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music

1,000 words, and only a few about sand

I had so much fun ironing pocket squares last night that I didn’t want it to end. So I stopped, and I can do more of them tonight, or another night. It’s a party in the ironing room.

The ironing room? You know, the one with the squeaky board and overheated iron and spray bottle (because our German-engineered iron has a leak and doesn’t hold water anymore). There’s also the bloating towel, and a lot of luggage, and an extra bed.

Alright, you found me out. The ironing room is the guest bedroom. Though I think I iron in it more than we have guests there. So we’re renaming it.

Anyway, a lot of squares were ironed, still a bunch to go.

And, this afternoon, I made some more cufflinks.

I’ll soon have a set for any type of playfully colorful situation. I have so many cufflinks. I need more french cuffs.

If you think that’s all I’ve got today, you, dear reader, are wrong! W-R-O-N-G.

There’s a rabbit living in our backyard. It’s a regular old zoo out there. And this critter is not bothered by people at all. I got within about five feet before it took two tentative hops away, to see if I would give chase.

I did not.

And, yes, look at how green that grass is. The last few days of rain have been what we needed to finally get us out of a drought. It started last September. And we might have emerged from it a little more quickly than meteorologists had expected last fall.

Which is great. This was my first drought on well water. I don’t have a good sense of the size of our watersource below us, and some people around here are a bit thirsty.

I do know the aquifer is glauconitic sand overlying micaceous sand. Obviously. It is porous and permeable, of course. I know this because I just found a state aquifer map. The challenge is that we’re on the geological border of everything, here where the heavy land and the green sands meet. There are seven different types of aquifers running on the diagonal, and the map is just vague enough that we could be in one of three or so. So I do what anyone does when they want to know about the glauconitic sand, I overlaid the aquifer map with a working map … and found that, even when you adjust for size, the scale of one of them is off.

Who to believe? The state’s map? Or Google Maps?

And while you wrestle with that …

Let us return to the Re-Listening project, where I am presently nine discs behind. The Re-Listening project, you’ll recall, is where I’m listening to all of my old CDs in their order of acquisition. Roughly so, anyway. I’m right now working through a book out of order. So the book is from 2007, but these CDs are older. None of that matters. The point of the Re-Listening project is listening to the music, and here I’m just filling space with videos of good music and the occasional recollection. So that matters a little bit.

Which brings us to Melissa Etheridge. I had her four earliest records on cassette, maybe five, and maybe didn’t upgrade all of those to CDs. But this, her seventh album, is the last one I bought. Etheridge turned 40. She’d had her first two kids. She was entering a new phase of life. (All of this is great, of course, but … ) The older material, where she was younger, more intense, raw, dramatic, as she now says, all of that was the best part of her catalog.

And since this was released in 2001 she’s had about two lifetimes worth of experiences. Maybe I should dip back in.

Anyway, the first track is a good one.

And much of the rest is this comfortable kind of at-peace-with-itself pop, when I’m just looking for her to put to words some core feeling and belt it out over a 12-string.

But that didn’t happen a lot here — some artists you just don’t want to change, I guess, even though you know change and growth are good things — and so I never listened to this all that much. I don’t even know all of the lyrics.

She’s still touring. Playing solo dates and with The Indigo Girls. We saw them together last fall. Melissa Etheridge will absolutely tear a building in two from the stage. She’s still got that sort of power and intensity. Its impressive.

And I was blown away by her cover of Joan Armatrading.

The next CD is from Michael Penn, 1997’s Resigned. I’m not sure why that shows up in this book. I’ve had this disc since soon after it came out. (It’s terrific.) I probably bought this off the strength of radio or MTV airplay. Here’s the first track.

Probably it was right about here that I entered into my “I wanna be a songwriter” phase. But, as I told a friend, I’d have to work with someone who sounded like this. My friend laughed at that, and every so often she would ask me if I’d found that person yet. I had not. Also, I never wrote any songs. It was a short phase.

My appreciation for Penn has lasted throughout the years, though. And you’ll just have to believe me that I listened to this record three times this time around.

This whole record was long spring days with apartment windows pushed up and doors opened and the stereo, tied into those big, waist-high speakers, turned up loud. I think there was even multimedia on this disc. But who puts discs in computers anymore? Opportunities lost, there.

