Maybe you don't know about Grandaddy's song Miner At The Dial-A-View, but it's a really good song.
There's some harmonies and some deet-deeeztsing electronica influences, but it's not an electronica song at all.
It's more like a Ray Bradbury story brought to modern song form. And it's beautiful and poignant and is fully eligible for inclusion on the Best Songs Ever list.

Tags: grandaddy, music, songs
Current Location: somewhere so far away

Slept in late enough not to feel like going to the gym, and then sat down to do something, I don't quite remember what. Called my mom. Stacked all eighty of the cds I printed yesterday up and looked at how nice they all are. Made a pie. Made two pies, actually. Banana coconut custard, I'd suppose you'd call them. Pecans on top, peanut butter cookie/pecan crust beneath. Rich as anything, really, a bit too sweet. Some food is like cheating; it's so simple to just assemble foodstuffs that taste hella good.

Got an armchair from your family home.

I restored the dining room to more or less rights, and left the second pie in the fridge (I can never spell "refridgerator" so that it appears correct, and I'd love to say icebox but I don't want to come across as...well, shoot. Next time, I'm just going to say icebox.) as a token thanks to the roommates for letting me completely commandeer our dining table and our coffee table for the last two evenings in my vigilant printmaking exercises. The first pie went with me to work, along with the cds I printed and all the loose books I'd checked out but never actually read, or read halfway and lost, or read all the way and then disgarded and forgot.

Got your P.G. Wodehouse novels and your telephone.

Geez, but somedays I feel sharp. Like the sun breaking through the clouds, like it does that just when I pull into a parking space and step one foot out of the car door, and my heel touches the pavement and a cool clean beam breaks into the sky. I got new garters, won 'em (as they like to convince you on the electronic bay system), wore 'em, wished some darling boy or the other would notice. If they did, they weren't speaking up. You win some, you lose some. It was good enough. I had pie.

Got your plates and stainless steel.

Got off work late enough, came home. Had an organic cheese poof or two, and tried my hardest to find an acoustic version of Radiohead's "Creep" that lacks any sort of expurgation. Am beginning to believe that maybe Thom Yorke just likes singing the word "very" in an incredibly deep voice for no particular reason. My toes are cold, even in socks and shoes.

Got that way of never saying what you really feel.

Oh, Lord, I want it to be summer again, and this time, I want to take a road trip, for reals, I want to see the country from a passenger seat, I want the Weakerthans on so loud that it's impossible to even remember winter. We were listening to one of their songs last night, and John K. Samson or whatever his name is has this great habit of creating summation lyrics that hit you dead on at the right moment, and if you're singing along with someone in the car, you both are really only just waiting for those lines to come on. Mostly the ones from the song last night are as good as he gets "rely a bit too heavily, on alcohol & irony, get clobbered on by courtesy, in love with love and lousy poetry", but I finally got an analog real life disc of Fallow, and there's a song on it that reminds me of this comic book I read all in one sitting, crosslegged in a friend's industrial loft last summer. It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken. I think it's because it's about a death in Manitoba, and I associate most Canadian things with each other, in a wantan act of provincial attrition.

Tags: lyrics, rambling, songs
Current Location: wearing blueblack eyes, wearing dead men's neck-ties
how i feel: anchorless
what i hear: (but the union makes us strong)

   I've really appreciated Last.Fm, even though I'm still too close to it to have it reflect some sort of greater truth. I refresh it, sometimes, desperate to see that new line that tells me what I just listened to. I need that attention.

   It has flaws. I noticed them first when I realized that it couldn't show that I listened to Dylan's Temporary Like Achilles over and over in my  car, driving down a highway, and it can't hear my record player to know that I kept dropping the needle at the beginning of Patsy Cline singing about walking after rmidnight. It still doesn't realize that I put on hip-hop videos when I'm cleaning. The oversights, the gaps, go beyond that. I want it to know just how loud I was listening. Keeping Sam Cooke tuned low while we have dinner is one thing, playing the Weakerthans so loud that any radius closer than several feet from my computer's speakers fuzzes out the details, that's another thing, and an important thing. I song becomes more real the louder you play it.

    I want to tell Last.Fm the things it doesn't know, maybe check off boxes and fill in blanks. This is the song I was listening to while laying on the windowsill, on the sunny day off I had. I want it to know that while I was hearing M.Doughty's voice, I was looking at the way there was a startle of light dots on the ceiling, still reflections from the Mexican stained glass ornament hanging in the window. I want it to attach emotional value through new complex algorithms. I could click down the list of the names I was thinking about,  and how I didn't just hear the song, I had to let it fill the room while nobody was home. I had to listen to each word, and how he said it, how it builds to a phrase that kills me with its perfect simplicity. Record how much I like the way he catches at the end of a chorus, and the way the loop stutters behind. I volunteer to tag it with the label of "sweet melancholic joy", and Last.Fm can shuffle it into place. But websites don't listen like that, so I've just got my top charts, and tracks played, and meet your neighbors,  and I have to find other ways to keep notes.

