It's certainly time to wake this blog up a bit... I've been incommunicado for a while as my band Hutson finished up our first LP, "From A Transistor Radio" - (due out in March 2012)...
Since that job is done for a bit, I have returned to the blogging sphere.
What I'm going to talk about is the life-changing aspects of certain albums. I'm sure most of you who are true music fans, (and even those who are casual listeners), have at least an album or two that "changed your life"... Or an album that you continuously come back to for inspiration, etc...
However, here is where I need to make a distinction... There are those albums whose discovery
coincides with certain events in one's life... An example: you bought album "x" in 2003 after a bad breakup with your girl-friend/boy-friend of 4 years, and it helped you get through a tough time, etc ... While I'm sure everyone has plenty of those, that's not the kind of life-changing album that I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is when you've bought an album, and upon listening to it - it has shifted your paradigm or changed your understanding of music from that point on.
Albums like this, are not as common....
In this blog, I'm going to examine one album that did this for me.
I'm guessing that it would be in the first couple of weeks of January 2000, in my first year of college. Me and my girl-friend at the time had seen "Girl Interrupted" at the theater, and I had the urge to purchase the soundtrack to this movie. Now, in hindsight, the movie has made little impact on my life and seems to have been only a means to an end to purchase the soundtrack. As far as that soundtrack goes, it's a fairly solid collection of late 60's rock and pop tunes, (see: Petula Clark's "Downtown" and/or the Band's "The Weight")... Some good songs on there, but nothing necessarily mind-blowing... Except for one song.
The odd one out is a song by Wilco, called "How To Fight Loneliness."
I found this song most interesting on the soundtrack, simply cause I knew it was a current band at the time, and yet the song sounded almost as if it had come from the same time-frame as the aforementioned song by the Band. I'd heard of Wilco, read some random magazine articles, etc... but hadn't picked up any albums by them. Still, I found it kind of invigorating to hear a band playing this type of music now, so I decided I should track down an album by them.
Probably a few weeks later, I made the trip into Walla Walla to the only good record store in town, Hot Poop, (say what you will, but Hot Poop was, and still is, a seriously awesome independent record store)....
I found the Wilco album that also contained the song I loved so much. That album was "Summerteeth."
This was a fairly big leap of faith for me, cause in most articles I'd read of Wilco, they were portrayed as an "alternative country" band, (and yes, I'm aware how stale and over-used this genre term has become in the past several years - especially since my understanding of it was that it was a rock/country hybrid, but it turns out to be mostly a bunch of boring-ass folk music in the past decade... but I digress...).
The idea of anything "country" being anywhere close to rock music gave me reason to shudder at the tender age of 19.... My reasoning? I grew up in Oklahoma long before I moved up to Oregon, and was exposed to a ridiculous amount of country music, and by the time I hit my teenage years I found anything in the genre revolting - having grown into my teenage years with the so-called "alternative rock" music of the early-mid 90's.... (It should be noted that the "country music" that is played on heavy rotation on CMT or on nearly every country station in town is still equally revolting to me, but for different reasons....)
So, while I enjoyed "How To Fight Loneliness", I was a bit skeptical if I would dig this entire Wilco album, but I figured it'd be worth the 15 bucks to find out.
Now, at this point I could easily do a track by track breakdown of the album to explain all the great things about it, but I think a listen on Spotify could fill in all that information for you. But there are certain important aspects about it that made it life-changing for me. First, and foremost, it changed my perception and disdain for "country music." The type of "country" music that was incorporated into these songs was that of the 60's and 70's, even the earlier Johnny Cash stuff. This type of country I could tolerate and even like - mostly because it wasn't the glossy, Nashville garbage that had been going on for the last 20 years - (I'm looking at you, Garth Brooks and Shania Twain...)
After hearing this album, instruments such as banjo or pedal steel became less foreign and added a fascinating touch to what were basically straight-forward pop songs, buried beneath some cool studio flourishes.
