Sam Beam's Tiny Desk Concert

January 24, 2011

Sam Beam’s songs sound a lot better in this stripped-down form. A friend of mine said that Beam is probably this generation’s Dave Matthews. From what I’ve heard of the new record, he’s certainly in danger of that. Some singers need to add more to their songs, but Beam’s songs just don’t do well when weighed down beneath layers of studio. I’m looking at you Shepherd’s Dog, and I’m glowering at you, new record out tomorrow. I’m no encase-it-in-amber purist; I like it when songwriters stretch their sound. But Beam hasn’t taken his music in a very interesting or necessary direction, nor has the sound he’s alighted upon done his otherwise precise songs any justice.

As a side note, his brief asides in between songs concerning songwriting are worth listening to; they underscore his care as a writer and how needlessly overproduced his records are getting to be.

January 24, 2011

I believe that the records that played in the background when you were a kid determine, to a large extent, the kind of music you’ll listen to when you’re an adult. Even those who react against what they were raised with (lots of my buddies had to listen to some pretty horrid “Christian” music in their nonage), I think, are still drawn to music that sounds similar on some level. I won’t take any more time defending this thesis; I’ll just say that I’ve observed this at work in almost everyone I know.

Two recordings founded my own record collection. First, the cassette version of Neil Young’s Harvest b/w After the Gold Rush: from thence comes my taste in classic country, classic rock, country-rock, folk music—and so on. Second, Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense. This album cultivated in me a taste for intelligent, danceable music and—despite it being a live record—the use of the recording studio as an instrument. One cassette or the other was always playing whenever my family would pile in for a car ride of any length. By the time I was 15, both were worn out completely and unceremoniously discarded in favor of the CD versions.

Save for the sacred and classical music weighing down my CD shelves and portions of iTunes (owed to Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum and years of singing in choirs), every record I own now is traceable to the imprint of those two records. There’s a secondary layer of massively-influential albums—Combat Rock, I Care Because You Do, Darkness on the Edge of Town—but they themselves clearly descend from my two primary sources.

It should be really obvious which record got me listening to LCD Soundsystem.

“In a society where the prevailing ideal is material gain and where physical labor is studiously avoided as wholly inadequate to the realization of that ideal, my reference to the dignity of human toil may invite the charge of sentimentalism. Let me anticipate the rebuke and hasten to explain that I do not mean primarily the kind of industrialized labor which is nothing more than enslavement to a machine, work that degrades the worker and saps his vitality. That kind of labor, common and unskilled, is basic in our economy. Those who do it for us should have our sympathy and understanding, as well as an adequate reward. But my reference is to toil of another kind, to physical labor that is modestly creative and independently productive; work that activates the bones and sinews and that at the end of the day, week, or month yields something for the worker to behold as entirely his own creation. Man needs such toil for the good of his body and mind as much as he needs good food and the passionate lyricism of a Mozart; and the more he divorces himself from it, the greater will be his estrangement from life and the millions of workers who toil in his behalf.”

— Angelo Pellegrini, from The Unprejudiced Palate: Classic Thoughts on Food and the Good Life.

January 17, 2011

“I’m not exactly a slow writer—when I’m really cooking I can do 800-1,000 good, polished words in two hours, that’s not bad—but it can take me a long time to get cooking, and sometimes one sentence can hang me up for an hour. (Those are usually the first sentences, in the next draft, to be cut. You would think I might have learned by now.) I have a hard time writing an excuse to one of my kid’s teachers, a recipe for Dutch babies, an apologetic email, without sinking into a revisionary funk. I’m also slow to know what I think, and slow to know how I feel: we’re talking reptile time, rock time, empires rising and then crumbling to dust. I still haven’t decided how I feel about Sandinista!, for example, and I’ve been thinking about it on and off since 1980.”

— Michael Chabon (via ayjay). I’m a slow writer, but I do know that Sandinista! should’ve been a twelve-song record (and an uncontested classic). The other twenty-four tracks should’ve occasionally surfaced piecemeal on rarities & B-sides comps (and, of course, Clash on Broadway) until the inevitable re-issue box set sometime in the mid-2000’s.

