Woke up before the alarm this morning. This sometimes happens. Usually, when it happens, it is because my alarm wasn’t set especially early that day. Today I woke up by a distant meow. It seems I’d accidentally closed the cat into the home office overnight.
He was fine, but I felt bad about the whole thing of course. Our cats, however, are incredibly forgiving. A few moments later he was cuddling and purring and, thereafter, underfoot. There’s a lesson in there, and don’t you know I spent most of the morning apologizing to him anyway.
I did a few other things with my morning and early afternoon, small things. Things that don’t even build momentum to larger things. So, in retrospect, I should have done more. I’ve had the good fortune to gear down the last few days as we approach the end of the semester, but, starting this weekend or so it’ll be time to look ahead, speed up and start making choices my students will have to live with until May. It’s the most wonderful time of the year!
Two classes today, as has been this semester’s Thursday routine. Today was our last time together. Today we screened their final projects.
I’d broken them up into groups, based on their own interests and dislikes in crew positions. Each group had to then create a two-minute public service announcement. They’ve had the opportunity to work on this for about a month. Some of them have used some of that time wisely. The pre-production part of the assignment demanded it. One group may have produced their entire video project yesterday.
All of the projects had their strengths. Most were quite creative, one or two were perfectly straightforward. I enjoyed watching them all. My favorite part is talking about them after we screened each one.
I asked the people not involved the project we watched to share some thoughts. It’s always a lot of fun to hear feedback from others, and gratifying to me to see them all reaching for something constructive and critical, but in a positive way. After almost four months of putting up with me, they’d bonded together in sympathy. Then I would ask the group members what they would do differently if they had to do it again. And then I would offer some observations. That can be as big or as little as you want it to be.
And that was it. I gave them the last big speech of the semester, reminded them of basic school-type things they needed to hear and thanked them for the semester. “Bump into me around campus. Catch me up on what you’re doing. It’s up to you. Now get out of here and go make great things.” And they all left.
The second class wrapped at about 6:30, and so I walked to the car in darkness, just before 7 p.m. There’s a peculiar feeling on a college campus on a night during finals. It’s lonely and sleepy, but alive and awake. It’s tired and full of energy. It’s full of wonder.
Or maybe that’s just me.
I drove back the long way because I missed the left, again. But I saw a lot of Christmas lights that direction and I wondered what Monday night will feel like after that class ends.
I was listening to the “Sound of Lies,” which is the next stop on the Re-Listening project. I’m playing all of my CDs in my car, in the order in which I acquired them. This is the 1997 record from The Jayhawks, and the third of their albums in a row. I bought “Sound of Lies” and the previous one, “Hollywood Town Hall,” on the same night in 2004. I bought them because, that day, I’d gotten my acceptance letter to graduate school.
That letter left me 12 days to prepare, and these records were the soundtrack, and a huge part of the musical foundation of the next year or so.
Marc Olsen had left the band. Secret weapon Karen Grotberg had been with the band a few years by now. Tim O’Reagan had settled in on drums. Gary Louris was essentially the sole front man. Probably that’s the point of the terrible cover art. But don’t judge a record by the liner notes. (It was the 90s, after all.) It does not sound like the 1997 you remember. And, as I discovered it in 2004, it was better.
The first track.
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you put pablum and cliches into a lyrical form … it turns out you actually get a catchy little number.
Without distinctive moments — and, really, I spun this disc so much that it’s impossible for just one event to stand out — some of these things just fit into my memory as driving here or there. Or the car in the sunshine. In this case, it’s a lot of driving in the dark. I don’t think that’s a metaphor, but it must be something.
You want the best track on the album? You want the best track. This is fundamentally, subjectively, perfect.
O’Reagan is doing the background vocals there, and that’s just the appetizer. Also — and no one tell my lovely bride, because this is stealing her gimmick, but … — I butcher a lyric in this song every time. The way I sing it is so nonsensical it works. But probably not as well as the actual line.
But back to Grotberg. She puts in these amazing vocal runs and plays the piano. None of this works without her, and I’ll be humming this for days. It’s all her fault.
Does everyone know what the sound is at the beginning of this song? Least favorite song on the record. But it does have a random Nick Cave reference. Nick Cave, I think, is everywhere, if we but look for him.
Matthew Sweet, just a year or so removed from perhaps his biggest hit, sings on this track. I only mention that here because we’ll hear from him in the next installment.
Here’s the title track, #12, the last song on the CD. It probably should have come up earlier, because it’s a weeper to end on.
And so we’re not ending on it. Instead, I’ll backpedal to track 11 because O’Reagan wrote and sang “Bottomless Cup” and I listen to this song over and over and over again when this CD is being played.
Whenever there’s a track that has Tim O’Reagan’s name on it, I feel like I could take a master class on song writing. He produced one solo record, in 2006 when the music industry was imploding, and I should pick that up one of these days. Hang on. There, it’s in my shopping cart.
Anyway, The Jayhawks are playing right now, and touring again next spring. Oh, look, they’ll be near me in May. I might have to be there.
But that’s for a different day — and not our next visit to the Re-Listening project. Up next, here, we’ll have a supergroup of sorts.
