Another quiet Friday. What a wonderful sentence fragment! Ordinarily — OK, sometimes, if I caught it — I’d rewrite that. There’s no need to do anything to that sentence (fragment) in the lovely part of the middle of June. So I’m leaving it.
It’s a Friday.
It’s the countermelodies. To hear those you have to learn words. Then you can really hear the countermelodies. From there, you can get to whatever earnest thing that draws you into the emotional aspect of music. To me, what jumps up has always been the intensity and the vulnerability. The through-line for both is an unforgiving sort of sincerity. And that’s what you find in the countermelodies.
Why, yes, I am going to get another week or so of playing songs from this concert. This is a good thing. Anyway, here’s the song most people think of as their first Indigo Girls song. It was a 1994 folk-pop crossover hit, to be sure, on an album that went platinum and peaked at number nine on the US charts. The video received a lot of MTV airplay.
Probably I’ve only just described people like me. Their first four albums earned two golds and three certified platinum designations. Those successes notwithstanding, this was another opportunity for more people to walk in. I clearly had a lot of catching up to do, I did, and it was great.
When bands play their signature songs, these sometimes-iconic anthems, these we-burn-it-down-if-this-isn’t-in-the-setlist hits, I often try to think back to what it was like to hear it for the first time. It’s a silly little mind game. It’s just a song. Sometimes they are modest hits, sometimes bigger than that. But the meaning that comes along with them comes along over time. Listen to how The Ryman responded when Emily Saliers plucks the first few strings there. They didn’t do that the first time they heard it. There’s, now, almost 30 years of meaning and enthusiasm in that song.
I just learned something trivial and interesting. In 2020, The Indigo Girls became the first duo to reach the Billboard Top 200 in five different decades. Each one builds on the last. Body of work and all of that. It started before 1994, but for me it started, right there, with that song, in 1994.
Things here were quiet today. Not too quiet, a movie trope which doesn’t really occur in really life. It was just the right amount of quiet. If, that is, spending an hour and 45 minutes on the phone is your idea of the right amount of quiet.
The first call was one hour. And it was a long hour. Also, it was barely productive. But, I did get my email added to an account. This took an hour.
Also the poor woman who had to deal with me had her mind go blank when she was trying to suggest I look something up on “that search index.”
What is it called? Oh yeah, Google. Or that other one, oh, she said, which one is it, I forget. But you can, she said, in her proper Texan drawl, look, oh, yeah, you can look it up on YouTube.
Because I was calling 1996, apparently.
No, I said into my Nokia candy bar phone, I prefer AltaVista.
On my second call, I found myself talking to a guy from Massachusetts. He wasn’t even with the company I needed, but he assured me he is passionate about this work, and he gave me a 45 minute education on something I knew nothing about.
This makes me wonder about the extent of customer service and phone calls as reputation devices. Let’s be fair. That first woman, she might have just been having an off afternoon. Perhaps she was new. Maybe she was multitasking. It is very possible that the things I was asking her about isn’t something she does a lot, or maybe she wasn’t even well trained in that particular area. Any of these are possible, and it’s just one person and one call, but the experience leaves you with a feeling, doesn’t it? The second person I talked to, he was on top of his game, explained things in conceptual and operational ways. Patiently let me distill his knowledge and his explanation into loosely applicable analogies. Corrected me a lot. Repeated himself as necessary. It was great.
I told that guy to have a great weekend, and that, when the time came, I was going to do business with his company. He’s just the work-from-home customer rep. He’s not even in the state I’m talking about. It could be an entire one-off. But Tyler made the lasting impression today.
Weird how these things work, and how we justify and rationalize things based on them.
So a quiet day.
Also, I watched the second half of this video today.
That could be subtitled “the things you don’t read about in books.”
But if that’s too grim, this is nonsensical and fun. It is amusing to see a real pro like John Oliver get upstaged, lose his bearing and be a fan.
I never noticed, though, how Cookie Monster has no shoulders. That’s a wardrobe problem.
I wrote recently about Sean Demery in the Re-Listening project, and this one gets back to him, too. He’ll probably pop up once or twice more as we continue on, but he played this breakthrough single a lot in Atlanta, and that’s where I found it.
I’ve also mentioned how I load these in the CD player without looking at the discs. So while I can sometimes remember what’s next in the old CD books, a lot of times the disc change is an exciting little mystery. The first track on this record is the big single, and from the initial A it’s immediately, distinctively recognizable.
Those guys got signed in high school, they were 20 when that song accidentally blew up. The single topped the Modern Rock charts and took over Billboard’s Heatseekers new artists chart. The record went platinum. They pushed out four more singles, but most of them didn’t resonate with me.
But this one, it’s got a catchy little hook, and it’ll stick with you all day, and into tomorrow, if you aren’t careful.
Also, look how impossibly young those guys are.
