When Plans came out, I didn’t know what to expect, and wasn’t ready for what I got. I’d been put on to Death Cab for Cutie when a friend of mine put “We Looked Like Giants” on a mixtape for me. I’d ignored them until then, knowing their name, but not their music, laughing when my friend said he was going to start a parody emo band and call it Death Cab Confessional.
It turned around with that song. I bought Transatlanticism and got to know it like family. I wrote to it and about it. I loved it (save for the two terrible songs).
I heard the lead single from Plans a few weeks before it came out, and dutifully bought the album. I wanted more of what I’d grown to love, but it never has grabbed me in quite the same way.
But beyond that: there’s something to the fatalism of “I Will Follow You Into the Dark”. I like the foreverness of it, the sense of always. It suits my romantic notion of love, my sense of being a dreamer and thinking in the long term.
It was suggested that it play at my wedding, and I wasn’t sure, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I like it.
There’s never been anything wrong with a little fatalism in your romance.
Wes Anderson has a way of invoking emotion through his use of music. His movies can be charitably described as whimsical, or less charitably as overly stylized, or least charitably as unbearably pretentious.
His carefully curated soundtracks bear this out. Even when there are scores as such in his films, he gets more use from pop songs to serve that purpose, to help heighten the mood.
So when Richie’s usual escort from his days on the circuit arrived by way of the Green Line bus (as always, late) and walked toward him while that plucked out guitar line started to play and that melancholy voice sang about the things she wished she’d done and how it should have been different… well, it’s tough not to get the message.
When I’m feeling like I’m usually feeling about myself, listening to Nico sing this song hurts. “Please don’t confront me with my failures; I have not forgotten them.”
And I probably won’t.
I frequently wish I wasn’t able to be brought low so easily. Little things will have a big effect. Something that’s really nothing will grow into something that’s way too much, and I’ll lose all perspective on what’s actually going on.
“These Days” can do that for me. So I only listen to it when I’m already low. I love it, but I don’t want to feel the way it will make me feel if I’m not already. If that makes sense.
I sometimes wonder how much sense I’m actually making.
I have a weird relationship with the Smashing Pumpkins. I can barely stand some of their (qualitatively) best work, but some of their least palatable I find endlessly fascinating. They’re a band that definitely defined a fairly significant chunk of my musical awakening, both for their music in and of itself and, more tragically, for the fact that they were the girl to whom I sang Depeche Mode’s favorite band.
The fact that I use that word, “tragically”, and mean it makes me probably a very pathetic individual. If not pathetic, then at least sad. But that’s not where we are.
“1979″. A song that I don’t think I am capable of listening to unless I’m in a good mood.
This is different than a song that actively makes me happy; while I suppose it’s theoretically capable of achieving that, it’s never really been given the chance. It’s not sneaky that way; I know it and listen to it as a happy song. That means, unfortunately, that whenever it comes up and I’m not in the mood for it, whether I’m listening to Mellon Collie or have my music on random or even if I’m just driving around in Grand Theft Auto, I’ll pass it over.
It’s just… happy. It’s difficult to explain the why, but it’s easy to explain the feeling. The first time I heard it, I thought of the title and flashed instantly back to Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69“, which is a song about young and dumb and having fun more than anything else for me. That connection, “Summer of ’69″ to “1979″, seemed like the logical connection to me, a generational shift.
The song itself backs me up, at least in my mind. It’s driving and bouncy and a little ominous. Rather like my adolescence, I think. The video supports all that, too; it is, literally, kids running around and having a good time. I don’t know if I understood the metaphors when I was 13 and 14; I know I’ve come to understand a lot of what the Pumpkins were on about a lot better now than I did then.
But “1979″ isn’t ever going to get that chance. It lives in its little capsule for me, a little place for me to go when I remember that I’m young and dumb and having fun, no matter how much I feel otherwise sometimes.
I am naturally a very emotional person. I tend to feel things powerfully, take things personally, and react in kind.
This is, for my purposes, a negative personal quality.
As a consequence, I’ve spent a good portion of my adulthood more or less suppressing my emotions. Not completely, of course; it wouldn’t suit my temperament. Just enough to keep me from getting hurt too much or hurting others.
