The Road

Whatever Gets You Off - The Last Vegas (mp3)
The Road to Ensenada - Lyle Lovett (mp3)

I cried twice when I first read Cormac McCarthy's The Road three years ago.

The only other time I ever recall having to wipe away tears from my eyes while reading a book because the damn pages got too blurry was when I was in seventh grade and read Where the Red Fern Grows for summer reading. In that book, I cried when the boy is carrying his disemboweled dog home in the desperate hopes of saving its life. What can I say? The kid's name was Billy. I was young and took the book very personally.

This isn't because books don't stir my emotions. But, much like a book is played out in the mind, on the storyboard of imagination, my tears for a novel's plot are usually leaked inside the synapses in my brain. I weep more openly for movies and TV shows. It's more visceral, for better and worse.

On Tuesday, I saw the film version of The Road. I'd read the reviews. It was going to be a draining and miserable experience, but I'd promised myself I would do it the day I first heard about the movie. I owed it to the book, strange as that sounds. To the characters. Especially that father, and that son, but to others as well. For books I really love, I feel obligated to see the films, knowing damn well the movies can't be as good. But they don't have to be. I don't expect that out of a movie. It's not fair.

Few if any of you will see this film. Doing so means you want to be weighed down, sad, full of despair, for almost two hours. And you're paying an ungodly amount of cash to do so.

That said, here's my take: It's the perfect film to conclude 2009.

Although I haven't seen Up in the Air and desperately want to, and although lots of folks claim that flick captures much of 2009's angst and zeitgeist, I can't imagine it's a more pristine way to wrap up this year than The Road. Especially if you watch it alone. No one to share your reactions. No one you can look over and see their reactions and feel like you've got company in that hellhole of a film. Just you, with a handful of strangers, miserably engaged in a nightmare scenario.

Massive unemployment? Skyrocketing health care costs? Political backbiting better suited to professional wrestling? Terrorists with explosives next to their nuts? Yup, that all feels pretty damned oppressive. But 20 minutes into The Road, all that shit ain't shit.

None of the world's current burdens matter as much. You just want to go find a loved one and hold them. You want to go out and start your car engine and hum along to its happy engine tune. You want to roll down the window and look at all that glorious light pollution coming from street lamps. You want to play that glorious iPod and hear mindless stupid shit like The Last Vegas, whose sole skill is making AC/DC seem high-minded. (No offense, Vegas... I enjoy the hell out of this song.)

You think you got problems? Try living in a world without electricity, without plant life, with few mammals, and where your fellow man is just as likely to eat you as shake your hand. Try shepherding your child in that environment, without any assistance from anyone.

Parenting, brought down to it's very primal core of love, protection, and nurturing.

You want some theology? You want a kind of violence that makes the shit in Transformers feel even more fakey and meaningless than it already does? You want Robert Duvall pulling off a kind of role only Robert Duvall can? You want to see a kid evolve from an almost ignorable sidekick into an actor who convinces you he's really living the part? This flick's got it.

You want to leave a movie feeling a moral compulsion to be a better parent, to savor the mundane miracles embracing us every minute, to go watch some sitcoms and maybe back that up with The Hangover? This is your film.

Sure, it's probably 2010 when you read this. But it's not too late to watch a film that makes 2009 seem pretty damn OK.

And the next time you find yourself about to say the words, "I'd do anything for my children"? Maybe you'd best comprehend just what you're saying, and then maybe you should find another way to say it.

Loose ends and forgotten promises...

Yeah, it's that other kind of summing up, the kind where you try to take care of all of the leftover stuff you didn't get to. I'd compare it to cleaning out a closet, but since every single closet and cupboard in our house is packed to the gills, I don't think that metaphor works for me.

First, the blog and the music. I suppose that Billy and I have enough of our own agendas that we don't always get around to posting the music we said we'd post. He's been better at it than I have. Anyway, here are some things I'd been planning to put up by some people who are trying to get heard. It's an eclectic bunch of songs, so even if you don't like all of the choices, maybe this will give you a song or two to surprise someone with in the new year:




High On Stress--"Alcohol Smile (unreleased)" (mp3)

My favorite band that sent us stuff in '08 was kind enough to share an unreleased track with us. Good songwriters. Good stuff.









Chris Hickey--"Kerouac" (mp3)

Can't remember the context for how we got this song and can't find the email, but I've been planning to post it for a while. Companion piece to Bill Malonee's "Hard Luck and Heart Attack."





The Orphan Factory--"Night Shift" (mp3)

A guy who might just be a whole band who sends his own stuff without a publicist. Worth a listen.









Lamar Holley--"Forgotten Friends" (mp3)

Holley has written a concept CD called Confessions Of A College Student. Production is slick and the songs have kind of a geekier Ben Folds vibe to them.





