I had a meeting this morning, and there were doughnuts. The doughnuts were from a craft bakery, which means they put non-traditional toppings on them so they can charge you 36 bucks for a dozen. Also, they seem to be croissants covered in non-traditional toppings. Tasty, sticks with you throughout the day. Makes you think of doughnuts all day. They also ensure you don’t need to eat anything else all day.
The rest of the day was the rest of the day. A few meetings here and there. A lot of emailing and some phone calls. The usual stuff. And then into the studio in the evening. The late night host was interviewing an expert on M&Ms. As a part of the bit, she was doing so in an awkward British accent. The expert was not actually an expert. But she new many things about the hard-shelled candy, despite not being old enough to have spent 33 years researching them. Also, some of the information might not have been perfectly accurate. Wikipedia might need some updating.
Very usual stuff.
Here’s a photo from Wednesday I forgot to share. I like this one. A monochromatic skylight seems just right for the moment, somehow.
Three long days in a row. Just a regular 8-hour day tomorrow. It’ll feel like a half-day, I’m sure.
That recent weather has meant slower driving. My commute — a normally mysterious 20-minute, 4.5 mile adventure — has been longer. I guess that’s why I’m working through discs in the Re-Listening project so quickly in the last few days. So we return once more to revisit old music. I’m playing all the old discs, in the order that I picked them up.
Did you know I have some photographs in the Museum of Alabama. I used to, anyway. It’s been a long time. I’m sure they’ve been archived and warehoused or destroyed by now.
In the summer of 1997 I was commissioned to drive around much of Alabama and photograph the old covered bridges. I think they were doing a series of these in different seasons, and also some paintings. But traipsing through woods and creeks in the heat of an Alabama summer seemed like the perfect job for a college student, and someone knew me and that’s how I got the job.
I drove over a third or more of the state listening to Tigerlily. It came out in 1995, went platinum five times in the United States and peaked at 13 on the Billboard 200 album chart. Somewhere in late 1996 or early 1997 I bought it. Probably as a bulk deal, but when I got around to listening to it, I listened to it a lot.
The record starts like this.
There’s a lot of interesting texture in this record. There’s a moment in this song, a lament of losing a lifelong spouse, where Merchant’s voice breaks. It’s a syllable, and it is so impactful I remember it years on. I know it is coming. It gets me every time.
She didn’t sing it that way live. On a subsequent re-release (with new instrumentation) it isn’t there, and the song, a powerful ballad, is lesser for it.
Or, if you prefer a different kind of mood.
Music is a funny thing, and if I look at the five or 10 CDs on either side of this one in my collection, it is pretty obvious I wasn’t ready for Natalie Merchant in 1997. But I should say that about a lot of things and 1997 me. Driving on country roads on dirty, sweaty days, listening to this CD spin was a good thing, and a lot of fun. Ready or not.
Wikipedia tells me Natalie Merchant is teaching arts and crafts to kids these days. She has a new record due out in April. Maybe I’ll be ready.
And that’s enough for today. Don’t worry, there will be more tomorrow including, incredibly, another CD in the Re-Listening project.
It snowed overnight, and most of the morning. This is the first substantial snow we’ve received since last February. We got about four or five inches. On the drive into the office there were two nervous moments. I got into a bit of a fishtail at a roundabout. And then, at a red light, I wasn’t sure how and when the car would stop.
But at least this guy got to sleep in.
And two of his buddies were driving around, with their snow plows up off the ground.
That might be unfair for one of a few reasons, but, then again, the roads were a mess.
Somewhere approaching 11 a.m., well after the morning rush, they got around to clearing the roads, as you will see. And they didn’t even wait until the snow had stopped falling. Just before it ended, the great big flakes, one last bit of winter defiance, came down. Here’s the tail end of that.
But those first few hours after, it was quite lovely.
It is the wrong kind of snow, however, in that it didn’t melt right away. It won’t melt until the weekend, if the weather forecasts are accurate and it won’t look that lovely in a day or so. But that’s for Thursday or Friday. For now, we listen to music.
It is time, once again, to dive back into musical memories, with the Re-Listening project. I’m going through all of my CDs, in order of acquisition and listening to them in the car. It’s about memories, rather than music reviews. No one is asking for another review of quarter-century-old songs, after all.
In the fall of 1996, a buddy of mine told me to look for a particular band. They’ll be big, he said. You’ll like them, he said. At the same time, there was always a stack of CDs on the giveaway table at my station. And one day, there they were.