They released two more records before splitting up in 2004. While the first went platinum, the second was certified gold. But the third disappointed, commercially. A few years later they got back on the road. There was an EP in 2021, and a full album in 2022. I listened to a little of it. Still noisy. Not really my type of noise anymore, though. I saw them on the summer festival circuit in their big boomlet. But they’re not touring right now.
eve6 isn’t a very good band. they got lucky and had like a hit and a half like twenty years ago and sold some records but who cares. they’ve had all the terminally predictable ups and downs of every other band thats been chewed up and spit out by the machine … eve6 thinks music industry people are the worst people in the world and this includes label people, lawyers, publicists, managers, radio program directors, music supervisors etc. thanks for taking the time away from your fake slack job to read this.
Counter-counterculture, I guess.
There’ll be a lot of music here in the coming days, and some of it will be in the form of the Re-Listening project. The next installment here is from a soundtrack. And it’ll probably be brief. You’re welcome for that.
Be it noisy or loud, have a great weekend, at the decibel level of your choice!
cycling / Friday — Comments Off on Time is funny 2 Jun 23
It got up to about 90 degrees today. I watched most of it from my office window, in a climate-uncontrolled office.
There’s a thermostat in my office. It has a digital readout with green lights telling me what the university has programmed for us. They sprung for the deluxe version, too. There are two buttons on the thermostat that don’t do anything. They’re just there to make you feel as if you have some control over the 76-degrees-in-the-summer. You don’t, but it’s a gesture.
And that gesture did not help when, at quitting time, I opened the door and felt 90 degrees today for the first time since last September 21st.
That’s 254 days.
Now, as I get older, I find that I don’t relish the real flesh-burning heat of my youth. It once was a badge of honor or something, I guess, now it is just a thing to endure until you find some air conditioning. (I blame a bad bout of heat exhaustion I had in the late-oughts.) Ninety isn’t bad, unless you’re working in it. Ninety is good and warm, no matter what you’re doing. But you can, in a few days or so, get adjusted to it.
There’s a reasonably fine line here, I would say, and I think that changes over time, over the course of one’s experience and, again, what you’re having to do outside. Anything in the mid-90s seems right up next to hot. If you get over 106 degrees or so, in our usually humid climes, and it just feels painful.
But even 90 degrees, the first time you get above the mid 80s, can feel deflating.
What I’m saying is, 254 days is a long time to go between summer temperatures. This is a dawning realization, one that will prompt me to spend more of the summer outdoors.
What I’m really saying is, how is it June already? And, simultaneously, how did this month take so long to arrive?
This is where I erased 1,600 words on the notions of things that are far off and close at hand, how time flies, but also sinks into the muck on the bottom of a lake.
It was warm enough that I decided to not go for a bike ride today. Par for the month. Err, last month. May featured the fewest rides of the year, so far. And it is starting to show on the mileage chart. Computer, show us the mileage chart!
It’s a humble set of marks, but, for me, these are good numbers.
Except, look at all of those scary little plateaus in the purple line. This chart is based on a daily mileage spreadsheet (what, you don’t run spreadsheets on things like that?) and plateaus on this chart mean no bike riding was done. Meanwhile, the colorful average daily lines just keep marching on. It’s your classic case of when projections and realities sometimes wind up at odds with one another. In May, some travel, illness, and busy schedules slowed me down. That’s something we’ll have to remedy in June. Starting tomorrow. There needs to be more distance between the purple line of reality and the only mildly ambitious green line which signifies averaging 10 miles per day.
But, first, since it is the second day of the month, I’m already one day behind on updating all of my spreadsheets, cleaning the computer, and so on. This is how I will start my weekend, which begins right … now.
Have a great June weekend everybody, and thanks for stopping by today.
Reading a site regularly gives you great insight into its habits and routines. The page, when consistently produced and consistently read, at least, can certainly have a personality. For example, when you see a hastily composed and carefully cropped photo — shot from the hip and edited for more than 11 seconds — like this …
… or another shot, with tint and flares like this …
Then you know we’re on the road. I suppose the long weekend was another clue. Anyway, we’re headed south for the Memorial Day weekend. Family, sun, good fun, some time by the pool, and … BARBECUE.
It is the little things — like slow slow-cooked meat — that you miss the most when you don’t have them close at hand in in abundant supply. But over the course of this trip, I’m getting barbecue at least twice.
And so we drove all through the afternoon, stuck in traffic at the Kentucky border, near a place where authorities are presently looking for an escaped murderer, and slowed down again several times north of Nashville because of the hour, picking up some ‘cue from Jack’s a proper little joint right there in the Gulch. We finally exited the interstate for exiting the interstate at a quiet little part of Tennessee, where the community is named as a portmanteau in honor of the guy who either influenced or bribed lawmakers to get the train to run through the area.