When I was in high school, my best friend introduced me to a LOT of music. Some of it was terrible. Some of it was amazing. Some of it was so fantastic it changed my worldview. It’s fairly safe to say that all of it, though, had a serious effect so far as shaping who I am musically is concerned. Which is to say that it’s his fault you’re reading this, I guess.
One of the bands to which he turned me on is Tool. Back then, I loved them. Yes, I counted myself a follower of a band that those who don’t like them refer to as “the first band named after their fans.”
It’s funny, sadly, because it’s mostly true. Only mostly, though. I don’t consider myself a tool. Well, maybe sometimes, a tiny screwdriver or something. But, you know, not like a table saw or anything.
BUT I DIGRESS!
I’ve grown apart from Tool as I’ve grown up. There are a few reasons for this. For one, I think their newer material is simply weaker. It’s good, yes, but it just doesn’t have the same impact on me that their earlier music did. Then there’s the course of changing taste as time passes. I don’t fault them, or me, for that inevitable change.
Perhaps most importantly, though, I just don’t feel the way I did then. Because I’ve forced myself not to feel as hard, I’ve lost some of the contact I had with a band whose music, with its passion, its complexity, the way it forces engagement, enforces strong emotion.
I am loathe to feel as strongly as one needs to feel to appreciate what they have to say.
That doesn’t mean that I never do. Sometimes, I get very angry. When I am very angry, I know they will be there.
I’ve shown a tendency in the past to have Pavlovian reactions to things, to associate unrelated things in my mind. I used to get tired at the thought of doing homework, because the only time I had to do homework was in the middle of the night when I should have been sleeping.
I probably negatively affected my grades, now that I think about it.
I wonder if I will develop that reaction with Tool’s music. I almost always listen to them in states of high emotion and/or high stress. It’s not remotely beyond the pale of reason that they will cause the heightened state of feeling at some point, as opposed to serving the mood as they do now.
When I think about it like that, it makes me not want to listen to the music in those situations. It makes me want to go back to the time when I had no preconceptions, when I was hearing it for the first time, when I first truly started to learn me.
That learning is never ending, I’m finally coming to find.
When I was about twelve or so, I decided that I wanted to listen to my own music. I immediately eschewed the tastes of my parents; if they liked it, I didn’t. I wanted something of my own.
What can I say, I was on the cusp of being a teenager.
I went to the Musicland (status: sadly defunct) at Eastland Mall (status: sadly defunct) and bought a cassette (status: sadly defunct) of Pearl Jam’s Ten (status: not defunct; in fact, awesome). That was the first music I bought for myself.
I steadily increased my music collection over time, first a cassette every couple of weeks, then the switch to CDs, then the job at the big box store, where I’d buy just about anything that caught my fancy, and listen to all of it.
Throughout all that, though, there was one band that I never left, one band from my mom’s collection that I didn’t drop, who I never stopped respecting: the Cars.
(That would be in opposition to the bands I dropped but then went back to when I realized that I was wrong, like Guns N’ Roses or Metallica or Bon Jovi. That was a valuable lesson, realizing that these things I’d dismissed were, in fact, worthy of my attention. It taught me that it’s okay to be wrong sometimes.)
So, the Cars. Always awesome. By my own definition, which is that I’ve never not liked them, the Cars are my all-time favorite band. The pinnacle of their music? Their excellent self-titled first album. Nine tracks, each as strong as the next, each worthy of its status in the rotation of those stations that still play the fuckin’ Eagles.
(As I said, their debut was only their musical pinnacle. Their overall pinnacle is the cover of their second album, Candy-O, which featured an honest-to-goodness Vargasgirl. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with their music, and this is tragically not 30 Days of Pinups. Although I would gladly read someone writing about that.)
This one is a little different, a little special. There’s no YouTube video for this song, because it’s never been released. Not never been released as a single, either. I mean that it’s never been released for public consumption, beyond being excerpted briefly on a TV show and maybe existing on a streaming site somewhere or other for a short while.
I first found Schatzi back when people used P2P networks to find music. I was looking for music to make a mixtape featuring the names of my friends. I already had my own song; pretty much everyone I’ve ever met has sung it to me at one point or another.