This is one of the two things I remember about the Matchbox 20 debut. It sold something like 12 million copies in the United States, and 15 million worldwide. People liked it. It got a lot of airplay. This is the other thing I remember. The wrong single got all the attention.
This was the debut single, and the best bit of the record, by far.
The rest of it is a bit aggravating to me. Maybe it got overplayed. Maybe it wasn’t something we played in crowds. It definitely sounds whiny today. And, oddly, I have no other recollections associated with the album.
Similarly, I don’t have a lot of memory attached to “To the Faithful Departed.” Seems odd, but I don’t recall picking this up, either. I knew I had it, but I am slightly dismayed that I don’t recall what came behind it. And, yes, I think I should remember how and where and why I bought a circular piece of plastic in 1996. I probably barely listened to it, which is a shame. It seems, at times, conceptually and lyrically repetitive. At the same time, the instrumentation is there, and Dolores O’Riordan’s talent is fully on display.
This song struck me tonight, and I was surprised to learn, or re-learn, that this was one of the singles. (This is how closely I was paying attention to The Cranberries, I guess.) It also figured prominently in O’Riordan’s funeral in 2018. Beautiful song.
Two other singles were released. A fourth was canceled when the tour ended and the Irish rockers went home after O’Riordan had some health problems. In retrospect, that the fourth single wasn’t released might have been a good idea. It is hard to listen to that song in the context of the album and airplay at the time and think it would be as successful as the songs that came before it.
Why they didn’t release this as a single though is an enduring mystery. It’s U2, The Cure and Depeche Mode all in one. It would have been a big alt hit.
There was a well-packaged ballad just waiting to be called upon, too. And there’s an all too obvious Doc Martens reference in there, just waiting for sponsorship.
The contemporary reviews suggest this wasn’t The Cranberries’ best album, but “To the Faithful Departed” didn’t top charts in four countries and climb to number four in the United States by mistake. Maybe it was my mistake to overlook it.
A wise man said you should never end a post by admitting a mistake, so … a joke.
I benefit from a traditional that The Yankee has kept for, I dunno, most of her life. It goes like this. When it snows overnight, you have chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast.
It snowed last night.
And it was the best kind of snow. The sort that arrived in the evening of a night I didn’t have to be anywhere, accumulated to an amount that was in no way an imposition to travel. And, most critically, it was gone by mid-afternoon.
We took a walk at about 2 p.m. to admire what was left in the woods.
The kitties stayed inside, because they are inside cats, and it is cold outside. And they have their creature comforts. For instance, here’s Phoebe sitting on a two-cushioned chair.
On Saturday she was napping on a pillow. The pillow was on top of the mattress. The mattress is also covered by many blankets. She knows what she’s after.
Poseidon, he’s more accustomed to roughing it. You can see him here, just on the one cushion, taking advantage of the arm rest as a pillow.
These are the most comfortable cats in the known kittyverse.
I took a midnight ride on Saturday-Sunday, tapping out 28 miles. Felt slow and, at times, it was! But then at one point the game awarded me a green jersey. It just digitally appeared.
And it means that I was the fastest person on a sprint segment. This is a platform with global appeal, but the result has to be the time of the evening. (I am not a sprinter.)
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 42 routes down, 78 to go.
It is time, once again, to dip our toe into the soothing waters of musical nostalgia, with the Re-Listening project. I’m going through all of my CDs, in order of acquisition and listening to them in the car. It’s one part memory, three parts fun and, the occasional skip-to-the-next track. This is my second round of the Re-Listening project. I did it a few years ago but, this time, decided to write about it. Easy blog filler! But these aren’t reviews, no no, they’re memories. They are fun, they are whimsy, as most music should be. And today the waters of musical nostalgia are provided to us by Fountains of Wayne.
Their self-titled debut album was released in late 1996. I am guessing I picked it up in early 1997. “Radiation Vibe” was on the radio, and peaking at 14 on the US Billboard Alternative Songs chart that January. Probably somewhere around there I got this. It was a giveaway from one of the radio stations I was working at, rather than something I purchased. I liked the single.
And I hated the rest of the album. This record did not enter the US Billboard 200, but peaked at number 20 on the US Heatseekers Albums Chart. Not that I knew that at the time, or that it mattered. And I’m pretty sure I didn’t realize they were behind “That Thing You Do” in 1996. You assume, through the distance of time, that the movie song was a huge hit. But it was only moderately successful. It is also not on this album, which is what we’re talking about today. (This is the second single.)
