10/11/15

Some songs you love in a singular context - there's no connection to the artist's catalog, albums or performances, it's just this one song you hear and hear and hear and it's perfect every time. That is Ron Pope's "Drop in the Ocean" - while I'm sure he's a very talented piano player and songwriter and has a lot of good things to say, I can only come back to this perfect beautiful song.

I believe it's a Pandora discovery, but every time it winds up on a channel of mine I love it. His voice is equal parts delicate and clear, managing full-throated held notes and occasional falsetto. A quick review of his discography tells me this was on his 2008 debut - the fact I still hear it so often in 2015, though, says something about how this might be the song that winds up defining his career. And if it is, what a beautiful thing that would be - I love the wanting in this song, and how hopeful the chorus is despite this rather melancholy setting of droughts and deserts.There's heartbreak here, but it's not accepted, it's not giving in.

I should listen to more solo piano songs like this today. There's something so sophisticated and uncluttered about it, and also quite impressive. I love imaging fingers dancing across keys and finding all the right notes. I love how crisp and bright and still dramatic the sound can be, I love how it highlights words and stories layered above it. It shows how powerful one good melody can be, when you don't need any other adornments. In this little relatively unknown song, with just voice and piano, there is so much beauty and simplicity and expression, a devotion to undying love, the kind that isn't little or unknown at all, and I just love how timeless and human that is.

"It's just a drop in the ocean
A change in the weather
I was praying that you and me might end up together
It's like wishing for rain as I stand in the desert
But I'm holding you closer than most 
'Cause you are my heaven."
~Drop in the Ocean
Ron Pope, Daylight

9/29/15

"Wearing all your best clothes
Up until the sun rose
Laying in the backyard
Just picking up the dead stars
Go ahead and tell them all the world
Never change this
You're the living proof, yeah, it's dangerous
Snow covered streets
So, where you really wanna be

Come on, follow me down
Yeah, while you move your mouth around
Follow me down
You said, 'be the one they talk about.'
 
Staring at a crack in the window by your bed,
Stumble over your words in bed
Tell me where we're going, where the bad win
So I follow her down."
~Follow Me Down
Lydia, Run Wild


When I first decided to listen to the new Lydia record Saturday morning, I had no idea I would end up playing it all weekend long. This is a fun one. Easy breezy beats and dead-on satisfying guitar parts made the new Lydia record my go-to listening this week - I even bought it on iTunes so I could headphones-it. I think what I like the most about it is how surprisingly good it is.

This is one of those bands that sort of passed me by back when they had their heyday - the release of "Illuminate" didn't catch me immediately, though I've come to appreciate its beauty years later. I didn't make much of the band after singer/keys player Mindy White left to start States, and it wasn't until after hearing Capital Cities that I checked out the musicians' earlier work. I've come to find it really beautiful and emotive and full - but as beautiful as an album as it is, it never reached any sort of regular rotation for me. "Run Wild," though, is as addictive as its lusty, glittering hooks aim to be.

At first listen, it sounds more like the electro pop of Capital Cities than the full band sound of Lydia. But I like the lightness, I like the effervescence, and I like the space. The production of Aaron Marsh is an obvious benefit, and I hear a lot of his styling here: the way the backing strings build and the verses slow a bit before a deep and sentimental chorus. The riffs themselves. And I love Leighton's voice, a raspy, tired sound that feels fresh and modern and floats over drum beats and handclaps and synthy strings; it sounds like mainstream pop filtered through a graceful indie gauze. And there we have the golden thread of past Lydia releases, a sound that has shifted with trends without sacrificing the lust-fueled, wide-eyed orientation.

There's a few really great moments on this record, like the cinemtatic chorus of "Late Nights" like the 80s warm pop glow of "Paper Love" and its Coldplay-esque guitar lines. I like how this record always seems to be catching its breath, with melodic little riffs and floating harmonies and  interesting rhythms in interesting places. I can't get enough of it. Might have to check out their past catalog a litlte more than the occasional thumbs-up on Pandora. A sound like this - something modern and peppy but oh so familiar - surrenders to the present, without erasing the past. 



