Re-Listening


23
Jan 25

Re-Listening: Not sure if rhythm or all the vocalists

The front of our house faces to the northwest.

Excuse me, I have started typing and a cat has interrupted.

Thirty-four minutes later I am reminded why I sometimes struggle to get things done. And he only moved after I had a little coughing fit, because I am getting a sinus-head-cold-thing.

But after 20 minutes, he started snoring, which is always kind of cute.

Anyway, the front door faces to the northwest. If you’re standing on the porch, the driveway is to your right. We have something of an oversized driveway. It seems that, at least for a time, the previous owners had an RV. So there’s a spot for that. It’d be great for additional parking, if we knew that many people. We don’t. What it is, right now, is extra cement to shovel. Or slip and fall on. (I’m fine.) Or ignore. And that’s what we’ve learned to do. After the first snow here I paid attention to the tire tracks and saw the part that isn’t important for getting into or out of the driveway and garage. And I’m not shoveling that part.

It’s on the northeast side, almost east-northeast. And this is how it looks four days after the snow and in constant subfreezing temperatures.

Which is also the answer I found earlier today when I asked myself, Why haven’t I been outside in a while?

It’s stupidly cold. And I have a temperature rule. That’s why.

We’ll hit the low 40s to start next week, though.

We haven’t visiting the Re-Listening project lately, which means I’m behind again, which means we’ll rush through some more records. The purpose of the Re-Listening project is that I am playing all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. It’s a lot of fun and a lot of nostalgia. And a lot of good music. I figured I could pad the site out and write about it here, and so that’s what I’ve been irregularly doing. And boy, has it been irregular. I don’t think we’ve done a CD since November. Then, I was listening to music I picked up in 2006 or 2007.

I’ve started a new CD book now, however. And I think I’ve done this out of order. It doesn’t matter. But it matters to me. Which means it matters not at all.

The year, then, is 2001 or so. Or maybe 1998. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I guess I have to re-frame the whole project. I’m re-listening to the CDs mostly in the order in which I acquired them, more or less.

I’m sure I had this on a cassette, originally, since it came out in 1992 and the first time I heard this song on the radio, or MTV or wherever it was, I knew this was something I had to hear more of.

Which was pretty odd for a kid being steeped in everything Seattle exported.

But these guys from Chicago put out a big sound full of rock, soul, and rhythm and blues. And it was fantastic. It still is.

So imagine my surprise the first time the tape got to the third song. My utter delight, looking at the faux wood grained stereo, those big hip high speakers with the black foam covers, when these sounds came out of it. Every sound is perfect.

But the real treat in the record, then as now, is the sheer variety. The styles, the singers, the vibes, all of it. Every tack is a story all it’s own.

Also, the vocals. All these people have these hugely powerful voices. It’s also been a great singalong. And I do always wonder, when it does float to the top this way or that, how it disappears for big chunks of time.

A song I was just singing while washing the dishes.

Sonia Dada toured at least a few continents, released four more studio albums and a live album before they broke up in 2005. Not bad for a bunch of guys that started singing in the subway. Sadly, I don’t have any of their other records, but they’ve been added to the list.

The next time we get back to the Re-Listening project, which won’t take two months, we’ll hear from a pair of north Georgia boys.


7
Nov 24

I’m grading, so you get the simple version of the day

I made a Christmas present today. Can’t be talked about. You never know who reads this stuff. And another present arrived. Ssssh, don’t tell anyone.

Christmas? I am in no way prepared for the Christmas season. I never really am. But it doesn’t seem like that time of the year should be sneaking up on us. It never really should. But all of this happens every year.

If I wrote about that today, what would I do in the next six weeks? I should get back to grading, anyway.

I started the week with 148 items to grade, and I’ll finish those up tonight. It’ll be a fury. Or a flurry. It’ll probably be fuzzy.

Let’s return to the Re-Listening project. In the car, I am playing all of my old CDs in the order of their acquisition. And I’m writing about them here, occasionally, to pad out days like today. These aren’t music reviews, because who needs that. But they are sometimes a good excuse to dredge up a memory or two. They’re always an excuse to put some good music here.