As I said. Didn’t care for it in 1997. Liked the one single, but that’s it. Probably didn’t listen to it for more than two decades, until the last Re-Listening project. And let me tell you something fascinating that happened. I realized, decades on, that everything that happened in indie and pop music since 1996 is on this record.
True story. Every nuance, every string, every open note, every bit of air, every emo chorus inspiration, every bit of millennial adolescent spark are all found on this album. It’s incredible. This is the point of the Re-Listening project.
This is a lot to accept, I know, especially if you’re invested in the period. But you can’t escape the evidence.
Others did some of this earlier, and bigger acts completed the form with great success later. But the synthesis of what came before it — The Zombies, The Hollies, maybe some BOC and others — is all right here, the output of what was to come later is all found in the power pop ingredients in this record.
The band broke up in 2013, an 18-year run, but Fountains of Wayne released five studio records. They found themselves in commercials and soundtracks and with Grammy nominations. Their biggest hit was in 2003, a song that reached 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 and 12 on the Hot Rock and Alternative Songs chart. It was another song I didn’t like, so what do I know?
What I know is we’ll be moving swiftly through the next installment of the Re-Listening project. It’s another whiny record. (I need to make better skip rules for this game.)
Until tomorrow, then, have a great start to your week!
I’ve never had a clever idea for a personalized license plate. And, wouldn’t you know it, the best idea only occurred to me when I found it, already in use.
(You might note that, in the reflection, I am wearing gloves. Today was the day that broke me. But my fingers stayed warm.)
There are only two problems with that plate. First, it’s on the children’s hospital tag. Hard to discern what we’re saying here. Second, I suppose the state wouldn’t sell you an ellipse. A few dots on the end would have made the thing.
“Sigh … ”
I guess you could always put that on a mug or a thermos or something. Still get much of your point across, but not in traffic. But then, there are vinyl clings for that. One for the front bumper, and one for the back.
I’d actually like two light kits for the car. One that says “Sigh” and another that says “Hey thanks.” Light those up, front and back, at the appropriate times, and you could convey a lot of messages. I’d be better with that than the horn. There are certain places where the horn is a complex form of communication, but where I’m from the car horn was a solo angry note. Or, if you ever watched poorly scripted dramas, it could also indicate “My brakes are out! Get out of the way!”
Come to think of that, you don’t see that as a TV trope that much anymore. Maybe automobile manufacturers have figured something out about brake technology since the 1970s. Or maybe all of that is on Amazon Prime, or Apple TV. We don’t have those, so the tropes could be in full force over there.
I had a nice long meeting about documentaries today. This is probably the third of these meetings I’ve had, and this meeting was the conclusion of the second or third email chain about them. We’re going to be watching a lot of documentaries at work over the next couple of months, which is exciting.
I also had a short stint in the television studio this afternoon. Someone needed to shoot a quick promotional video, so the studio became a set. I enjoyed watching people moving around chairs and using state-of-the-art cameras as props.
Also, I have begun a surely losing battle with YouTube. This would be difficult to describe, even if you cared, which you don’t. Everyone has their own struggles with YouTube, or they don’t. And, sure, I’d Google the problem if I knew how to describe it, alas.
Our dystopian, but not because of this, future: when you can’t figure out the right search terms to find the answer for how to solve a YouTube issue.
This is a strong contender for my First World Problem of the Year.
Sigh.
We return to the Re-Listening project, where I am playing all of my CDs in their order of acquisition. It passes the time, gives me something to sing to in the car, and something to fill a bit of space with here. These aren’t reviews, but a bit of memory, and a bit of whimsy, as music should be.
We are, I think, getting close to the music getting quite good again, but I digress.
The year was 1996. My on-again and off-again girlfriend suggested a movie. If memory serves we had to erase some lame movie experience from our collective memory. I wish I could remember what that one was (and I’ve tried) but I remember this specifically: when the credits rolled, we stood up to leave and she said, “This movie needed more explosions.”
So the next one was Twister. I think we blew off something that seemed important, but was anything but. That was the sort of thing that appealed to her sensibilities — low key rebel that she was. And so it was that we found ourselves in one of those old theaters that instantly feels a little dirty and dusty and spent the afternoon with Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Cary Elwes and all the rest.
Sometime soon after I picked up the soundtrack.
