Adam: I was 12 years old and my family was on vacation in Florida when I saw the news reports on TV in our hotel saying that the singer from a band I was vaguely familiar with had killed himself.   I was just beginning to be interested in rock music in 1994, and after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, I wasn’t allowed to own any Nirvana albums.  I had to get my Nirvana fix from the radio and from a mixtape a friend gave me later that year which included half of Bleach and half of In Utero.  I used to listen to it through headphones on the school bus and in the back seat of our minivan.  I listened to it a lot in the winter of 1994-95, and for a long time after that, listening to In Utero reminded me of winter.  I still haven’t heard the other half of Bleach, but I bought In Utero a few years later and I listen to it every now and then.  My inspiration for writing this post was the recent media attention surrounding the DVD/CD release of Nirvana’s set at the 1992 Reading festival.  I bought the DVD, and it is great because it documents what a Nirvana concert was like when the band was at the peak of its popularity.

Glenn: Like you, Adam, In Utero was my introduction to Nirvana. I was obsessed with that “Hey! Wait!” song that showed up between Foreigner and Journey songs on the local FM rock station. I saved up my $14.98, ordered the CD from BMG Music Service (which, along with Columbia House, was the iTunes of the ’90s, kids), and played it incessantly. I even adjusted the volume knobs on my ancient stereo to match the EQ suggested in the liner notes. (This being a Steve Albini recording, it’s all treble, hardly any bass.) In fact, my mother took the In Utero CD away from me because I was playing “Rape Me” in the presence of my impressionable young brothers. Years later I bought it back from her at a garage sale. My brothers turned out fine.

In my experience, many people our age have a deep connection with this album, more so than with Nevermind. Why? For one, In Utero may be slightly more approachable. The songs are muckier, for sure, less catchy, and even slighter than those on Nevermind. But they sound like songs your own shitty basement band might come up with. If you were awesome. And you could sing like that. And if Dave Grohl was your drummer. (Dave Grohl, man, good god.)

At any rate, In Utero has that anybody-can-do-it punk-rock spirit that absolutely thrills, and even masks the paucity of excellent songs on the record.

Adam: I think this album sounds much better than Nevermind.  It is definitely muckier, and heavier, which I rather like.  I think its the album that the band wanted to make, whereas Nevermind was more a creation of producers out to make a quick buck on the grunge craze of the early 1990’s.  Cobain’s voice sounds more rough and the lyrics are darker on this album as well.  Regarding “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle,” for instance, the ostensible subject is Frances Farmer, a Seattle-born actress popular in the 1930s who was involuntarily institutionalized for essentially no better reason than being a free spirit.  The line “she’ll come back as fire/burn all the liars/leave a blanket of ash on the ground” struck me soon after I heard the song for the first time on that mixtape I got in sixth grade, and I remember thinking about that particular line at age 13 and thinking about what it meant, and how vitriolic it was.  Reading the line doesn’t do it justice, one really has to hear Cobain singing it to get the full effect, which is part of the reason I’ve included the song below.

Another particular line that affected me early on is from the song “Pennyroyal Tea.”  “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld/So I can sigh eternally.”  I remember hearing that line on my fabled mixtape and wondering who this Leonard Cohen character was, and being the intrepid youth I was in those pre-internet days, I figured it out.  I don’t remember exactly how I figured it out, but I found out he was a singer, and I remember thinking that he looked like someone old people would like.  That satisfied me for years, and I was content not knowing his music at all until my junior year of college.  Leonard Cohen is now one of my absolute favorite artists.  Do I have Nirvana to thank for my near-obsession with Leonard Cohen?  Probably not, actually, but that song let me know he was out there waiting for me.