January 14, 2011

“Ellis was my grandfather, my father’s father, to be more precise. In some ways, I am writing the song through my own father’s eyes, trying to trace his own experience with his dad. My dad and I don’t get along all that well. He was a hard man to grow up with (“it takes pain to grow, don’t you know, don’t you know”), not someone you’d call exactly call a role model. I wanted to know what made him the way he was, why he had so much anger. When my grandfather died, my dad cried and acted like the world was half dead. I know for a fact that Ellis wasn’t kind to my father. So why was my dad in mourning? Blood is thicker than water, as they say (“The days are like blood, the nights are like wine”). We moved around a lot as a kid. My father was restless, and always running. Further and further away from his own family. The line, “What good is a man without a family, my son?” is my own imagining of what Ellis would say to my father as my dad kept putting more miles, more distance, between our extended family. It is also a reminder to me: Ellis is right. But what kind of family is he talking about? We can’t avoid blood (“I see his face sometimes, and it looks a lot like mine”). We can’t choose our parents. We can’t escape our past. But we can learn from it, and choose how we want our own families to be. His abuse doesn’t have to be mine, though “All of my children, they are carrying his name.” I don’t have children. In some ways, I am the child, and my children will carry his name. But they don’t have to carry the burden of Ellis’, nor my father’s, behavior.”

— Jason Dodson of The Maldives concerning “Blood Relations”. Read the rest of my brief interview with him about the song over at Stereopathic.

January 14, 2011

January 13, 2011

The Maldives are stupendous 8-man band from Seattle. They played at Birds on a Wire in March 2010, and it was all the theater could do to contain them; something I read about them somewhere described their sound as “Epic Americana”, which just about nails it. “Blood Relations” was one of the most visceral moments in the show—pure rock power that stirred everyone’s blood to move faster, singer Jason Dodson howling beautifully over the band’s astonishing four-axe attack. The song is about the shadow a father casts over his son and his son’s sons. Somebody somewhere is standing on his grave, but all of my children are carrying his name, goes the refrain. It’s a song for men; it gets at the ambivalence that grips us all, at some point, about our fathers. Sadly, most men who put this struggle in their work only wallow in it, never getting anywhere. But “Blood Relations”, I think, is the sound of a man fighting through it, grasping for the peace he knows that is to be had with his father’s shadow—no matter how elusive it may seem.

Here’s the text of my interview with Dodson on its own page.

January 07, 2011

Buckner’s Since is my favorite record of his this week. “Ariel Ramirez” might be his most famous song (one friend says that no song better describes the hole at the center of that man) but “Faithful Shooter” is probably what really roped me in to the entire album. As always, it’s Buckner’s lyrics that really get at me; if poetry is a concentrated excess of language, they are poetry (even if the subject is ultimately rather maudlin…). These lines really struck me:

You looked up to her window from the backyard dusk/Hired as a shot, lingered as a crush

See I’ve only had a photograph to drag around

Would you take another trip with a candle like her/Strike another promise and watch it burn?

South Dakota. The light and wind and grass are beautiful, but it’s the two strands of barbed wire that make this picture. Found at the pretty comprehensive Plowden image collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript L… — South Dakota. The light and wind and grass are beautiful, but it’s the two strands of barbed wire that make this picture. Found at the pretty comprehensive Plowden image collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

January 05, 2011

A classic from David Plowden. East of Las Vegas, NM, 1971.

January 05, 2011

“To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over ploughshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray — these are the things that make men happy; they have always had the power of doing these, they never will have the power to do more. The world’s prosperity or adversity depends upon our knowing and teaching these few things: but upon iron, or glass, or electricity, or steam, in no wise.”

— John Ruskin, from Modern Painters (via ayjay)

December 30, 2010

“Centuries ago Cato the Censor is reported to have said, “I wonder how one haruspex [weatherman] can look another in the face without laughing.” Since that time the weatherman has developed a lessened sense of humor. I can see why. Instead of enjoying the simple pleasures of the sky, he is swamped by letters of criticism and his office is one of charts and graphs and maps and gadgets. While you and I enjoy weather wisdom in an amateur manner, we get to look at the sky; we argue about and slosh around in hail and snow and rain and wind. We experience the weather to its fullest, and living with the weather is more rewarding than analyzing it.”

— From Eric Sloane’s introductory “Author’s Note” in Look at the Sky and Tell the Weather, which my wife got me for Christmas (along with three other Sloane weather books; my daughter got me a journal in which I am to record weather observations for the coming year). I’ve always been fascinated by weather and how it forms the places we live; between Eric Sloane and Job 36-37, I feel like I have a fighting chance to indulge that fascination and mature it into something not unlike understanding. And may that hoped-for understanding only deepen the enjoyment.

December 29, 2010

Latah County Grain Growers, two days before Winter.

