, the man can tickle a mean ivory or two.
Go support a good band and a good friend. Buy the new As Cities Burn record Hell or High Water.
I've been going through quite the nostalgic period lately. I think I'm finally starting to pull out of it, but I have noticed that the older I get, the more these phases occur, and the longer they last. Perhaps that's because I have more experiences to nostalgize (<------not a real word), or perhaps it's because I'm slowly losing the drive to adapt to new things. Becoming "set in my ways," as they say.
I don't know, part of me becomes angry when I think about this. Another part of me doesn't mind so much. It's all part of the inner conflict of not just growing older, but growing up. The irony here is that being afraid of change is a change for me. I used to get bored with the old, but now I find myself being bored with the new.
These past few weeks, as I've shuffled through my iPod library in traffic (<-----not safe), more often than not I've chosen those records that I've been listening to for a decade now instead of the record that came out last week. I've even gone back and added songs and records that I was into in high school, which means, because my iPod stays pretty much full, I had to delete newer stuff to make room. Whereas a couple of years ago, this decision would've tortured me, now I don't even give it a second thought.
The discipline of staying current with new musical trends is less and less of a priority for me, and the necessity of treasuring my tried and true musical gems has begun to take its place. The role of music in my life is morphing into something else - almost as a comforter or a distraction instead of a challenge or an exercise.
A song has to grab me, and I mean really grab me, for me to spend my time exploring it and falling in love with it. Is this unfortunate, or is this the place I've been looking for all along? Knowing what I like and being ok with it. Is it complacency, or is it an earned respite?
I'm not sure, but I know that it feels good to be here, at least for now. I'll let you know how I feel next week.
The song of the night is Morrissey's "Something is Squeezing My Skull" from his new album Years of Refusal, because I like the way he sings the word "skull." Enjoy.
Every Friday night, I will post a favorite song by a defunct artist. Sometimes I will write, sometimes not. Tonight, I'm not feeling very articulate, so I'll just say this -
The new Doves album came out this week. I've only listened to it all the way through once, but I can already tell you that it's probably the best and most accessible Doves album to date.
Superior to most other Brit Rock bands in their vein, Doves create lush, spacey rock anthems that reach all the way to the back of the room. On Kingdom of Rust, we see them becoming a bit more fun and playful with their songs, while still maintaining that head-swelling drone that they're best known for. I haven't listened to this enough to write a fair review, but I wanted to at least leave you with the first single from this album, the title track "Kingdom of Rust." Enjoy.
There were signs posted in the first floor lobby of the building where I work that read:
SICK OF THE BAILOUTS???
JOIN US AT THE "DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS TAX DAY TEA PARTY!!"
So, here's the thing.
The Boston Tea Party was a historically important event because it was in protest of "taxation without representation." Not only do we have representation now - we vote for elected officials who then legislate (presumably) based on the values and convictions that they initially campaigned on, and we know what they're about (again, presumably) before they get into a position where they can influence policy - but the reason tea was thrown into the bay as opposed to anything else was because drinking tea was part of the social culture of pre-Revolutionary War America. It was a big deal to throw crates full of tea into the water - wasting tea for almost any reason was sacrilege.
But now? In 2009?
Who cares?
My quarrel is not with people protesting. I say good for them. My quarrel is with the unoriginality of it all. Do something relevant, people. Make your own mark in history. This is just boring.
And if you don't believe me, I submit to you Joe Strummer's take on all of this, who was far more political (and awesome) than I. He said it first and said it best.
My girlfriend and I spent the evening assembling furniture on the living room floor. That's not a euphemism. On hands and knees, pushing in cam locks with our thumbs, I thought it only appropriate that we soundtrack all that rugburn and chaos with a bit of Raw Power. I like to be pumped up when I take on tedious domestic manual labor. Makes me feel less emasculated.
We ended up listening to Johnny Cash's American IV instead, which is still pretty manly but in a different way. But since this is my blog, and there's no girlfriend's nerves to consider here, I'm exercising my passive aggressive veto power and bringing on the destruction.
Now go get on your living room floor and screw something.
