At My Window Sad and Lonely - Billy Bragg and Wilco - Mermaid Avenue - 1998

Back in 1998, Wilco was relatively small potatoes when they were asked to feature with noted British punk/folkie Billy Bragg on an album of unrecorded Woody Guthrie songs. At the time the were the band led by the less respected member of the Uncle Tupelo. They had had a minor "Y'alternative" hit with Box Full of Letters and then faded into the background with a solid but low selling follow up and a third album that relied more on Beach Boys-esque pop than Hank Williams Sr.

But then with Mermaid Avenue, their rise to the thrown of Starbuck's Comp/Dad-Rock icons was on it's way. The Guthrie estate had a set of lyrics that Guthrie had written but never set music too...they hand picked Wilco and Bragg to make an album with these lyrics and the results were solidly succesful...take this song for instance.

At My Most Beautiful - REM - Up - 1998

Well, sorry again for a bit of a lengthy gap between entries, but I took a few couple of days off of work to make a little road trip down to DC and then I had a fair amount of catching up on both work and sleep when I returned.

So anyway, since I've sort of gotten the hang of this whole travel blog thing recently I'll probably be writing a bit about DC...but I actually have a few things to say about this song, so the DC stories can wait for the next entry.

In 1998 I was working night shifts at a hospital's computer help desk in Cincinnati. I worked completely by myself for most of the night, and unless a system was down I rarely got many calls. As such had plenty of time to work on projects, catch up on reading, listen to music, etc. And one of the things I was doing was starting an internet romance with a girl I had known for a few years. She was obsessive about REM and had seriously recommended this album to me.

Now I, like many people, had sort of assumed that Bill Berry's departure after New Adventures in Hi Fi meant the end of REM as a creative force...and by and large I was correct, however they still had one last good album in them (Unless they seriously surprise me in their middle aged incarnation). And that album was Up.

The departure of Berry left the band free to experiment a bit. Their tour with young upstarts Radiohead as openers had left them with a taste for a bit more unusual textures and much of the album shows this influence. At My Most Beautiful however is one of the few songs on the album that looks backwards...it is admittedly a band trying to sound like the Beach Boys and they do a stirling immitation. Michael Stipe has long admitted his boredom with the icons of classic rock, but in doing his band mates a "Favor" and doing this song in the Pet Sounds style actually allowed the song to open up and breathe rather than stagnating in imitation. The sleigh bells, the baritone horns, the perfect pitched harmonies all work to show the delicacy of the song in both lyrical content and structure. It's really a lovely song and makes me wish even further that they had simply hung up their hats after this album.

At Least That's What You Said - Wilco - Kicking Television - 2005

I am currently DVRing the Champions League Semi-final between Arsenal and Man U...the two great rivals of the EPL (circa 1996-2005) meet in the European cup for the first time ever and it should be a great game...assuming that I can avoid any spoilers.

The DVR is really the double edged sword of the soccer fan these days. Since our games are played on a continent 5 to 6 hours ahead of us, the games are usually played during the day...so unless I want to take a day off work (or have a "doctor's appointment") then I have to set the DVR and wait till I get home. THe plus side to this is that, if I can pull it off, I can still have the majority of the excitement of watching a game live (but you know, there's still a little something missing knowing that it's not). I can watch it at my leisure. If I'm home a little late, I don't miss anything.

But, I have certainly had big games spoiled by the internet. When Liverpool made their amazing comeback against AC Milan in 2005...it was a a big enough story to make the AP newswire, even here in the states. Earlier in the year, when Arsenal was playing Roma in a tightly contested game...I stayed late at work so I could head straight to Rance's to watch the game. I avoided anything sports related. And then some kid in Cincinnait, that I was his camp counselor a billion years ago, updates his facebook profile to say "I can't believe Arsenal won on penalties!!!" My evening plan was shot.

So now I sit here, avoiding sports AND facebook and waiting for the day to end. Hopefully, I'll make it through and hopefully Arsenal will pull the victory off.

