5/6/14

Something about a real classy, traditional cover that just hits all the right notes.




With her voice, so bluesy and pure, and this song, so traditional and heartfelt, I cannot help but sip some tea, light a cigarette, and indulge in the purity of grand piano keys and soft brushes on a snare.  A good torch song will do you right, and a singer like Fiona will bring out its most delicate and honest moments. It's easy, I think, on first listen, to write off the kind of songs you've heard time and time again, or at least thought you have, the kind of songs with this old-school vibe. So easily we forget how much these words meant to the one who wrote them, back in the 30s, 40s, 50s, or whenever.

This Sinatra standard was composed with Cy Coleman, a Broadway type, and Joe McCarthy, a lyricist of the Tin Pan Alley cohort. I can't even find the exact year they wrote this (at least, on the first page of Google), because people forget these things so easily and songs then just seemed the breathe their way into existence. I just know Sintara recorded it as a kiss-off to Columbia. But when McCarthy wrote these words, he felt something, he knew something, about not being conventional and being off and having bad habits, and knowing in his soul that maybe it was worth staying true to who he was, despite the melancholy of the day, the melancholy this melody captures so well? Songs had integrity back then, and that is what makes them so timeless, so worthy of reinvention without sacrificing the classic sensibilities. At the end of the day, the songs worth revisiting will be the ones that tap into something beyond modern trends, into something with much more heart and honesty and purity that, when crafted in the right hands, needn't be made by trying too hard.

"I'm sentimental
So I walk in the rain
I've got some habits
Even I can't explain
Go to the corner,
I end up in Spain
Why try to change me now?

I sit and daydream
I've got daydreams galore
Cigarette ashes
There they go on the floor
Go away weekends,
Leave my keys in the door
Why try to change me now?

Why can't I be more conventional?
People talk, people stare.
So I try
But that can't be,
Cause I can't see
My strange little world
Just go passing me by.

So let people wonder,
Let 'em laugh, let 'em frown
You know I'll love you
Till the moon's upside down
Don't you remember?
I was always your clown.
Why try to change me now?

Don't you remember
I was always your clown
Why try to change me,
Why try to change me now?"
~Why Try to Change Me Now
Fiona Apple, Then Was Then & Now Is Now

1/1/13

Well.

I'm a little late on this one.

I wanted to sit down and write about my favorite albums of 2012, the music that came out, crossed my path and meant something to me for any combination of reasons.

I wanted to talk about how there were songs that reminded me how wonderful it is to be young and alive even though it's messy and mean, like Japandroids and The Menzingers. And how there were songs that blasted the cracks in my heart with deadly aim, and others that caulked in the gaps, like those from The Gaslight Anthem and Lovedrug.

I wanted to do this yesterday. But time got the best of me, and here we are, 2013 with no "Favorite Albums of 2012" on the blog. Let's proceed.

Normally people order and rank these things; I have done this in the past and found it to be useful, clean and a fun reference for discussion purposes should the topic ever arise. My rationale for placing an album on this list could come from many places: Did I hear it, and love it instantly? Was I drawn to replay it in full one more time, or are there tracks that I simply couldn't get enough of? And why? Was it the meaning, the message, the technique, or the timing?

I've also decided to highlight other albums that caught my ears for being very successful records in one way or another, because 2012 was a damn fine year for new music from artists both familiar and burgeoning. Here's a whole bunch of proof:

10) mewithoutyou - Ten Stories
Kicking off the list, an old favorite band out with a new, thematic collection that's eerie and haunting and potentially their most polished, meticulously produced effort yet.  Details pop out at every new listen, a harmony or a guitar part or an elusive, mysterious phrase. So enchanting, how could you not want to get lost in the night inside an otherwordly tale?

"All circles presuppose they'll end where they begin/But only in their leaving can they ever come back around"

Posts from the Year: 7/15/12

9) Passion Pit - Gossamer
Ya heard. Electropop made it on my favorites list. But I've never liked electropop this much before, I've never seen the weirdness and depth this way. Played it all the time, even got my mom hooked on it. I found this album uplifting and entirely thoughtful, bright and shiny but ever calm, ever cool and just enough collected. I hear the  live shows are slammin'. Also: Gossamer is, and has been, one of my favorite all-time words.Shimmers just like it should, a perfect title.

"When then I'll say what they say/And I'll do what they do/But it doesn't mean a goddamned thing"

8) Lord Huron - Lonesome Dreams
Oh how perfect and beautiful this album is, how folksy. Though it seems acoustic and auxiliary-heavy Americana bands are a stone's throw from every dive bar in mid-sized cities to the hottest clubs frequented by trendy, hipster-inclined urbanites, Lord Huron is, to my ears, the real deal. Kick back, relax and let their lonesome dreams interrupt and intersect with yours for awhile. And take a walk in the fucking woods while you're at it.

