House work continues. It’s slow, but progressive. We have arrived to the point where it feels that it may never be over. Of course it will get finished. The magical sprites of the woods aren’t getting the job done, though. That’s disappointing, but we’ll get it all finished. We’ll hire an excavator if that’s what it takes. Or maybe we could turn this into a reality show or something: The Unpackening.
The garage is more-or-less in order. I’ve turned a bit of attention to my office and learning what all the light switches do.
Today, though, we took our first bike ride at our new home. My first bike ride in two-and-a-half weeks, and boy did it feel like it. But how about that new bike banner, eh? Similar to the old graphic, changed the colors, put in an easter egg and added a cyclist, It was an inspired decision to put her ahead of me in the graphic, since I’m always trying to chase her.
There are a few, but I did not take a lot of photos. I found myself having to get used to the whole process again. Riding a bike is just like riding a bike; it was everything else that felt a tiny bit off.
Out working among the crops.
We are surrounded by beautiful farmlands. (Look out produce stands and farmers’ markets, here we come!)
The Yankee’s form was just fine. It was a warm day, and we’re riding from map cues, but she still looks pro.
My shadow selfie looked pretty decent, much better than I did today.
We made a big circle, which, hey, is the goal. It gets you back to where you started.
Did our walk through of the new house this morning. Everything is lovely in this new place. Aside from some additional cleaning — of course the sellers cleaned things, but still — everything is lovely here. One of the rooms has a blackboard wall. This will be The Yankee’s home office. The sellers left us a lovely note.
We went over to an office to sign all of the forms you must sign to buy a home, and all of the forms you must sign to acknowledge that you just signed the last form. So long is the process now that two separate people race through a thumbnail sketch of what they’re putting in front of you in a lab-tested voice that sounds interested but, you know, has gone through this so many times they’re clearly just bored with it and won’t you sign it so the fees can get transferred.
So we signed them.
There are at least 762 treaties that ended armed conflicts that involve less paperwork and signatures than the modern house process. I know because I counted them, in my head, in between the taut recitation of how this form notes that you will provide your own ninja security detail on your new property, and this document notes we’ve not told you which agencies to hire them from …
When all of that was done, everyone went their separate ways. Someone must work in that office, but I’m not sure which of the four people in the room that might be. And we went back to the new house. The movers were there waiting for us.
They loaded us up with four guys. They unloaded everything with two guys. Two guys plus us. Those fellows worked so hard today, and so did we, to a slightly lesser extent.
At the same time, the ISP guy came by. Bald, long braided beard. Probably rides a motorcycle when he’s not in his service van. It made him look older than he was, and older than his humor. Overly polite, like he’d just come out of some company-mandated customer service workshop. He got his job done in a hurry, and gave us more of the gigabytes than we expected.
At the same time we met our first neighbor. She was dispatched by the sellers to pick up from us a few things that they’d accidentally left behind. We were, of course, happy to oblige them of the sentimental. And the neighbor is lovely. A retired teacher, she watched the kids that used to live here grow up, and now those children are young adults. That’s just part of it for teachers. We talked for maybe five minutes, a welcome break in the air conditioning for me, and you can already tell she’s got plenty of stories and is ready to share them. In a week or two, when the house is in order, I’m going to have to think of a good excuse to stop by and visit her.
Everything is everywhere, but everything is here. Well, except for the cats. We’ll fetch them on Sunday. Because we’ll have wrung order from chaos in just two days.
Hah.
Tonight, we set up part of the kitchen and living room. Tomorrow we learn where all the light switches are and start breaking down boxes.
Something amazing happened in my office today. It’s one of those grown up things that should never feel like a fun thing to the adolescent version of your inner monologue, but is immensely satisfying to the adult part of your conscious thinking.
Not everyone thinks as an adult, of course. Not everyone has an adolescent version of their inner monologue. We can all agree that 33,977 emails is a lot of emails. That’s so many emails the email program had to delete them in batches.
I wonder how long it took to accumulate those emails. A bit longer than it took to dispatch them and, even though they were all already in the trash folder, watching that number disappear felt pretty great. It was a good Thursday exercise. But why this Thursday?
Lyris Hung is here for your fiddle needs. She’s using a looper, or some such technology, to do a multitrack song all by herself. (She is the fourth artist I’ve seen do this live, and I’m sure that she could do whatever she wants with this, though this is a beautiful atmospheric piece. The second person I saw use this was also a violin player, Kishi Bashi in 2015, and his set was so incredible I was convinced he’d discovered the future of music. Maybe I’m not far off.)
Also, Hung transitions effortless into the opening strains of “The Wood Song,” and that’s never a bad thing, another classic track from the chronically misunderappreciated “Swamp Ophelia.” Critics are on a deadline and they listen to a song a few times, maybe, amidst whatever else they have going on. They bang out some copy and move on. Thing is, this song is going to be 30 years old next year. Still a huge a hit with the Indigo Girls’ fans.
Also, once again, The Ryman … an amazing place to watch a show. Each time I upload one of those videos I find myself wanting to go back.