Case in point, the song "Via Chicago" that ripples beneath waves of feedback and intermittent squalls of detuned guitars - accompanied, (at times), by drums that sound like they were recorded in the apartment next over... These are all tricks that Sonic Youth had been doing for years, but at the time, it was rare to hear these being incorporated into a sad acoustic ballad. Not only that, with lines such as "I dreamed about killing you again last night, and it felt alright to me" - Jeff Tweedy was writing cryptic lyrics that held way more weight to me at that time-frame than anything from the KornBizkitNickelSum182 bands that covered the radio...
So, I guess in a nutshell - "Summerteeth" made me not afraid of country music anymore, which opened me up to a broader range of music and artists, (i.e. Son Volt, the ever amazing Uncle Tupelo, the Byrds, the Jayhawks, Jerry Reed, Cracker, etc....), that I wouldn't have found otherwise.
And really, it's just a freaking awesome album. Do yourself a favor and give it a listen.
Since that job is done for a bit, I have returned to the blogging sphere.
What I'm going to talk about is the life-changing aspects of certain albums. I'm sure most of you who are true music fans, (and even those who are casual listeners), have at least an album or two that "changed your life"... Or an album that you continuously come back to for inspiration, etc...
However, here is where I need to make a distinction... There are those albums whose discovery
coincides with certain events in one's life... An example: you bought album "x" in 2003 after a bad breakup with your girl-friend/boy-friend of 4 years, and it helped you get through a tough time, etc ... While I'm sure everyone has plenty of those, that's not the kind of life-changing album that I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is when you've bought an album, and upon listening to it - it has shifted your paradigm or changed your understanding of music from that point on.
Albums like this, are not as common....
In this blog, I'm going to examine one album that did this for me.
I'm guessing that it would be in the first couple of weeks of January 2000, in my first year of college. Me and my girl-friend at the time had seen "Girl Interrupted" at the theater, and I had the urge to purchase the soundtrack to this movie. Now, in hindsight, the movie has made little impact on my life and seems to have been only a means to an end to purchase the soundtrack. As far as that soundtrack goes, it's a fairly solid collection of late 60's rock and pop tunes, (see: Petula Clark's "Downtown" and/or the Band's "The Weight")... Some good songs on there, but nothing necessarily mind-blowing... Except for one song.
The odd one out is a song by Wilco, called "How To Fight Loneliness."
I found this song most interesting on the soundtrack, simply cause I knew it was a current band at the time, and yet the song sounded almost as if it had come from the same time-frame as the aforementioned song by the Band. I'd heard of Wilco, read some random magazine articles, etc... but hadn't picked up any albums by them. Still, I found it kind of invigorating to hear a band playing this type of music now, so I decided I should track down an album by them.
Probably a few weeks later, I made the trip into Walla Walla to the only good record store in town, Hot Poop, (say what you will, but Hot Poop was, and still is, a seriously awesome independent record store)....
I found the Wilco album that also contained the song I loved so much. That album was "Summerteeth."
This was a fairly big leap of faith for me, cause in most articles I'd read of Wilco, they were portrayed as an "alternative country" band, (and yes, I'm aware how stale and over-used this genre term has become in the past several years - especially since my understanding of it was that it was a rock/country hybrid, but it turns out to be mostly a bunch of boring-ass folk music in the past decade... but I digress...).
The idea of anything "country" being anywhere close to rock music gave me reason to shudder at the tender age of 19.... My reasoning? I grew up in Oklahoma long before I moved up to Oregon, and was exposed to a ridiculous amount of country music, and by the time I hit my teenage years I found anything in the genre revolting - having grown into my teenage years with the so-called "alternative rock" music of the early-mid 90's.... (It should be noted that the "country music" that is played on heavy rotation on CMT or on nearly every country station in town is still equally revolting to me, but for different reasons....)
So, while I enjoyed "How To Fight Loneliness", I was a bit skeptical if I would dig this entire Wilco album, but I figured it'd be worth the 15 bucks to find out.
