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

Re-Listening

Everything about this post is a classic, even the cliches

I rode my 25-mile time trial route today. This is the 13th time I’ve done this route, and that doesn’t matter. My time today was right in the middle of the 13 times, and that doesn’t matter. Top half by 16 seconds, and that doesn’t mean anything. It could have been the wind or a little better fueling or I just sat up a few seconds earlier on one day than the other. It doesn’t matter.

Maybe I took one less photograph this day than that slightly slower day that separates the two halves of the sample.

That’s about halfway through the route. I just like the way the road dips into those trees, how they carve a bit of darkness out of the brightness of day. Each time I’m on that road I imagine the next little bit to be something like spelunking on wheels, but it’s just a patch of trees, a good canopy that will soon open back up to the sky. Too soon, on some days, like today.

It is official, heat is hot, and right now heat is bad. Also, it’s going to get hotter.

When your skin is under siege — and urushiol is a siege — heat isn’t especially pleasant. The cab of this tractor is air conditioned.

My bicycle is not. But maybe if I’d gone faster? Maybe if today’s ride had found its way to the top of the spreadsheet.

May as well start digging out from this stack of CDs I’m under. I was doing something here I called the Re-Listening Project, where I was playing all of my old CDs in the order of their acquisition. More or less. When last we did this I was in a batch of CDs that replaced some that had been stolen. It’s a weird bit of decades old nonsense that serves only to confuse me for something that only interests me, but, hey, my name is at the top of the site. Also, I’m probably way behind in this little effort which, again, is a singular indulgence. The point was to put a few songs from each disc here, maybe think up something interesting about them. This never was a review, because no one needs more of those.

At this point, I’m just trying to take some discs out of the Re-Listen To Do pile and put them back in the old books. It’s a big stack.

Daylight was Duncan Sheik’s third studio album. (He’s up to nine, now.) It was released in 2002, and I probably bought this soon after. (Shame on me for not clearly remembering that detail.)

This was a single, and found its way into a movie, a teen comedy few remember.

This one sounds romantic. Has great imagery. And even the narrator knows that it is in no way true. It was, and remains, my favorite song on the album.

For a long time I played this CD on my way into the studio, because singing along, I thought, might just lower my speaking tone a bit for the day. And during that time part of this song fit the vibe. A sarcastic sing-along was, I thought, just one of the most clever things you could do in a deep cut.

There might have been a breakup right around that time.

The next one is Deuces Wild, B.B. King’s thirty-fifth studio album, which was released in 1997. Each song features a second musician, and so this was one those homage-slash-gimmick records. Also, it is quite good. With appearances by Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Mick Hucknall, Bonnie Raitt, D’Angelo, Jools Holland, Dr. John, Marty Stuart, Dionne Warwick, Paul Carrack, The Rolling Stones, Zucchero, and David Gilmour how could it not be great?

Also, it had these three tracks, which are automatic favorites for a variety of reasons. The first being Tracy Chapman, because Tracy Chapman is absolute dynamite in everything she does.

And this one, because the idea of Heavy D seducing Lucille is too hilarious to overlook. Plus, the entire concept is fun. There’s just enough mirth in King’s voice to allow this to be nearly timeless.

Speaking of. This song was released in 1960. King played it as far back as 1967, at least. King and Willie Nelson did it way back in 1984, at least. As a duet, the two of them have had it in their repertoire since 1984 at the very least.

I remember hearing this track for the first time and thinking it felt like something as a sad dirge. This could be the last time and all of that. But King played for another 17 glorious years after this was released. I’d been in crowds at concerts where the audience had serenaded Willie Nelson on his birthday. More than once, as I recall. And he marked his 90th birthday, in 2023, with two concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. He’s timeless, so is King. So is this. Enjoy the man hailed as the single most important electric guitarist of the last half of the 20th century and one of the greatest troubadours and musician of his, this, or any generation.

That song is 66 years old, and a timeless treasure. Willie Nelson was just 26 or 27 when he wrote it on the road. Looking back, I don’t even think I could understand, truly understand, the song at that age. While it is amazing that he could right something that would persist as this has, we’re all just fortunate that it has stuck around for each of us, when we’re ready.

And, with that, I am something like 35 discs behind.

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6
Jun 25

Gaining light late

We were standing in the kitchen this evening, it was 6:57 p.m. We were talking about this or that and I looked into the dining room and saw the sun streaming in from one of the windows on the front of the house.

