Animated Airplanes Over Germany - Superchunk - Here's Where The Strings Come In - 1995

I realized that I spent a lot of last week talking about 9/11...which is something I'm usually not given to do. Generally, I hate talking about it, and hate when I go home to Indiana that there is always some relative that wants to hear the story again...but it would be impossible to not talk about it in the context of this song.

Granted, this song was recorded a solid 6 years before those events, but it's hard to not see a weird reflection of them in the story of this song. Mac McCaughan has never been that much of a storyteller with his lyrics. He tends to write in impressionistic blurbs that paint a story in the details rather than in events. (Think of the way that a nation of kids took "Slack Motherfucker" as an anti-capitalist rant when in fact it was the opposite, a screed against a lazy co-worker)...but in this song the events are fairly concrete. A man is taking a flight over Europe, the plane starts to go down, the man picks up the phone in his seat and calls his wife/lover to say that he loves her one last time. The plane pulls out of the dive and the man thinks about his life and how close he came to losing it.

I also can't help but think about the person on the other end of that call. I think of the scene in David O Russell's Three Kings were Marky-mark calls home while he's chained up in an Iraqi prison. His wife is doing the dishes, tending to the baby, having a normal crappy day and having no idea how to respond to the fact that her husband is in so much more of a dramatic situation. Or for a more comedic example, there is John Landis' American Werewolf in London...when David Naughton, knowing that he's losing out to the wolf, calls home only to get his bratty 12 year old sister...who has no idea why her brother is tripping out and telling her he loves her. But with both of those scenes, and the scene depicted in this song, it's hard not to personalize it. To think of how confused and sad and horrified I'd be if my girlfriend called me to tell me that she loved me and that she'd be dead in a matter of seconds. Jesus.

The Angels of Sleep - Portastatic - A Slow Note From A Sinking Ship - 1995

When I was a little kid I used to try and catch my guardian angel. As a pre-schooler I had been subject to really traumatic nightmares. So, my sweet, caring, hopelessly naive grandmother had convinced me that I had a guardian angel watching over me and keeping me safe at night. This is probably what led to my weird religious phase.

But anyway, I believed that every time I closed my eyes the angel would appear...so I'd spend hours laying in bed trying to suddenly open my eyes in the hopes of catching the angel off guard. Two things about this story, first of all it speaks to the human need to prove that there is something beyond our experience in the world...that we are constantly looking for some proof that there is still some magic left in this science based world of ours...even when all signs point to there being very little.

And secondly, what kinda second-rate slacker-ass angel did I think I had if I thought it could be punked by a 7 year old boy. Clearly I already had shitty self-esteem if even my imaginary guardian angel was a fuck-up.

Anyway, here's the mighty Mac McCaughan (if you haven't noticed, the man is one of my personal heroes) with one of his earlier, low-fi Portastatic tracks, letting the quality of the song overcome the production, the playing, his nasal voice, etc...and still being absolute gem.