Michael Penn has been composing for TV and movies for quite sometime. Probably better than life on a bus. Though, sadly, I never got to see him play live, but I would go to a show.

It’d be “an evening with” event. Black jeans, crisply ironed pocket square.

Friday / memories / music / Re-Listening / video — Comments Off
9
May 25

Let’s listen to some music

It’s Friday, you should always do something fun on Friday. Some of us might not have conventional work weeks, and that’s great. Your Friday could be any day of the week. That just means you have two Fridays. Mark them both accordingly. And, today, we’re going to do that with a bit of music.

So we’ll return to the Re-Listening project, in which I am very behind. The Re-Listening project, if you haven’t been paying the closest attention, is where I am listening to all of my old CDs in the order of their acquisition — well, mostly, I’ve got some of the CD books confused. It’s a great trip down memory lane. And, I figured, I could write about it here. It seemed like a good idea at the time! Pad out the site … add some music … have a memory or two. And mostly it is a good idea. Unless you don’t like my music. Some of it is a little obscure. Some of it regional. Some of it is very obvious. None of it is astounding. So let’s just assume you like some of it, that it was a good idea when I started this a bunch of years ago now.

You know what has always been a good idea? This next album, which not a lot of people heard, and that’s a shame. The band Mr. Henry released two records, their debut in 1998 and “40 Watt Fade” in 2000, each on minor labels. Their blend of Americana was at the right place at the right time for alt radio. And while it was released in 2000, I picked it up in 2007, and it has never, ever disappointed.

I think I listened to it three times in the car this go-around.

This is the first track, sneaking that organ in there was pretty genius. The chorus here is probably the most reductive thing on the record.

By the third track, the choruses get much better, but the lyrics throughout are pretty generously full of imagery.

At which point it would be easy for me to embed the entire album. Here’s the brilliance of the fourth track, for instance. If you ever needed a ballad for hurtling down the highway in the middle of the night, they’ve got you covered. Once you get around the distortion in the twangy guitars they’ve really got something here. Though it feels like it needs another lyric.

It’s weird how I append that to non-specific memories of so much music: there I was, speeding up the interstate from here to there …

Just to prove I’m not playing the whole tracklist, we’ll skip ahead to the seventh offering, which is fundamentally a perfect song for the period, plus it has an unironic accordion.

In a similar vein, but somehow even better, if that’s possible, is this one, which trades in cliches, lends the record it’s title, offers an acoustic guitar driven chorus and more of those nice little harmonies the band was figuring out. Also, it sounds like a bunch of motivational posters.

Don’t worry, I’ve found the pattern on some of my musical preferences. I haven’t named this one, but maybe I should call it the Tim O’Reagan genre. He’s not in this band, but this sound, a sort of wearily optimistic traveler’s lament, is his sound. Also, there’s a lyric in here that’s so obvious, but still blows me away, decades later, and typies the album for me.

U-Haul chases big county lines
No FM reception
just a box of B-sides

There’s a real lament in there somewhere, and an obvious word play. Maybe the only one you can make there. But it surely does work for me.

So Mr. Henry split up sometime after 2000. There’s not a lot out there. The lead singer, Dave Slomin is now working on a new project, which is called Waiting for Henry, in a not-at-all confusing way. Waiting for acknowledges Mr. Henry. The bassist is playing with The Gravy Boys, which have released four Americana records. The drummer, Neil Nunziato, just published an Instagram post saying the band will play a one-night-only show in New York next month.

Maybe it’ll go well and they’ll figure out something for the future.

The next album is a Hootie & The Blowfish disc, a band which I enjoy mostly un-apologetically. Their South Carolina sound appeals to my South Carolina sensibilities. Anyway, “Musical Chairs” debuted in 1998. For some reason I didn’t buy it until 2007, apparently. It peaked at number 4 on the Billboard charts and was certified platinum, but music people were disappointed. Music people are only interested in unit sales, and have no appreciation for the come down that the hottest acts experience. And Hootie and the Blowfish came down somewhat. Their 1994 debut was certified platinum 22 times. The 1996 followup went platinum three times. So I guess the writing was on the wall with the music execs. But, come on, how can you expect anyone to even approach that again?