Next, the resolutions. I'm not even going to go back and check, because if I can't even remember them, you already know what kind of progress I made. I think I vowed to do three things: 1) write more, as in a novel or something, 2) go see more live music, based on my life belief that it is always worth it to make the effort to see live music, and 3) lose weight.

I didn't do too badly with the writing. Without counting, I can safely claim at least 120 posts to this website, but I didn't write beyond that. Wrote one poem. Have a good idea for a novel that came to me a few weeks ago, if I can just remember it. As for the music, not too bad. Particularly good job of getting out to shows while in Chicago over the summer. Special thanks to TroutKing for dragging my ass to a Springsteen show and breaking the 31-year curse. I truly enjoyed myself until this guy passed out and fell on my wife, but was not able to shake that wistfulness for seeing the Boss when I was 21 and "believed" the songs. My last concert of the year, thanks to my brother dragging my ass to it, was just two nights ago at Snug Harbor in New Orleans, a 4-piece jazz band led by a terrific clarinetist playing traditional New Orleans jazz. My weight held steady, but still needs to drop. Maybe if I gave up beer for Lent. Maybe if Lent was all year long.

Finally, the compadre. Thanks, as always, to Billy for.....Billy? Billy? BILLY?

Neutral Years

The Bottle Rockets--"Brand New Year" (mp3)
The Bottle Rockets--"Another Brand New Year" (mp3)

There is talk right now about what a bad decade this has been, this first decade of the new century--9/11, economic woes, War on Terror, Rwanda, waterboarding, Wall Street, global warming, you name it. Those social observers claim that we are off to a rough start and that things can only get better.

Better, you say? I am reminded of Szymborska's poem written for the end of the last century:

THE CENTURY'S DECLINE
by Wislawa Szymborska

Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others.
It will never prove it now,
now that its years are numbered,
its gait is shaky,
its breath is short.

Too many things have happened
that weren’t supposed to happen,
and what was supposed to come about
has not.

Happiness and spring, among other things,
were supposed to be getting closer.

Fear was expected to leave the mountains and the valleys.
Truth was supposed to hit home
before a lie.

A couple of problems weren’t going
to come up anymore:
humger, for example,
and war, and so forth.

There was going to be respect
for helpless people’s helplessness,
trust, that kind of stuff.

Anyone who planned to enjoy the world
is now faced
with a hopeless task.

Stupidity isn’t funny.
Wisdom isn’t gay.
Hope
isn’t that young girl anymore,
et cetera, alas.

God was finally going to believe
in a man both good and strong,
but good and strong
are still two different men.

“How should we live?” someone asked me in a letter.
I had meant to ask him
the same question.

Again, and as ever,
as may be seen above,
the most pressing questions
are naïve ones.

Sorry, gang, but we can't blame it on the decade. Years, tens of years, hundreds of years, they're all neutral. They're just time passing.

Nope, we've got to blame it on us. I don't know that things are going to get better. They certainly haven't gotten better so far. Oh, I know, the economy maybe improving, the surges may ultimately help the Arabs to kill each other instead of us, and my family has been recycling on and off for the past year, but real improvement anywhere for a long time is pretty hard to see. A few steps up, a few steps back, here and there. That's about it.

I don't say that as a pessimist. It hasn't gotten me down. Nor am I enjoying the wallow in some kind of "told you so" penchant for pointing out bad things.

I don't say that as a realist. I'm not so shrewd an observer that I'm able to fully understand either the trends or the patterns or the how what we once did is not coming back to haunt us or the how what we will do is too little, too late.

I don't say that as a scientist, though I can see what a giant, unwieldy organism we have become, not unlike a slug that can't react until the salt is already falling in its direction, until the first few sprinkled crystals of trouble have already started to pelt our flanks.

No, I say it as the optimist that I am. No, things haven't gotten better. But it doesn't feel to me like we've given up, either.

"How should we live?" the poem asks. I don't think the answers are that difficult: with love, with caring, with sacrifice, with awareness, with understanding, with faith. But those are always going to be places we're going to have to work to get to, as has always been the case. Naive, to be sure, but what optimism isn't?

Both songs come from the Bottle Rocket's Brand New Year, which may or may not still be available. The photo of the guy is somewhat random, though his picture did come up in a search for "bad decade" images.

Christmas Cards and Treats

Lately I've been super busy with moving to my new apartment, but here is a quick post with a few cute sweet treat ideas for the holidays from Bakerella found on the blog MadeByGirl, artistic Christmas cards by artist/illustrator Bella Pilar and some more inspirational images for Christmas decorating!

I hope you all enjoy this tidbit post.... Chances are I'll be too busy in the next few days to post again, so Happy Holidays to all!!!

Cake Pops! *faints*
Visit Bakerella to see more cake pop designs, here.

Visit Bakerella for more baking inspiration and fun ideas!

