Re-Listening « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Re-Listening

‘Forever’s not so long, stop moping’

I was chatting with a friend who got a new phone. He’s rightly impressed by the quality of the images it takes at night. And they have greatly improved, haven’t they? If we can solve the digital zoom problems, and let people take high quality photos of the moon, that super computer in your pocket will really be something.

Even money on which impossible thing phone designers can solve first. Thing is, they do so many other things pretty well, or excellently, those are the next big things they can brag about in ads. Generative AI ain’t it, designers.

Anyway, I stepped outside to take a photo for comparative purposes. It’s been a pleasant discovery of late to learn that my phone, a bit older now, still takes interesting photos of the night sky. I went out to demonstrate this, because why not? But it was one of those nights common to the season. A bit overcast. Still, a few stars amidst a pixelated background.

When I came back inside and looked at the photo again I was impressed. The camera caught light reflecting off the maple leaves. The light is coming from a small handful of solar powered yard lights, mounted 80 feet away.

How much harder can it be to let me take archival quality moon photos from the small rectangle that also plays music, games and shows me maps?

It’s time for another installment of the Re-Listening project. This, as you might recall, is where I am listening to all of my old CDs in the order in which I acquired them. It’s a fun bit of nostalgia and good music and I’m writing about it here, for days like this, so I can pad out the site. This isn’t for review — because who cares? — but it is an excuse to put some good music here, and sometimes they come with memories.

Today the memories go back to 2005-2006 or so. It’s another used purchase, a Barenaked Ladies record, their sixth record, 2003’s “Everything to Everyone.” This was a year before Steven Page started wondering about his future in the band, six years before he left. And 15 years before they were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. They released three versions of this record. One was a standard 14-track effort. The limited edition features three bonus tracks from some improvised acoustic sessions. A special edition included a DVD. I got the one with the extra tracks.

And here’s the thing, despite my love of the band, I am not a big fan of this record. Some of the songs, if anything, are too catchy.

Consider this earworm.

That was the last single off the record, and it was released only in Canada. The first single is another song that’s too sticky, even if the video is appropriately ridiculous. The theme is too, I suppose, but it will be in your heads for hours if you listen to it more than once.

Most of my recollection of this record is hearing those two songs too often, and at times it seems like that’s all that’s on here, but there are some great understated efforts on this project. Ed Robertson is always good for one of these.

I’m in the group of people that wishes Page and the rest of the guys could put it together again. BNL works well as a foursome, but Page’s voice and stylings make the band truly great.

Mixed in here are a lot of songs that were more political than their previous efforts, but also a lot of sounds and themes that felt like the same old band, familiar as the old flannel you were wearing when you discovered them. (Though I was probably wearing a henley.)

Come on, this was released in 2003, but that absolutely feels like a henley … if a song can feel … like a shirt.

This one’s just nice. That’s all, that’s it. It’s just nice.

But here’s the problem. I said I had the limited edition with the extra tracks. Here they all are. This is an acoustic version of a song I shared a moment ago.

The acoustic songs have improvised percussion, which makes me want a concept album of their catalog with entirely improvised instruments. (They’re so talented some of those songs would come off better than their originals, I’m sure of it.) And here’s an acoustic version of “Maybe Katie.”

Seriously, there’s a part of my mind or my memory or both that thinks this is an entire record of just those two songs. I wish I could recall the circumstance behind that impression. It must have been a hard drive to somewhere.

This is the last extra song, and I have no recollection of this one whatsoever, because see above.

The next time we return to the Re-Listening project, we’ll check out a soundtrack from a 2002 motion picture. And, it’s a soundtrack of cover songs. You probably know every one of them. If you’re familiar with early 21st century films this should click into place for you without any more hints. You’ll hear some of them, probably, next week.

But, first, come back here tomorrow, too. Because we’ll have something fun to help us mark time until the weekend.

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20
Aug 24

There’s a hint of live music below

Well, today was just beautiful. Impossibly so. Sunny, blue skies and temperatures settling into the 70s. There was no ambitious mercury in the thermometer. No overbearing sun. Just this …

… and the promise of another day or two of it afterward.