"I've been dreaming again of a lonesome road/Where I'm lost and I've got no friends/Just the rocks and the trees and my lonesome dreams and a road that'll never end"

Posts from the Year: 12/12/12

7) Bad Books - II
Perhaps I am inclined to rank anything involving the likes of Andy Hull and Kevin Devine, given my listening roots grew up in their respective heydays. And yet I have never appreciated them as much musically as I do today. Maybe it's in the maturity, the sardonic tone, or the willingness to try on styles and sounds exemplifying a mastery of creative convention. Bad Books colors in the lines, but this is by no means a dig on lack of originality. Rather, we've got layers and layers of complimenting and contrasting rock 'n' roll theory. More, please.

"Folded arms and I felt your heart hum/Speedy eyes and I want what I want/Truth cut with a generalized fear/Cash baggies and an ash tray beers/I know you know/I wanna love you but I can't let go/Honey, it never stops/No it never stops"

6) Alabama Shakes - Boys and Girls
How did you not just instantly love this band? Rootsy and bluesy and fusion-y and all kinds of familiar, Alabama Shakes debuted with a powerful hello to an indie pop audience that was ready to lap up something designed to comfort the soul. We've got real instruments, real vocal talent like we haven't heard in some time, real skilled players, and a whole lot of heart. Between the dynamics, the passion and the style, Alabama Shakes has serious rock chops, and I'd bet strong that we've only seen the start.

"I feel so homesick/Where's my home/Where I belong/Where I was born/I was told to go/Where the wind would blow/And it blows away"

(Bonus Link: Listen to this full KEXP performance!) Seriously. Do it. Your face might melt, though.

5) fun. - Some Nights
Yes, I know I've said The Format is better (and first!) but what a record this was. Everyone seemed to love it, everyone related to it. At the tail end of 2012, I found myself replaying this album over and over. Great for drives, for thinking alone. Nate Ruess is a genius at capturing the mischief in melancholy, the hope in the view from the ground, and I am grateful he continues to make wonderful music to share with the world.

"My head is on fire/But my legs are fine/After all they are mine"

Posts from the Year: 8/14/12

4) Lovedrug - Wild Blood
Redemption comes in many forms. Lovedrug's first full-length after a run of successful EP releases left me feeling full and happy, and intrigued by the new direction of a band. Focus, melody, depth and layers were always strong currents, but these qualities are the crux of Wild Blood's impressive, hungry and ever-onward spirit. Glad this record was made, because it marks something of an end of an era for me -- a triumphant effort from a band I've followed for years in a year that, for me, showed similar feats.

"We were owls when they came in the night/they were lookin' for a creature to fight/I can see it that you're ready to go/Like a bat in the cave of my soul"

Posts from the Year: 2/10/12, 3/6/12, 3/13/12,  4/15/12, 6/15/12

3) The Menzingers - On the Impossible Past
Sometimes, people kind of laugh a little when I tell them I'm a pop punk/hardcore/whatever the fuck you call emo these days fan. A bit of an eyeroll. But The Menzingers are amphetamine laced proof that the genre isn't dead and Epitaph is a fighting beast of a label(so shut your fucking trap). Heart-wrenching and boldly embracing pathetic helplessness and hopeless, this album is a collection of odes to self-fulfilled failures past and present. As I am a codified expert on such instances in my own life, it was entirely too easy to relate. Coated in familiar chords and fast-finger solos and just the right amount of scream, I listened to this at my worst only to end up feeling pretty damn close to my best.

"I will fuck this up/I fucking know it"

Posts from the Year: 8/22/12, 8/27/12

2) The Gaslight Anthem - Handwritten
What to say that I haven't said? Do I have a bigger music idol of 2012 than Brian Fallon?  Not really, maybe, probably not. "Handwritten" proves that TGA will continue to churn out confessional narratives with amphitheater-sized proportions. They've proven to be true to their own style, a dash of the past included, so the end product is good, old-fashioned, new rock and roll.  And this album could've been a make or break moment after so many past successes. No doubt it was a daunting task to say, "Oh shit, gotta write more great songs." And yet, I am more of a fan than ever.

"And we waited for sirens that never come/And we only write by the moon, every word handwritten/And to ease the loss of youth and how many years I've missed you/Pages plead forgiveness, every word handwritten"

Posts from the Year: 4/30/12, 7/16/12, 7/19/12, 7/31/12, 9/13/12, 10/9/12, 12/5/12

1) Japandroids - Celebration Rock
Japandroids just got it just right. They got the hunger right, the anger and fury, the passion, and the inescapable needs and conflicts of living fast. They've captured a certain brazen slyness that once thrived all over punk and rock scenes that's shrunken to give way to pretension, a forced literariness that can be so guarded. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not really a good one either, if you're looking for something to rock out to.