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Also, check out some pretty Christmas cards by Bella Pilar that I saw today on the blog Riviera View.

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And of course... some more Christmas decor/table scape inspiration found on the blog MadeByGirl....

The Cars: An Appreciation

The Cars--"Good Times Roll" (mp3)
The Cars--"Moving In Stereo" (mp3)

The thing about decades is that life does not package itself so neatly and conveniently. Even as we try here at the end of the first ten years of the new century to do various kinds of summing ups, I hope that we still realize that trends and patterns don't necessarily fit the package so well.

Case in point: the Cars.

If decades really worked as decades, then the Cars would have come onto the scene sometime around January 1, 1980 and would have announced at that time: "Listen, the upcoming decade is going to have a distinctive style of music, and here, on the songs from our very first album, are the characteristics of those songs you'll listen to for the next ten years."

But it didn't happen that way. Like the Talking Heads, who provided a jarring coda to the late '70's, straddling the disco beats and rhythms of the dance clubs and the jaundiced sensibilities of a rock music that was dying and trying to reinvent itself, the Cars seemed to come out of nowhere from Boston with a couple of years still to go in the '70's. Boston? At that time, we thought music coming out of Boston was either the biggest guitars you ever heard and songs just as big (from the band named after the city) or the long-admired-but-always-on-the-fringe bluesy bar band sound of J. Geils (who would take a lesson from both Boston and the Cars in creating their commercial juggernaut, Love Stinks, a few years later).

But the Cars? They don't sound like they like they're from anywhere except all of pop/rock music, stealing standard riffs and solos from the likes of Roy Orbison and the Beatles, with some laconic vocals mixed low, as if they don't trust their lead singer, and cheesy, but catchy, synthesizer parts. One might almost be tempted to call them generic. Instead, I call them the template. They sound much more like what was to come than what was going on at the time.

Sometimes, when I hear the Cars, I hear all of the supposedly-revolutionary New Age and the pop music outcroppings that followed. Put on "Let The Good Times Roll" or "My Best Friend's Girl" and see what's there. Think Thomas Dolby copped this one? How about Gary Numan's Tubeway Army? Wang Chung? Soft Cell? The Outfield? Rick Springfield? Marshall Crenshaw? Who else?

The Cars take a lighter tone, rarely deviate beyond the subject matter of girls, and generally capture the self-focused 80's in a way that few bands can, but there's always a sadness there, as well. They've lost a girl, they've settled on a girl who is "all I've got tonight;" even the good times "make you a clown." Ric Ocasek, the principal songwriter, had clearly experienced his share of pain, which became obvious later on when he married a supermodel and the media could not understand the connection between beauty and the beast. The Cars are the geeky music nerds who never fit in in high school, but figured out how to rise above that. Yeah, after them, the pop music got more minor key sometimes, maybe more self-important, but for the sheer fun of being alive at that time, despite personal tribulations, I'm not sure that there was anyone better.

Of course, when I really like a band, even against all odds, there's usually a guitar involved. The Cars are no exception. Eliot Easton's licks and solos are among the most inventive of that time period. No matter how many times I hear "Just What I Needed," I still wait for and enjoy Easton's counter-rhythmic solo that echoes the melody of the chorus while establishing itself as an additional motif for the song. He is a player who is not bounded by a particular style; he's playing what the song requires instead of forcing the song to accept what he can play.

I don't think I appreciated the Cars enough at the time, thinking that what they were doing was too simplistic, too derivative, but paralleling the punks as they did, I see now that they did their own kind of straddling, drawing on the stripped-down ethic of that movement, while embracing the earliest rock patterns and a few of the tricks from the bloated supergroups that punk was trying to counteract. Whether you like synthesizers or not, it is hard to argue against the idea that the Cars used them more infectiously than almost anyone. Usually, the synth adds another, single-note-melody layer to a basic song and gives it almost a depth.

But not really. The Car's music is mostly candy. Good candy. The kind that is so sugary that you can't stop eating it, even if the only taste you're getting is sugar. And their lyrics aren't deep either, but they're just quirky enough that they engage you each time you hear the songs. "Let them brush your rock and roll hair" it says in "Let The Good Times Roll." What does that even mean?

The Cars, and especially this first album that I'm referencing, certainly don't need verification from me. The record was on the charts for almost three years and spawned 6 hit singles. But I'm here as someone who started listening to it all again this week and realizing that, hey, it all holds up thirty years later. There is a lot of music from back then that doesn't.

The Cars are available from Itunes.

He's a Hoarder

It's My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry - Glasvegas (mp3)

My name is Billy, and I'm a music hoarder. ("Hi Billy.") I've been a music hoarder for going on two years now.