Tags: music, namedropping, songs, summer
Current Location: a few feet from the windowsill
what i hear: m.doughty-ways & means

     If growing older means that I sift myself into a position of admiring and adoring Bjork, than I am much more accepting of maturation, and of whatever newfound patience it is that had me glued to every moving pixel comprising her face onscreen tonight. I'd like to think that I was never given a good enough chance, that I never truly got to see her before, that the screen was never big enough. But perhaps it's that I never sat still and listened. All I know is she got to be larger than life and I was absolutely riveted, and there was her and the orchestra spread out below, and the harpist, and the Greenlandish choir, and she had a thick ostrich of cascaded feathers sweeping around her waist and every time she opened her mouth I held my breath some. I also said her children were all fey changelings, though, so take that as it falls, for some pleased gushing.

Tags: beauty, music, songs
Current Location: top of this mountain
what i hear: three guesses, first two don't count

    I drank loads and loads of coffee this morning, and I brewed it too strong, and in addition I steeped it with this yerba mate tea that I've been drinking. The mate tea (Yes, I left out the accent, so just read it as mah-teh or what-have-you regardless.) has this earthy almost vulgar taste to it and so I always think tempering it with another drink will lead to sure-fire hot beverage success but it is mostly hit or miss and I usually need to add near tons of sugar, which I consider to be cheating.  So it was that and hummus and egg on bread, and then, bam, round two o' the clock there was all of a sudden this jewelry hammer at the front of my skull starting to try and blacksmith out the One True Ring against my forehead, which was unfortunate, believe me. See, all morning I had been lapsing in my sworn duties to create/clean/cook, but it was all in vivid anticipation of truly wreaking good havoc in the afternoon, and, well, this headache just really messed me over.  And I don't get headaches very often at all, and I consume much caffeine or so I'd like to think, but this apparently took things too far and my synapses are in revolt. Viva La Revolucion! Except I don't speak Spanish or French really at all, so probably there are errors in that bit of anarchistic pride. But I took one of those little blue tablets I buy at Walmart every now and then when I think I need to stock a medicine cabinet, and then I got a nudging that said I wanted to listen to not only Atom but also His Package, so of all the things to listen to when one's head is being techy (Tetch-Ee), those sorts of stuttering beeps and the exclamations and churning simple chords, well, those aren't what you'd aim for, but I think my head is getting better.  

     But you know who does speak Spanish and French and Italian and Hebrew? Jonathan Richman does. Go find your sweet Bippy. Bet her that. You'll make an easy tenner out of it. I think Saturday night was something along the third or fourth time I'd seen him, and he, I think, escalates in charm by several x-ponential degrees each time. Which is pretty amazing. And I'm not even good at math, but I can do those sorts of calculations in my head when he is up on stage in a good striped shirt and he throws his hands out to the crowd and, yes, he swings those hips, and the guitar swings with them a bit, and I look over at the girl next to me and she looks back and we sort of nod but don't look much longer at each other because Jonathan is much more interesting at the moment. I like to imagine that time when he actually must have been in the Lesbian bar, and what that must have been like. Sweet Lord, I bet they adored him.

Tags: coffee, drinking, music, songs
Current Location: jiggity jig.
how i feel: Putting the "i" in "frenzied".
what i hear: atom and his package-alpha desperation march

Who's the punk still disheartened by Yusuf Islam's return foray into the singer-songwriter scene? Shit, son, that just might be me, who's always been so vouchful of catty Mr.Stevens and his wild world of goodness, and also of the fact that he pivot-turned and disappeared off that folked-up scene all for the sake of what he believed. He never sold out, and I loved that so much, and so I talked it up all the time as an example as the one true goodness, when now he comes back and I am several types of crestfallen.

Chalk one up to life's little let downs. There's another pillar gone awry.

Tags: end of an era, music, songs
Current Location: air conditioned gardens
how i feel: hard-headed
what i hear: my favorite tunes

Would probably somehow manage to be better if I knew the Finnish language.

Tags: angst, links, lists, songs, video
how i feel: unfair

 And how was it that I even went about missing the Damien Jurado Four-Song Ep with the song "Spitting Teeth"? Someone was unbecomingly taciturn, that's for more than sure, and I suppose the only thing I'd have to thank them for is that I got to hear it for the first time tonight, when it's all coming down like winter, and I like it in a way even heightened by how long it took for me to get around to it.