If you told me that 2012 would be the year that it turned out to be for me personally, I probably wouldn't have believed you. Or, maybe I would've of, but immediately passed out from fright, thereby changing said future through butterfly effect means. So, the present is fleeting, the past is permanent and the future, a wide scary unknown. In this lost haze, Japandroids brought a reminder that all you have is you and now, and fast is fun when your eyes are open.

Musically, omigod, so cool. Not only was I completely blown away by the sheer sonic power of such a tiny band (two skinny white dudes!), but you don't hear guitars played in this way, so full of repetitive fierceness, in ways that are simultaneously melodic. This has a lot to do with the chord choices, and phrasing of vocal, but we've got some real metal technique doing some indie rock things.

So thanks, Japandroids, for making me remember so much of what I love about loud and fierce rock music, and for laying it all out so honestly, that there's no way I will ever be able to hear these songs, and not connect to the moments, people and places of 2012. What more do you want out of an album of the year?

"It's a lifeless life with no fixed address to give/But you're not mine to die for anymore/So I must live"

Posts from the Year: 6/2/12, 6/18/12

Special Awards:
Best EPs: The 1975 - Sex EP, The 1975 - Facedown EP

Best Genre-Bending, The Cool Award: Frank Ocean - Channel Orange

Most Ambitious, Most Likely to Make Me Dance Contemporary Ballet, Most Poetic Album Title: Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do

Best "Comeback:"  Soundgarden - King Animal

Best Collaborative: GOOD Music - Cruel Summer

Best Taylor Swift: Taylor Swift - Red

Best Album for a Love Scene in Outer Space: The xx - Coexist

Best Metal (TIE): Converge - All We Love We Leave Behind, Every Time I Die - Ex-Lives

7/28/12

Surprise, surprise, she's won me over again.

Fiona Apple doesn't release albums often, but when she does, rejoice. Fiona albums only grow better with time and "Idler Wheel..." is no different....Flurried and frantic sometimes, steady and desolate at others, it sounds like nothing else out there. It took me about four listens to truly understand it, understand where it was coming from, but I love that I couldn't give up on it; I couldn't because her words were drawing me in past anything else that I wasn't getting. You will see reviews talking about private she is and how revealing her songs are and whatnot, but at the end of the day she's an artist. She's honest and weird and metaphorical, an artist we only know of because of the pop charts who produces these strange and wonderful narrations of internal struggle and external desire and just feeling.

On "Idler Wheel...." there are multiple moments of painfully bold sharp notes and bellows. She growls, she writhes, she shrieks. But then she resolves, with patience, and returns back to a decisive cleanliness...vocally, her control is phenomenal and used to convey meaning like none other, see "Left Alone" for a taste of the variety Apple can cram into two measures. She says every single syllable with its own intensity, capturing insanity, loneliness, self-doubt and self-assurance with the most appropriate vocal tone, even if they're all in the same phrase. Quivering on the right words is interspersed with whisperlike trills, and Apple hits the blues notes with just enough throwaway....there is really just something behind every syllable. Instrumentation is sparse but purposefully so, the use of space and texture is refreshing to ears used to everything electronically layered so damn close...piano is center stage sharpened by unique auxiliary (shakers, ringing bells and hard-to-identify drums are in no small number, even what appears to be nat sound of footsteps on stones), and it's expansive, so, so expansive - the intro on "Anything We Want" is probably my favorite, playful and primitive.

But delivery, and instrumentation, would be nothing without these words. She just says it....lyrics are wry and dark and often tortured but exposing all the sad, scary vulnerable bits we feel and never say. "Werewolf" and "Periphery" in particular show immense perspective wrapped in metaphors and the end result is achingly real. She puts your head in a place that's always on but rarely tuned; these songs are the result of one woman's subconscious turned inside out and the lessons to be learned, the insights to glean, the connections to forge, will give and keep giving as long as you're willing to look.

"I could liken you to a werewolf the way you left me for dead
But I admit that I provided a full moon 
And I could liken you to a shark the way you bit off my head
But then again I was waving around a bleeding, open wound 

But you were such a super guy 'til the second you get a whiff of me
We are like a wishing well and a bolt of electricity 
But we can still support each other, all we gotta do's avoid each other
Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key 
Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key

The lava of the volcano shot up hot from under the sea
One thing leads to another and you made an island of me

And I could liken you to a chemical the way you made me compound a compound
But I'm a chemical, too, inevitable you and me would mix
And I could liken you to a lot of things but I always come around
'Cause in the end I'm a sensible girl, I know the fiction of the fix 

But you were such a super guy 'til the second you get a whiff of me
We are like a wishing well and a bolt of electricity
But we can still support each other, all we gotta do's avoid each other
Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key
Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key
Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key
Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key"
~Werewolf,
Fiona Apple, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do

6/5/11

Very good music journalism on Fiona Apple.