In the day’s dying light, we glided through 11 miles of a U.S. highway that, if you were ambitious, would carry you some 2,300 miles from where my sister is in North Carolina to a place in Arizona where no one I know is. We were racing daylight, because we still had 22 miles to go on a little county road up in the hills where the darkness comes early. You pass through towns that show up on a map, but not in real life. Then there’s the state line store, and the big right turn, past where some of my family is buried, on roads that seamlessly put you into another unincorporated place that stretches to each horizon before, finally, there’s a four-lane road straight and true, one more turn, and then there’s the warm light shining in my mother’s yard.
She’s got the hugs. We’ve got the barbecue. And that’s how we started the weekend.
I’ve been working on cleaning up the ol’ email. I use my inboxes as To Do lists, so the email count there never gets too high. Right now there are 20 emails in my inbox and that, to me, is too high.
The other side of the coin is that there are folders aplenty. And sometimes those need to be cleaned out, too. Anyway, today I was able to wipe out the last of the old communiques from a no-longer important folder. This was the graphic Google rewarded me with.
I’ve deleted the label name to protect the innocent, but seeing that … that was a good feeling.
And it was worth a giggle. But not the biggest giggle of the day. But you’d need several anecdotes worth of backstory and 71 words to be able to properly appreciate that one.
After all of that email fun, and other paperwork fun, I got out for a nice little bike ride this evening. It was an easy hour, just 17 miles and change before the dark clouds threatened.
More urgent was the absence of any legs. This, I told myself, was just one more ride to try to feel better in the hardest gears. It was the regular roads, but the third ride in the last six days, after a week or so being off the bike. Just — huff– getting — wheeze — my legs back.
It was an almost perfect ride, though. There are presently four criteria in this category of bike rides. First, it has to either feel super easy or incredibly hard. Second, no matter which of the first, I have to be able to exit the bike at the end with grace and ease. Third, my shoes stay in the clips for the entire ride, meaning I never have to put my foot on the ground. And, fourth, no close passes.
The first did not happen, because the sensations were mediocre throughout. I almost got the second one — but since the first criteria wasn’t satisfied, it doesn’t count, not really. The third one did happen. My feet stayed in the pedals the entire ride. And the fourth criteria was almost met, but for a truck just near the end of the route. Thanks, black pickup truck.
So, really, about one-and-a-half of the criteria were met.
We were trying to recruit, via text message, a colleague and friend to a particular cause this evening. It’s a poli sci, comm theory guy, but he might be professionally miscast. He’s an outdoors man, a keen student of nature. And now he is very much interested in, among other ecological things, the health of the insect world.
Like most serendipitously random conversations that can tolerate puns, I drove the initial joke of insect biodiversity in the media straight into the ground.
My lovely bride? She knows who she married.
We’re still trying to make up ground on the Re-Listening project. I’m listening to all of my old CDs in order, of course. That’s not the part where I’m behind. I’m behind in needlessly writing about it here for content filler — and embedded videos. So let’s get to it.
We’re in early 1999, contextually, listening to Duncan Sheik’s second record, the 1998 release, “Humming.” He’d gotten accidentally famous on his debut record, which “Barely Breathing” helped drive to gold record status, earned a Grammy nomination and stayed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for a year. I vaguely recall an interview once where he talked about playing small clubs this week, and then giant theaters the next. I’ve always thought, on the basis of nothing more than that interview, I’ve always thought that this release was a deliberate choice to go the other way. Less obvious pop, more introspective art.
That’s the first track. The album title, I’m pretty sure comes out of these lyrics after the bridge. You’re also listening to the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which makes several appearances throughout the record.
Atlantic Records released this one as a single.
Didn’t really register on the charts, but it got him a guest slot on Beverly Hills, 90210.
This was the second single, and part of why I think choices were made on this record. Also, why couldn’t they get John Cusack in for this video?
Probably I’ve mentioned this before, but two lifetimes ago when I was a reporter and on the air everyday, I decided to replace vocal exercises with a few musicians. Duncan Sheik was one of those. And, for a time, this record was one of those things I played in my car a lot at 3:30 a.m. on my way to work.
I just rubbed my face, hard, at that memory. Evening typing “3:30 a.m.” made me tired. The point, though, memories of being ultra-sleep deprived aside, the vocal work Duncan Sheik does always impresses me. The man’s still got it, too. I ran across this cover a year or two ago.
These days, he’s not working as a touring musician, but he’s produced a lot of others’ work. There’s a lot of theater credits under his name — he won a Tony in 2007 — and you can find his music is all over movies and TV, as well. He won a Grammy the very next year.
He’ll appear in the Re-Listening project once or twice more, too. And he’s got about five more albums I don’t own, besides. And so I’ll add those to the list, too.
Up next on the list, musically speaking, another staple of the 1990s alt rock scene. But, first, the weekend!