And Glenn, I agree with your “good god” statement regarding Dave Grohl.  The man is insane behind a drumkit.  I remember reading an interview with him some years ago in which he said when he was a kid and learning how to play drums, the only kind of sticks he had were marching sticks, which are big and thick and heavy.  He says that the reason he hits the drums so damn hard is because he learned by using those heavy sticks.  His heavy-hitting style is reminiscent of another hard-hitter, and my favorite rock drummer of all-time, John Bonham.  Of course, no one will ever be able to replicate Bonzo’s unique sound, but Grohl comes close on In Utero.

Glenn: I’d like to offer a minor rejoinder, Adam. Nevermind was not created to capitalize on the grunge craze, as you suggest — it created the grunge craze of the early ’90s, as far as the mainstream goes. Sure, sludgy metal-influenced punk had been around for years before Nevermind, but as far as West Michigan middle-schoolers (that’d be you and me) were concerned, Nirvana was grunge. And that meant that grunge was Grohl’s drumming, mucky guitar playing, and Cobain’s scream.

Cobain’s voice is deceptively simple. At first it’s like, “Okay, depressive screamer on the horse screams in agony — got it.” But there’s something more calculated. As a friend put it, “It’s not just that he screams, it’s that he screams melodies.” Take that, Dave Mustaine. I read someplace that during the Bleach sessions, an engineer told a Seattle scenester, “I hear this guy open his mouth and I don’t know if it’s good or bad but it blows me away. You have to hear it yourself.” There’s chaos but also control. Another good description of Cobain’s scream comes from world-class jackass Robert Christgau: “Kurt Cobain yowls like John Hancock crosses his k’s.” (Stray comment: Christgau, as dickish as he is, is usually right.)

As I was listening to “Frances Farmer” just now, my girlfriend came into the room and said, “Do you like this music?” To which I responded. “Yes. Of course. Good god, yes.” I think what Cobain (and his scream) offered us was an example of crisp sincerity and absolute commitment to the angst of adolescence. He took our feelings as seriously as we did. That’s why it’s sometimes hard to listen to Nirvana as an adult — it’s hard to take those feelings of adolescent pain and angst as seriously as Nirvana did. Cobain’s singing can be like an open wound. And if that’s too much to bear, just listen to Dave Grohl.

Adam: I stand corrected, Glenn.  Nevermind did indeed create the grunge craze.   And with regard to your comments regarding Nirvana taking adolescent angst seriously, I think the first lines of “Serve The Servants,” the first track on In Utero, sum up Cobain’s feelings on the subject:  “Teenage angst has paid off well/now I’m bored and old.”

4 Essential Tracks:

“Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle“
“Tourette’s”
“All Apologies”
“Serve the Servants”

Buy their album, they’re Nirvana

One of our goals with this new version of So Well Remembered is to highlight excellent examples of music writing, old and new. Here’s a brand-spanking-new essay that treats Steve Winwood’s shit-chestnut “Higher Love” as a gateway into grief, memory, and politics. The essay is a really wonderful illustration of the way that music can be both a sovereign work of art and a method of considering much larger ideas and emotions. Plus, it happens to be by one of my favorite writers, Rick Moody, and appears on one of my favorite new blogs, The Rumpus.

A word of warning, though: if you are that dude who thought I was a hilariously pretentious piece of turd, you will probably dislike this essay.

Read it here.

Posted by Glenn

The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground (1969)

Glenn: Let’s clear one thing up: “The Murder Mystery” is awesome. Anybody who disagrees hasn’t caught onto the Velvet’s project, which is to use drones, pulse, and deadpan-specific lyrics to create a trance that contains an entire world. Anything else the Velvets do — sing, change chords, play feedback, take speed, let Nico do her thing — is extra. While “The Murder Mystery” isn’t a typical Velvets song, it does have the elements I’ve just identified, plus a wild bouncy-piano-with-vocals outro.