If you haven't, in a fit of late-night tossing and turning, found yourself watching a little of A&E's show Hoarders, then bully for you. But if you have, then you've seen some screwed-up tales of incredibly screwed-up people whose houses have become overrun with, to bastardize U2, all that they can't leave behind.

Houses where every square inch is covered with trash, or boxes, or belongings in various states of decay. Floors piled sometimes four and six inches high with it, so thick and long-trampled that it's like an extra few layers of cushion. A mess so horrendous that mice, rats, sometimes bigger pests have passed entire generations through the experience. Some people can't even bear to throw away their own fecal matter.

Anyone who has visited my home on a normal chaotic day will know that I ain't makin' fun of these folks. We are very much a "there but for the grace of God..." kind of family on this one. Our house is rarely immaculate. Our house is usually quite disheveled. And by "disheveled," I mean fucking messy. But I see these people on Hoarders and I think, Hmmm... we ain't so bad after all...

No, I watch this show for some of the same reasons I watch Supernanny: to witness a cautionary tale of what we cannot allow to happen to us.

I learned growing up with two massively screwed-up step-brothers that sometimes we learn the right path by witnessing first-hand where the wrong paths lead. Sometimes we learn what best to do by learning what not to do and how not to do it.

Hoarders -- and according to the show there's an estimated 3 million of them in the US -- have a mental illness. I would have laughed at that suggestion a decade ago, but now I firmly believe it to be true. Still, that illness places them only a hair's breadth from the sane and normal world in which most of us live.

But back to my original point.

Since I started blogging with Bob, I have become a music hoarder.

This is due to a perfect storm of events: (1) the rise of the almighty iPod as the centerpiece of a music lover's life; (2) the starting up of a music-themed blog where we aim to post songs with every musing we make; (3) the increasingly narrow window of time in my life where I can sit down, uninterrupted (by my own urges or those of my friends and family), and simply listen to and savor music.

In my younger days of albums and cassette tapes, I would buy something and listen to it several dozen times in the first week. I can remember having the entire words to Rush's Hold Your Fire memorized before the first weekend of ownership had concluded. This memorization was done with the same kind of pride and conviction that some people ascribe to memorizing lines of Shakespeare or entire Robert Frost poems.

As my obsession with females became less of a theoretical notion worried over in the isolation of my bedroom, and as I passed through high school and then college and then into the precious career world, I simply couldn't sit with my back against a wall, album liner notes and lyric sheet in my hands, studying every line break and chorus. Then, suddenly I not only had a job, but I had kids and obligations that went beyond the work day and the family life, and what time I stubbornly fought to keep for myself was devoted to going out and getting beer with friends or watching a movie or playing some mindless video game. Memorizing the lyrics to a Rush album suddenly became the punchline to some twisted joke about having way too much fucking free time on your hands.

With my first iPod and initial trip into iTunes, I was only downloading 1-5 songs from most of my CDs. The idea of wasting precious hard drive real estate on the detritus of albums, even "pretty good" albums, felt foolish. Who listens to "Rats" off Pearl Jam's second album all that much anyway, right?*

On my first iPod, I knew every song I'd placed on it. Not just the name of the song and the artist, knew it. On my latest iPod, I'm fast approaching the 8,000-song mark, and probably 10-15% of the songs I couldn't tell you the artist and song title. Sometimes I don't know either, mostly thanks to all the free stuff given to me through BOTG.

"In the old days," even if I didn't like a CD I'd purchased, I could trade it in at McKay's, get some trade value out of it, and let myself believe that CD would find a happy home, like a pound puppy. Buying them digitally, however, changes the game. My only choices are to keep it or delete it forever, to wipe it out of existence, to declare it to have zero worth.

That's tough for me to do. I just can't declare a song I purchased worthless, even if it actually is worthless, gathering cobwebs in the dark recesses of my iPod. I am incapable of declaring something that I've paid for to be utterly worthless.

* -- This is a rhetorical question and does not need to be answered by nutty Pearl Jam-ites who happen to think "Rats" is the most brilliant work of musical art since Mozart wrote kick-ass requiems.

"I'm Scared, Ain't You Boys Scared?"

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers--"Spike (live)" (mp3)

"I'd like to see a poll on this. Yes or no: Have we become a more vulgar country? Are we coarser than, say, 50 years ago? Do we talk more about sensitivity and treat others less sensitively? Do you think standards of public behavior are rising or falling? Is there something called the American Character, and do you think it has, the past half-century, improved or degenerated? If the latter, what are the implications of this? Do you sense, as you look around you, that each year we have less or more of the glue that holds a great nation together? Is there less courtesy in America now than when you were a child, or more? Bonus question: Is "Excuse me" a request or a command? "

In her latest Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, "The Adam Lambert Problem," former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan makes the argument that, yes, we as Americans have been beaten down by the economy and health care, but that what has really worn us out has been the cultural assault on us and our children. The springboard to her position is a recent poll that shows that 55% of Americans think that America is going in the wrong direction and very few (27%) think that their children's lives will be better than their own.