It was this beautiful. I couldn’t decide what to do with the day. Which was weird.

Finally, I settled on sitting outside and reading. It was a good choice.

It was such a good idea, I did it again, sitting outside this evening, listening to the symphonic crickets, flipping through pages of a book, asking myself why I don’t do this all of the time.

I should do this all of the time. Or at least more.

We return to the Re-Listening project. Regular readers know I’ve been listening to my old CDs in the car, and in the order of their acquisition. We’re in, let’s say it is 2006, listening to a 1998 record that I picked up at a library sale. It’s everyone’s 1990s friend, the Dave Matthews Band.

“Before These Crowded Streets” was their third album. Béla Fleck appears. Alanis Morissette is on it. And so is the virtuoso Tim Reynolds — this being just before he joined the band. It was another successful album, even as they were beginning to change some things up. The instrumentation gets more exotic, the time signature experiments are underway, and the themes got a bit more mature, a bit more worldly.

This was the record that pushed the Titanic soundtrack from atop the Billboard charts. Three singles became hits, the record went platinum four times in the United States.

Some of the best parts of this record are the interludes, usually outtakes, between the songs. And the biggest memory I have about this record is actually from a live show. They play the amphitheater in 1998, supporting this record and the version they did of “Don’t Drink the Water” was just about the most intense thing I could imagine seeing at a yuppie party. Here’s a version from that tour, about three weeks earlier than the show I saw. This is sedate in comparison to my recollection.

They’re still at it, of course. Ten studio albums and something like 17 live albums later. Touring machines, who even knows how many millions of concert tickets they’ve sold at this point. But I know some people who have purchased a lot of them. My god-sisters-in-law (just go with it) and their large entourage see them a lot, probably four or five different dates a year. And they invited us to one of them. It was my third or fifth time seeing them, and my first in 20-plus years.

I don’t think I even mentioned the concert here. We left the show early for some reason that was never explained. The group gathered and walked out and, I said Who doesn’t stay for the false finish, let alone the encore? And the answer was, the crowd of people we were with, for some reason.

Though I blame DMB as the sole culprit in the outlandish ticket prices we’ve seen explode in the last several decades,
they still create a happy crowd. And their tour continues right now. They’re playing the northwest, before heading back east in late September for some festivals, and then a few fall dates in Mexico.

We’ll go north, to Canada, when next we return to the Re-Listening project.

But what will we get into here tomorrow? Be s ure to stop by and find out!

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16
Jul 24

‘Step high and light’

Just when you thought the sinusitis was done with you, the head thickens once again. Otherwise? Feel great! Except for right around the middle of the head. It’s just a head pressure thing, a let me go and move on abut my day thing, an enough already thing. It’ll be fine soon.

So, it’s back to the OTC pills.

I treated myself to a nice long swim today. The water was warm, 92 degrees the thermometer said, and it is true what swimmers say, you swim faster in colder water.

That’s why I went slow, you see. Has nothing to do with taking forever to get my arms warmed up. Nothing to do with poor form. Nothing to do the continued head cold recovery. It was all about the warm water.

But I did have a nice 3,000 yards of it.

It gave me a lot of time to think of something legendary swim coach David Marsh told me. He has won 12 national team championships and 89 individual NCAA champions, and he’s coached 49 Olympians, so you come around to thinking he knows a thing or two about what happens in a pool.

On a show I hosted, he told me, “You have to respect someone willing to spend hours and hours, swimming hundreds of laps, to shave a thousandth of a second off of their best time.”

I didn’t swim a lot then, but I thought I understood his point. But now, swimming lots of laps of my own, I appreciate the point a bit more.

See? I’m slow in the pool.

I’m never shaving anything off my time.

But I bet if Marsh stopped by, he could give me two pointers that would improve everything.

Too bad he’s busy just now, Olympic year and all.

