6/11/16

"Here we are again, love

Here we go again

By your side i can't pretend anymoreNow everything starts where it ends." 
~Everything Starts Where It Ends
Lovedrug, Everything Starts Where It Ends

Dear fellow listener and occasional reader,
I want to thank you for stumbling upon this blog in whatever fashion you have. This will be our final post at this particular site, but that's better news than it sounds — we're moving to a shiny new blog with shiny new tools and hopefully going to get our thoughts out to a bigger audience.

Check us out in a few days at www.learninglovesongs.com where we'll be up and running from here on out. Plus, all our archives will be available there for future perusal.

It's interesting to look at back at my earliest posts and see how some of my favorite artists back then are still my favorites today. I still love dreamy delay, I still love gut-spilling bridges, I still love spine-tingling, hair-raising, fist-pumping hooks. But so much has changed about the music I love and who I am and this blog is a mirror for all of that — the songs that I needed in dark times, or the ones that I used to celebrate on the other side, they say something about the connection between music and listener, between artist and fan. That connection, I have learned, is one of the most powerful in the world.

I've learned a lot in the course of eight years. But with all the music there is in the world, I know I've only scratched the surface.

See you on the other side,
MD



"Hey now, we're wide awake and we're thinking
My darling, believe your voice can mean something
Say hello to good times
Trade up for the fast ride
We close our eyes while the nickel and dime take the streets completely."

~Futures

Jimmy Eat World, Futures

6/8/16

"3 AM I scream your name
I don't sleep, I don't change.
There's no magic left ,
No card up my sleeve,
Forever's gone
And I watched it leave.

Maybe I get drunk enough to call you
Admit the thing I'm finally seeing clear
I can make good turn amazing
Then disappear
Disappear."

~Disappear 

Matt Nathanson, Show Me Your Fangs 

I’ve never been turned off by a Matt Nathanson album before, there’s always at least two or three song that are these brutally honest and beautiful takes about how hard it is to love and live with abandon, or some equally heart-wrenching theme. Though Nathanson is an artist whose radio airplay is a footnote of his discography and hardly a household name, his songs often have something of a commercially appealing sound with these provocative or vulnerable twists, never safe but never at the cost of pleasant-sounding melodies.

On his latest record “Show me Your Fangs,” the ballads are what gets me, coming in a one-two punch midway through the album on “Disappear” and “Washington State Fight Song,” using an orchestral setting in the former and his trademark solo acoustic accompaniment in the latter.  These songs arguably the most depressing on the album, but I think they're the most effective - while the happier takes in the beginning of the album might be good for a toe-tapping listen once or twice,  Nathanson continues to be at his most successful when he lets his guts spill out on the floor. Album after album, he comes back to these points of no return, where a desperate love is tearing him apart, and each time I'm a sucker for a repeat listen.

It’s hard to tell, with an artist who has been around the block once or twice like Nathanson has, whether these songs are the result of pure emotional inspiration or a more imaginative, fictional spark. But either way he succeeds in bringing forward something real — and really catchy. I've had these songs swirling my head the past few days and while I don't think I'll come back to them as often as I do "Beneath These Fireworks" and that era, they prove Nathanson is a modern songwriter worth following. 

"I wish that I could be a sucker for love
The way I'm a sucker for lying
But I like getting lost
It's easier than finding my way.

I want to start over, pack up, disappear
And come back treating you better
But there's a girl up in Spokane
And I'm like a moth to a flame

Oh, the mistakes I've made
Oh, in Washington state."

~Washington State Fight Song 

Matt Nathanson, Show Me Your Fangs

6/2/16

There's a song off the latest Hey Marseilles album that's been floating around in my head for awhile, probably for about six weeks, ever since I first heard it in a rather serendipitous Spotify browsing session. The song is called "West Coast," and I heard it the first day I woke up in my new home in California.

So maybe part of me will always love this song, because I hear it now and I am flooded with the memories of feeling free, flushed and happy, feeling so enamored and invigorated by new surroundings. As a piece of indie folk rock in 2016, it's a great lead single from a band whose is reliably heartfelt and musically interesting.

Their most recent album -- a self-titled release -- has a few hints of electropop but still spotlights their chamber-pop strings: here we have cellos and violins and mandolins and perhaps some slightly Eastern-sounding instrument that I can't quite name. It's a really lovely little listen, calming and soothing and good for pondering. The album is at its best when tempos stay in a slow to mid range, bringing a sense of patience that is somewhat out of style in an era of frenzied, over-produced radio tracks or sprawling hipster noise rock.

Opening track "Eyes on You" is a fun take on the same old dance, it's a song with a lot sections and rhythms. I like the way it resists its own momentum, the way the rhythm drops out in the bridge before the entry of a melodic and flowing piano. Their cover of David Bowie's "Heroes" (my favorite Bowie song, as it were) is a techy take and plays around with the solos in an interesting fashion, though it's singer Matt Bishop's yearning drawl that gives the track a spine. But it's "West Coast" that I couldn't quite shake, a song that travels from coast to coast and still explores, a song that lives in the moment while gazing at the future in the horizon. It's a beautiful song, and I'm grateful I have reason to remember it.

"Meet me on the west coast,

with the salt air, breathe slow. 

Go out to the unknown,

we'll make it our own. 

Meet me on the west coast." 

~West Coast
Hey Marseilles, Hey Marseilles