Let’s spin a few more CDs so that we can find ourselves (temporarily) caught up in the Re-Listening project. You know the drill by now, dear regular reader. I am playing all of my old CDs in my car, in the order in which I acquired them. Today we’re doing a double shot, because it is the same band on two consecutive discs. I must have had a few extra bucks in my hand at whatever point this was in 1999, because I probably did a little binge buying. This first one was a 1993 CD that I picked up to replace the old cassette version of Pearl Jam’s “Vs.”
This was their second studio album. Wikipedia tells me they scaled back the marketing, and yet still sold 950,000 copies in its first five days on sale, a record which apparently stood for five years. No idea who took that odd bit of trivia off their shoulders.
This album stood atop the Billboard 200 chart for five weeks and was certified seven-times platinum. So naturally, I needed the copy in a new format. Though they produced no videos (again, this was 1993), Pearl Jam had four singles chart from Vs. Three of them lodged themselves into the top three of the US Mainstream Rock chart, including this one.
(If you watch that with the closed captioning on YouTube tells you it begins with “pensive indie rock music.” That’s not where I give up, but perhaps it should have been.)
For some reason seven songs from this album have their own Wiki page, including “Rearviewmirror” which is a wholly underrated track. And it is great in the car, at any age, just so long as the wheels are turning reasonably fast.
Best song on the record, even if it’s a 20-minute pretentious put-up.
Which brings us to the “Yield” record, somehow. “Vs.” was second, “Yield” was fifth, and I got the ones in between later on, for whatever reason. That doesn’t make any sense, in retrospect, given how much I enjoyed Pearl Jam. But maybe I was starting to shuffle in another direction by this point. “Yield” came out in early 1998, debuting at number two on the Billboard 200. I picked it up somewhere in 1999. “Faithful” is OK, but things were changing to my ear.
Much was written and said about how the band changed their process when they produced this album, and how that helped form a more straightforward, accessible record. No longer the guys in flannel from Seattle, they were America’s rock band, by this point. I remember thinking this, though it is not accurate or at all fair to say, but they were as close a thing to The Doors as the ’90s would produce, and Roskilde was still a year or so away. So they’d mainstreamed the sound, which diluted the power a bit. All of the slower, quieter songs sounded like this for a time.
And the intensity that is Eddie Vedder’s hallmark felt a little askew on this record. Except for “MFC.”
I doubt I listened to this one enough way back when to give it a real chance, but I don’t think my impressions have really changed much. Platinum in five countries, and an undeniable hit, but this was the last of Pearl Jam’s studio records that I bought. (Not counting picking up a few earlier discs.) And so we’ll let Yield’s hidden track, “Hummus,” play us out.
I made a handful of cufflinks today. Sixty will go to a larger project that a friend inspired. But, as I went through my old cufflink making supplies, as one does, I discovered there were some colors and fabrics that didn’t exist in my personal cufflink catalog. So, having remembered the workflow, my fingers regaining their muscle memory, I made a few extras for myself.
Now I just need to pull a french cuff shirt out of the closet, to show them off.
So I made 72 cufflinks. The three-part History Channel George Washington docudrama. Just trying to clear things off the DVR. There are so many things on the DVR.
Let’s watch something else.
Last weekend we were at The Ryman with the Indigo Girls. This was the third single off their sixth studio album, 1997’s “Shaming of the Sun.” (I wrote some more about the record in February.) This is, perhaps, the least good song on a terrific album.
Amy Ray talks about how this is the beginning of a new kind of sound for the band. There’s more rock in there, some Patti Smith perhaps, and some literate punk elements, too.
Tom Morello did a remix of this song some years back. I had no idea this existed until now. It’s a remix. Every remix basically feels like this — Yes, I liked your song, though this is how it should have been done, in a longer, and still lesser, way — but at least you can hear Ulali on this version of the track. (Sadly the a capella group is not on this tour. Though they toured with the Indigo Girls for part of 1997.)
That song was a big part of the setlist on the original Lilith Fair tour, turns out. They released an EP alongside it. (That Morello remix was on the EP). In one of those curious examples of timing, the 1998 double live CD that went alongside that particular music festival is playing in my car right now.
I really ought to move beyond the late nineties, I know.
The Re-Listening project will probably bring us the Lilith Fair album on Monday or Tuesday — because this is suddenly a music blog? — but first we have to work through one other record. The Re-Listening project, of course, is just an excuse to write about, and play some of the music I’m listening to in the car. In the car, I am listening to all of my old CDs in the order in which I acquired them. Today, that CD is Dishwalla’s second studio album, released in 1998 “And You Think You Know What Life’s About.”
I know I picked this up a bit late, based on the 1999 album that came before it, in my CD books. Then as now, it’s a soft, crooning filler. Nothing too remarkable here. The Re-Listening project isn’t about musical reviews because, who cares? But, if you’re interested in that, the Critical Reception section of Wikipedia has an incredibly spot-on summation.