In the end, the idea came to naught. There simply weren’t enough songs with my friends’ names to make a long enough mix, and then as now, I’d rather scrap a project than complete a compromised version of it.
That’s not good for my self-esteem, I don’t suppose.
I did listen to the songs I found, though. Sir Paul’s “Heather” was lackluster, in the way of a lot of his post-Beatles work. Obviously, the Pixies’ “Tony’s Theme” was great. But the SwAmpee hadn’t yet written “Andey”, and there were slim pickings on most of the other names as well.
There was one standout, though, that caught me immediately, a power pop number called “Song for Stephanie” by a band I’d never heard of.
I didn’t realize yet that my life would be different.
I downloaded as much of the rest of their work as there was to find, and struck out into the wilds of the 2002 internet to find out as much about them as I could. I saw that they had a record coming out in about six weeks, and an EP that was of recent vintage. I tracked down the EP in a record store (remember those?) and got familiar.
On Valentine’s Day, I went to see Jimmy Eat World with my friends. It was immediately after “The Middle” became the biggest song in the world, and the venue was full of people who didn’t quite have the history with these guys that I did. I was annoyed.
The show was still great, though.
After the lights came up, workers at the venue were handing out flyers for upcoming shows. A superhero named Tony came up to me excitedly clutching one for the Promise Ring in a few weeks.
“Cool. You want to go?”
“Look who’s opening.”
An amazing coincidence. We had tickets to see Schatzi play before we got out the door.
We got there early that day, actively ready to see the opening band. It was a weird situation, but hey. Their set was as impressive as their EP had been, which was a good sign. I also shouted out for them to play “Nadine”, one of their older songs. They hadn’t rehearsed it, but they still knew it, and that was great.
Yes, I realize I was That Guy. But I totally looked the part. Still do, in fact.
In the way of small bands in small venues, they came down and hung out with the crowd a little after the show. I met three of the four band members; the drummer was from my hometown and was talking to his parents. Chris and Montez, the two frontmen, were unsurprisingly the more gregarious members of the band. Marc, the bassist, was more subdued. They were all awesome dudes.
On the way out of the show, we saw that each car had a flyer put up under the windshield wiper: another Schatzi show in a few weeks in Norman.
I drove down with a few friends to see. In the meantime, their album, 50 Reasons to Explode, had been released, and I made myself familiar with it. I saw Chris unloading equipment before the show, and asked if they were going to play my favorite song, “Delta”.
“Yeah, I think so. Montez wrote that, I’ll be sure to tell him you asked about it.”
Ouch. That was embarrassing. And then my friend called me a brown noser. I had to agree with that assessment.
Again, they put on a great show, and again, I talked with them a bit afterward. Again, I found out they were playing soon.
There were three more shows over the next several months. They opened for Ultimate Fakebook on their farewell tour. I saw the last show, saw the Schatzi guys get duct tape mummified and have flour dumped on the drum set. (Incidentally, Ultimate Fakebook have since reunited and are releasing a new record in the near future.)
A few weeks later, Schatzi played at one of those venues that changes its name, but not its function, every few months. I remember Montez loved the place because they were the only bar in the world (as far as he knew) that had one of his old bands on the jukebox.
My favorite, though, was the time I saw them alone. I drove down over an hour to see them, got a flat on the way, made the rest of the drive on the donut spare. When I got to the venue, the show had started. Chris recognized me when I walked in and nodded to me, touching his lip to the mic and getting a shock. Apparently there was a short somewhere in the line, because it happened a few more times until he finally had the bright idea to pull a sock over the mic and provide some insulation.
As always, they were great, and this was the most intimate setting in which I’d seen them, in the sense that the few dozen people in the space were right up against the “stage”, such as it was. A small space, a close space.
Afterward, I bought a couple of compilations that Schatzi appeared on from Marc. We got to talking, spent an hour or so shooting the shit until the band decided to go to Waffle House. They invited the fans who’d stuck around to come with them, but I couldn’t stay any later, given the state of my flat tire.
Not long after, they went further afield on their tour and I wasn’t able to see them again. I kept up with their exploits via their tour diaries, which I found out were written by Marc, and which weren’t your average tour diaries.
He didn’t really write about the places they played, or the people, or the other bands, or the travel, or being stuck in the van. All of these things were mentioned, obviously, but that’s not what the writing was about. It was about how it felt to be in this band on the road, working together.