And this good music is from Will Hoge. He’s from Nashville, and he fits the overlapping areas of Americana and country these days, but his debut was pure blue bar rock ‘n’ roll. He had a band that almost made it, then toured the South as a solo act with a supporting band. Dan Baird stood there and played guitar next to him, so it was basically a coronation. Carousel came out in 2001, and this song broke speakers all over alt rock stations.

I loved it immediately, it was the frenetic pace, the driving rhythm section, the desperate way he was screaming out the lyrics. Hey, it was 2001, but it was five or six years before I picked up this record.

It’s a debut album, which is great, but also limited. He was still growing into his craft. And I’ve yet to see him live, but it looks like a good time.

Here’s the title track.

Somehow, this was one of those CD mixes, one with a provenance I’ve forgotten. But whoever made this did me a real solid, or maybe I knew what I was doing, because there are five live Will Hoge tracks tacked onto the back, including this phenomenal Bill Withers cover.

He’s got a peppy little version of “Mess Around” that apparently no one has ever uploaded to the web. I’m not saying this version of the song being online would solve the web’s problems, but we can’t disprove it, either.

And there’s a sweaty bar version of one of the other key songs from this record, one I didn’t share earlier because I wanted to put it right here, in a live version worth hearing, in all of its clangy, brassy, Telecaster glory.

Since then Will Hoge has put out 13 more records, and I’m going to introduce his music to a relative soon, because some things just need to be passed down.

One day I’ll even get to see him play. He is doing some touring right now, just not close by. (Update: Turns out he was here about three weeks ago, and I had no idea. Come back, Will!)

The next time we return to the Re-Listening Project, we’ll go all the way back to 1992. This was a CD I picked up to finally replace an old cassette and I guarantee you that every time I’ve listened to it, I’ve wondered why I waited so long to do that. It’s going to be a great listen.


1
Oct 24

Welcome to Catober!

Welcome to Catober, where we daily highlight the kitties, because once a week isn’t enough. They also get their own posts in October, because they slipped that into their contract when we weren’t looking. So, I’ll take turns highlighting each cat. Tomorrow we’ll have some amazing Phoebe cuteness. You can see the full collection of lovely cat poses right here.

I’m mid-thigh in grading things. Fortunately not hip deep, and only that deep because I stayed up far too late — even for me — grading stuff. And so today I graded stuff. Tonight, I will grade other things.

At this rate I’ll be grading things all day and night tomorrow. I believe I have it paced out so I can finish grading on Thursday. Just in time for this weekend’s stuff to start rolling in for grading next week …

Whoever set this schedule up deserves a talking to. Me, it was me. I deserve a talking to.

Here’s a video I shot on yesterday’s bike ride. There are a lot of fields turning a beautiful, bright yellow just now. I might have caught these just a few minutes too late in the evening for the color to really pop. Still lovely in their own way.

  

Since it is the beginning of the month, we should check in on the mileage. September was a good month, my best September ever, and it turned into the fourth most miles in any one month, be they ever so humble. And we can see the progression through the first nine months of the year on this neat little chart.

The blue line is this year, the red one is last year, and the steady green one is a simple what if projection of doing 10 miles per day. I’ve been trailing behind that, sadly, since mid July. Now I’m making progress and I’ll be back over the green line before you read this.

And there are some humble, yet cool-to-me milestones coming up on the bike. You’ll be underwhelmed.

I’ll be whelmed.

That’ll be the extent of it.

Let’s get back to the Re-Listening project for a brief update. This is the one where I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. At some point, I figured I could write about it to pad out the site with a bit of content — share some videos and the like, but these aren’t reviews, because no one cares. So let’s get to it, so I can get caught up. (I’m only behind by three albums, I think.)

We’ll return to 2006 or so, when I picked up a copy of Live’s 1999 record, “The Distance to Here.” It was the band’s fifth studio album, it went platinum in a month, debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 chart, topped the charts in three other countries, and settled into the top 10 in a half dozen more. They promoted three singles from the record, all which became at least moderately successful on the Alternative Airplay chart. But it never really worked for me. This is the last Live album I bought, and by the time Ed Kowalczyk left the band a decade later, I had no idea.