Excerpt:
"She read about whipping cords, which are used to bind and repair frayed ropes, in 'this book about boating that was at my last boyfriend's house.' The idea is less about avoiding mistakes than learning how to cope with them. 'You're gonna get punched and blown around,' she says. She looks over my shoulder into the empty restaurant, tries to figure out how to express what she wants to express. 'What's valuable is to know how to make something out of that.' Apple has had a lot of years to learn."
Good. Journalism. Music. Very. Words, sentences, phrasing, style, headexplodes.

I just want to feel like I'm saying something meaningful, something beautiful. Maybe not now, but someday. Otherwise, what the hell am I doing here?

7/21/11

Don't call it a theme song.



"I was staring at the sky, just looking for a star
To pray on, or wish on, or something like that
I was having a sweet fix of a daydream of a boy
Whose reality I knew, was a hopeless to be had
But then the dove of hope began its downward slope
And I believed for a moment that my chances
Were approaching to be grabbed
But as it came down near, so did a weary tear
I thought it was a bird, but it was just a paper bag

Hunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh it kills
'Cause I know I'm a mess he don't wanna clean up
I got to fold 'cause these hands are too shaky to hold
Hunger hurts, but starving works, when it costs too much to love

And I went crazy again today, looking for a strand to climb
Looking for a little hope
Baby said he couldn't stay, wouldn't put his lips to mine,
And a fail to kiss is a fail to cope
I said, 'Honey, I don't feel so good, don't feel justified
Come on put a little love here in my void,' he said
'It's all in your head,' and I said, 'So's everything'
But he didn't get it I thought he was a man
But he was just a little boy

Hunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh it kills
'Cause I know I'm a mess he don't wanna clean up
I got to fold 'cause these hands are too shaky to hold
Hunger hurts, but starving works, when it costs too much to love."
~Paper Bag
Fiona Apple, When the Pawn

8/26/08

Okay so, I took a vacation. What are ya gonna do.

But I'm back. Given that I'm at college again, I'll have plenty of time in front of laptop for a blog update each day when I should be doing something else.

This song has been stuck in my head lately. I listened to the record the other day for the first time probably since it came out in 2005. I thought it was great back then, but now it just makes more sense:

"Those boon times went bust
My feet of clay, they dried to dust
The red isn't the red we painted
It's just rust
And the signature thing
That used to bring a following
I have trouble now
Even remembering

So why did I kiss him so hard
Late last Friday night
And keep on letting him change all my plans
I'm either so sick in the head
I need to be bled dry to quit
Or I just really used to love him
I sure hope thats it

I knew that to keep in touch
Would do me deep in dutch
Cuz it isn't the rush of remembering
Its just mush
And the signature thing
Is only growing harrowing
I should have no trouble now
To keep from following

So why did I kiss him so hard
Late last Friday night
And keep on letting him change all my plans
I'm either so sick in the head
I need to be bled dry, to quit
Or I just really used to love him
I sure hope thats it

Those boon times went bust
My feet of clay, they dried to dust
The red isn't the red we painted
Its just rust
And the signature thing
That used to bring a following
I have trouble now
Even remembering

So why did I kiss him so hard
Late last Friday night
And keep on letting him change all my plans
I'm either so sick in the head
I need to be bled dry, to quit
Or I just really used to love him
Or I just really used to love him
Or I just really used to love him
I sure hope that's it"
--Fiona Apple, Tymps (The Sick in The Head Song)
Extraordinary Machine


Maybe I just have a better appreciation for songwriting than I did back then (which may be true), maybe I just have more elaborate tastes (also possible). But Fiona Apple made a really cool album when she wrote "Extraordinary Machine."

There's something theatrical about it. The instrumentation is weird and Radiohead-esuqe at times, her voice is mature and jazzy, and her songwriting is as stream-of-consciousness narrative as ever. Powerful choruses (see "Window" or the above, "Tymps.") and I love a good chorus as much as the next headphone-aholic. She's great at building tension, and resolving it.

"Please Please Please" is a great song, a kind of sociopath anthem that puts you in a good mood. For that alone I respect Fiona Apple, for letting her songwriting say something about people and how they work. I love that line..."But everybody's on the same sad team/and you can hear our sad brains screaming"

Her analysis of emotions in her songwriting is impressive--the metaphors and observations she makes are intimate enough they feel personal, but pretty universal. it's not just like "i'm sad/life sucks/i hope i get hit/by a pick up truck" or whatever other bullshit we're hearing these days. Her ballads feel like 21st century jazz standards (read: awesome). Example:

And it's dangerous work
Trying to get to you too
And I think if I didn't have to
Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill myself doing it
Maybe I wouldn't think so much of you
-Red Red Red

Good stuff.