After listening to the demos and live stuff from the Peel Slowly And See box (see below for a live “What Goes On” that kills), I’m convinced that the Velvets were after some kind of secret chord-pulse-noise mechanism that could transcend space and time. In other words, they were trying to be Can or Bitches-era Miles Davis, before Can or Miles dreamed a way to the astral plane. The thing is that the Velvets were also Long Island dopes who wrote folk-pop songs. The tension in their music is the tension between trying to get free and trying to keep together — the dichotomy Dave Hickey traces in his classic essay about the differences between jazz and rock and roll.

The Velvet Underground is the Velvet Underground at their most quintessential. I don’t believe it’s their best album, but I think it illustrates best what they were trying to do, which was to wrap melodies, lyrics, and freaky noise around an undeniable pulse. In essence, that’s the goal of rock and roll from Bill Haley onward. The difference is that the Velvet’s pulse is not funky or danceable or sexual, but tense and worried, like your breaths when you realize you are “One minute born/one minute doomed.” A lifetime lies between thought and expression, and the Velvets provide the heartbeat.

Jordy: I’m glad you picked this album, Glenn. It would have been much easier to find something to say about any other Velvets record. S/T stands alone as Lou Reed’s least distinguished album (note the dork in the sweater on the cover).

That’s not to say that I don’t like it. In fact, I would consider it a baseline for what rock ought to sound like: insistent grooves (perhaps Glenn’s “pulse”) in “What Goes On” and “Beginning to See the Light”, mixed with touching musings in “Candy Says” and “Pale Blue Eyes,” and a couple straight-up ditties in “That’s the Story of My Life” and “After Hours.” Everything here was so well-written that it seems like a template for all rock that followed. Perhaps this is a corollary to Brian Eno’s observation that while not many people listened to the VU while they were active, everyone who did started a band.

So all those people who started bands after hearing the Velvets wrote some great songs which ended up sounding like those on The Velvet Underground. This is probably why the album sounds unremarkable: it gets obscured by all the smoke that it created.

Wait…one remarkable thing about this album is how bad “The Murder Mystery” is. You bit off more than you can chew there, Glenn. I liked “The Gift” on WL/WH because its spoken narrative was hefted by a heavy-as-fuck groove. Here you can’t even understand a word they’re saying and the music is rambling. It’s like they let Andy Warhol stick his toupeed head back into the band to write a song. Worse yet, it kind of sounds like the Doors.

Glenn: Don’t even fuck with the Doors. The Doors are awesome. But I digress. I like the swirling nuttiness of “The Murder Mystery.” It’s two insistent grooves juxtaposed; it sounds almost like techno from the ’60s. And the guitar tones are incredible. As for the lyrics….so what? I mean, you can’t understand a word that Damo Suzuki says, and you still like Can, right?

But you’re right, Jordy — there’s a workmanlike quality to this album that sounds unremarkable. At first. It took me a few listens to notice the feedback-drenched guitar on “What Goes On” and the “Heroin”-esque buildup of “I’m Set Free.” These songs are both mainstream and forward-thinking. The Velvets finally found a way to graft their craze onto simplicity.

Adam: First, Jordy, I don’t get your hostility toward the Doors. But that will have to be hashed out in a future post. I’m surprised neither of you have mentioned that this was the first album the Velvets made without John Cale. Cale’s avant-garde influence dominates the  first two albums, where this one is dominated by Lou Reed’s more traditional rock sensibilities. This album, then, is far more straightforward that the first two, save for the much-maligned “The Murder Mystery,” which I neither love nor hate. You can actually understand the words if you listen to it one channel at a time, however that won’t help you decipher any meanings, because there is no coherent narrative. The song was clearly conceived under the influence of hallucinogens. I very much like Maureen Tucker’s vocal contributions on this and “After Hours,” however.