But I have two things here. This works a whole lot better now, for me, than it did back then. It could be a small doses record at the very least. And one or two of these tunes could be sticky — which is sometimes good and sometimes “get out of my head.”

The other thought was centered around this show at a concert. I saw the band at a festival when they were touring on this record. They closed their set with this song, and they were working out the instrumentation so that, one-by-one, the band slipped away off the darkened stage. Then there was only Kowalczyk, and the whole sweaty crowd was singing along and he stopped strumming his guitar, they kept singing, and he waved and walked off. It was better than this version, which came about some years later, but similar.

Kowalczyk rejoined the band after a few years away. And then he fired the band. They were all, as I recall, southeastern Pennsylvania high school classmates who got their break soon after, and became a 10-years-later overnight success. And now, they’re taking turns suing each other or some such. Kowalczyk is touring with the name, but all new band mates. They just came off the road from a midwestern swing last week.

In the next installation of the Re-Listening project, we’ll try out a pretty decent tribute album I’d entirely forgotten about — which is entirely the point.

And now, back to grading. And next for you, more Catober!


17
Sep 24

Come for the cats, be pleasantly surprised by something else

I have been asked by the house’s executives to get right to the important part of the day’s activity, which is, of course, the most popular feature on the site. So we will go directly to checking in on the kitties.

Phoebe is usually the driver of this, because she knows she is very photogenic. Just sitting on the landing of the stairs, look at those pretty eyes.

She does not want to share the mail, however. Sometimes she gets mail, but she’s convinced all of it is hers. She sits on it.

Oh, sure, she lets us have the bills, but she keeps the bulk mail, magazines and the like. She’s not supposed to be on the counter, but our cats are jailhouse lawyers, and they’ve figured out that if you’re sitting on a bank mailer, you’re not sitting on the countertop.

Poseidon is no better about countertops. And here he is, different day, same counter, sleeping on a box full of produce.

He’s waiting to see what’s inside. He loves trying to chew on some of our veggies. This summer he discovered corn stalks. Corn stalks are bad for cats, so we have to hide them. And we have to hide them when he’s not paying attention, because he remembers they’re in the fridge, or stored away here or there. He remembers long after they’re gone. He’s probably dreaming about corn there.

And when there is no corn, he might switch between pouting about it, and trying to charm you into getting some for him.

But we, of course, tell him no. He’s never one not to try, though. He’s a persistent little so and so.

The cats, you see, are doing well, and they thank you for your interest.

I had a nice cool swim this afternoon. It was a 1,720 yard swim. They’re getting a little faster of late, but there’s only so much improvement of which I am capable of. I know it, because I can still shave chunks of time off in pretty decent increments. Probably it’s the cooler water.

Also, I’m swimming enough to know when my arms will stop protesting and just do the work. And I’m close to knowing lap lengths just by feel.

But to demonstrate my ability: this is the summer where I’ve finally started to swim in a straight line.

More or less.

Let us return to the Re-Listening project. Here, I am listening to all of my old CDs in the car, and I’m playing them in the order of their acquisition. I’m also writing about them here, because we need the content. These aren’t reviews, because they’d be woefully out of date and I’m no critic. They are, however, sometimes full of memories, and a good excuse to post a few videos. These songs are from 2003, from an album I got in 2006 or so, of the overnight success, Howie Day, who was, in fact, a seven-year overnight success.

“Stop All the World Now” was the second album and, the major label debut, for Day. Critically, it got a lukewarm reception, but it went platinum in 18 or 19 months, and the third single, “Collide,” which you heard on the radio and in TV and movies a lot, was certified gold. And, two-plus decades later, it holds up as a pop-rock record.

And it’s full of hum-along songs, tunes you pick up quickly on the first or second listen and want to come back for a few more times. This is the fifth track on the album, and it fits that bill with an instrumentation that feels simultaneously earthly and ethereal, which seems a feat.

It is also of it’s time. But, there’s a small window on the musical calendar where rock was in an ebb and alt was disappearing and singer-song writers with some indie-pop sensibilities could fill some airspace and some evenings. I don’t really know what that means, except that I do, and it also sounds right.

This was the first single from that record, the first time a broader audience heard him. It was August 2003, and this sounds like that. I don’t remember the first time I heard that song, but I do remember the work I was doing late that summer.