It was something else.
Not long after, Marc started writing a personal LiveJournal. I read it for a while, kind of in awe of this guy. I knew him, a little. I knew he was a kickass bassist, I knew he had sweet dreadlocks, I knew he seemed shy but was a smart guy and a great conversationalist once you got him out of his shell a little bit.
I hadn’t heretofore realized that he was a genius.
I wrote him an email, just telling him what I thought, how impressed I was by him and what his band meant to me. He responded, and we became friends after a fashion. He told me they were going into the studio in Lincoln, Nebraska to work with Mike Mogis, he of Saddle Creek Records production fame, as well as, you know, being in Bright Eyes and Monsters of Folk. It sounded like Schatzi were ready to take the next step, and I was fucking pumped.
The recording sessions were harrowing. Lincoln in the winter is not exactly heaven on earth; it could charitably be considered a wintry wasteland, I suspect. But I’m biased against Nebraska, so maybe don’t take my word for it.
Marc continued to write, about the recording process, about himself, about the band, about the everything. About life. I was in my early 20s, a kid, and I am not ashamed to say that I was learning about life, the inner workings of being an artist, from this guy. A guy I knew, a guy that I’d spoken to, a guy I’d call a friend.
It was a weird experience.
Marc watched a lot of Travel Channel while they were holed up in Lincoln. He became smitten with Samantha Brown, the host of Passport to Great Weekends. He decided to name a song after her.
The band finally finished the record and struck out on tour again. They prepared for a new release. They were at the top of their game.
Then, not.
Disney bought their record label, and with it the rights to their unreleased album. It remains unreleased; the Machine Breaks Down, as foretold by the song of that title on said unreleased record.
Meanwhile, on that tour, Montez discovered he was going to be a father. He left the group to prepare, leaving them as a power trio in an awkward situation.
After they finished the tour, they returned to Austin. Schatzi was on the cusp, and circumstance had derailed them. I kept in contact with Marc, and not long after, he sent me a burned copy of their unreleased record.
It is, tragically, as good as I’d hoped it would be.
I still talk to Marc to this day. In fact, I asked him to upload the song so I could use it for this post.
And Marc Fort is one of my heroes. A true example of a gentleman and scholar, one of the coolest dudes I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, and someone I wouldn’t mind being more like. A writer whom I respect. A musician whose work and tastes I love; his most recent release is as part of the dreampop band Norushi Minx; you should go buy now. Hell, buy two.
Schatzi are one of a few bands who have literally changed my life. I’ll champion them, always. I hope that they return someday, able to do for someone new what they were able to do for me.
Even if they don’t, though, they’ll always represent for me one of the best things about music, the way that you can accidentally discover someone with no previous presence in your life and they can be the greatest band in the world. Most people who love music have a similar experience, I’d bet; maybe Bowie on the turntable when you were a kid, R.E.M. at a bar before anyone knew their name, some bar band whose name no one else would ever remember.
If you love music, there’s music that helped shape you. There are others that I’ve mentioned in other of these posts, and others that will be mentioned. But more than any other, Schatzi the band and Marc Fort the person are that music for me.
I resisted the pull for as long as I reasonably could. I’d heard the name, in whispers and shouts, but dismissed her as another pop tartlet whose 15 minutes of fame would be up shortly.
Only she kept getting more famous. Creeping further into my consciousness. Gaining purchase in my mind.
It turns out Lady Gaga might be a genius.
I once heard her dismissed offhandedly as someone who appears to believe she’s the only one who ever heard of Madonna. I laughed. It is, after all, a statement built on a kernel of truth. But that’s overly reductive. Of course she’s taking from Madonna. I think that she is trying to be that for this generation.
I like glamour in my pop stars. I like imagination. I like seeing revelry purely in the name of decadence. No matter what one thinks of her, no one can argue that Gaga does not have these qualities.
I don’t think a pop star has entered my consciousness since the late ’90s, when I was working at that big box retailer and absorbing everything because I had to do so. Since then, I have essentially divorced myself from the broad music culture; if you are a mainstream musician who has hit it big in the past half-decade or so and I know you beyond a cursory knowledge of your name, you are almost certainly really fucking famous.