Noonan hauls out the usual suspect--televison. She characterizes it as a medium focused on graphic violence, highly sexualized behavior, and "cultural messages that...may be destructive." In short, using the language of a culturally conservative friend, she says that the "cultural left" has no right to inflict its "cultural sensibilities" on the rest of us. And the most recent, most awful example of this is Adam Lambert.

May we first take a couple of moments and dismiss the overgeneralizations that she relies on? First, I accept (I have to) that a majority of Americans think we have lost our way, but what I refuse to accept, especially in such a pluralistic society, is the notion that all of those dissatisfied Americans are dissatisfied about the same things in the same way. It's ridiculous. While you may think that we are not religious enough, I happen to think that we let religion impact far too many aspects of our way of life. Or witness the current health care reform struggle where both the far left and the far right are dissatisfied, but for exactly opposite reasons.

Noonan also pulls out her broad brush in her attempt to paint our cultural woes, whatever they may be, on the "cultural left." Does anyone really need a reminder that it is the Fox networks, owned by arch-conservative Rupert Murdoch, that present the most graphically violent and sexual shows on television? From 24 to Family Guy, from The Shield to Damages, it is the Fox networks that push the boundaries on channels that are very accessible to children. If there is blame, spread it across the political spectrum, Peggy, and include the network you regularly appear on!

I didn't see Adam Lambert's performance. Based on the way Noonan analyzes it from a distance, neither did she. She sounds outraged by something she heard somewhere else. I, of course, did hear about the gay kiss that took place, that Barbara Walters chastised him for. And it's that gay kiss that has lingered in the American discourse. It seems that each gay moment on television breaks a new boundary and has to be parsed and dissected in the court of public opinion. Lambert's performance does not sound like something I wish I had seen. Nor does it sound like quality television. But Noonan's idea that the assaults of the Adam Lamberts are shocking our children and unraveling our moral fiber seems off the mark.

What's more harmful to our country--a simulated sex act during a musical number (which has been around on television since Elvis 50 years ago or so) or a government whose two sides cannot reconcile on anything? We are complacent while the Chinese are motivated. Is that because we are lying around waiting for Adam Lambert to come ravage us? We are the great nation of equality, and yet we still lack gender, race, and sexual orientation equality. Do we blame television for that? I doubt it. Not when television and movies portray artificial worlds where women, minorities, and gays are all more empowered than they are in real life.

As for Ms. Noonan's questions highlighted above, despite her clear implication that the proper answers to all of those questions are negative, I must heartily disagree. As someone who has taught the same-aged children in the same private school now for nearly 27 years, I see the same tendencies toward human decency and self-interest that I have always seen in teenagers. Which is to say that from where I'm sitting, we're hanging in there pretty well. If today's students are indeed more selfish in their desires and more coarse in their ambitions than their earlier counterparts, the fault lies not with television, but with their helicopter parents, who have coached their children to focus on resume-building and gamesmanship.

Alex Keaton from Family Ties may have predated such a phenomenon, but he is hardly to blame for it.

Has Noonan forgotten that her own heyday, the Reagan years, are inextricably linked with the "Me" Generation? Was that a more moral time? And, caught up in her nostalgia for the good old days when we treated each other more sensitively, i.e. 50 years ago, has she forgotten that 50 years ago, segregation was legal? Perhaps we did say "Excuse me" more as a request to the other white people gathered around our white water fountains, bathrooms, and bus seats back then. I don't know.

No, to me, the real problem is the kind of cultural hysteria that Ms. Noonan perpetrates. Something is bad wrong; therefore something must be blamed. And that something should be something that is outside of the good, mainstream "us." That her latest something is a performer who is openly-gay makes her argument even more insidious. I will agree with her that Lambert's argument that he should be able to act as perversely on television as women do seems a bit thin, but to single him out as the one, distinct inspiration for her societal analysis is the worst kind of scapegoating.

But it certainly saves us from having to look deeper, doesn't it?

Tom Petty's song came off of Napster, back in the "good old days."

Billy's Year-End Favorites Mix

OK, here's a dirty secret. I'm not really sure our loyal and faithful readers give much of a shit about our opinion of music. And I get that. Most of y'all know us and read us because you are friends or enjoy hopping on for those flashes of clever insight or revelation that sometimes-decent writers mired in obscurity can manage. Or maybe you read it 'cuz you like us, you really like us.

But our music? That's for all these people who don't know us, I guess.

But we're a "music blog." And as such, having year-end salutes to music just feels right. It feels necessary. Music is our muse. It's like this big megaphone emerging from our hearts and penetrating the ears of all those prisoners at Shawshank. Without it, neither of us could write anything.