We return to the Re-Listening project. I’ve been playing all of my old CDs in my car, in the order of their acquisition. The real point is to just enjoy the music, but I’ve doubled my value by using it as a way to pad out the site with a few memories and some good music. These aren’t reviews, far from it; there are enough of those, and then some, out there. Besides, we’re going back to 2005, or 2006, to discuss a 2000 record.

I picked up “Smile” without knowing anything about it, because I’d been fully bitten by The Jayhawks bug. It was their sixth studio album, and it was a move in a somewhat new direction for the band from Minnesota. The alt-country, jangle-pop sound gave way to a more straightforward pop, sonically.

“Smile” reached number 129 on the Billboard 200 and number 14 on Billboard’s Top Internet Albums chart, which no one knew existed.

If you picked up this album, the first sounds you heard were also the title track.

It isn’t entirely devoid of the jangle-pop sound we all loved so much. But you can chart the progression all throughout the record.

But you couldn’t overlook the new direction. Probably it didn’t sit well with the purists, but Gary Olson was gone (for the first time) and this was their second album without him. It was like they were looking for something. And it took a little getting used to.

They were clearly exploring new distortion pedals. If you sit with it, though, the lyrics are still strong in spirit. Most importantly, the harmonies were still shimmering.

This was always a car CD for me. A lot of back-and-forth to work, 20 or 25 minutes at a time, for quite a while. I was probably late a lot. Hurried parking lots and the like. I remember I bombarded The Yankee with it, because we were carpooling at the time, but she preferred other Jayhawks records, I think. I also think it’s hard to go wrong. What you get, across their catalog, is material for a lot of different moods.

The Jayhawks are going back on the road next month. And, in October, they’ll be playing a show about two-and-a-half hours from us. This was the first band my lovely bride and I saw together. They were about that same distance away that night. And the next day we decided we, in our late 20s, were too old for driving that far and back in one night for a show, with work the day after. (We were both working morning drive at the time and being in the newsroom at 6 a.m. the next day was not easy or pleasant.)

But this show is on a Saturday. Something to think about.

And with that we are, for the time being, caught up in the Re-Listening project. But there are still about 150 CDs to hear again, and share with you.

Come back tomorrow, we’ll talk about a neat little light.

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9
Jul 24

Mid-century sod

It is so hot, it must be July. Later this week, I’m shopping for ice vests. Summer just feels different, the older I get, and it is, of course, getting hotter, too. Maybe I should invest in ice vests.

We sat in the water to read. Shade, body-temperature water and good books. There was little relief in the activity. But it was a lovely activity.

I finished reading a biography on Gino Bartoli, Road to Valor. It’s one of about 250 books you can get on Ginettacio, any number of which are quality reads. It’s one of the handful that focuses a bit more on the Gino the Pious aspect of the man. Champion cyclist, hero of Italy, Resistenza italiana, who had his best years on the bike taken away by the war, a man who nevertheless used his bike to save an uncounted number of people’s lives during that time.

Among his highlights, Bartali won the Giro d’Italia in 1936 and 1937 and the Tour de France in 1938. Then the war, and when it was time to race again, he was already viewed, in his early 30s, as an old man. And so the anziano won the Giro again in 1946, and the Tour in 1948. It was, and remains, the longest between Tour wins and the second longest such streak in the Giro, which brings us to his rival, the great Fausto Coppi.

Coppi was the vanguard of the next generation of great Italian bike racers, another top talent, and he didn’t want to sit in line behind the old man, hence the rivalry. The book oversells it a little. There are stories, not included here, of how the two got along and worked together, even at the peak of their rivalry. But that duality doesn’t lend itself to drama, one supposes.

(Coppi would later set the mark for the longest interval between wins in the Giro.)

Everything about Bartali’s life — short of his riding a bike at the absolute peak of his powers — strikes you as a hard life. But it isn’t a hard read. The authors, Aili McConnon and Andres McConnon, took great pains with their source material and interviewed many people who knew Bartali. He was the subject of some of the myth-making, lyrical style of mid-century Italian journalism, but none of that was used here. Instead, this easy breezy read comes off a tiny bit elementary. It’s a backhanded compliment: I enjoyed the story they were telling. I wanted more of it.

