Your lunacy fits neatly with my own

aka Anatomy of a Mix, one

Dear friends,

I give friends mixes for their birthdays. And because I know and love an extraordinarily large amount of Librans*, I've fallen way behind on my mixmaking. But I'm working on it, I'm working on it. Here's one that I've actually finished. This is for my beloved friend, the furry and button eyed Jared.

1. I Can't Stand It/Lou Reed (yousendit download)

While I prefer the VU original, this version has the unexpected oomph of having the girls that went "too-doo too-doo too-doo" come out of nowhere and start blastin' away on the chorus. Who are these women? I would like to be their apprentice.

2. Sparta #2/The Fall

My signature dance song.

3. Ignition (Live)/Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

I first talked up this cover here. Jared owns Trapped in the Closet or at least rented it or something. I figure while he's probably never heard the R. Kelly original, which takes itself VERY seriously despite the car metaphors, he'd still appreciate this take on it.

4. Exodus Damage/John Vanderslice

I had a weird experience with this song late one night. I couldn't sleep and as I was switching channels, I came across the video. I can't say I loved it but I couldn't let go of it. In fact, the song lingered in my head in a disquieting way for several days. Soon after whilst browsing the blogs I read about my experience on another site. Jigga huh? Apparently, they were also was up late that night and got sucked in.

Deceptively simple, almost a, b, c-ish with its non-rhyming lyrics and repetitive choruses yammering on and on about Dance, Dance Revolution; this song captures the fragilility and unease of ordinary life after unfathomable events.

5. Hesitation Blues/Dave Van Ronk

From unease to impatience. Van Ronk's interview fascinated me in the Scorsese's Dylan doc, No Direction Home. Those teeth! That voice! A great interpreter.

6. Check On It/Beyoncé feat. Slim Thug

'Cause it sounds good after the hesitation.

7. Rusted Guns of Milan/Art Brut

I love following a Beyoncé bold woman manifesto with Eddie Argos mewling about impotence.

8. Anthems for a 17 year-old Girl/Broken Social Scene

For Emily Kane.

9. Just a Thought/Gnarls Barkley

I would love this song so much more if it didn't have such sloppy loud drum samples on it. As it stands, it still resonates. I know people dismiss Cee-Lo's "I'm so ca-ca-crazy" schtick but coming from hip hop, where admitting depression is well, just plain crackers, this is a bold move. Everytime I hear him utter his chipper "but I'm fine" after talking about his suicidal urges...I feel gratified. Sure, biggie did it first. But not with that weird almost asian keyboard bit at the end.

I'd love to hear Chan Marshall cover this. Maaad slow and zombie sounding, the way she always does things.

10. Land of Lost Cars/Susu (yousendit dowload)

The first time I saw them do this live, I was spellbound by Andrea Susu's woman-as-seagull background vocals. On other Susu tracks she's got an almost baritone brusqueness, but on this song there's just this wild continual high yowling until it fans out into sky-pretty held notes. The fact that it sounds nothing like what she's doing on guitar makes it that much more satisfying to the ear.

11. Sea Song/Robert Wyatt (yousendit download)

My friend Alex, who is quite the singer, was playing this in my living room a few weeks ago. I love Wyatt (I babbled in admiration in this post) but I tend to concentrate on the sound of his voice rather than what he's saying. SO, after hearing Alex sing this song, I realized there's a whole story to it that I'd never paid attention to. Namely, a man, a lonely man, falls in love with a sea creature. A mermaid probably. Or maybe something less human looking. This is irrelevant. Man and sea beast meet at night, during the summer, get drunk a lot and form a relationship that gradually means more than he can possibly say. This romance has little to nothing to do with sex. No, it's about realizing that even when she's away, he's not alone. Because he is loved.

Listen around the 4 minute mark, when Wyatt starts to wordlessly vocalize over the mellotron. His complex, ululating wail will make anyone who is a musician feel either wonderment or deep burning shame.

12. Break My Body (Live)/Hanne Hukkelberg

Since it's The Pixies, let's call him Black Francis...well, that man was obsessed with sex. But in his world sex was stripped of its simple pleasures and became something pulsating and somewhat ugly. Impossible to ignore or resist but easy to recast as an alien, stick your finger in the goo type urge. Miss Hukkelberg says fuck that and turns this Pixies classic into a perfectly reasonable observation. Something you might take her up on.

13. Jack the Ripper/colin meloy

unjustly maligned meloy, he of the specs & the grand, grand stories about orphans & high seas intrigue, is quite clearly a "type a" fan. a fan who collects b-sides & looks at every story with the excitement of dickens reader. I hear he's singing about murderous butchers nowadays. I wonder if this morrissey cover with its benevolent look at a serial killer led him down that particular cobble stoned path.

14. You Don't Have Far To Go/Candi Staton

Jared likes a horn intro. Also, he likes Staton's loathsome and popular, Young Hearts Run Free. This song is far more depressing, which is probably why I prefer it.

15. Baby C'mon/Stephen Malkmus

Bitch please. I don't need to explain myself.

16. Carbon Monoxide/Regina Spektor

I put Joanna Newsom on Jared's birthday mix last year. He was like "what the...?"

After he listens to Spektor's "walka walka walka walka" tangents he's gonna say the same thing all over again. Every mix needs such a moment.

17. I Love You/The Boyfriends

The birthday boy is a fan of Moz and The Smoking Popes. Ergo, The Boyfriends.

18. Heartbeats (Live)/José Gonzáles

I love this song, no matter who does it.

19. The Greatest/Cat Power

Using Moon River as the hook in this song was a brilliant move. Consider this Marshall's Hard Knock Life or Trans Europe Express rip.