So please take a listen. [NOTE: Alas, you missed the boat on this one. Copyright folks have already flagged me, so the links are gone.] Pick a few songs. If you like 'em, jump to the bottom and download a collection of many of these songs. You might even consider buying an album, or buying a song, and showing a little bit of Christmas love to some hardworking musicians.



BEST UP-TEMPO

1. Sharp Knife - Third Eye Blind
If one is inclined to believe Third Eye Blind had some damn fine pop/rock songs at one time, then one should give this gem of a track a whirl. When Stephan Jenkins pulls off his talky-singy thing well -- and he does it superbly in this song -- it gives the songs an immediacy and passion that help forgive what are admittedly eyebrow-raising lyrics ("My mp3 is out of juice"). But somehow it makes some quirky lyrics work quite well ("How did we get not so loose"). Took me a while to figure out he was saying "a shiv," which isn't exactly a sharp knife, but it certainly gets the job done. Personally, this song hit the right nerve at the right time. Sometimes you wish you could grab a tourniquet and lop off the crappy parts of your soul in the desperate hopes of rescuing the rest.

2. I Don't Wanna - The Von Bondies
Songs about being fucked up -- but angry and unsatisfied with it -- certainly seem to resonate with me. "Sharp Knife" mines similar territory. This song gives little warning before cranking to 11 and screaming its way deep into your eardrum. I don't even know what to call the signature sound in this song -- hell, I'm not even sure if it's someone's voice or some funky instrument -- but it's mighty catchy. My love of this song probably belies the fact that a catchy riff and one potent line overrides any interest I might have in lyrical brilliance.

3. Quiet Little Voices - We Were Promised Jet Packs
If I were to base the size of a country on how many of its bands I like, Scotland would be roughly the size of Brazil. This ditty is never gonna win a songwriting award, but sometimes simplicity and repetition just fit. And this song just fits. I'd run to you. I'll come for you. I'd die for you. Quiet little voices. Quiet little monsters. 

4. Turn It Off - Paramore
Hayley Williams would be one of those surgeons who could eat rare steak while talking about operating on a man with gangrene. I don't know how, but this chick must have had her heart broken a couple dozen times before she even learned to drive, because she's not even old enough to buy beer, but she's got an anchor of Love Bitterness tied to her. Haley, if your scorn is what drives your music, I selfishly hope you never stay in love for too long.

5. Pass the Buck - Stereophonics
Although this album was released in the UK in 2007, I wasn't able to get my hands on it 'til this year, and this song quickly became one of my all-time favorite 'Phonics songs. These guys are famous for feeling jilted by specific people and taking it out in song, but this song feels less about them and more about a moment all of us can identify with.

6. Be All That You Can't Be - Broadway Calls
Bob claimed yesterday that bands aren't writing songs about the war. But this somewhat-popular proto-punk band mines that territory with this song about our military's habit of selling a dream of fool's gold to the lower classes. This album is one of the most unabashedly political collection of songs by a young band I've heard in a long, long time.

BEST BLATANT POP
Links to songs not included in the hopes it protects me from angry lawyers.

1. Taking Chances (Glee Version) - Rachel (Lea Michelle)
"Don't Stop Believin'" was the Song That Launched a Thousand Gleeks, but some of my favorite Glee songs are those I never noticed or had never heard. And this Celine Dion cover is all the better for my having never heard the Celine version. In a show dependent upon the viewer's willing suspension of disbelief, perhaps the toughest moment for me was when I was forced to believe Kurt could sing "Defying Gravity" from Wicked as well as Rachel if only he could hit that high F. Don't you believe it. Lea Michelle has soul in her voice. Like, a shit-ton of it. She's every awesome part of American Idol wrapped into a fictional high school character. Except my preferred version's Simon Cowell is a cheerleading coach named Sue. Which means Glee is better.

2. Bad Romance - Lady GaGa
Lissen, I'm not proud of this, but I gotta give this woman her props. This song is intense and catchy and bitter and self-involved (gotta love people who put their names in their songs!).

3. I Do Not Hook Up - Kelly Clarkson
As the father of girls, I'm unavoidably drawn to any songs that might catch my daughters' ears that also might hint even slightly of being Anti-Slut. This song and Taylor Swift's "Fifteen" get frequently accidentally played when we're all in the car together. A part of me wonders if the "Keep your head in my hand" line is a sexual one -- maybe she's actually saying she only allows the hooking up to occur if she's on the receiving end -- but I let it slide.

4. Sometime Around Midnight (Acoustic Version) - The Airborne Toxic Event
You wouldn't think someone could steal from The Arcade Fire and make it into something commercially appealing, but that's what this song feels like to me. It's like a slightly dumbed-down, slightly more superficial version of The Arcade Fire's stuff. Clearly I don't find this to be such a bad thing, or it wouldn't be on this list. I knew I was gonna like this song from the opening guitar riff,  maybe because it reminds me of one of Bob's most-hated pop songs ever: "Blinded By the Light" by Manfred Mann.