Lady Gaga is really fucking famous.
All that said, I’d still not heard much of her music. I had heard more of Eric Cartman covering her than I had of her performing her own songs. One day, though, I was in the deli awaiting my lunch, and the radio playing overhead commanded that I listen.
That was the first time I truly heard “Poker Face”. And I was on my way to being converted.
I still don’t love all of her music. It’s just frankly not to my taste. I am not one of her “Little Monsters“. (Yet.) But I love what she represents.
There’s a lot to say about her. Amanda Fucking Palmer wrote a great post about Gaga after seeing her show in early July in Boston. I don’t agree with Palmer completely, but the issue is complex, and her opinion is well worth reading. You know, if you are so inclined.
Mostly, for me, it comes down to this: I look forward to what comes next.
When I was growing up, the Eagles were always on the radio. Their steady stream of hits made this a pretty solid programming decision, I suppose. I heard just as much Aerosmith. Hit singles get airplay, especially on classic radio station formats, where it’s less about how it actually was than about how it’s remembered.
So, a steady diet of “Desperado” and “Hotel California” and “Life in the Fast Lane“. I didn’t mind. I’d even go so far as to say I enjoyed the Eagles.
That changed.
Now, I find them almost offensively trite. No amount of technical skill can get me past whatever it is that I don’t like about them, something I can’t even really explain. It’s similar to how I feel about Journey, only without the molten core of pure raging hatred.
This idea is difficult for me, possibly the most difficult post of this entire project.
I am frequently a deeply insecure person. I can know objectively that something I do is worthwhile, but in my heart of hearts I’ll never believe it.
One advantage of this, I suppose, is that I’m often quite good at accepting criticism. After all, if I believe in my heart that there’s nothing redeeming about a piece of work, then a few hypothetical red marks on the page can’t possibly be as bad as what I’m imagining.
However, it has the opposite effect with concern to value judgments. If someone tells me they don’t like something, or even that they prefer something else I’ve done that I consider not as good, I tend to take it extremely personally.
I used to describe myself as highly self-confident, but with no self-esteem whatsoever. It is a vast oversimplification of how the situation really is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not accurate. There’s definitely a bit of truth to be pieced together from it if you can parse what exactly I mean by it. Which shouldn’t be hard, since I told you as much in the second paragraph.
All of this is paralyzing for a writer. Of course, I don’t know any writers who aren’t at least a little neurotic; it follows, in its way, that a person who had the tendency and desire to create other eyes through which to see the world, or to describe what is seen in the world in another way, would be a person with a tendency towards any of a number of certain neuroses. (Hell, for all I know, most of them share my paralyzing fears and specific doubts.)
This is what it ultimately comes down to, I suppose: the way I accept value judgments makes me loathe to show my work to other people. That would be fine, if I were writing for an audience of one, but I’m not. I write for myself, but not just; the things I write are, I guess, typically supposed to be read. So you can see how not wanting to show my work to others might be a negative for my creative process. I wish I could get past it, could accept that some people just aren’t going to like Thing X and move on, that I could let their opinions bounce off of me.
Wait a minute… that sounded curiously like THE POINT: for all the many and varied other ways the song can be read and applied to me, how it describes me is the most simple explanation possible, and only barely a metaphor.
Some people just have a je ne sais quoi about them, something that makes it clear they enjoy perfect little Swedish pop rock songs. Apparently I don’t have that something.
For anyone who’s been reading my blog for a year or so (or, you know, gone back through the archives), my enduring crush on Nina Persson (oh, Nina) should be obvious. However, apparently to people who don’t know my love for the Cardigans, it seems odd that I would love “Lovefool“.
I suppose I understand this, in some ways. I am, despite my own belief in my ongoing boyhood, a man. If you’re stereotyping, I can see why you might not be inclined to think that me loving them makes sense.
I don’t see it. For one thing, I have a long history of loving pop rock bands; I mean, I love the Beatles, and drawing the line from them to the Cardigans doesn’t take a lot of ink. For two, I never didn’t love this song; I have no context that accounts for me not singing along with it every time it came on the radio.
I don’t know, if we’re stereotyping… maybe it’s obvious why my mom thought I might be gay?