Anyway, they hadn’t tinkered with the formula, and if you liked it in ’94, you would have enjoyed this in ’98. Or ’07, or today.

This might be my favorite song on the record. Every time it plays, I will play it again. And maybe more. That’s the memory: the re-plays. There’s just a lot going on there to appreciate in two minutes and 21 seconds.

Any song that name-checks an Aunt Inez will get my appreciation. Especially if you just casually drop in where she’s from. I think that’s just a rule in our part of the world.

This could also by my favorite song.

I feel like a dare was involved here. “What if we put Darius in a leisure suit and gave him a lounge act vibe?” It amuses me.

The hidden track could also be my favorite track on the disc. So there are easily three favorites, and some other strong stuff on here, too.

I think I saw Hootie and the Blowfish when they were touring supporting this album. Probably an ampitheatre show, maybe in Atlanta. (Why is 1998 suddenly so fuzzy?)

Hootie isn’t touring this year, but Darius is.

And so are we. Touring that is. Lower New England, specifically. It’s a quick Mother’s Day trip for us. And a happy Mother’s Day to all those who celebrate, as well!

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25
Apr 25

Time for some air guitar

Since I’m well behind — but when am I not? — let’s return to the Re-Listening project.

The Re-Listening project, for anyone still here after such a dynamite introduction, is where I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the car, mostly in their order of acquisition, and writing about them here. I say mostly because these discs are all kept in CD books, if you remember those, and I got a bit out of order. Anyway, we’re in 2001 at this point. And so what we’re doing here is talking about music from more than two decades ago. But not so much about the music, but whatever might come with it. These are more memories than reviews — because who needs reviews? — but, really, an excuse to put a little music here, while padding out the space.

So we go back to the by-now over-commercialized realm of alt and roots rock. What I mean is that we’re beginning today by talking about the second studio album by Train. One of the better songs on the record was the lead track, and third single, which settled at 21 on the US Billboard Adult Top 40 and peaked at 40 on the US Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. And if ever there was a song you shouldn’t listen to after YouTube’s compression algorithms work their magic, this is it.

Anyway, I was working at a place that was playing a lot of Train. And I think I saw them twice on this tour. They played a two-night stretch at a now defunct venue in Birmingham, and I saw them on the second night, an amphitheater instead of a small concert hall. Also, we ran into these guys at breakfast the next morning. Let’s say they had had a long night. Later that year, I saw them at a bigger venue.

One of the deep cuts is a personal favorite.

It got mixed reviews at the time, this record, and you can still hear that unevenness today. Nothing on here is bad, but not much really stands out, which is I guess what everyone wanted at that point. Everything pretty well holds up with the passage of time. But, for the most part, it is, and was, pretty much what we’d come to expect from the band.

Still went double platinum, though.

Train are still touring, and they’ll return to the U.S. this summer, though it’s not the same band, if that matters. Over the years 18 people have been a part of the group. Pat Monahan, the vocalist, is the only founding member of the band left.

Up next, Athenaeum’s “Radiance.” This was an alt pop band from North Carolina, a group of guys that got together in the 8th grade and then played together for 15 years or so. This was their debut record, and it made it to 46 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart, a minor success in 1998. I bought it much later. The record was powered by this single.

You go through the first four tracks and think, “Here’s a band with a good rhythm section, one distortion pedal and a few clever lyrics. Probably the kids not challenged or interested in school.” And then they change it up a bit on track 5 and fool you.

I haven’t listened to this in a long time, and that’s the reaction I had this time through, and I bet I had a similar thought when I first played it.

I’m in a chat with a younger member of my extended family where we share music back and forth. We’re getting pretty close to understanding each other’s tastes at this point. Every now and then I send him something and he slips a knife in between my ribs. “Yeah, that sounds like the 90s.”

How do you argue that?

Also, this sounds exactly like the 90s.

I have a feeling they played a lot of school dances. I bet this was a big hit when it came time for a slow number.

The band folded in 2004. Some of the members are still making music, performing, or as songwriters and studio musicians. One of them is an associate professor at Clemson.