There are other stories about his time during the war that deserve more attention. He put some of his Jewish friends in an apartment he owned, hid people in his cellar. The biography discusses his ferrying messages and forged documents through the Italian underground, hiding them in the frame of his bike and risk his life, trading on his celebrity, to move this information from one place to another. There are varying accounts of how this played out with the fascists and the Nazis, but that gets glossed over somewhat. There was no mention of his leading refugees toward the Swiss Alps in 1943. Some of the gloss is understandable. It wasn’t something he talked about, and a lot of it are now vague and, contemporaneously dangerous diary entries others kept, or decades old recollections. Bartali himself told his son, “One does these things and then that’s that.”

It was an act of his faith, and then, like many people, he simply tried to return to his life, tried to build a new and better one. And chapters and chapters could have been written about that, for most of us are fortunate enough to not know the experience. Just after the war, for example, when Italians started racing bikes again, they did not race for money. No one had any. They raced for chickens. Or for supplies. Or, in one instance, there was a race for pipes, that the winner gave his community so they could continue rebuilding their infrastructure.

There are always a lot more to these stories, is all.

I had a 2,500 yard swim today. The water was about 92 degrees. It felt a bit warm for a swim.

Swimmers say they swim faster in colder water. I swim slow enough, under any conditions, for this to be a negligible, to say nothing of perceiving it. But I did notice how warm the water is. Can a pool feel sticky?

Just as I finished my laps, I saw a plane turning north overhead. I waited until this moment to take a picture, because I thought I might need to make up a navel-gazing essay about two planes occupying the same plane and what it means for time and conspiracy theories and the efficacy of windshield wipers at speed.

But then I rememebered, it is Tuesday, and I’m not pressed for content.

Still, airlines aside, do you think a pilot ever gets up in the air and aims for a contrail? Just to break it up?

And while you think about that, please enjoy one of our stands of brown-eyed susan flowers (Rudbeckia triloba).

If anyone needs some for an art project, a bouquet or flower pressing, let me know. We have plenty.

And, finally, we return once more to the Re-Listening project. Longtime readers now this is an intermittent feature. In my car, I am playing all of my CDs, in the order of their acquisition. Here, I am writing about some of what I hear. It is one part reminiscence, one part excuse to put some good music in this space and entirely an excuse to pad the site.

I’ve been behind on the Re-Listening project for … I dunno … roughly a year. (See? Very intermittent.) It looks, though, as I’ll be caught up next week. That’s a weird feeling. But I digress.

So we’ll return to 2005, when I was listening to the 2004 Harry Connick Jr. release, “Only You.” it was his 21st studio album. It earned a Grammy nomination debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 in the U.S. and hit the top 10 in the UK and Australia. All of the tracks are Baby Boomer standards. I think I picked this up used.

I played this whenever The Yankee was around so I would appear cultured.

My favorite songs were full of understated little moments. The Temptations and Stevie Wonder and a big handful of other recording artists made it famous, but Connick had to do it too. He puts some nice coloratura to it. And that little vocal nod at 1:24 somehow makes the whole song.

I was, and remain, a fan of this one.

And since we’re listening to standards, the next CD up in the Re-Listening project is a Frank Sinatra greatest hits, another 2005 library find. I prefer Deano, but this is pretty good. “Nice ‘n’ Easy” spent nine weeks atop the Billboard chart in 1960, and was nominated for the Grammy in the Album of the Year, Best Male Vocal Performance and Best Arrangement categories. It went gold. Old blue eyes could do no wrong, right? He was doing some things right here, to be sure.

It’s one of those records that is useful to have, but I never really played all of that much.

This is Sinatra’s take of a Hoagy Carmichael-Ned Washington classic. It’s beautiful.

There are 16 tracks, almost all of them are performed as ballads. The notable exception is the first song, the title track.