"I watched the trains on the coast, they're moving me
I washed your hands like the wind blowing the breeze
I saw the sky open up your blue and grey
I saw that, I saw that night life running through your veins."
~Late Nights
Lydia, Run Wild

9/21/15

"Like any great love 
it keeps you guessing
Like any real love
it's ever changing
Like any true love it drives you crazy
But you know you wouldn't change
Anything anything anything."
~Welcome to New  York 
Taylor Swift as performed by Ryan Adams, 1989 

I probably don't need to say any more adoring things about Ryan Adams on this blog but he covered the entirety of Taylor Swift's "1989" and it is amazing. Amazing! I cannot stop listening to it.

The authentic profound messages of these songs come across a lot stronger without the glitz and shine of a pop record - Ryan Adams also has better delivery than Swift does, partly because he's been doing it as long as she's been alive. Hear how he takes the hooks and stretches them out across bars instead of repeating them, and how he gracefully falsettos at the crest of them. I'm noticing different lyrics and meanings behind them; the flirtation of "Blank Space" is replaced with a sad hope, and the in-your-face attitude of "Shake it Off" is replaced with an ode to overcoming anxiety. Not that those traits weren't found in the original recordings, if you searched heard enough, but here they are that much clearer.

Turning "Out of the Woods" into a waltzy ballad was an obvious - and brilliant - choice. It sounds so much like a Ryan Adams song, like something out of the Heartbreaker era, with gentle guitars and a slow kick backbeat and rich, string-filled outro. It might be the best musical section of the record. I think it's the one I'm the most surprised by, and my immediate favorite. That and "Shake it Off," with its woodblock rhythm and breezy keys. He removes a lot of the words and pre-chorus structures, and it makes the meaning that much stronger - same with "Blank Space," a song I regularly sing and dance to but loved without its punchlines.

Some tracks he doesn't change too much but just adopts - like the piano-set "This Love," and "Clean," which is sped up slightly and decorated with guitars instead of automated bells and xylophone. A song that, in Taylor's word, is a little flippant like "All You Had To Do Was Stay" suddenly becomes a forlorn kiss-off, with a slightly syncopated melody and a warmth that wasn't there before. It reminds me of the quiet restraint he started exhibiting about 10 years ago in his solo work, the kind that his self-titled last year celebrated.



"When you're young, you run,
When you're young, you run,
When you're young, you run,
But you come back to what you need." 
~This Love,
Taylor Swift as performed by Ryan Adams, 1989

I anticipate this record all summer long, being a huge fan of both artists and really into their latest work. Now that it's here I can't wait to revisit "1989," a record that was all kinds of fun and romantic and dreamy and uplifting in the winter of 2014. Who didn't love this record? To hear in this way, filtered through the mind and fingers of an artist I love as much as Ryan Adams, is a gift. His motivations for doing it are as pure they could be - and his praise of Swift is, too.

In a broader sense, a crossover record like this promises to marry the fan bases of two at-a-glance disparate artists and show, quite easily, how much they have in common. Too often I hear people write off Taylor Swift as a product of a machine, not knowing how much she can write and build and convey. And despite his epic catalog there's still a lot of people who aren't familiar with Ryan Adams at all, or who might not realize how sound and strong and touching he can be. I love that this happened.  I love that I can hear it and share it and enjoy it.  I love that something so "mainstream" is so fulfilling, restoring my faith in the tastes of the masses at large and the idea that music, in all its form, can truly unite.



"I never miss a beat
I'm lightning on my feet
And that's what they don't see,
That's what they don't see.
I'm dancing on my own
I make the moves up as I go
And that's what they don't know,
That's what they don't know

'Cause the players gonna play, 
And the haters gonna hate,
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, 
Baby, I'm just gonna shake. "
~Shake it Off 
Taylor Swift as performed by Ryan Adams, 1989

9/15/15

"I'm not the tiger he never had,
I'm not the first hit when you got it bad.
I'm not your second, I'm not your third but
I'll be your bird.

I'm not your Chesnutt,
I'm not your Mould,
I'm not your DJ on late night radio,
I'll be the first one to ask where you were,
I'll be your bird."

~I'll Be Yr Bird
M.Ward, Transistor Radio

This is my favorite album today, simply because I forgot it existed and how gorgeous it is. M.Ward is one of the most effective active songwriters, who I remember loving a good 10-12 years ago before his sound seemed to be adopted by a hundred others. When I first heard "Carolina." his voice hypnotized me and my heart broke and to this day it's one of my favorite songs. But as far as his impressive album catalog goes, I think "Transistor Radio" is my favorite - because of the way it flows, the way it cackles, the way it sucks you in and creates so much space between the sounds.