The Washington Post noted that “the band’s most bombastic choruses contain echoes of the slick power ballads that grunge banished.” Entertainment Weekly wrote that “when they pull out the cheesy Top 40 stops … like on the ballad ‘Until I Wake Up’, they come off like a modern-rock Journey—a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless.” The Ottawa Citizen determined that “the band remains a non-innovator, relying on go-to guitar riffs and catchy rock melodies.”
Stereo Review concluded that “Dishwalla spends part of its second album whining about the success of its first one.” Rolling Stone thought that frontman J.R. Richards “has managed to shed his grumbly, disaffected vocals for a softer croon on tracks such as ‘The Bridge Song’.” The Boston Globe opined that “Dishwalla’s chameleon act seems in total defiance of establishing a trademark sound.” The Los Angeles Times wrote that “this angst-filled and metal-tinged sophomore try sinks quickly under the weight of overblown emotion and puerile lyrics.”
It started with such promise, too.
The second track gives the whole game away.
Already, you can see what a handful of harried, on-deadline music reviewers were finding out.
Their first record felt like a gateway into pop-friendly distortion bars and industrial sounds. Not as a slight, but I think this record just hit on all of the same things every other band hit on, about nine months later, and at about 80 percent saturation.
I saw them on their first national tour, they were opening for Gin Blossoms, and, at that moment, they were almost as popular. The lead singer, J.R. Richards, was doing his rock lothario bit when he split his pants on stage. He was embarrassed, as anyone would be. Not so much then, but after that first album, it was all downhill after that. This was one of those records I bought, listened to a few times, and found few reasons to ever play it again.
I think we’re in another none of those stretches of the CD collection, stuff I listened to only a little, looking for the next heavy rotation winners.
Whatever work it is they are doing in the road by my office, they are only doing first thing in the morning. I showed you, yesterday, how they cut a small hole into the role. This morning, they’d dug out a bigger, longer channel. This was what it looked like when I went to work this morning.
And it looked like that all day, too. No one came around for any more work, or to move the big yellow machines.
That patch asphalt, whatever it is actually called, was still tacky this morning. I was tempted to find a good stick and scrawl in a message, see if they’d leave it. (I’ve never written anything in a construction medium.) By this evening, it was solid. I wonder if they’ll leave the roll of tape and the drink bottle in hole when they fill it in tomorrow.
We went to Menard’s this evening. There’s no real story here. We picked up some cat litter and storage bins. The woman that was working the cash register was so slow that they opened three other registers whenever anyone fell into line behind us.
And, plus, she has three cats. One sleeps by her feet. One by her hip. One at her had. She had the robotic kitty litter cleaner. And she liked it. While it worked. It died a year-and-a-half in, after the warranty had expired.
If all else fails, I said, sometimes the old ways are the best..
No one got the reference. Just as well.
I began to understand why she took so long to ring up customers.
In today’s installment of the Re-Listening project, we go back to November 1999 for a new record from a California band. The point of the Re-Listening project is to revisit all of my old CDs in the order that I acquired them, so sometimes I am listening to something that was released earlier that I am just catching up on. But in this case, I know this record was newly released when I picked it up for at the time I was a big Counting Crows fan and I would not have wanted to wait.
I’ve felt, for some time, that I have more of less outgrown the Counting Crows. The Re-Listening project has largely reinforced that feeling. But today’s installment might be the exception to the rule. I think it’s because they’re finally displaying a bit of irreverence, and humor. After spending the rest of the decade being a mainstreamed line of emo, this was a, well, positive move.
It went double platinum, and the album, “This Desert Life” peaked at number eight on the US Billboard 200. It all started with the first track, the first and most successful single.
A friend of mine was a huge mark for Counting Crows, the sort that knew everything about every song before it came out. This, being 1999, was a bit more difficult then than now. But he put in the time to find these things out, and he’d share the interesting bits with people that would listen and so I knew some of the interesting things early too. One night that October, before the album was even out, but when the single was just beginning to get airplay, we were at a restaurant eating chicken fingers and playing foosball. There was a guy in the corner playing pop covers as a solo act and he did “Hanginaround.” We were leaning over the foosball table at the time, my friend and I, and we stopped playing, straightened up, and did the clapping refrain part in the third verse. The musician was surprised. Everyone else in the place thought we were weird. My friend and I, however, were very impressed with ourselves.
That song hit 28 on the US Billboard Hot 100, topped the US Adult Alternative chart and peaked at number five on the US Adult Top 40 which, I guess, is why they waited 10 full months before the second single was released.
I’m surprised how well this song holds up for me. I think it is the guitar distortion. The minimalism of it still seems fresh, somehow.
Perhaps then, as now, this was my favorite track on the record. Oh my, the many highways and several county roads where I turned this up too loud, and the parking lots where I stayed an extra two minutes to get to the best part.
And the hidden track, which never got enough attention, I think. As the youth say today, it’s a banger.
I guess the last time I saw them live was 2001 or 2002 or so. I think they were supporting “Hardy Candy,” which is the next entry in their catalog. They’re playing in Indy at the end of next week, but I’m not going. I think I had my fill. But they will show up a few more times in the Re-Listening project. Up next, though, is a band with an X-Files inspired name because, no matter how often I do this bit, I can not get out of the late 1990s.