George and Ira Gershwin wrote this one for an operetta that was never realized. Ginger Rogers and Fred Aistaire brought it to life, Billie Holiday immortalized it. And then came Sinatra. There’s a story out there about how he had to really understand a song, really feel a song, to be able to sing it, and this song is on a slow enough roll that you can think about that for a bit, and then, sure enough, you hear it.

Most of the tracks here will be at least passingly familiar to casual listeners, but you have to have an affinity for 1947 music to know this song. Those times when I play this CD I marvel at how I’ve never heard this before. In 1947 Art Lund, Dick Haymes, Sinatra, Dennis Day, The Pied Pipers and Frankie Laine all had a hit with it. (Lund’s version topped the charts. Sinatra’s peaked at number six.) The Four Freshmen, Andy Williams and Dean Martin all made renditions later as well. But the first time I heard it, it sounded like this.

Those crying violins put you in that cafe, but the voice really puts you in the seat at the table.

And that’ll do it, for now. The next time we return to the Re-Listening project we’ll try some 2000 Americana pop from Minneapolis. And then I’ll be caught up. Unless I get behind again by then.

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11
Jun 24

A mechanic, two hours of exercise, and music that still holds up

Took my lovely bride’s car to the shop yesterday and got it back the same afternoon. Regular maintenance sort of stuff. But things are better, she said.

The guy has a shop in the middle of a neighborhood. It’s a two-bay shop, with a slab that’s not big enough for the cars he has on the property. His office is all the way in the back, it’s a … careworn sort of place. That isn’t ordinarily the right word for this sort of thing, but it fits. No one is especially happy when they have to see their mechanic. You take a little angst and stress and — depending on your pocketbook or what’s going on — maybe a little anxiety to your mechanic. People bring in the things that make something careworn.

The couple of times we’ve been there, I’ve seen a few fishing poles in the front room. They’re just sitting there, on a pile of stuff that looks like it hasn’t been moved in a long time. Two rooms back, there’s the guy. A bit on the tall side, thick all the way around. Always wears a bandana. He strikes you as a time-is-money guy. He’s economical with his words, because if he’s talking with you he isn’t making money elsewhere.

I’m not even sure what the guy did to her car given the small amount of money he charged. I asked him to look into something about my car, too. And maybe he will. If he does, maybe he’ll charge me a low, low price, too.

It’ll cost more.

Monday was a beautiful, mild, sunny day. Today was perpetually overcast, but Monday was just lovely. The sort of day where you could unassumingly spend too much time indoors. The sort of day where you wouldn’t even notice it. I spent too much of it inside.

I did go for a little 30-mile bike ride, my first in eight days. I felt like I needed a few days after my last one, and then other things come along and fill your days and before you know it, you wonder if you’ll remember how to balance the thing. It’s embarrassing.

They closed a road while I wasn’t riding. The first sign I saw said the bridge was out. It’s an overpass over the freeway, and I figured it couldn’t be really out, because that would have inconvenienced the motorists below and surely I would have learned about this. So I ignored the signs and the barrels, rode right around them and up to the bridge. And only when I was on the thing did I worry, but the bridge is an engineering marvel and, halfway over, I rationalized that if it could hold itself up then whatever was going on wouldn’t be challenged too much by one guy and a bike.

Only nothing was going on with the bridge. The issue was a little further down the road. This was the issue.

Once I got around that I had, of course, another little stretch of road that was closed from the other direction for the same reason. Almost a mile guaranteed with no traffic. It was lovely! I should just go back and ride that over and over and over again, for as long as it lasts.

Meanwhile, last night was the night the local volunteer fire department … practices driving their trucks around? They actually closed down one road, and a volunteer who takes his traffic directing duties very seriously waved me onto this road.

I’ve never been on this road before! A new road! This particular area is laid out in a wide country grid, so I knew exactly where it would go. It was almost like being lost, but not nearly as fun. Being lost when your legs feel good is just about the most fun thing you can do on a bike. The other day The Yankee was telling me about a ride she had without me where she got turned around for a while and I said, “Really!?” a little excited, and a little jealous. So when I’m not haunting that closed road I need to find more new roads. (I have one in mind just now.)

