Good Morning

This is probably the definition of a great Saturday morning listen. Light cracking through the slits in the blinds, with a cup of tea in hand and heavy, cold clouds on the horizon. I mean the music's great too, but lately I've been wondering about my own taste in songs. I'm not sure if what I love is as much a product of the sounds themselves as where my head is at the time I hear them. I haven't been very excited about music in any context for months now. There hasn't been much redemption in playing, writing, or humming along to anything I've heard, and maybe that's just because a large part of me doesn't care about finding perfection in some created thing. Reading that, I realize how little sense it makes. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is so much subjectivity to being creative, and yet it's amazing the number of ways we manage to try and quantify it. This song is good, this song is bad, this song is predestined as un-cool. I snub that attitude and yet I feel myself steeped in it constantly. It's too hard not to subconsciously sum up what I feel about art in a soundbite or a mental thumbs down.

What I want is to be excited about music because it meets me where I'm at. I'm looking at the sky, my friend's face when he laughs, the movement of gravel under my shoes and I realize this song completes an experience I'm already having in my head. Caught in the Trees is absolutely doing just that this morning...without being an altogether amazing album or showcasing some jaw-dropping set of musicianship and vocal prowess. It's simple and just what I needed. Plus it's albums like this leave leave me with the feeling that I have some hope left as a musician.

Albums That Take You Places

Let's face it, sometimes we need an "escape" from reality, and what couldn't be more assistive and innocuous than an album that reaches higher places.

I am currently listening to Hvarf-Heim, Sigur Ros's new release of alternate versions of previous recordings and B-sides. I have been enjoying this two-disc set at times after work when I need to unwind, as backround music when I'm reading a good book, and as my audio-backdrop when I'm engaging in one of my newest hobbies, painting. It has proven to be a very engaging, stimulating, and curious album. It invokes thoughtfulness, creativity, peacefulness.... it's album that "takes you somewhere else". A very limited number of albums can do this, but for many, that's not its purpose. Listening to a Strokes album might just make you just "feel cool", and even make you want to smoke a cigarette or where your coolest shades or something. I am on a constant quest for music that can do what Sigur Ros can do: give you a short vacation from reality, in hopes that when you return, you will be in better form.

Here's a short list of albums that have provided escape, inspiration, a one-hour vacation:

Sigur Ros - Hvarf-Heim and Ágætis Byrjun

R.E.M. - Reveal

Joseph Arthur - Nuclear Daydream

Appleseed Cast - Two Conversations

Death Cab For Cutie - Plans and Transatlanticism

Iron and Wine - The Shepard's Dog

Neil Finn - One All

A Buzzless Year

Who's really behind all the excess of buzz that many, in my opinion, undeserving bands get? Somebody must be paying off Spin magazine to push some of the most watered-down, substance-lacking groups I've heard in years. I read music publications in hope to to get a better idea of what is out there, maybe discover a band that I might not otherwise have heard of. I usually leave mostly unsatisfied after checking out the many suggested bands, the "must-hears".

Buzz has fucked over the industry in many ways. Bands have learned to rely on it; fans have looked to it. Buzz builds up anticipation, evokes curiosity, than, more often than not, drops you and leaves you hanging there with musical frustration. Perhaps the greatest bands out there have a sense of integrity and are avoiding this thing called "buzz" and are trying to pave their own way; let the music speak for itself, let the fans do the praising, never allowing press to dictate what they will do next.

I propose a Buzzless Year. I'm not sure how this could happen... it's more of a fantasy than reality, but bare with me. Imagine this:
2009 arrives and MTV is silenced, all major music magazines are banned (except Paste perhaps) and small, music-loving indie zines and blogs take the forefront. Record labels are in a frenzy and don't know what to do with all this extra money that they used to spend on assuring that their bands get plenty of buzz in the press... we no longer have to filter through music magazines trying to find two good articles, skipping past what musicians are wearing these days, what parties they were at, countless ads, what they think the top 50 albums were... you get the drift. Small, genuine, music-appreciating publications start to get attention, than maybe we will hear honest, buzzless, non-paid-for opinions on music of all sorts - not just the "next U2", or "the saviors of rock 'n' roll". We might find our new favorite bands; bands who are working hard, making great music and not conforming to something that would give the guys at Pitchfork a boner.

We could all use a little less buzz and a little more music. The reason all the bands sound the same is because if they want a piece of the spotlight they feel they have to fit in the boxes that the press has crudely fabricated. They have to be "the next U2". The world doesn't need another U2. And please, we don't need a savior of rock n roll. We need to move forward to a future where musicians can genuinely feel the freedom to make the best possible music they can. That could end up being something completely different than what rock n roll ever was.