Incidentally, the first two tracks on that soundtrack also appeared on records that we’ve recently visited here. The third song is an inscrutable Tori Amos track. (I wasn’t ready for Amos yet. But a different girlfriend, a few years later, helped remedy that, and even took me to a live show.)
I don’t know why this is, but I love every Alison Krauss song I’ve ever heard, and I own none of her music, except for two or three soundtrack appearances.
Hard to believe this is Mark Knopfler’s first solo single.
In addition to those, and the Van Halen and Rusted Roof indirectly referenced above, there’s a who’s who of forgettable tracks from big pop names here. There’s Soul Asylum, k.d. lang, Lisa Loeb, the Red Hot Chili Peppers for some reason, and the Goo Goo Dolls.
At the end is this song and … I think this might be my favorite Stevie Nicks song?
I’m too young for Fleetwood — and it’s an ever-shrinking list of things I’m too young for these days — and I never really got the Stevie Nicks appeal. But I like this. Probably it’s the Lindsey Buckingham medley.
The next album was the second effort from Bush. We recently ran through the 1994 debut in this space. They had a huge success there, but most of the record doesn’t appeal to me anymore. Their next release, this release, from 1996, even less so. But i remember being disappointed by it then, too. It’s a stinker. But what do I know? It topped the Billboard 200, though I’ve always found everything aside from the first single to be easily forgettable. I don’t care about this record at all. It’s an endless run through empty metaphors from the emo thesaurus, with hasty licks that are, I guess, fills.
Where their first record seemed like a polished parody of the grunge style, this one swung too far in the opposite direction. Wikipedia would like to convince me that this is generally held up as “the last ‘grunge’ sounding album of the 1990s.” Let’s think on that without thinking on in too hard. Did anyone release a record with overdriven guitars and out-of-tune vocals after November, 1996 …
First of all, this is a silly exercise. It’s a loosely labeled genre. No one in it liked the term, none of them. Soundgarden’s last album came out a few months before and they broke up in 1997. Alice in Chains was in that weird hiatus with Layne Staley — and Boggy Depot doesn’t seem to apply. Kurt Cobain was dead. Pearl Jam was still working, of course, but trying to be anything but grunge by then. So maybe Chuck Klosterman was right. Maybe Bush is the Warrant of grunge. Funny that it would be the British band to be there, simply because of timing.
Everything that came after was mislabeled as post-grunge or broadly, and hilariously, mislabeled as “alternative.” Much of it was the return of “corporate-formulated music to regain the footing it lost when swept out by the success of ‘Nevermind.'” Grunge used to be defined as a rebellious counter to all of that. More cynically, it was viewed as cheaper and quicker to produce, and there was a time and place for it. The time was the late-stage Gen X crowd and the 1990s. The place, I suppose, was their ethos. But we all went to work, too, and time marched on. And then the Spice Girls marched in.
Thankfully, the Spice Girls are not the next record on the Re-Listening project, nor will they ever be, but that’s for next week.
I had another quick bike ride before dinner. Just 21 miles, because the next segment was going to be 14 more and I didn’t know how I’d feel about that, plus there was dinner to consider and it was getting on 7:30 and, I couldn’t even use the “time got away from me” excuse, because, look! The moon!
The little things in Zwift delight me so much. The stars twinkle. This stage had a few drones flying overhead for some reason. (You can select an overhead camera view, and maybe that’s why they are they. That’s what I’m telling myself.) And the moon moves back behind that mountain. It is setting, and this happens to fast, because you are riding through simulated days and nights, but it also makes sense given the terrain and the path of your road and how that changes your perspective.
But, I think, when you see the moon in Zwift it is always a full moon. This seems like poor, or overly romanticized, programming. An always full moon would be a problem. It is, or isn’t, full from our planetary view because of the relative positions of the earth, moon and sun. So if the moon always looked full then the earth is out of the way, or, to be more accurate, the moon isn’t in our orbit. Big tidal consequences. Let’s assume it drifts away with some appreciable-to-human-eyes speed. The angle of the earth may shift widely. Our days would get longer, and some time after that things would get really bad here. Seasons would probably change a fair amount. Who knows what would happen at the then-wobbly poles. And I guess it depends on when, in our solar transit, that the moon decided to let go as to where it would wind up, but that could create a whole series of issues in the solar system, too. Zwift might want to fix that, just in case.
In case of what? The moon is watching a bike riding video game and getting ideas?
Sigh.