I was doing interviews and producing a documentary on an upcoming tax referendum. (The tax went to a statewide special ballot vote that September, but this is Alabama and so it didn’t just fail, but failed spectacularly. The director of the state Board of Education was in tears on TV that night.) Also, at about that same time I was busy covering Roy Moore being removed from the bench as Alabama’s Supreme Court Chief Justice. Being Alabama, he got another shot at the bench, largely on the same religious rhetoric that got him kicked off the first time.

Probably I picked up on Howie Day a little bit after that. Sharp-eared listeners might have found him on the “I Am Sam” soundtrack, which we featured here a few weeks ago. He covered “Help!”

Day has had a handful of ugly legal trouble of the domestic and chemical varieties, but he’s still out there doing it. Day is touring on the 20th anniversary of this record right now.

Next time in the Re-Listening project, we’ll have a glance at a post-grunge album at it’s most polished and most posty.

Tomorrow, a meeting, and also a meeting!


12
Sep 24

The press section put me over the top

This will be quick, because I am behind. (Watch this now become a 3,000 word, two-hour post.) It was a lovely day, foggy this morning, but then the low clouds turned into mist and it all rolled out just before noon. The mercury got to 81, found that this was an appropriate effort for mid-September, and stared there. It was all delightful.

Two news items piqued my interest today. If you get two a day, you’re probably working too hard at it. If you get more than two a day, you’re probably living in a decade-long election cycle and you should put down the phone, close the computer, and walk away. So I stopped at two.

This first one, simply because I came up with a slogan that should appeal to two opposed elements of modern society, Republicans who think their pets are at risk from their neighbors, and anyone else that would like to not catch an illness from a sick neighbor in denial.

NJ Republican governor candidate introduces bill to outlaw wearing masks in public

A Republican candidate for New Jersey governor introduced new legislation Thursday that would prohibit people from wearing masks in public, just weeks after a similar bill was passed in Nassau County on Long Island.

The bill would prohibit masks in certain circumstances, but even its sponsor, Sen. Jon Bramnick, acknowledged that it is a long way from passing.

[…]

According to Bramnick, there are people using masks to disguise themselves and commit crimes, and that’s who he wants this bill to target.

He believes that ultimately it would be an additional charge when a crime is being committed and that “legitimate mask wearers have nothing to fear.”

The bill would make it a petty disorderly persons offense for people to congregate in public while wearing masks or obscuring their faces in some way to conceal their identity.

Legitimate mask wearers. Police will know the difference.

Look, politicians who need to demonstrate their tough-on-crime bona fides push these sort of proposals, without a single care about putting high risk and immunocompromised people in greater danger, all in the hope of squashing protests and heightening surveillance. That’s all we’re talking about here.

But here’s my idea. And it works as a slogan or bumper sticker.

You can’t eat the dogs or eat the cats if you are wearing a mask.

The newsroom’s editorial board calls this what it is.

Start with this basic question: What if a troublemaker simply decides to disguise his face with large sunglasses and a hat, instead? Are we going to criminalize sunglasses and hats, too? Where will it end?

Not to mention all the enforcement and constitutional problems that this bill presents. Even with an exception for people who wear masks for medical reasons, it’s a threat to personal freedoms, because it leaves it up to the cops to decide whether someone has a legitimate medical reason for wearing a mask at a public gathering.

How will they know that? It’s subjective. And based on past experience, we know what that means: Police will disproportionately stop and question Black and brown people, who have also been the most likely to continue wearing masks to protect against COVID-19.

And, as Jim Sullivan of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey adds, this “overbroad and vague” bill “also gives law enforcement the ability to target people based on their political beliefs.”

This think piece … from Dan Froomkin, curiously enough, is just about the most frustrating thing you’ll find today.

Trump’s mental capacity is now topic one

The Donald Trump who melted down on the debate stage Tuesday night is not a well man.

He sounded like a lunatic. He expressed his belief in things that simply aren’t true. (Think: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.”) He was easily distracted. He repeated himself. He lied egregiously.

Is he competent to be president?

That’s a question journalists should be asking, prominently and relentlessly, until Election Day.

