/karen/

Random music tracks

Sunday, 19 August, 2007

(I wrote this during the writing time at Word by Word on Saturday, but only typed it up and polished it a little this evening.)

1.

It seems to me that music lovers are a highly individualistic bunch. Music listening is a very personal activity. I've come to realise that even though I'm friends with lots of people who love listening to music (and even playing it), we don't have much in common in terms of the artists we like. Even between me and Ben there are massive discrepancies: we both love The Twilight Singers, Stone Template Pilots, A Northern Chorus, Joanna Newsom, Andrew Bird, Van Halen and Ben Folds Five, but he reckons that Katie Noonan, Fiona Apple and Tori Amos are just “okay”—they're nothing special—and he's continually derisive about me liking Lindsay Lohan. (Well, everybody is derisive about me liking Lindsay Lohan.) Furthermore, I can't really get into Arcade Fire (I tried! But they're just a little too pretentious for my taste), I am unmoved by Bloc Party, I find Spoon mildly agreeable but have huge disagreement with Stryper.

Once I played Ben a Kate Miller Heidke song that I found online (it was “Words” and apparently it's nothing like the rest of her material). I hated it upon first listening, and the second listening didn't improve it, but Ben thought it was so fantastic, he went and bought it off iTunes. (Strangely, I rather like the rest of her stuff, but Ben doesn't.)

Of course, this should be obvious: loving music does not necessarily mean loving the same kind of music (or loving it as passionately as the other person). Often you don't know who else in the world who (to quote Sapphire in Almost Famous) “truly love[s] some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts” until you show up for the concert and you're in a crowd of screaming fans who amplify your passion for that “silly little piece of music” even more.

2.

What's odd is that the other person doesn't hear what you hear. I lent Ian Katie Noonan's Skin which transported me to Katie heaven, but he complained she was too breathy, and gave the CD back after two hours. I recommend Powder Burns to Guan but it's ruined for him by the first track (“I'm Ready” which, for me, makes the second track so wonderful). I play “There's Been an Accident” by The Twilight Singers to Rosey and she can't get past Greg Dulli's gravelly voice. I also play it for Elsie but she fails to see the beauty of the layering of the instruments—the piano, the snare, the long bass notes, the almost serpentine twisting of a melody on something I can't identify, a breathy chorus of voices over the top, then Dulli's entry: “Daylight is creeping / I feel it burn my face ...”.

Even if you do like the same song, you'll like it for different reasons. But the disparity makes you feel curiously alone.

3.

The other week I was browsing through the archives of Guan's old blog, looking for the post about the postcard that used to be on his door when he worked at MM (which looks like this and I was able to return it to him not long after), and I stumbled across this old post which listed his music tastes and discovered that Guan had discovered Andrew Bird long before I had. Furthermore, Guan thought that Andrew Bird was “way too talented”.

“Why didn't you tell me about him?” I asked in a Google Talk conversation not long after.

He did the virtual form of shrugging and muttered something about how it didn't occur to him to do so. Who knew that Andrew Bird played the sort of music I liked? We all like different things, so who do you trust for music recommendations? My childhood friend Emma gave me illegally taped cassettes of Fiona Apple, Jeff Buckley, Ben Folds Five and Alanis Morissette. I got into The Sundays because of her. Ben bought me Cerys Matthews (whose album I really liked) but he never thought I'd be into Stone Temple Pilots or Van Halen or The Twilight Singers. Sometimes his recommendations misfire: I couldn't get into The Frames or The Decemberists, even though he thought I'd like them. Guan recommended cLOUDDEAD but they get a little too creepy to listen to after a while. He also said I'd like Bats for Lashes and, based on the clips, I sort of do.

It doesn't always work the same way. We're too different, perhaps. Maybe that's the way music is: you find it on your own, you enjoy it on your own.

4.

Are there standards of good and bad taste? Yes, says Guan, but he's forgotten how he proved it and he can't define what it is. Yes, says Rob Gordon in High Fidelity:

A while back... [we] agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like. books, records, films -- these things matter! Call me shallow, it's the f---ing truth.

To some extent, you can tell something about a person if they are passionate about Kylie Minogue or Evanescence or Jet. They obviously tend towards mainstream music. Only music nerds out there (like Scaruffi) sneer at Pearl Jam for being too conventional. And though I do enjoy Evanescence and Jet and even Wolfmother, they're clearly one-trick sort of artists—derivative, repetitive, unoriginal in their sound. I call them music junk food and snub them for more serious acts.

5.

I noticed that when I started making playlists for my MP3 player, I tended towards the slower, more melancholy songs: “Last Goodbye” by Jeff Buckley, “Adhesive Love” by the Stone Temple Pilots, “Oh Well” by Fiona Apple, “Your Cloud” by Tori Amos, “Martin Eden” by The Twilight Singers. It's not like that all the time—I am totally obsessed with “Evie Part 1 (Let your hair hang down)” by The Wrights (and someone please choreograph a Black Mambo routine to it so I can stop picturing couples twirling in my head!) and “Love Train” by Wolfmother is just funky. But it's mostly slow and melancholy.

Put them all together and they don't make a very interesting playlist. It's better off leaving them in the context of their album.