December 20, 2010

“Last night the rain just wouldn’t fall…”

— Richard Buckner, from “Town”, which appears on the magnificent Meadow, and also the best Daytrotter Session ever. This is the kind of line I shall work my whole life long to write.

December 17, 2010

“Poetry articulates correspondences that pre-exist in the world. Just the other day, I was reading a book about greed on my back deck and a bird flew past and lighted precariously on a wire that stretches over our bird feeder. I instantly thought of Jesus’ command to “Look at the birds of the air,” and I felt poetic. I did not impose a concentrated excess of significance on the scene. The scene itself was a concentrated excess, and what I felt was the poetry of the moment.”

— Peter Leithart, “On Poetry”, from Credenda/Agenda.

December 17, 2010

December 16, 2010

In which Matthew Houck’s band completes their transformation from spacey stoner folkies to kick-ass road band. On this song, and the rest of Here’s to Taking it Easy, the open-ended looseness of their earlier records is invigorated with focus and discipline—but its ragged-edged vibe still feels very much of a piece with almost anything off Pride (its kinship with To Willie is obvious). I do really love it when bands with experimental leanings corral their artier impulses into more structured song forms. Even more, I love it when bands like this get onstage at Letterman and UTTERLY kick the crap out of everyone in the room.

“I am not advocating that the state expropriate the existing wealth of stockholders. I do believe that stockholders have the right to control the destiny of the firm, but the critical question is not stockholders’ right to control, but how they control it. The Christian social tradition advocates private property not because it allows one the freedom to do whatever one wants–choice is not the highest value here. Rather, private property provides an opportunity for persons to contribute to the common good, which serves as the basis for developing virtue at work. Virtue will not come about from the mentality of maximizing stockholder wealth, but rather from reconnecting capital to labor, communities, and others who have a stake in the capital.”

— From Michael J. Naughton’s “The "Stumbling and Tripping” of Executive Pay", which was published in December of 2001 in the New Oxford Review. Peter Leithart passed the full text along to me, which I’ve (possibly illegally) reproduced here; he also summarized this article on his blog. It seems that the Catholic social tradition stands to inform the enervated, free-market sloganeering you hear from most American Christians (here’s another post from Leithart on Cavanaugh that encapsulates what I’m getting at). I’d also say that there’s a lot in this article to deepen the Protestant doctrine of Vocation—or, at very least, my own shallow understanding of it.

December 15, 2010

December 10, 2010

December 09, 2010

The lyrics are stupid—something about a slacker with no life and an ex-girlfriend or something and absolutely nothing interesting to say about anything—and the singing suitably listless. But, ho-lyyyy CRAP—at the three-minute-mark, this song just straps on a friggin’ jetpack fueled by pure riffage and starts melting your face right off your skull. By the four-minute mark, you’ve already turned the volume up well past anywhere it’s ever been before. At 4:15, “F*** YEAH!” is about as articulate as you’re gonna get. 5:17: you’re calling your buddies to come over so you have something to crowd-surf on. At 6:24, you’re skipping back to start this track over again. The rest of the record is pretty good, too, far and away the best thing ever produced by Florida surfers.

Not yet repainted into Union Pacific yellow, an ex-Espee diesel rests next to a puddle in South Saint Paul, Minnesota, the water turning it upside down and fragmenting its image.

December 08, 2010

Song of the year, I think.

December 08, 2010

From my favorite record of the year. Sufjan really challenged himself and his listeners—setting aside, as he did, his banjo for electronics and twee prettiness for sometimes abrasive, ugly noise. Christianity Today’s review rightly concluded that fans of his older music put off by this record “will discover a more complex understanding of Stevens, who as it turns out, is neither a "Christian artist” nor an “artist who is a Christian,” but a human like the rest of us.“

Sufjan the human, however he may have left his old sound behind, still possesses unfathomable melodic gifts and a truly symphonic sense of composition. "Age of Adz” is a wild and uncontrollable and stupendous wall of sound and emotion, a song made up of bits of noise, stray sounds, and instrumental flourishes corralled into something beautiful and personal and giant. I discern in this something not unlike the creativity of God, whose Spirit hovers over chaotic creation and refashions it into something beautiful and new through the ministry of the Word.

Back to the record—while I do love Age of Adz on its own merits, chief among its virtues is how it recalls for me his Adz-heavy concert at the Paramount Theater in Seattle, which was so good I simply fumble for the words. And I love that this record, which I can spin anytime I want, serves mainly to testify about that unrepeatable, live event.

Sam Beam's Tiny Desk Concert

Song of the year, I think.

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