My biggest complaint with this album is that some of the songs seem to be a minute or two too long. This is especially apparent on “Some Kinda Love” and “Pale Blue Eyes.” The former has a great groove that feels like its going to go somewhere but just doesn’t, and the latter is a great song, but it would would be much better if it were under four minutes long. To me, “Pale Blue Eyes”  feels like a traditional lost-love ballad, and those kinds of songs are not six minutes long. The songs that aren’t too long or too abstract are very good (and they happen to comprise our Four Essential Tracks for this album. Coincidence? Perhaps. Or perhaps not). Does anyone think Lou Reed got the idea for “What Goes On” from the Beatles song of the same name? They both contain the line “What goes on in your mind?” and are thematically similar.

Glenn: Well, yeah, except this “What Goes On” doesn’t suck.

Phil: I hate the Doors.

4 Essential Tracks:

“That’s the Story of My Life”
“What Goes On (Live)“
“Beginning to See the Light”
“Candy Says”

Van Morrison – Astral Weeks (1968)

Glenn: I was lucky enough to meet magisterial bassist Richard Davis during college. When I asked Davis about Astral Weeks, to which he contributed genre-busting bass lines, Davis smiled down and said, “Oh, yes. Of course. Well, you know, Van was a mama’s boy.” And smirked. I’m not quite sure what Davis meant, but his pat response means he wanted to shed some humanizing light on Astral Weeks, as it is so revered. Davis is on record saying that Morrison didn’t know what he wanted from the musicians — or is it that Morrison couldn’t say what he wanted? Certainly the questioning delicacy of Davis’s bass, Connie Kay’s drums, and Jay Berliner’s guitar is what makes the record so unique. It sounds like a balancing act, as if no one is sure where these songs will go — except, that is, for Morrison. His singing is assured and forceful even as it is exploratory. And yet these adjectives don’t seem to quite do it. So: what is it about Astral Weeks?

Phil: My friend Jeff is usually about three years ahead of me when it comes to listening to music that was recorded more than ten years ago. The pattern usually went that he would compulsively listen to an album or a band for a week or two and tell me about how great it was or how great they were. He told me about Neu!, he told me about Television, he told me about the Ramones, and he told me about Astral Weeks. I listened to it and liked it, but pretty much forgot about it until I revisited the Jeff Buckley Live at Sin-e box set. His quavering ten-minute rendition of “Sweet Thing” made me get all glassy-eyed, and I had to come back to the album. And then I listened to it obsessively. For weeks. Last fall, I heard Rhino was repressing Astral Weeks on LP and I went to the record store and said, “Get me this record. Get me this record now.” And they caviled and mumbled and then four months later, I got a phone call saying “your record’s here.” So I ran down and picked it up and laid down on my bed and turned up the stereo and listened to this record over and over and over. It’s like I was a seventeen-year-old in 1968. Transported. Captivated by a muse.

See, Morrison is telling a story and he doesn’t quite know how it goes.  He shares details, gives you glimpses of Cadillacs and ditches and shoes and dresses and children, all significant in their own uncertain way. But his way of exploring this story is intensely compelling. It’s his story, somehow, even though you have no real clear picture of the end or the beginning, or who the characters are. But this is one of the strongest points of the record: like every good storyteller, he gives you enough specifics to frame his narrative but leaves out enough to let you enter into it yourself. It then becomes your story, and you know who you’re talking to when you ask, “Could you find me?”

As far as the instrumentation goes, the horn parts on “The Way Young Lovers Do” are as much a part of the chorus as the horns on Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” The bass, especially on the title track, is indeed genre-busting. Nothing like it, ever. But for me, it’s the overdubbed string quartet that’s the most transcendent. It absolutely transports me, changes my eyes, opens up my heart. I compare all other string sections to the emotional heft of this one.

Ultimately, you can only talk about this record so much. And, God help me, it does sound like Van Morrison is singing through a mouthful of socks.

Jordy: Honestly, I don’t know what it is about Astral Weeks.  But for me, it has been the most consistently thrilling and empathetic album in my collection.  No other record I’ve heard matches its vision of something at once deeply melancholy and achingly beautiful.