I saw some beautiful cattle enjoying their evening graze.

Soon after, a fire truck passed me. And I met that rig two more times. I’m not at all certain what they were practicing. (And I know for certain it was VFD practice because they’d deployed signs in some of the areas that were impacted.) Maybe they have new drivers.

Early this afternoon I went for a swim. I put my camera on the bottom of the pool to document the experience.

The experience was laps. I swam, slowly, 1,250 yards. All part of the build up. The build up to swimming more, later. As usual, it took a while for my arms to feel like doing laps. The first 50 yards or so felt great. The next 600 and change felt sluggish. Somewhere between 700 and 735 yards, though, I felt like a champion swimmer. Long build ups, short peaks. Typical.

Actually it felt like a nice swim from about 700 yards through to the end, though I was ready to be done at the end.

Ever since I was a little boy, I said in my best Robert Redford voice, I’ve always gotten hungry around the water. Playing in it, splashing around in a lake, wading in a pool or swimming medium distances, they would all create the same deep hunger. It’s a familiar feeling that a lot of little boys and girls get. Only it never left me. I came to think of it as a physical and a mental need. I can just look at the water and get hungry, was a joke I told my friends. And so I had a second lunch today.

Which was great because, in the later afternoon, and into the early evening, I went out for a casual little 25-mile bike ride. I saw this tractor, which, if you look carefully, is dripping something on the road.

And I set three PRs this evening, all on (little) hills. I am not at all sure how that came to be, but I’ll take it.

Let us return, once more, to the Re-Listening project. As you may know, I’ve been listening to all of my old CDs in the order of their acquisition. I’m also writing a bit about them here, just to pad the site, share some good music and maybe stir up a memory or two.

And today we reach back to 2005, to listen to a CD that was released in 1995, Son Volt’s debut, “Trace.” Uncle Tupelo’s Jay Farrar left the band and that lead to the creation of Son Volt and Wilco (Uncle Tupelo sans Farrar). Wilco’s debut was released first, by a few months, but Son Volt’s debut, in September of 1995, was a bigger hit. Either way, listeners one. (Both bands were, and are, terrific. Two alt-rock, alt-country bands are better than one.)

“Trace” was a reasonable commercial hit, peaking at number 166 on the Billboard 200 chart and soaring to number 7 on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart. Perhaps even more importantly, it was a critical success.

“Windfall” was the first single, and the first track. This was the first Son Volt sound most of us heard.

Something about Farrar’s voice that conveys a desperate, lonely, honky tonk feel that you didn’t get a lot of at that time. It was the nineties! And this, for me, was a library pickup to help fill an important gap in the collection.

Here’s the thing, though. These guys could absolutely rock.

The first time I saw them live was at Midtown Music Festival, in Atlanta, in 1998. It was a three-day, seven-stage show. There were more than 100 bands there, absurdly good acts, and you could see the whole weekend’s worth of music — if you were willing to sweat and stand for the whole thing — for just $30 bucks. Son Volt played early Friday. Just after that we saw the Indigo Girls and in between songs Amy Ray said they’d been over to see Son Volt, too. “God bless those guys,” she said.

I saw them once more, the next year. On Valentine’s Day, in fact. I took a girl to a first date to see them. I’d met her in a record store — and somehow it seemed that we knew each other, or the same people, or people thought we knew one another — and music was important to her. Soon after, we worked together. I got tickets to the show and she decided to call it a date, which was unexpected, at least by me. We had a nice time, and I am came to find out later that I passed many tests that night. We dated for four months after that.

She’s manages a big construction company and is married to a realtor. They live close to the beaches where she grew up, close to her family. It looks pretty perfect for her. I wonder what sort of music she’s listening to these days.

If Son Volt is somehow on the list, she’ll have to travel to see them this summer. They are playing a few festivals. Still rocking.