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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!

adventures / memories / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
8
May 25

And then it became our home

Two years ago today, at 12:14 p.m., I took this photo. It was one of those moments where your life begins to change.
That was when we saw this house for the first time.

It was the first one we looked at on our house-hunting visit. The one that the rest got judged against. And it was a hot market. The sellers had put up a few teaser photos on the weekend, a promo of the full listing to come on Monday. As we drove over we looked at the rest of the photos, which were great, if over-saturated. We called our realtor from the road and told him to add this one to the list. We were, I think, the second people in, but we were not the only ones that wanted it.

Somehow, we won the day.

You’d like to think of these as happy moments, but house shopping and waiting out bids is a special kind of tension. But the place, itself, is just as comfortable and relaxing as a home should be.

Friday / memories / music / Re-Listening / video — Comments Off
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 …

cycling / friends / memories / photo / Rowan / Wednesday — Comments Off
26
Mar 25

We saw Adam via Zoom

My old friend Adam joined our class via Zoom. He’s recently stepped down from a command of American Forces Network Europe, where he managed dozens of stations on two continents. It seemed a good perspective to add to our international media class. And he had a lot to offer, so I’m glad he took the time.

I was trying to remember, but we met in 2011. I wrote a piece about a distant cousin of his, a World War 2 hero, one of the Doolittle Raiders. Soon after we met in person, and became fast friends. He took a master’s degree and became one of my lovely bride’s students. We’ve toured Alaska and Ireland together.

We are close in age. His hometown is just one or two towns over from my grandparents. Once, we tried to decide if we’d ever been to some event as kids. We decided the most likely place would have been a steakhouse. My grandparents’ church dismissed earlier than his church, so it’s possible that he had to wait on us to leave so he could eat lunch.

I wrote a little bio of him for my students. It’s been an impressive, long career. Multiple deployments, some great experiences and some less than great. He’s now just a few months from retiring from the Army, an exceedingly happy family man, and studying to become a commercial pilot. We’re trying to talk him and his wife into moving close to us. I’m not sure if I’ve sold him on it yet, but you’ve seen the pictures around here. One of my angles is that it is a lot like home.

(Speaking of home … He knew where his ancestor who immigrated from England came from. Adam and I once visited that road in London.)

Speaking of pictures, I took these the other day and I’m cleaning up my phone.

As the weather warms up and the bikes go back on the roads, it is good to see these signs still out there reminding people about the rules of the road.

That one is relatively new. At least I don’t remember seeing it last year.

And here’s a man out there discing that dirt. That field, if it is all his, goes back some ways. He was probably doing that all afternoon.

That was Saturday, because you work every day on a farm. I wonder what they were doing there today. A lot more than me, I’m sure of it.

Friday / memories / music / video — Comments Off
7
Mar 25

Re-Listening: One of these has a notorious Star Trek reference

Apropos of nothing, I just sneezed. Some sneezes you can feel coming from a long way away. Sometimes you can sense that a sneeze will be arrive tomorrow, at about 1:30. The lining of your nose gets that first tinge. “There’s something in here!” signals are sent to the brain. The brain fires off memos in triplicate to the body. “We’re going to do it!” Your eyes shut, the tongue moves to the roof of the mouth, and the muscles brace. Sometimes it happens in just a few seconds, or 25 minutes.

That’s not the sneeze I just experienced. This sneeze was a bit closer to the seeing-your-life-flash-before-your-eyes tinged with a bit of “What am I going to do after this, if my nose stays on my face and my organs stay in place?”

There’s no metaphor here. Just the one sneeze, come and gone. Sometimes the nose needs a reboot. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a low-brain reaction to a sternutation.

I’m about 14 CDs behind in the Re-Listening project, so let’s make a small dent in that deficit. If anyone can remember back that far, the Re-Listening project is something I’m doing in the car. I’m playing all of my old CDs in more or less the order in which I acquired them all. I say more or less because this book is out of order. I had hit the 21st century, but right now I’m back in the 1990s. It doesn’t matter.