This is a live version of the previous song. It sticks pretty close to the text, which is fine since it's a great song...but doesn't really require much additional comment.

At Least That's What You Said - Wilco - A Ghost Is Born - 2004

This remains one of the few songs on A Ghost is Born that has any value to me. After the tidal wave of hysteria that followed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, AGIB was bound to disappoint most fans. Couple that with Tweedy's decent into vicodan addiction and the relentless touring and media coverage that followed the surprising success of YHF and it's companion film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart and you have an album that was destined to be "difficult" long before it ever went to press.

Even so, it started out perfectly...this song practically creaks under the weight of exhaustion and frustration. Tweedy's broken voice conveys the tone of a man who just can't take it any more and the moment the guitars kick in is the sound of a long brewing breakdown bubbling to the surface despite every attempt to stiffle it.

If only the rest of the album could have maintained this mood instead of veering off into melody deficient jaunts and krautrock experiments...

At Least For Now - The Posies - Failure - 1989

I've spent a lot of time on this blog writing about nostalgia...both wallowing in my own nostalgia, or waxing philosophical about the way that music can bring a certain time and place to mind in a few short notes...but this song brings up a phenomenon that I don't think I've covered before.

I purchased the Posies 3rd album (Frosting on the Beater) with the money I got for my high school graduation. I had read a favorable review of them and wanted to check it out, despite having never actually heard the band. While I was initially disappointed in the album, I eventually fell in love with it. For a long while it was "my favorite album" (I already have tickets to see them perform it in it's entirity at The Bell House in June)...as such I went out and purchased both of the previous Posies albums during my freshman year in college.

This song, one of the less juvenille tracks from their self-produced first album, is fairly indicative of the band in it's early stages: Annoyingly, self-consciously literate lyrics, Smiths-y instrumentation, Big Star Melodies and pitch perfect harmonies. It's good without being noteworthy...except one thing.

But what I find most interesting is that the nostalgia that this song summons up is NOT for summer of 94, when I purchased this album...but rather for 1989 when the song was actually recorded. Now in 1989, I was still 4 years and all of high school away from ever hearing The Posies...and yet, that is exactly what this song makes me think of...of painfully awkward 8th grade dances, of getting into fights with my Sunday school teachers that would ultimately lead to me quitting the church, of being just mind-bogglingly, blisteringly horny and yet having no idea what to say to girls, of finally being tall of eating so much that my parents nearly went broke...all of those things that are from years before I ever heard that song.

But why? Is there something about this sound...a sound that I wasn't even listening to in 1989 (I was a million times more into GnR than The Smiths)...but do recorded sounds just take a piece of the time that they were recorded in with them? Is it just a mental trick my brain plays, knowing that the song was recorded in 89? Is it something about the specific combination of instruments and recording techniques that label it as an artifact from 1989? As always, I have no answers, only more questions.

At Last The Night - Amusement Parks on Fire - Out of the Angeles - 2006

So there is a restaurant/bar not too far from my office called Edward's. Edward's is apparently owned by a former Cincinnati sports figure and as such has a monthly event called so creatively "Cincinnati Night" wherein they fly in food from 4 different Cincy eateries that do not have NYC locations. They fly in Montgommery Inn ribs (which are good, but I don't crave them), Greater's Ice Cream (Which is good, but it's just ice cream) and La Rossa's Pizza (Which I've never understood the fuss over) I go for one reason and one reason only, it's the only place in this town to get Cincinnati style chili.

For those of you that don't know what that is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_chili

If you have ever met anyone who is from Cincinnati or spent time there, in all likelihood, they are obsessed with this food. It's more addictive than crack and only slightly less bad for you.

For years I have been considering going and always had other things going on, or it simply slipped me mind...I was going to go in February, but the date was when I was in Europe. Then I tried to go in March, only to discover a line out the door and that only customers with reservations were being seated (Reservations! For Cincy Chili!!! Amazing).