[…]

Concerns about Trump’s mental state are hardly new. They’ve been raised for years on social media, in opinion columns, and on cable TV. But they’ve generally been avoided by traditional news reporters.

The good news is that this is officially no longer a story that’s too hot for reporters to touch. A permission structure has been established — by the New York Times’s star political reporter Peter Baker no less.

PERMISSION?!? I yelled to no one at all. PERMISSION? NOW YOU HAVE PERMISSION?!?

I said Froomkin, curiously enough, because he started Press Watch for a particular reason.

Press Watch is an independent non-profit organization devoted to encouraging political journalists to fulfill their essential mission of creating an informed electorate and holding the powerful accountable. It is funded by donations from readers and the philanthropic community.

The Trump era, like never before, has exposed the weakness of the elite media’s refusal to be seen as “taking sides” in matters of public interest — even when it comes to verification of facts and democracy. As a result, corporate political journalism ends up spreading lies instead of shouting the truth. It engages in false equivalence that normalizes outrageous political extremism.

[…]

This website is intended to agitate for change. It encourages reporters to fight disinformation more enthusiastically and effectively, especially when our democracy and people’s lives are at stake. It identifies best practices that others can emulate. It urges the reality-based parts of the industry to explicitly condemn Fox News and other far-right propaganda outlets as disinformation operations.

People who love journalism are deeply troubled by the media’s loss of credibility with the public. Press Watch’s view is that we lose credibility by not fighting more assertively for the truth.

Permission. You don’t need permission. Or political cover. You need the support of your publisher and to inform your audience. A person, any person, running for high office is always under the microscope. Or should be. I can’t image how the news business has lost it’s credibility.

Permission.

It was a lovely afternoon for a swim, so I swam. My arms and feet took me one mile, but I ended up at the same place I started from. And that’s laps, to me. I say my feet, but it was mostly my arms. I am not a good swim kicker.

I keep forgetting to kick. Then I remember, and I kick. For about 15 yards, maybe less, and then I stop again. And a lap or so later I’ll remember, Kick! And so I kick. Maybe 10-15 years, and then I forget again. And I did this today for 1,720 yards. It was nice.

Back outside for the nightly chores, the view above was peaceful.

You can hear kids playing, and a few adults chatting up the street. It’s a perfect, mild THursday, and why wouldn’t they be outside doing those things until deep into the evening?

Let’s dip our toes back into the Re-Listening project. I’m playing all of my old CDs in my car, in the order in which I acquired them. So, I figured, why not write about them here, too? Pad the site! Content is king! And there’s nothing better than 20-year-old content!

Or so I told myself before I sat down to write about 2003’s “Long Time Coming,” Johnny Lang’s fourth studio album. I picked this up in 2006 or so. And, for me, it’s a record I’d listen to once in a long while. It doesn’t find a lot of extended play or repeats. Lang was a gifted performer — sadly, he’s had some health issues that took him away from music — and it’s important to remember here that he was 22(!!!) when he released his fourth album. But, with the exception of a few moments this one doesn’t really stand out as his earlier efforts did. It made it to #17 on the Billboard 200, which was his best placement yet, and great for mere mortals. His live record at the Ryman, in 2009, would climb to the second spot on the blues charts. And that makes sense, the guy was a seriously talented live perform.

This record, though, it wasn’t highly received, and while it hasn’t aged poorly, it isn’t a fine wine. And the Re-Listening project isn’t meant to be a review. I’m just posting music and occasionally trying to summon up a memory to go with a song. But I don’t have any here, because it just didn’t get that many spins. Right from the first track, you can feel the genre fusion beginning. There’s a bit of a lot of things on this album, and maybe that’s part of the issue. And, again, the guy’s 22 years old.

I’ve always thought this song should be on infinite rotation in produce sections across this great land of ours.

Tell me that you wouldn’t happily puzzle over the ripeness of that pineapple during that chorus.

If blue-eyed soul and blues had an exemplar … well, there are many … this would be one, too.

And that’s sort of the difficulty here. Lang had been blowing away critics and fans since he was 15 or so. Here, it just felt a little workmanlike.

As we realize, over and over, music is a strange business.

And there we go. Fifteen-hundred plus words. As I said, I’m behind.