2023 Zwift route tracker: 38 routes down, 82 to go.
Wow, what a day. This wasn’t January, but it was. The high reached 54 and there was hardly a cloud in the sky. The highlight of the day, then, was the day. I even went outside for four minutes to walk around two buildings and take this photo. Things like this need documentation.
The Library of Congress and the Internet Archive will surely be along shortly to document the moment. And they should. Sunny and 54 degrees! In January!
I finished this book this evening. (I skimmed about the second half of it.)
Remarkable Journeys of the Second World War isn’t that good. The author interviews people who took part in the war. They’re all British subjects, and their lives and roles varied. Here’s a POW, there’s a nurse, a merchant seaman, member of the Home Guard, and so on. Their stories are theirs, and some of them are riveting, as you might expect. But the author, she gets in the way of those stories with her own narrative. It gets redundant.
There comes a point when you pass through respect to enamored that feels disingenuous.
I bought it for $1.99, so it’s fine. That I skimmed a book is the thing here. Couldn’t tell you the last time I did that.
The last chapter were short stories written by her grandfather, who was a POW from the Royal Air Force, they were all worth reading. The author discovered, and published, his memoir. That I’d read much more closely.
Next up on the Re-Listening Project, where we’re just making recollections through the old CDs played, in order, in the car, is the first Van Halen greatest hits. “Best Of – Volume I” has most of the songs you’d expect for a greatest hits, was rumored to be the reason that Sammy Hagar left the band, brought David Lee Roth, briefly, back into the fold and, ultimately set the stage for Gary Cherone’s brief time fronting the band. And, honestly, somewhere in all of that was when I got worn out by Van Halen.
I remember this well. It was the fall of 1996. School was busy in more ways than one. This was spinning a lot on the drive in to campus from Gentilly. Sunny days, warm skies, a hilariously mediocre football team but, otherwise, everything was ascendant. Michael Jordan and the Bulls were on the way to building the second three-peat. I was helping quiz my roommate, who would, the next month, rise to brilliant national prominence. I believe I was doing music shifts at the radio station, and I managed to be a lot of other places, too. Ahh, the energy and vitality of youth. And, also, David Lee Roth.
I am older now than he was then, so there’s that. (And he was born in Bloomington, apparently? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that.)
Anyway, the first Van Halen cassette I bought was “OU812” so I missed the Roth years. To me, the band was Van Haggar. Further, I am of the not-at-all-consequential-and-yet-controversial opinion that Alex van Halen is a terrific drummer, but Michael Anthony was the secret ingredient to the whole thing. A greatest hits disc got me most of the songs I’d need from the early days, which was perfect. I’m in no way a Van Halen completist.
It seems weird to write a great deal in this space about a now decades old greatest hits compilation. Instead, let’s briefly touch on one of the news from this …. now decades old release. This one, the last ever recorded with the original lineup, is quite good.
No video was ever made, creative differences apparently, but this was a radio hit. They topped the US Rock Chart for six weeks, the third time Van Halen did that with Roth; it was the band’s 14th number one, overall.
This greatest hits came, for me, with an inescapable realization, way back then, and I can’t not think of it today. For an act featuring one of the greatest commercial guitar players of all time, the late, great Eddie Van Halen put a lot of synth in his music.
The one that came to mind this morning, listening to this song: charismatic as he is, and before you could wave it away as his being a rock star, what was Roth like as a teenager?
Next up is Counting Crows’ second studio album, which was released two weeks prior to the Van Halen greatest hits. But this is the order I bought them in, and I shuffled through them at about an equal pace this time through. I have most of the Counting Crows catalog, but I just grew out of it, as all of us should. Time and place and all. (But I’m committed to this gimmick and the records get a lot better. Soon, I think.)
For some reason I always think of driving in Opelika when this song comes on. There must have been some restaurant or store or something that was involved. Maybe it’s a memory from juco classes the next summer. There’s an overpass, and too many decibels, and that’s the memory.
This one always seemed relatable, somehow. Who can say why? That’s what you get when you listen to emo pop rock in the free time of your teens or early 20s.
I always wondered how much of what Adam Duritz wrote and performed was real or in the character. It seems a dangerous thing to put yourself forward to profit from whatever happens next in your personal life. But I like to think this one is more real than not. There’s some wry humor here. Also, I think it is, in pretty much every way, the most lasting track on the record for me.
Also, it is, I think, just about the earliest possible namecheck for Ben Folds. I own no Ben Folds, but I did see him the next year.
Next time we check in on the Re-Listening project, we’ll have a soundtrack. It’ll be a … breezy one.