5. Relator - Pete Yorn + Scarlett Johansson
Gotta agree with Bob on this one. It's a great song. The album has ups and downs, but I've always had a soft spot for Pete Yorn and a hard spot for Scarlett Johansson. (Sorry. Couldn't help myself.)

6. Pantry - Lyle Lovett
Although this was first released on an album in 2009's Natural Forces, it's actually something Lovett has played in many a concert prior. It's like many of his best songs: clever and light-hearted, but with a weighty center that keeps you listening to it long after most simple pop songs have been forgotten.


BEST OF THE OTHER STUFF

1. Matthew 25:21 - The Mountain Goats
If music critics are to be believed, John Darnielle might be the best fiction-based songwriter in the country. His songs are all apparently based not on his own life and experiences, but rather characters he invents. Hell if I know. What I do know is that Live of the World to Come's songs are all named after Bible verses, and each explores a (usually modern-day) life or event related to the verse. Quite incredible, and this is my favorite one on the album.

2. Northshore - Tegan + Sara
The worst break-ups shouldn't result in ballads. They should result in something like this song, a whirlwind of panic and conflicting emotion and a paranoia that you might just be enjoying the misery and pain because you can't seem to stop wallowing in it. Then, after you've lived this song a few dozen times, maybe you're drained enough and sane enough to sit down and write a ballad.

3. Even if it Breaks Your Heart - Will Hoge
OK Beck, I know you don't like the guy, but this song is the guy's story. He'll never be rich. He'll never make his name in Billboard magazine. But he's out there on the road, even after a scooter wreck almost killed him, because he's in love. It's a love that's almost an unreasonable and frightening obsession, but it's a love I can't help but admire.

4. My Time Outside the Womb - Titus Andronicus
Dude, these guys make some of the early Replacements stuff seem immaculately produced. Their album is a shoddy bloody mess, but out of chaos comes some truly brilliant moments, and this particular song is almost an actual SONG. You can get this whole album on eMusic for the equivalent of $4-5, so if you like this gem, you really should check it out.

5. Out of the Blue - Julian Casablancas 
There's a lot of similarity between Julian Casablancas' album Phrazes for the Young and the latest Brendan Benson, but while I find the latter to be a more consistently strong collection, this song from Casablancas is superbly catchy. That's all I'm gonna say now.

BEST FREEBIE SONG OF THE YEAR

Dorchester Hotel - The Sounds
This gets honorable mention as my favorite free BOTG song. While we got a lot of good stuff, this is one of a small handful of freebies that earned its way into frequent and regular play on my iPod.

MERRY CHRISTMAS! Click here for some of my favorites (removed due to warning of Copyright Violation), but watch out, 'cuz at 132MB, this file is much to big to fit down some chimneys.

Songs I Listened To A Lot In 2009

I guess the title gives me away, huh? I'm trying to minimize the "what abouts" and the "you should haves" and such, because it really doesn't matter, does it? While I continue to have a huge interest in hearing really good songs that I haven't heard before, the need to try convince that songs are better or best is, I hope, just about gone.

I thought I had left Billy with the tougher task. After all, when forced to choose the top CDs of a given year, you are also, by default, required to, more or less, characterize the year itself, its trends and highs and lows. But Billy really didn't do that. He just went with CDs that he really liked.

Perhaps, without colluding, we just decided to leave "the bests" to the national press and the larger blogs (though last time I looked, it seemed like Said The Gramophone had been hacked into and taken over by some viral Bulgarians) and those who thrive on debate and controversy.

I remember as teenage males in about 1973, we were completely obsessed with who was the fastest guitarist in the world. Then, one day, a good day, I figured out somehow that it didn't matter.

So here are some songs I put on this blog or featured on my own mixes and playlists or searched for dangerously while driving down the road with the Ipod in my right hand and the steering wheel in my right. I hope you will play them. I hope that you like them. I hope that you will suggest some of your favorites, too.

In no particular order...

Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey--"Begin Again" (mp3) The Dbs were my favorite band for much of the 80's, and especially these two guys, who released a pretty solid CD together in the 90's. "Begin Again" is a mature song, probably not one that would attract many teenage listeners. It's far too world-weary for that. Think of it as a salve after a failure, a divorce, a loss, any moment when you have to gather yourself and start over. Brilliant chord/key changes to get you to the bridge, and an inspired use of saxophone.

LeeRoy Stagger--"Petrified World" (mp3) Every year needs a good road song, a "Blue Skies" or a "Runnin' Down A Dream." This was my favorite road song in 2009. The apparently-autobiographical story of the singer on the road with his band, the song has a simple, pleasant, two-chord riff, some "na na nas," and some astute observations along the way.