And now we’re two albums closer to being caught up. Probably still a dozen behind …

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31
Mar 25

Cherry blossoms

We went to Washington D.C. on Saturday. It was a warm spring day, the sort that promises a lot of mugginess in the capital. It was peak cherry blossom season. Everyone knew it. So crowded.

This was the first time I’d been to D.C. since this monument was installed. It has a commanding view. And as you walk around the sculpture, it seemed the expression changed.

It’s also much taller than I’d imagined. But that’s as it should be.

Once you’d elbowed people out of the way, you got some nice views.

I kid, of course. Everyone was having a lovely time. Snippets of conversation floated through the air, like the kites flying everywhere, and the blossoms as they fell to the ground. I picked up sticks, because you never know when you’ll need a bit of cherry wood.

We walked down to the mall. The monument in the background, and perhaps the one place the capitol building doesn’t demand your attention.

We met my god-sister-in-law (just go with it) and her brother for dinner. We were all in town for a concert. Usually, I put up a lot of these, but I put up a lot of these. This was the really touching moment. A show that’s being discontinued — because of its themes of inclusiveness, perish the thought — got two nights of attention, in the Friday show and the Saturday show, and they sang with Guster and the National Symphony Orchestra.

Artists, man.

But that was only part of the weekend! More tomorrow!

books / Friday / music / Re-Listening / video — Comments Off
28
Mar 25

Between misguided travellers and roses

It’s another day of playing a bit of catch up. Mostly because the day was spent working on stuff sitting at the computer. Dear Diary, today was more grading. That’s not terribly exciting. There’s always something more exciting than that, if you’re willing to look on the bookshelves everywhere around me, or the big stacks of music that are everywhere else.

This weekend I read “The Day The World Came to Town.” I picked it off the Kindle via a random number generator. It was released in 2003, I bought it on a big sale in 2021, and it’s sat there, waiting. And, when I opened it, I didn’t have high expectations.

This is a book about September 11th, and the days that followed, in Gander, Newfoundland.

You’ll recall that one of the things the U.S. did after the planes hit the World Trade Center was to close down American airspace. Every plane had to land at the nearest available, accommodating airport. No mean feat, logistically. This applied to international flights coming over, too. No one knew it at the time, because no one knew much in those first terrible hours, but the military was preparing to shoot down any planes that didn’t comply.

Up there in Newfoundland was a great big airport. They’d had an aeronautical boom during and after World War II. The biggest positive were the very long runways that could allow the biggest planes to takeoff and land. When jets, and their greater range, became the kings of the sky, it became more-or-less obsolete. A small place with no real reason for people to visit.

Then, 38 planes landed there, putting 6,595 people on the ground in a town where fewer than 10,000 people lived. And this book is that story.

And, as I said, I didn’t expect a lot from this book. But this book was good, and really quite charming. It details the people of that community, Gander, and some of the people who couldn’t have found it on a map before September 11th. These people, the Newfies, are really something. For instance:

The biggest problem facing officials was transportation. How do you move almost 7,000 people to shelters, some of which were almost fifty miles outside of town? The logical answer was to use school buses. On September 11, however, Gander was in the midst of a nasty strike by the area’s school-bus drivers.

Amazingly, as soon as the drivers realized was was happening, they laid down their picket signs, setting their own interests aside, and volunteered en masse to work around the clock carrying the passengers wherever they needed to go.

And the whole book is full of this, a parade of regular folks doing the small things that were huge things in such a traumatic moment.

In most cases, the passengers didn’t have their actual prescriptions with them. In each case, O’Brien and the other pharmacists had to call the hometown doctor or pharmacists so they would know the exact medication and dosage, and had a new prescription sent. During one stretch, O’Brien and his wife, Rhonda, worked forty-two hours straight, making calls to a dozen different countries.

Surprisingly, there isn’t one universal standard for identifying drugs. A drug such as Atenol, commonly prescribed to patients with high blood pressure, can go by different names in different countries. A pharmacist for more than twenty years, O’Brien spent hours on the Internet, and worked with the local hospital and Canadian health officials, to sort through the maze of prescriptions and find the right drugs for each passenger. In the first twenty-four hours, pharmacists in Gander filled more than a thousand prescriptions. All at no cost to the passengers.