Now, at this point I could easily do a track by track breakdown of the album to explain all the great things about it, but I think a listen on Spotify could fill in all that information for you. But there are certain important aspects about it that made it life-changing for me. First, and foremost, it changed my perception and disdain for "country music." The type of "country" music that was incorporated into these songs was that of the 60's and 70's, even the earlier Johnny Cash stuff. This type of country I could tolerate and even like - mostly because it wasn't the glossy, Nashville garbage that had been going on for the last 20 years - (I'm looking at you, Garth Brooks and Shania Twain...)
After hearing this album, instruments such as banjo or pedal steel became less foreign and added a fascinating touch to what were basically straight-forward pop songs, buried beneath some cool studio flourishes.
Case in point, the song "Via Chicago" that ripples beneath waves of feedback and intermittent squalls of detuned guitars - accompanied, (at times), by drums that sound like they were recorded in the apartment next over... These are all tricks that Sonic Youth had been doing for years, but at the time, it was rare to hear these being incorporated into a sad acoustic ballad. Not only that, with lines such as "I dreamed about killing you again last night, and it felt alright to me" - Jeff Tweedy was writing cryptic lyrics that held way more weight to me at that time-frame than anything from the KornBizkitNickelSum182 bands that covered the radio...
So, I guess in a nutshell - "Summerteeth" made me not afraid of country music anymore, which opened me up to a broader range of music and artists, (i.e. Son Volt, the ever amazing Uncle Tupelo, the Byrds, the Jayhawks, Jerry Reed, Cracker, etc....), that I wouldn't have found otherwise.
And really, it's just a freaking awesome album. Do yourself a favor and give it a listen.
2 comments:
I will check this album out on Spotify today at while I'm working. I'm ashamed to say I've never given Wilco much of a listen, so I guess today's the day.
Significant music for me? Probably Tom Petty & the Heartbreaker's Greatest Hits--got me through a tough breakup in highschool with songs like, "Even the Losers" and "Don't Come Around Here No More". They're not a particularly profound band, but for whatever reason, spoke to me at that time in my life.
Records/songs that gave me a "shot in the arm"? Probably started with the song "Kissing the Lipless" by The Shins, which sorta blew my mind at the time--not even my favorite song by them, but it was so different from anything I was listening to at the time that it sparked my interest in getting into more not-so-mainstream artists. Also Death Cab's album "Plans", and particularly the song, "What Sarah Said". I've always been inspired by emotionally vulnerable/brutally honest songwriting--this one took that to a whole new level for me.
Thanks for the fascinating post! I can't wait for more news on the CD release. BTW--when I hear Riot Saturday Night, I hear a hit potential. Of course I'm never very good at judging those things.
Well, the one thing I would say is that upon a first listen to the Wilco album, don't expect to be blown away like I was... (that's not to say my entire blog post is invalid), but that everybody is completely different in how they listen and interpret music - so your reaction could be completely different from mine, in fact you might not even like it at all.
But I think, likewise, that it shouldn't diminish the subjective power that certain albums have for some people. We're all different, and we should expect different things to move us.
As for Tom Petty, that's probably the hands-down best greatest hits album ever. I bought that on tape back in 1995 or so, and I listened to it so much that the song listing on the sides of the tape were all but worn off in a couple of years... (I of course upgraded to CD format a couple of years later).
And likewise, that album got me through a couple of awkward teenage years... Not mind-blowing as far as perhaps lyrics or musical aspects go, but rather a case of "the right songs at the exact right time" in my life.
Another thing I forgot to touch upon in the post, was that sometimes there are albums that act as a shift in your perceived idea of music or taste in music - that are not instantly likeable, in fact, may be difficult to listen to or accept. I've had a couple of those, albums that I sorta just didn't like and that I had to work at to appreciate and understand, (my 2 key examples are Passengers "Original Soundtracks 1", and Blur's "13" - 2 albums that were incredibly hard to like, but now hold a place in my collection that I would never sell).
More Hutson album news should be coming soon, along with the videos of the covers that the backers requested should be popping up on our youtube channel:-)
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