I don't have any cohesive thoughts on it just yet, having finished reading it about 2 minutes ago, but Harry Crews' memoir A Childhood really got my wheels turning, mostly about my heritage and my childhood and how things change but never really get better because of the inevitable trade-offs that we make.
What I mean is, less than a hundred years ago, members of my family, some of whom are still alive, lived in self-made homes with no wiring or plumbing. They lost siblings just barely old enough to walk to illnesses that can be cured today by getting a shot or taking a pill. They had chickens living under their houses that they fed through holes in the floor. They paid the doctor with jams or fresh vegetables. Their lives were unimaginably hard - almost to a mythological degree. They had to do terrible, horrible things to survive, but they did them because they had to, and that was that.
On the backs of those people, and on the backs of every generation since then, was laid the foundation for modern America, and subsequently the modern world, that we live in today. Every generation wants to make life better for the generation that follows it. And so we find cures and invent and advance and try and fail and try and fail until we succeed and then we take that success and try and fail and try and fail until we make it even more successful, and so on. In so little time, we've moved so far beyond where we were back then, that now, as I said, it all seems like a myth. Like the stories our grandmothers and grandfathers tell couldn't possibly be true. Not in this world.
Harry Crews makes a very good observation early on in his book when he talks about the day his Uncle Alton took him to meet some old friends of his father. Harry never knew his father, as he died when Harry was only a few months old, so one day, on the front porch of his Uncle Alton's old house, he asked his uncle to tell him something about him. Instead of doing what any one of us might do and floundering his way through a few piecemeal memories, his uncle took him out to where some of Harry's father's old friends were known to congregate, and the stories commenced.
As Harry listens to the men, he thinks about how no one will be able to tell these kinds of stories about him when he is old. His life has been scattered across so many acquaintances and unnamed places that if it weren't for the books he'd written, you'd scarcely know he'd ever existed. Not so with these old men. They were rooted and grown right where they sat, and their connections to the people around them ran deep and long. They knew everything about each other. It was just the way things were during those times, when life was too hard not to be in each other's business. People couldn't survive on their own, isolated from their neighbors. It just wasn't done.
I don't have to explain how that's changed. We all know how. But I think there's something to be said for what's been lost in exchange for an easier life. Yeah, we can go down to the doctor's office and get a prescription and not have to worry about dying from simple infections. We can get from one place to another quickly and without much preparation or thought. We have running water and electricity that gives us the ability to hole up inside our apartments for days on end without having to ever see the sun. We can live our lives never really having to know anybody and still get by, and even be successful.
All of that has its definite advantages, but in an attempt to gain these advantages, I'm afraid that we inadvertently laid the idea of real community on the bargaining table. We move from place to place and job to job and clique to clique, never really planting roots or investing in anything except ourselves. And in our society, this is acceptable and even expected. You can't sit still for too long or you're seen as backwards or unambitious or lazy. Even in the south, where some of those old ways still exist, it's hard to find anyone under the age of thirty that wants to stay in their small towns. There's a drive to move away and make something of ourselves.
Listen, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I did it myself, and I think an important part of growing up is trying to find yourself and all that that entails. I'm just saying, I wish it didn't have to start so early, and I wish it wasn't driven so hard into us that we have to be better than our parents and we have to make the world better for our kids. I wish we'd had that stillness and patience instilled in us that only comes from pain and struggling and scrapings with death - so many scrapings that you no longer feared it but accepted it as just another thing that happens.
And maybe that's it - maybe we never became familiar enough with death that we learned to accept it. Maybe we're all running around with such blind fury because we're scared it might catch up to us if we ever stop. But it's not something that chases you, and it's not something that you're running toward. It just is. Life is a binary state - you're either alive or you aren't. That's it.
I don't know why I got off on that. Like I said, my thoughts about this are a bit fragmented. I'm just thinking about how I wish that one day, there will be a group of old men sitting around a table in the back of an old country store playing dominoes and telling stories about me to my kid. It won't happen because the world is different now, and tonight, that makes me sad.
The song that happens to be sound tracking these reflections tonight is Iron & Wine's "Sodom, South Georgia." One of my favorites. Enjoy.