I've made the mistake of abandoning my guitar a little too much lately, and this record makes me want to run home and play, play, play. When this guy solos you can feel the pluck of every string - and while he plays at the pinnacle of folk mastery, there's an allegiance to the basics before showing off. He shows how much you can do with strumming and just a couple layers of sound and harmonies. The lap steel highlights are subtle enough to be heard without kitsch. Upbeat moments are Americana through and through, and the plucked solos shine among the saloon-style piano.

Lyrically, our narrator is a sad, solitary heart who weeps openly throughout, using these effortless verses that don't follow a strict structure, that don't beg for hooks, and instead just breeze across the guitars' backbone. He doesn't overly dress up the hook, opting for choice phrases that are repeated, and his voice is as quintessential as they come. I love how unencumbered his words are - how free from overemphasis they are - keeping it simple through and through.

In this era, when the sensitive twee songwriter type is a dime a dozen, and that folksy Americana sound has been homogenized and filtered and adopted by the mainstream, it is a worthy trip back to examine the modern roots of this sound. The kind of sound songwriters like M.Ward were polishing off long before some one-off seven-piece was soundtracking fashion commercials with their mediocre banjo solos. Happy to have rediscovered this record now, as is it carries the perfect fall aesthetic - soft and patient, wistful and warm, all the things you feel when the sky is suddenly dark and the near-dead leaves crunch under your feet and your heart finds a little comfort in the cold.

https://youtu.be/TAEkn0htBEg

"I dug beneath the wall of sound
I ended up back where I started
The song is always the same
Got lonesome fuel for fire

And so my heart is always on the line
I've traveled all kinds of places
The story's always the same
Got lonesome fuel for fire."
~Fuel for Fire
M.Ward, Transistor Radio

9/8/15

"And I was afraid, but you were glowing like,
A most relieving light.
You were my revealing light.

I close my eyes and suddenly we were attached.
You stayed with me after the moment passed,
I felt you buried deep under my chest,
Like my lungs when I’m breathing in,
And I was not myself when I opened up my eyes again."

~Like Slow Disappearing

Turnover, Peripheral Vision

Lately I've been getting lost in "No Closer To Heaven," but the past two days I revisited an album that continues to captivate as much as it did the first time I heard it this year - Turnover's "Peripheral Vision." I took it in completely when it came out this May and played it several times over the summer, only to hear its tracks hold out pretty well on Pandora. Coming back to the LP was a solid choice - few bands are this good at keeping away from filler, and there isn't much of a weak moment to speak of here.

What a warm, resplendent sound this is, with choruses and hooks that sneak up on you. The landscape is awash in vintage emo tones but somehow sleeker, played through cleaner guitars but willing to lock into their groove. Forty minutes of desperation and wandering begin with the brilliant "Cutting My Fingers Off," a song that toys with tempo in all the right ways without losing a silky, melodic feel. I'm equally obsessed with the lovesick "Humming," which somehow manages to pull off peppy without losing the moodiness that precedes and follows it. The dueling verses in "Diazepam" are equal parts sad and honest and refreshing. 

What I love about this record is its consistency, and how it unfurls. The layers that feed off one another, from interesting, unstructured lyrical patterns, to muted guitars acting as intros and adornments before their centerstage licks, wrapped up in a steady, slow bass and familiar backbeat.

I checked out some of their older work after this record and I can't say it took me in quite the same way; "Peripheral Vision" has a feel that pushes the genre's boundaries rather than living squarely between them, and I prefer the more interesting parts and sounds. The heavy echo and delay here, underscored by occasional backing harmonies to the subtle, muted leads, creates a sound that reminds me at once of 80s English rock and mid-aughts pop punk, committed to the slower sound.  I'll take the combination, in all its wistful warmth and beleaguered maturity. Turnover made something special with this one and I hope the audiences at large treat them well for it. 

"Cause I can still remember when you were afraid of the darkAnd I told you to come and you followed where I asked you to go

Would you come here and spin with me?
I've been dying to get you dizzy,
Find a way up into your head
So I can make you feel like new again."

~Dizzy on the Comedown
Turnover, Peripheral Vision