I like when the sun comes in and I just wanted to show you that.

By that time of the evening, at this time of year, the sun is starting to fall over the house across the way. We’ll soon have new neighbors there — the current hypothesis is they have children in school and are waiting to wrap up their school year and whatever else. I hope they enjoy how the sun falls on the woods behind them after a bright day.

Hopefully they’ll have bright days when they move in. This was an overcast one, until just before that time. And by overcast I mean Canada. And by Canada I mean the huge fires raging up there. It reminds me of 2023, when we moved here, when big swaths of Canada were on fire. Since we can’t blame the climate or the Anthropocene era, I guess we’ll just have to clumsily correlate that to people moving into this neighborhood.

Fortunately for Canada, no other houses around here are on the market just now.

I got dropped most droppedly. Mere miles from the house. I blame the wind. And also the nice ride I had yesterday. And that my lovely bride is riding very well right now. Anyway, this was an out and back, and it worked out to just under 20 miles, total. This is when she was coming back after turning around. My computer said I’d ridden 8.48 miles at the time. Which means that she was already almost a mile ahead of me by here.

Most droppedly.

The next shot on my phone is just an empty bit of road and field, because she flew out of the frame. And, then, the third shot was as I whipped the camera back around to my left.

Do you know how if you hold the shutter button down it’ll just keep taking pictures? The burst mode shoots something like 10 frames a second. So this was three-hundredths of a second? She’s riding very well. You’d be dropped, too.

Ehhh, I’ll catch her tomorrow. Or just hold her wheel. Or at least vainly try to do so.

Let us return now to the Re-Listening project, where we are now only seven or eight albums behind. The Re-Listening project, you might recall, is a now years-long effort to listen to all of my old CDs in the order of their acquisition. More or less that order. I’m a little out of order right now, because I mixed up the books. None of that matters. What matters is that I’m listening to music I enjoy and, for our purposes here, am padding out the site with a little more content. Videos, music, and occasionally a memory or two. These aren’t reviews, because no one cares. Anyway, just press the play button.

Anyway, let’s say it’s the summer or fall of 2002. Counting Crows fourth studio album, “Hard Candy,” was released that July. Counting Crows were, and are, a big, but my interest would wane in subsequent years. But this is still quite good. It went to number five on the charts, was certified gold in the U.S. and in three other countries besides. It was lighter, full of pop, and well received.

Anyway, the title track was the first track, and when I played this in the car recently I wondered if I had to reconsider my stance on the band.

They’re not bad. You don’t buy six records across the decades because you dislike an act. I just outgrew this one, is all.

This was the last single they released off the record, about 11 months into the album (you could do that back then). The layers of it are quite intricate and I mostly remember this as a song I played in an empty apartment which was empty because no one was there but me. I wasn’t enough to fill up the space then, so there was a lot of overwrought pop and rock music, I guess. See, outgrew it.

And despite my saying that, for me, these two deep cuts hold up very well.

Hey, we should all be so lucky as to have two or three things we did hold up after 20-plus years, right?

Anyway, the Counting Crows are still doing it, 30-some years later. They released an album, “Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!” just last month, and they’re touring the U.S. and Europe this summer and fall in support of it. And, if you can’t wait until they come near to you, Rick Beato recently released a well-done interview with Adam Duritz where they discuss making all of these decades of music.

The next record in this book is from a hardcore punk veteran. Only I didn’t know that at the time. There’s great percussion, and it’s singer-songerwriter pop-rock. Peter Searcy was sitting at the intersection of the Crows and the Replacements. And, if I may say so dismissively, it fits 2000 almost perfectly.

This is one of the tracks that got airplay, and probably caused me to buy the record.

This was on a small southern California punk label that shut down a few years ago. And, again, given how I have always heard this whole record it’s funny to me to think of any punk work at all. If I had to describe it I’d say it’s a high charged coffee house record.

It’s a fine little power pop solo effort. The lyrics do get a bit repetitive. Listening to it today, it feels like there’s a formula at play. Not that anyone was doing that in 2000 or anything.

Here’s the title track.

And, for me, those are the biggest thrusts of the album.

Peter Searcy has returned to groups, he’s in a power trio now called Guilty Birds, with Grant Fitch and Ben Daughtrey, two guys with serious grunge and indie and alt rock credentials. He’s also selling real estate in Georgia. I take that to mean he’s playing music for the fun and creativity of it, which sounds nice after all of these years.

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29
May 25

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.

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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 …