I decided, since I was listening to all of these again I could write about them here. “What a great regular feature,” I thought, back when I did that sort of thing. “I can pad this space, pull up an old memory or two, and then play some good music.” And I did that, until I kept forgetting to do it, at least, which is how I’m so far behind right now.

So it’s … let’s say 1997, maybe 1998. This was a record that wasn’t meant to be a success, but a 1996 single got a lot of airplay and a Grammy nomination. And then the record was certified gold the next summer. And that happened to Duncan Sheik who was used to playing small venues, and suddenly he was on much bigger stages, which was a surprise for everyone, especially the singer, who saw that one song stay on the charts for a year, after peaking at #16. It spent 55 weeks as a radio hit, which was one of the longer stays on the chart at the time.

But there was more to the debut record than just the one single. There were two other singles! And a lot of deep cuts. Probably I picked this up after the second single, “She Runs Away,” but I don’t recall for sure. It was almost 30 years ago … a sentence I find I am now saying a little too often.

Anyway, when I popped this into player, I was hooked by the second track. (It sounded great on big wooden speakers.)

Why did we ever move away from those large speakers, anyway? Everything sounded better. And nothing was re-compressed by an additional layer of digitization.

And, look, that first Sheik record was pure singer-songwriter pop. Except for the parts that weren’t. But he did like to incorporate his vocal range all over the place.

At various times, when I had to do such things, Sheik’s music was a good vocal warmup. Sing along on the way to the studio and all that.

There are 11 tracks on the record, I liked 10 of them, and eight of them still hold up. Sheik has released eight other studio albums and a live record, but none more commercially successful than his debut, which did hit number 80 on the Billboard 200. He’s probably OK with that. I got the impression from interviews that the unexpected success was a little overwhelming.

These days, he’s performing as a writer and composer on Broadway, where he’s won two Tony awards.

I’m sitting here looking at the next disc trying to decide how I have this false memory. The record was released in 1998, just another power pop, post-grunge alt record. And the overriding memory doesn’t fit that timeline. I went to high school, and once worked with a guy who was in a local band. I saw them play, just another group of kids who were inspired and he’d sing the big hit, but he did a cool vocal trick in one spot where he’d sing on top of the note in a key spot. It was just enough different that now, when I think of or hear the song, I hear it his way.

Only, I didn’t work at that place when the single was a single. I hadn’t worked there in probably two years. So how does that memory even work?

Beware of memories, I guess.

A few years later I got an out-of-the-blue email from a mutual friend and it turns out that that guy was going to go to jail for a while. He’d gotten drunk and climbed into his house through his bedroom window, only it wasn’t his window and it wasn’t his house. Extremely common name. No idea what became of him.

Anyway the band was Semisonic — and I mean that made the record, not the band of the guy I knew. “Closing Time” was the single everyone knew, of course, and it was a big hit, climbing to 11 on the US Radio Songs chart, four on the Pop chart, topped the Alternative Airplay chart, 13 on the Mainstream Airplay chart and so on.

But, and I realize I used this above, there was a lot more to “Feeling Strangely Fine” than the one single. The second single, from August of 1998, is a terrific little pop number which found its way into two top 40 charts. I always liked that it was a song about listening to a cassette. It was charming even to me, a slow music format adopter.

Then, as now, there was no way this piano — a keyboard, really — should pair up with that bass sound.

Whenever I picked this up, I don’t recall that either, I listened to it for a good long while. It got heavy rotation during the year of driving back and forth from Little Rock to Birmingham. This was a good late night, empty highway song.

I don’t know your feelings about this, obviously, but I think we all need a New Year’s Eve song. Here’s one now.

There’s one song another song on here that I’ve always liked, but I can’t listen to it, because the weird way the singer treats the chorus is too catchy. It’s just days and days of this, when you play it. You’ve been warned.

That was Semisonic’s second album. They produced two more studio records and a live album. And they’re still at it, touring the U.S. this summer with Toad the Wet Sprocket.

That’s enough for now. The weekend is here!