Summer Tonight--"Who Knew" (mp3) In the same spirit as the Sheds for me. Such a simple, but daring first line: "Who knew that life was good?" Like, woah, I never thought of it that way. And not carrying any of the irony of the Joe Walsh exploration. I like it when a man and a woman sing together, especially when the way they do it sounds natural. Like here. One of my top songs of the summer.

The Bottle Rockets--"Kid Next Door" (mp3) No one, and I mean no one, is talking about the war(s) in popular music right now. Except the Bottle Rockets. This chilling reminder drives the point home quite convincingly:

The kid next door, the kid next door,
He ain't comin' back no more.

Think back to that Dixie Chicks' song about the traveling soldier, strip away any of the hope or romance, and you'll have this song. Sung by an older neighbor who hears the confidence of the young soldier, but knows better. And accompanied by lonely, eerie electric guitars.

Girls--"Hellhole Ratrace" (mp3) Perhaps the only song on this list that will be on some other people's lists. An eMusic find. It took me a while to get through the heavy reverb of the production. The sound takes you back to the 60's and back to the Ramones, but the sensibilities are very modern. Like the ending repetitions of a Springsteen song, the repeated "I don't wanna cry..." over and over really makes the song stick. The lyrics are not especially deep, but they effectively capture the angst of everyday living.

Richmond Fontaine--"You Can Move Back Here" (mp3) Probably not on your radar and one of my favorite bands of the last 5 years, I "discovered" Richmond Fontaine thanks to a subscription to the incredible music magazine, Uncut. The Brits, who are quite obsessed with Americana, raved and raved about this band. So, I bought up all their stuff and entered the down-and-out world of the far west, not California or Oregon, but Montana and Wyoming and other places with wide open spaces. To some extent, they're kind of like what a band led by Raymond Carver would be like.

The Fiery Furnaces--"The End Is Near" (mp3) Some songs that you really like, like this one, are purely contextual. Much as I enjoy listening to this version, what I hear in my head is the live version from Millenium Park in Chicago, where as a 3-piece with a singer, the guitar played all of the parts that the the keyboard plays here. But, ultimately, this is a solid pop song no matter how you play it.

Yo La Tengo--"Nothing To Hide" (mp3) Another contextual song. Saw this band at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. I've gotten choosy with Yo La over the years. They have some droning songs and some keyboard-driven songs that are hard for me to take for very long, and entire CDs that I've avoided, but when they just revert to the guitar, bass, and drums set-up, they still rock with the best (of the lo-fi's).

Withered Hand--"Hard On" (mp3) This guy is probably my favorite Scottish band. What's yours?

Pete Yorn and Scarlett Johanson--"Relator" (mp3) I've stated my love for duets on these pages before. This song, though the whole little EP is good, is about the catchiest duet of the year. I read some critical comments when the disc first came out about how this was ripping of M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel's She and Him CD, etc., but guess what? This is better. Yorn's songs are stronger than the other CD's ironic, arch covers, and, if it matters, I got tired of Deschanel's character in 500 Days of Summer and it's kind of turned me off to her.


LEFTOVERS:

Rosanne Cash, "Sea of Hearbreak"
David Bazan, "Hard To Be"

St. Vincent and The National, "Sleep All Summer"

Pixie Carnation, "When Did The Lights Go Out"

The Fiery Furnaces, "Charmaine Champagne"

Jeff Beck, "A Day In The Life (live)"

Buddy and Julie Miller, "Take Me Back" (would have listed it if Billy hadn't)

Neko Case, "People Gotta Lotta Nerve"

Lil' Wayne, "Ms. Officer"

Avett Brothers, "I and Love and You" (ditto)

Color Inspiration Injection!

I had to take the day off from work yesterday to attend the orientation and walk-through for my new apartment downtown... What an exhausting mission! I won't even get into it... The point is, today is my Monday and I need some inspiration to get me through the rest of the week... which won't be too long since I am taking off Friday because that's the day of the big move! U-Haul loading Thursday night... joy.

I am definitely more anxious than ever before and I can't wait to get it all moved so I can begin unpacking and designing/decorating my next blank canvas! Right now my mind is fixated on color! Paint colors that is... The possibilities are endless! There is a soffit in my new place that turns into a small wall which I am fairly sure I want to paint a rich earthy curry mustard yellow color... I'm not sure where to slap on the turquoise yet. Hmmm....

Anyway, here is a random slew of beautiful and inspiring images of various spaces, all of which have a striking element of color, if not several! My mind is in planning overdrive therefore expect more posts today! Ha! Enjoy!

(All images via Google Image Search, Flickr, WeHeartIt, Vi.sualize.us, Design*Sponge, House of Turquoise or Apartment Therapy)