So this month I did it right, I made reservations and showed up on time, and the chili was definitely worth it. Oh sure there were little things off, the spaghetti was too thick, as was the grated cheddar. The hot dog on my cheese coney was a little too thin and red...but the chili itself was a wonderful bit of happiness and I fully intend to go back next month.

At Last The Night is an instrumental...and is really only noteworthy in that it is one of the few Amusement Parks On Fire songs to not sound exactly like every other Amusement Parks on Fire songs.

At Last Is All - I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness - Fear is on Our Side - 2006

Well, I've already told this story to basically everyone I know, so that's pretty much the readership of this blog but...I want to write it down, just so I'll have it for posterity.

On Wednesday April 15th, a few events took place. One of them was that Arsenal Football Club played the second leg of their Champions League Quarter Final against Villarreal, the second was that it was Tax Day, the third was that a bunch of short sited morons decided to have a protest of paying taxes to a liberal administration and dubbed their protest with the unfortunate name of "Teabagging" allegedly in honor of the Boston Tea Party.

So, as the game was live at 245 and I had to be at work, I had set my Tivo and divorced myself from the Internet at approximately 244 (I had been screwed by the Internet too many times in attempting to watch non-live games...including one rather unfortunate event with a friend's facebook status post). But before I signed off I remember seeing the coverage of the Teabagging parties on CNN and thinking "My God, CNN has been hacked"...but no, this shit was for real.

Anand and I had planned to meet at a local watering hole called The Patriot. The Patriot is one of those faux country dive bars that exist in NYC, clearly created by people who have never been to a country dive bar but have seen a lot of movies that had them in it. A lot of Toby Keith is played in this bar, the beer is all flat, the place reeks of vomit and the waitresses are uniformly skanky.

So I walk in to meet Anand, and on a Wednesday night the place is absolutely packed. Like I can't even make it to the bar or the bathroom. It's then that I notice that all of the other attendees are wearing the same T-shirt (Except one guy who, I shit you not, was wearing a revolutionary war town crier outfit). The T-shirt says on the front "Obama-Reid-Pelosi" above the presidential seal and "Wrong for America" below it. On the back it says "Liberals are Freaking Faggots".

I quickly realize that this is not a bar I wish to be in and beat a hasty retreat. Running into Anand on the way, we popped into a second bar only to see that that bar is showing a replay of the Arsneal match that is already 15 minutes into the game. I see us scoring our first goal, though I managed to get Anand out of there before he saw it...so at least one of us would be going into the game fresh.

The thing is...I won't go too much into covering the ludicrousness of the Teabaggers agenda (or their name)...it's been covered by funnier people than me. But seriously, it's amazing how quickly they lose their prudery when the shoe is on the other foot. They gladly trash a president they don't like when they accused us of being traitors for questioning the one that my side didn't like. They call us "Faggots" (yet still down grade the F-word to "freaking"???) all to protest what? Not the loss of human life, not the allowing of robber barons to run roughshod over our economy, nor a government that simply sat back and watched our country fall apart...they are pissed that the government is actually trying to DO SOMETHING. They want inaction at a time when our country is falling apart and it is simply staggering to me.

You lost, wing nuts. Suck it.

Anyway, it seems appropriate to end this with a song by I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness. Fear has always been on their side, and that hasn't changed much. Wouldn't it be nice if we ran our country on hope rather than fear?

At Last - Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood - 2006

Oh Neko...despite the general "Country Chanteause" label that usual gets thrown at Miss Case, there is little in her music that is familar. Sure, you can find your traces of the usual touchstones, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, even Stevie Nicks in her music. But the albums she actually produces sounds less like anything we call "Country" and more like the music being played at the country bar in Twin Peaks. In a little over a minute and a half here, miss Case manages to weave a spell using only guitars and her voice.

God bless her perpertually broken Virginian/Canadian/Ukranian heart.