   And that's the sort of mumbled November song I like with my evening knitting and cider, yes.  And okay, perhaps you are all colored with step five paces back from the headphoned one with the anger management problem, but if you'd just listen to Jurado who is practically a child's stuffed bear every time he plays, you would see how he tempers it all so very well that it is not as much of a gratuitous deal as perhaps it sounds. And if you are a particularly blase sort of listener you might not even catch it the first time through. You'd have to be pretty blase, yes, to not pick up on this one, but he has others that pick their own way across lyrics so that the overall glisten is something sweeter, and it is only on later listenings it becomes all too evident that there is a serial killer lost in between those chords. We used to sit around and talk about what it's be like to have yourself a husband like that, one who would write down songs that would make people wonder if he'd ever killed a man. He has a song about his dreams, bad dreams, and how he has them every night. It's true, Jonathan said. I know someone who knows him who knows he has those bad dreams. And so I still think about that sometimes, about coming real close to someone who's got a thing that won't let them sleep right, but God, he makes something beautiful.

Tags: songs
Current Location: lucky I guess
how i feel: I am dead weight I am no one
what i hear: Damien Jurado-Smith 1972

      Have I mentioned that I very resolutely do not want to be 25? I'm only turning 24, of course, but 24 is rubbing shoulders with 25, and 25 is some big number, I will tell you that. And I understand if you don't feel like giving me the pity I've got the hat turned out for, I promise. But I was walking to work the other day, and it was cold, which adds +10 Misery points at any given moment (including the present, actually), and I was listening to Modest Mouse's Came As A Rat, which is a song that once I chewed up with a rapt vigor and spit out everywhere, including a few relevant mix tapes (by few I mean one, but I am numbing the particulars with vagueness.) And it's got this bedspring of an opening grind, and the chatter of the lyrics, oh snap, it was red meat. Geez, but the lyrics, there's this part where I don't know but I been told you'll never die and you'll never grow old, and I used to believe that in the way I always believe songs in that moment I am hearing them, and I believed it in life, too, because I was just 20 or maybe a little more and there was that novel blossoming of life/the universe/and everything where I was downright amazed, and I could listen to Modest Mouse and felt so full of vinegar and awesomeness. And the other morning, walking in the dead leaves, listening again, I sure as hell didn't believe it. Even after two passersby nodded and said good morning, I still didn't belive it anymore. But I could remember believing it. And that made it even sadder.

    Didn't help, getting to work. They coddle me some, because I am younger still than all of them, but we were standing in this half circle near the time clock and one of the boys grabbed that piece of skin at my elbow, which he usually does, and I squirmed, and he said you know, when you get older, the skin doesn't spring back into place anymore. And the other guy grabbed at his own elbow and said look, mine's already doing it. As I stood there and looked at the pale piece of skin sticking up off his knobby elbow, something  in that rusted little heart of mine jumped kittycorner to itself and freaked the fuck out.

Tags: angst, growing old, modest mouse, songs
how i feel: stuck to

While bicycling:

• Elliot Smith- Needle In The Hay- As a direct result of the lyric "four more blocks plus the one in my brain", every time I take a glance up to a street sign to reason out how many blocks I've got left until I reach my (not final) destination, I pick up the strand of this song and it winds up occupying my mental space for at least several more blocks. Fun Fact! My ex-roommate Jonathan used to live off of eleventh and Powell, and if you do the math..."6th and powell a dead sweat in my teeth gonna walk walk walk four more blocks plus the one in my brain", that's just about right there.
  

• Broken Family Band-Where The Hell Is My Baby- When I'm coasting down hills, something about the rhythmic clickings around the spoke and chain area of the bike invariably brings me to this bit towards the end where they start repeating  "come back baby, come back honey, come back home, come back home, come back baby, come back honey..." to a sort of escalating cadence. It's catchy. I usually wind up pulling up to a stop sign or something while humming under my breath.

• Placebo-Meds- On my way home from work, there's a big white delivery truck parked along one of the back streets. It's sort of old, sort of run down, and it has a few tags of grafitti on its side, one of which is a scrawl that says "Meds", the other which is a big green outline of what is probably a marijuana leaf.  The timing generally works out so that I am still crooning "Ba-a-by, did you forget to take your meds?" right about when I pull into my driveway.

While at work:

• Wolf Parade-You Are A Runner- See, 'cause in the mornings and afternoons, we print up all these slips for different titles that customers have requested, and generally one person goes around the store and finds them all, and we call that person the "Internet Runner". Or The Runner, for short. Hence.

• The Kinks- Picture Book- Guess who shelves the Middle Readers and Young Adults section, located conveniently in the heart of the Children's Area? That would be me, yes. And sometimes, because I am so very helpful, I also shelve the children's picture book section. "Pi-IC-TUre BO-ook! Pictures of your mamas, taken by your papas, a lo-ong time a-go."

•  Magnetic Fields- Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits- For unknown reasons. It's just been happening. I neither subscribe to or actively repress any of the sentiments stored in this song, and for the life of me I can't figure out what the trigger could be.  Possibly related to all-too-frequent sightings of  "The Runaway Bunny?"

While at home:

• My bastardized version of Elvis Costello's Allison- Have you met my roommate? (Sometimes combined with Scapegoat Wax's Hello Allison.)

Tags: books, lists, songs, work
how i feel: that's all i got