What would a SF Mix be without this damned beauty of a song about mutual self-destruction and the will to burn it all down.
Dear John Darnielle,
I fear that I’ve patterned the worst parts of my relationships after your songs, perhaps desiring to be one of those desperate narratives in my own self-consciously tragic way. I suppose it all goes back to Nick Hornby’s eternal question: Do we listen to pop music because we’re miserable, or are we miserable because we listen to pop music?
See you on the 18th, we’ll talk about all of this then.
Sincerely,
J.C.H.
*thanks to Karen for this particular nuanced revision of my long held contention of being just a “sad bastard”
Write a piece of fiction for the duration of a single song, without revising. You may revise afterwards.
The song: Fredo Viola – “The Sad Song”
The fiction:
The first time she said my name, she half-sang it to me; each syllable filled her mouth with a slight longing, a desire to make me manifest out of the darkness, as if from a corner. The second time she said it, I tried not to well up; I’m overly emotional anyway, crying always at movies, at sappy love songs where the girl or boy dies and the singer is left wanting. The third time she said my name, I couldn’t hear her anymore; the sound of crowd around us had risen to a din.
I realized three months into our affair that I had fallen in love with her voice. I lusted after her sonorous tone with its fragile breaks in emphasis. I longed for her giddy inflection on her “can”s her “am”s, those verbs that indicated abilities or possibilities.
The night before she left, I crept into our house while she was in the shower. I came in quietly to listen; she would sing to herself in there. I wanted to hear the language she used in her songs, the nonsense lyrics that spilled out of her while she rinsed her hair, newly greyed, down the drain.
Say what you want about Coldplay, Chris Martin’s lyrics, or the band artiness (or lack thereof); their show in Atlanta was nothing short of brilliance and their new album Viva La Vida has forced me to eat most of my prior criticisms and come out of the closet as a proper Coldplay fan interested in where they go next. Cue Prospekt March EP.
Karina and I were quite a few rows behind this fellow; though this presentation of the spectacle during the finale is remarkably accurate for everyone on the floor.
I highly recommend following the link in order to watch the video in high quality.
I’ve been working on a review of Mount Eerie’s latest album with Julie Doiron, Lost Wisdom. Here’s a little performance of my personal favorite off the album, “Voice In Headphones” sans Julie et al. Yes, he’s singing the chorus to Bjork’s “Undo.” Yes, its amazing.
Amanda Palmer isn’t known for her subtlety, nor is her producer Ben Folds. Though they be no Oliver Stones of the indie world, occasionally their songs come across like sardonic, dark sledgehammers. “Oasis” is no exception; its a pop song about a rape and its subsequent, necessary abortion. Is the song shocking? Is it meant to provoke? Palmer, though blunt, plays with her audience’s reception of a narrative of a(n assumably fictional, though based no doubt on real life) horrific event that’s presented in such an undeniably toe-tapping way.
She made a Cindy Lauper-esque video, which is just as ridiculously captivating as the song (the album’s first single, natch):
Tonight I sat in my nearly empty old apartment, waiting for my clothes as they rumbled in the laundry room. I didn’t know it at the time, but this voice was what told me to leave, that it was fine to leave, that I’d be fine and had nothing to fear or worry about.
Sometimes the most broken thing reminds us that everything else is mostly broken too, and that there’s nothing wrong with any of that.
Maybe I’ll get this tattooed on an arm after the Emily Dickinson poem:
Creo quia absurdum.
Sometimes you’ll read an interview with a Pulitzer Prize Winning novelist and you’ll know that you’re looking for gems, for tokens of wisdom that sparkle at the corners of their words like so many paltry trinkets a simple thief would be attracted to, as if these things were strategically placed there, jangling about the hip, to detract from the real golden watch in the left breast pocket or the ornate heirloom locket tucked safely in a bodice. Marilynne Robinson managed to dispense with the pleasant costume jewelry at one point during her recent interview for The Paris Review, giving a brief glimpse of her riches:
“The first obligation of religion is to maintain the sense of the value of human beings. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: Stop doing this to yourselves.”
I have far too much music on my laptop’s external hard drive, more music than I’ll ever really listen to in any given week, or given year; inspired by Chris’ work-centric quest to listen to his entire iTunes library from A-Z, I have decided to institute an equally absurd, if more loosely regulated, listening exercise.
The Exhaustively Complete iTunes Library Listening Exercise, or E.C.L.I.L.E., commenced last week. I’m still in the A’s, listening to Acoustica’s string quartet re-imaginings of Aphex Twin songs. Yeah, I know, what the hell was I thinking.