Canadian Tire was giving products away. The local cable company made sure every place that was housing refugees had a connection for news. The phone people set up banks of phone lines and fax machines. And on and on and on it goes. People welcomed strangers into their homes. They made herculean efforts to get messages back and forth. The locals tried to distract a woman who was worrying over her firefighter son, and finding ways to let teenagers be teenagers.

One of the stories is about Gary Vey, who was the president and CEO of the Gander International Airport Authority. He wasn’t in Gander, but in Montreal at a big airport conference. He couldn’t fly back to work at his airport, so he rented a car, drove more than 600 miles, caught a six-hour boat ride, and then drove eight more hours to his hometown, going straight to the airport, arriving in the afternoon. He worked for about 12 hours, after all of that, and headed home in the predawn hours.

Not wanting to wake his wife, he quietly showered in the hallway bathroom and decided to sleep in their guest bedroom. The room was dark as he dropped his towl and climbed into bed, wearing nothing more than wet hair and a weary expression on his face.

And that’s when he realized he wasn’t alone. He was in bed with a seventy-year-old woman from Fort Worth, Texas, whom Vey’s wife, Patsy, had befriended at one of the shelters and decided to take home. Remarkably, the woman was still asleep. Vey gingerly stood up, covered himself with his towel, and retreated to his own bedroom.

“We’ve got company, I see,” he told his wife when they both awake the next morning.

“Yes,” she said, “that’s a lovely lady from one of the flights.”

She told her husband she couldn’t stand the thought of this old woman spending a night sleeping on the floor of a classroom at Gander Academy. So she’d brought her home and tried to show her a good time. Well, he said with a laugh, he almost showed her more than that.

It was a great weekend read.

Since we had so much fun with the Re-Listening project yesterday, let’s jump back in today. I’m still about 10 or 14 discs behind, after all. And next on the list is a great little 1998 record that no one purchased, but me. Seven Mary Three’s fourth studio record peaked at 121 on the Billboard 200, and it’s easy to forget, but even easier to enjoy.

It’s a rock album, but it’s also introspective, more than you would expect, in a rock album sort of way.

There’s also the visceral, which is perhaps what that band is best remembered for. Just roll down the windows, press a little deeper into the accelerator and sing aloud sorta stuff.

And that’s Seven Mary Three to me. My college roommate and I saw them on their second record’s tour. We played that one a lot in his place, and in his truck. And so this band, to me, is about Chuck — I didn’t see him much when this album came out. I wonder if he ever heard it. — about that whole driving into a song thing, and oddly, a band I listened to a lot while mowing the lawn.

I have four of their albums. Maybe I should buy the other three to round out their catalog.

Also, the rhythm section of this band never gets its due.

The band hasn’t played since 2012, and doesn’t look to anytime soon, apparently. I’d probably go see them again. We caught them at Five Points South, a now defunct club that hosted a lot of great music over the years. That’s also the place where I saw Edwin McCain for the first time. And his second album, “Misguided Roses” is up next in the Re-Listening project.

It is a perfectly acceptable effort. The album peaked at 73 on the US Billboard 200.

The single you remember, of course, is “I’ll Be,” which was on radio everywhere, and at most every wedding since then. It went all the way to the second spot on the US Heatseekers Albums chart, blocked from the top spot there only by the band, Fuel. And then it really took off, which disqualified it from the odd rules of the old Heatseekers chart, but it lodged itself into the top 10 of six other Billboard charts. I wasn’t even aware it could have been eligible for six of them, or why some of them even exist.

The rest of the album is stuck in amber which, for pop music, is probably an OK thing. One of the songs still stands out. (Though, I must say, they all sound better on every format that’s not “YouTube.”)

I probably saw McCain and his band three or four times right around that period, usually opening up for one of his buddies. He took some time away from music, restoring boats, apparently had a TV show about that in the middle of the teens. He’s released two records since then, 12 studio albums in a solid 20-year career. He’s touring this summer.

And that’s enough for now. That’s plenty. We’ve got a beautiful, busy spring weekend ahead of us. How about you? Big plans?