20. Hate Then Love/The Dears

I actually do not like the way the new record sounds; all hissy and rushed. I loved, loved, loved the majestic sprawl of their previous effort, No Cities Left, so the new album has been something of a let down. Wha'appen?

At the same time, even I will admit the songs are better. And since I've heard this number live several times, I know what it feels like when Murray Lightburn shrieks about believing in love like he's got to, once again, convince himself of it.

Love, D

* We freakin' rule! Librans are lovers of beautiful things, problem solvers, horrible with money, spacy, obsessed with balance and fairness to the point of rage-inducing insanity. Eh, what's not to love?

Purloined in Petrograd

Dear friends,

I've been trying to write this thing forever about a guy called Morgan. One chapter concerns his lifelong best friend, a caddish petty tyrant named Stanwix Stackless-Wells*. When people ask Morgan why he has remained friends with such an unrepentant scoundrel, stealer of comics, girlfriends and guitars, he can only think of one reason and a seemingly insubstantial one. That, when they were children, Stannie always played the best games of make believe. It was always French pirates stashing their loot in 18th century Cornwall or an heir to a large fortune traveling to Nepal to suss out the originator of a dastardly plot involving the Rothschild banking fortune and a very strange piece of jewelry. Those games, assisted by unused red velvet curtains acting as capes or a mother's yellow scarf as a swami's turban, were still vibrantly fresh in Morgan's mind. Even when, years later, he discovers that entire plots had been cribbed from various classic novels by Defoe, Sands, and Collins, nothing could diminish their exalted position in his memories and consequently, his life. The grown-up disaster was also the source of all that fantastical fun, how could he let that go?

Now, I'm not suggesting that Colin Meloy is a rake and a roue. I'm sure he's a perfectly nice guy, sitting at home on his comfy chair, writing his songs about teen hustlers and vengeful mariners. Nevertheless, when I listen to Picaresque by The Decemberists, I think of ole S.S.W. and his candle under the face shenanigans. Each song is another make believe game, another story too bizarre to be believed, too sad to recount, but behind it all you can see the artifice of the situation, the fake swords and drawn-on mustaches on baby faces. I adore that because it gives this album a sense of magic. You know that the title character of Eli the Barrow Boy isn't really haunting the lane, forever bemoaning the loss of his love or that the protagonist in (From My Own True Love) Lost at Sea only stalks her foggy Widow's Walk for a verse, chorus, verse but the belief which Meloy and his merry troupe of playmates invest in their performances makes you gladly go along for the ride. At least until someone's mother opens the door to ask if anyone's hungry.

While I enjoy listening to this album as a whole, because taken in sequence, it works like a serialized novel, currently I'm partial to The Bagman's Gambit, a tale of a Washington, DC patsy duped by a femme fatale into giving up important government information. Aided by a simple but hypnotic guitar line, the story involves torture, bribery, and near misses. The poor narrator/mark keeps surprising himself with his nerve, frantically trying to save his inammorata, even though he knows that his efforts will also ensure he'll never see her again. It's a far, far better thing that I have done and all of that. The curtains and lighting is supplied, by the triumphant entry of the rest of the band at the 2:04 mark, like lights suddenly shined on the guilty. The song continues to weave it's narrative, through hush and swell of sound, through a noise terror bridge (well, the nicest, most polite noise terror), into a final image that works like a bittersweet movie still.

The Bagman's Gambit/The Decemberists

Buy Picaresque on Amazon

J and I went to see Colin Meloy last night at The Town Hall. Laura Veirs (written about before here) opened and did some magic of her own by making a mini orchestra of herself through judicious use of loop pedals. Guitar and vocal line. STEP. Former stuff keeps playing. She harmonizes with herself. STEP. She plays another guitar line. STEP. Another harmony vocal line. STEP. And so on, and so on, slowly building a cathedral of song which hovered over the confused and leaning towards youthful audience**, +.

Meloy performed Decemberists numbers and new songs next to a table decorated with a small sheep doll named Erick, a human skull dubbed Cheryl and a tiny ship called Maya Angelou. He jokingly said the skull was there to remind us all of our eventual demise and as he sang away his novelettes, I kept looking at Cheryl, wondering what she thought of the whole affair and the fact that, here she was, still employed. Meloy was affable and charming throughout, insisting he wanted a campfire feel and asking people to sing along which proved to be hilarious on a snap-happy rendition of Los Angeles, I'm Yours (from 2003's Her Majesty) as the audience tried to vocally approximate the extended string passage. Later, he invited John Wesley Harding and his 12-string acoustic to join him on a couple of Shirley Collins numbers which were great but seemed to go WAY over the more Emo-ly inclined well-coiffed heads. Too bad, I love those British folk revivalists and personally, given Meloy's performing style, don't see much of a difference between him covering them or Morrissey. Which he did later, after teasing with tiny bits of Pink Floyd's Fearless and The Replacements' Can't Hardly Wait, with a slowed down, reverential take on Ask by The Smiths.

Well, Mr. Meloy, I had a fun time. Please say thank you to your mom for the snacks. Next time, invite your friends!

Love, D

NB: Contributor Mike wrote a post on This Sporting Life here on Soft Communication. Do read, if you missed it the first time.

* I wanted an appropriately ridiculous archaic sounding name. The kind of name given by parents who are into Melville and taxidermy.

** 'Cept for Lou Reed, standing in the back, arms crossed, by the doors, where you couldn't miss him. His primate etched in mahogany visage scowling in...concentration? Hunger? I had to fight the most intense urge to run over and kick him in the balls and run out cackling, dolphin-style. Man, I love living in the city. It affords me these fantasies.

+ Just to be clear, like anyone with ears and sense, I love Reed's contribution to music. Still, I daydream about pummeling him. I can't imagine I'm alone here.