Van Morrison was just 23 when he recorded Astral Weeks but, as Lester Bangs writes, “there are lifetimes behind it.”  The songs are populated with half-formed but very affecting characters from Morrison’s memories.  And like Phil pointed out, the music here somehow becomes your own.  It addresses your pains and pleasures.  It feels like something you could have dreamed up.

The album is a sigh — a deep breath that relaxes yet makes you aware of your own weariness.  I used to skip over “The Way Young Lovers Do” because I thought it was just too brash for an album of such sepia-toned yearning.  But now I see it as the reinvigorating first breath of Side B that slopes down into what I consider the record’s centerpiece: “Madame George.”  Morrison has always been credited for singing beyond his race and this is why.  Listen at 2:59: “Then from outside the frosty window raps.”  And again at 4:29: “And as you leave, the room is filled with music, laughing, music.”  Wow.

If you own this album but haven’t listened to it in a while, I encourage you to dust it off.  It will work especially well during this Fall season when we pass through the darker, quieter months.

Adam: The first thing I think of when I think about Astral Weeks is the line in the title track “Could you find me?/Would you kiss-a my eyes?” and the second thing I think about is the harpsichord in “Cyprus Avenue.”  Seriously, who puts a harpsichord is what is ostensibly a rock record?  (In addition to the lovely harpsichord, I am also quite partial to the drumming throughout the album, and, like Phil, I love the horns on “The Way That Young Lovers Do.”)  It is interesting that Van chose to put an instrument most popular in the baroque era on his album in 1968, at the height of the psychedelic era.  I think the choice of the harpsichord says something about the kind of album Van wanted to make.  He didn’t want to make a conventional rock album.  He didn’t want to make an album that was easy to understand.  He wanted to make an album that was a comfort to people who, to quote the title track, “ain’t nothin’ but a stranger in this world.”  The record is meant to appeal to people who feel as though they are living, breathing anachronisms.  This sense of timelessness is communicated through the instrumentation as well as through Van’s wailing, otherworldly vocals that would be right at home in an early 20th-Century blues record.

In short, Astral Weeks is not an album that you listen to.  If you do nothing but listen to this album, you won’t get it and you will probably be bored.  To really understand this album, it is necessary to form a relationship with it.  Don’t know what Van is saying?  Look up the lyrics.  Listening to it in the background of some other activity?  Stop what you’re doing, turn off the lights and let the music consume you.   Read Lester Bangs’ review and listen to nothing else for a week.  Then maybe you will begin to start to comprehend Astral Weeks.

Phil: The reason I’m lobbying for “Slim Slow Slider” is that it acts as a brilliant coda to the album, a reluctant goodbye, a remembrance and a farewell kiss to a memory.  I think it sums up the emotional weight of the record, really heartbroken and resigned after this whole sorry, beautiful affair. It’s the feeling of the whole record, not all of the tracks, but the weight of the whole record set in miniature that makes me pick this song.

Glenn: I concur with you on “Slim Slow Slider,” Phil. I especially like the rattling bass strings at the very end, after what turns out to be a pretty drastic edit — cutting out around four minutes of music. Read this awesomely extensive interview with Astral Weeks producer Lewis Merenstein for more insight into the creation of this record.

4 Essential Tracks:

“Astral Weeks”
“Madame George”
“Slim Slow Slider”
“Cyprus Avenue“

Buy Astral Weeks

Bob Dylan:  Live 1966 – The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert

Modest Mouse – The Moon and Antarctica (2000)

GLENN:

I had such high hopes for The Lonesome Crowded West. But it turned out to be a droney, overlong, emoish Pixies ripoff. I dug a few tracks, but soon filed it away and returned to Fugazi.

A few years later my friends were talking about “this great new band, Modest Mouse,” and the record they just picked up at Best Buy. I shrugged and picked up The Moon & Antarctica, but again, it was a little…well…iffy.