6.

How long does it take to build a relationship with a song or an album? Nick Hornby reckons he's listened to Bruce Springsteen's “Thunder Road” 1,500 times—“just over once a week for twenty-five years, which sounds about right, if one takes into account the repeat plays in the first couple of years” (31 Songs). It means something to him—the lyrics still resonate years later. Will I still have the same obsessions with songs when I'm old and too deaf to hear?

7.

I've found I can only consume one album at a time, otherwise I get indigestion and can't cope. When I get something new, I'll play it to death until I know it—not the words, not the song titles, but the music becomes a part of me.

But playing things over and over makes Ben (and Guan) feel physically ill. They're “polymusicists” (Guan's term).

8.

In his wedding speech, Cargo said that there are two types of people in the world: music people (i.e. people who are into music for the music) and lyrics people (i.e. people who are into music for the lyrics). Ben and I are music people. I never pay attention to the lyrics. I may know some of the words but it's not often that the marriage of lyrics and melody actually makes an impression on me. I also never know what songs are called so I'd be hopeless on Rockwiz or Spicks and Specks because I'd recognise the tune but wouldn't be able to name it. (I could probably tell you who sang it though.)

Funny how some lyrics—or the meaning of a song—can totally destroy it for you. Wild Like Children is a great album by Tilly and the Wall but “Nights of the Living Dead” (yes, I had to look that up) is an unsightly blemish because of the frequent use of the F-word. And it's always seemed to me such a pity that “I Hope I Didn't Just Give Away the Ending” by New Radicals is about overdosing on drugs because the melody is so lovely.

And then there are other songs which just perfectly describe how I feel at certain times: “Bonnie Brae” and “The Lure Would Prove Too Much” by The Twilight Singers, “People Used to Dream About the Future” by A Girl Named Eddy, “Tomorrow” by Avril Lavigne.

9.

I'm quite picky about who I'll put on my list of “Favourite music”. I have to be committed. They can't be one-offs or fads. They need to have stood the test of time. A Northern Chorus doesn't cut it because even though I love Bitter Hands Resign, Spirit Flags is curiously lacking. Silverchair's Diorama stands out as a favourite but not their earlier work. Drive and Beautiful Collision by Bic Runga are wonderful but The Birds is too melancholy even for me. Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is sublime but Blacklisted is dull.

I have to like—or at least not dislike—everything the artist or band has ever done. Who makes the grade? Ben Beilharz (I know he hasn't put out any albums but I've loved everything he's done, and I know you'll think I'm biased but it's high praise from someone like me who is quite picky), Jeff Buckley, The Sundays, The Twilight Singers (even though She Loves You is weaker than the others), Greg Dulli, Stone Temple Pilots, Katie Noonan, George, Elixir, Fiona Apple, Killing Heidi, The Beatles, Poor Old Lu, Selah, Ella Fitzgerald, Stephen Sondheim, Tori Amos (though From the Choirgirl Hotel is a bit contentious), Sarah McLachlan, Goldenhorse, and Joanna Newsom.

But then where do you draw the line? Jeff Buckley only produced two albums, and Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk probably isn't everything he wanted it to be. What if he went off the rails later on in life? Would he have still qualified? Andrew Bird isn't on the list because I've only heard two of his albums. But then Goldenhorse is because I like both Riverhead and Out of the Moon. Can I really put down Milla Jovovich if all she's done is The Divine Comedy before going back to modelling?

I'm just as picky about my favourite albums of all time: I must like just about every single track. I can say this about Grace (Jeff Buckley), Static and Silence (The Sundays), Armchair Apocrypha (Andrew Bird), Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (Neko Case), Powder Burns (The Twilight Singers), Scarlet's Walk (Tori Amos), Pocket Full of Kryptonite (Spin Doctors), Riverhead (Goldenhorse), Extraordinary Machine (Fiona Apple) and Temple of Low Men (Crowded House). And OK Computer ought to be on that list—I remember obsessively listening to it the year I met Ben, playing it over and over again on my Walkman as I walked to and from university, or to and from International House when I was still going to Bible Study there but living in share housing—but it's ruined for me by “Fitter Happier”. Guan says it matches the mood of the album but I seriously cannot stand it. (Does that make me a Philistine?)

10.

Let me end with a quote by Kieron Gillen from Newsarama when they interviewed him about Phonogram, a comic about Brit Pop:

KG: It's certainly one division in the readers, but you could draw other lines through them if you wanted to. And there's certainly a level of fuzziness; there's not many people who get all the references. Because of that, you have to primarily write for the latter and assume that they don't know anything about Britpop other than what you tell them (It's another thing which makes Phonogram's structure essay-like, much like you would approach a piece of music journalism in a relatively mainstream magazine). However, you can rely on universals. You may not know Kenickie, but you know what it's like to be in love with a band so much it opens a whole world up to you. You may not know Kula Shaker, but you know about that din on the radio that makes you want to punch through glass. When the specifics of the situations become increasingly important—for example, the Manic Street Preacher material in the final episode—you'll notice we elaborate a whole lot more. Compare that to issue 2, where we give only explain Edwards as an Archetypal figure—the guitarist who disappeared mysteriously.

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