The production was crap. Many of the songs seemed just as slight as those on The Lonesome Crowded West. The singer still lisped. The double-tracked vocals canceled each other out. The guitars lacked tactility, the bass was muddled, the cymbals were too damn loud, the rest of the drums thuddy or inaudible, and when the band tried to rock it sounded like a bad car radio with the mids cranked and the high end rolled off. Plus the cover art (the old cover art, two disembodied hands shaking over some sort of lunar landscape) sucked. What, exactly, was going on here?

At some point it hit me. The cotton-in-ears production was meant to evoke stillness, sickness, sadness. The just-out-of-earshot clattery percussion was meant to sound like the mystery and menace of nature. The out-of-nowhere shifts in tempo, structure, and style were meant to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. The record is about loneliness, wide open spaces, and juxtaposition. My favorite song, “The Stars Are Projectors,” embodies all these themes.

“The Stars Are Projectors” features some of the album’s clearest production, in the “It’s all about the moderate climates” section — and yet that singable melody is surrounded by a rocket-ship-leaving-Earth’s orbit roar on one side and a speeding-up-only-to-slow-down section on the other. In fact, the song has at least three distinct parts, all of which could be developed into typical songs, but aren’t.

What gives?

I’ll tell ya. The song is hard to pin down, just as almost everything on The Moon & Antarctica is hard to pin down. Why do the guitars on “Alone Down There” get really loud all of a sudden? Why does “Lives” give up halfway through and start again as a different song? Why is the deep-freeze-of-outer-space-by-way-of-Plato’s-Cave vibe of “The Stars Are Projectors” interrupted by some dumb ditty about a plague of wild dogs?

Because The Moon & Antarctica is about uncertainty and mutability. It’s about the inevitability of death and the failure of love and friendship to stave that off. It’s cold and hard to follow for a reason. The sound of the record and the song order is meant to juxtapose emotions not in order to confuse but in order to create complexity. Out of context, many of these songs really do sound slight, but in the context of the album they are absolutely essential. After the record is over, I feel exhausted.

At any rate, that’s my take. What do my esteemed colleagues make of this album? Mess or masterpiece?

JORDY:

The first two tracks (“3rd Planet” and “Gravity Rides Everything”) are stone-cold classics in the MM catalog and are the first real evidence that Isaac Brock had quieted (though not silenced) his demons long enough to compose vibrant, solid songs with some consistency.  Indeed, there are few flaws on The Moon & Antarctica.  My only complaint is perhaps that the hooky songs distract from the supposed themes of alienation and loneliness.  As regards said theme, Glenn would probably consider “The Stars are Projectors” to be the album’s centerpiece.  It is surely a weird suite of great guitar work and spacey production.  And most nearly evokes the Moon of any song on the record.  But I tend to judge this album by all of the songs except “The Stars are Projectors.”  That is, I don’t consider it a highlight.

It is in the briefer tunes that this album distinguishes itself.  A concert favorite, “Paper Thin Walls” should have made Modest Mouse a radio favorite four years before “Float On.”  “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes,” despite inspiring a perplexing covers album from Mark Kozelek, is my favorite song on the album for its insistent groove, shrieked chorus, fine lyrics (“Our hearts pump dust”), and touching slide outro.

The Moon & Antarctica is not a mess – it falls together conceptually and includes some of the band’s best songs.  Masterpiece?  Probably not but it’s the closest they’ve come in their 16 years together.

ADAM:

I had absolutely zero interest in Modest Mouse two weeks ago.  And as I write this, I have listened to The Moon and Antarctica exactly twice.  I do, however, remember hearing Jordy drunkenly belt out “Paper Thin Walls” at a party circa 2005.  Other than that, I approached the album with fresh ears.  Admittedly, my insight is limited after two listens, but I can say that the lyrics are intriguing and warrant further thought on my part.  It’s too bad they are buried under such dense instrumentation.  One track that sticks out in my mind is the closer, “What People are Made Of.”  What are they made of, you ask?   Why, water and shit, of course.

4 Essential Tracks:

“3rd Planet”
“Tiny Cities Made of Ashes“
“The Stars Are Projectors”
“Paper Thin Walls”

Buy it here

Friends,

For over two years we’ve offered mp3s and commentary on the songs of our lives. We met some fine people along the way and generally had a good time sharing our musical lives with you, one song at a time.

However, something seemed to be missing. This blog was formed by four friends who loved music, and loved to talk about it often (to their girlfriends’ dismay).  Music binds us to one another and few things animate us more than a lively discussion of it.  We’d like to return to these roots: friends talking about the music they love.

To that end, we will be changing the form and purpose of So Well Remembered. Our focus will be on albums, new and old. We will write in  dialogue form. On any given week you might see us arguing over a 1967 sacred cow, discussing a minor Dylan work, fawning over Charles Mingus, wandering the Kinks discography, analyzing the guitar tone on a recent post-rock opus, or sharing a memory of that one time we listened to that one record in mom’s car late at night — remember that? — and it was totally awesome. We may not turn you on to the latest and greatest or weirdest and wackiest, but we hope to provide honest insights into the pleasures and distinct pains of music listening.

Talk to you soon,

SWR Writers

Warren Zevon doesn’t get the credit he deserves for being a great songwriter.  He was well-respected among other musicians, and his songs are often covered by the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and others.  As a teenager, Zevon briefly studied modern classical music with Igor Stravinsky, and in the 1970s, he was the touring keyboradist with the Everly Brothers as well as with Don and Phil Everly on their respective individual tours.  He was also an occasional stand-in for Paul Shaffer on both late-night iterations of David Letterman’s show.

“Carmelita” from Preludes:  Rare and Unreleased Recordings (2007)

“Carmelita” is a junkie’s lament and one of Zevon’s most famous songs, after “Werewolves of London.”  The song first came to my attention recently after hearing a cover by GG Allin, of all people.  The version I’ve posted is an acoustic demo, but after comparing it to the original release I felt this version was more affecting.

“Searching For A Heart” from Learning to Flinch (1993)

I very much like songs that are able to distill the complexities of love into such simple words, and yet still convey emotional depth, and “Searching for a Heart” succeeds admirably in that regard.

“I Was in the House When the House Burned Down” from Life’ll Kill Ya (2000)

This is just a great song that showcases some of Zevon’s darkly comic style.

Posted by Adam

It's how you float that matters

Simon Joyner – “The Drunken Boat” from Out Into the Snow (2009)

Pardon my absence once again, but you don’t want excuses, you want results.

What we have here is an anomaly, an anachronism, a man out of time. A Billy Pilgrim, if you will. The warm sound of tape, the warm lap steel,the electric guitar tone, the mumbling juxtaposition of Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen and Dylan, the strings seemingly lifted right from the end of Astral Weeks. It’s all here. Everything about this song (especially the production!) screams “I was written and recorded in 1976!”

But no! This album came out last month! And it makes me wonder how albums (or songs) use production values to present themselves as something else entirely.  How much of the irresistible charm of this nine-and-a-half minute epic is due to its built-in nostalgia? Would Kings of Leon’s Sex on Fire be as irresistible as this song if it sounded like it was recorded in the 1970s?

These are the questions I have for you, gentle reader. Please listen and consider and respond.

Also please buy this record because you want to

Posted by Phil

Guy Clark – “L.A. Freeway” from Old No. 1 (1975)

T’other day, Glenn mentioned that he was playing this song with his sometime band.  I first heard it a few years ago and found it to be one the best ramblin’ tunes I’d ever heard.  I still feel that way (I also dig the spare Wurlitzer piano).  This whole album is terrific and showcases some of the very best lyrics in the genre (see “Instant Coffee Blues” in particular).

Buy it here

Posted by Jordy