The Whitest Boy Alive - Island

This is "Island" by The Whitest Boy Alive, a now-defunct band based in Berlin (but with members from also from Norway). The song is from their second and last album Rules (2009).

I knew this girl in Galveston, Texas

I knew this girl in Galveston, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico. I was living in Houston and I would drive down I-45, past all the topless bars, and into Galveston to see her. She had pretty blue eyes and a disarming smile. She would wear her flip flops to the beach, dragging me with her. I always wanted to leave, but she would make me stay. I still remember an image of the ocean, dark and foreboding as a storm approached the beach. We were silent a lot, but I think she knew what I meant and vice-versa. We communicated a lot without speaking. So I wrote this song "So Few Words" for her. I wrote the song on May 23, 1999 and recorded it on the same day. Me on guitars and vocals. It is the fifth track from my first EP called Locust Dreams.

Lie Cheat and Steal

The opening track from Tool's debut album Undertow (1993). Did they ever top this? Doubt it. This is music that is taut, pulled apart, completely under control, like an armored division, attacking, rolling down to its target. Utter control and precision. Yes, they released better albums than Undertow but did they ever top the ROCK GUITAR ATTACK of this song ever? No.

No One Is Innocent.

Sylvia Plath - Crackle and Drag

I just realized that the day Sylvia Path killed herself, February 11, is also my birthday. I had no idea. But Wikipedia does not lie, as we all know. That's a pretty morbid coincidence. Strangely or not, I've been thinking of her quite a bit recently. Like most young people, I also read The Bell Jar, I think during college. And I'm pretty sure I re-read it when I moved to Northampton, Massachusetts in the early nineties, given that Smith College features prominently in her life and the book. I remember liking it quite a bit although I'm not sure how I'd feel now.

Part of the reason I've been thinking about her is that I recently (re)saw the movie Sylvia (2003) directed by Christine Jeffs and starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig. Basically a straight-ahead biographical drama about Plath's life (with an obvious focus on her relationship with Ted Hughes), the movie was not judged kindly by audiences at the time (although Roger Ebert did give it a fairly good review). I was not one of the many who were bored by it. I actually liked it, especially Paltrow's very nuanced performance, one of the best in her (now stalled?) career as a top-flight actor. I kind of actually believed Paltrow was Plath. And there are moments of amazing vulnerability conveyed in her performance that were, well, surprising. I didn't expect that.

The soundtrack to Sylvia was composed by Gabriel Yared (who also scored and got an Oscar for The English Patient) and I also kind of liked it. It wasn't maudlin or too laden with sentimentality. As one reviewer noted, there are echoes of the violins from "Eleanor Rigby" but the basic motifs and themes are rather understated. The actual suicide is depicted with a spare piano motif that suddenly cuts off the orchestral score:



More to my typical music tastes, I have a feeling that the producers of Sylvia had wanted a pop/rock song or two to soundtrack the movie. And word probably got around. Someone told Paul Westerberg about it who came up with one of the great tracks of his late period solo career, "Crackle and Drag." Unfortunately, the song was never used in the actual movie, which is a pity as it's a beautiful reflection on her life and suicide. The words "crackle and drag" refer to Plath's famous poem "Edge" where she writes (about a doomed woman):

The moon has nothing to be sad about / Staring from her hood of bone
She is used to this sort of thing / Her blacks crackle and drag

Here the "blacks" are the long funereal curtains that drape the theater stage. The "crackle and drag" is an allusion to the static caused by the curtains as they brush up and drag against the floor... as they move across the theater stage.

In Westerberg's capable hands (and voice), the song has two studio versions, both featured on his album Come Feel Me Tremble (2003), a kind of "soundtrack" to a video documentary of the same name. One version of the song is acoustic and the other a kind of raging but beautifully heavy power pop version, kind of like early Cheap Trick filtered through Big Star. Fantastic actually. But the version that I really love is one that he never actually released (a totally Paul move if there was ever one) but performed quite a few times on his 2002 tour before the album came out. Here is that version performed in Minneapolis on July 1, 2002. The song begins very tentatively, with Westerberg flubbing lines, basically screwing up the whole thing, but gains momentum slowly until by the end it's a tour de force. Really amazing. Would have been perfect for the movie:



And finally, there is the totally rockin' version by Westerberg, released on Come Feel Me Tremble:

The Stooges - L.A. Blues

Today, Wednesday, I am in a state of anguish. Especially tonight. Fucking sucks.

Hence this "song" (because it's not really a song so much as a wail into the void) which has a title which is VERY appropriate "L.A. Blues." Ladies and gentlemen, I present The Stooges from the greatest album of all time, Fun House (1970).

METZ - Acetate

BECAUSE THIS IS EXACTLY HOW I FEEL TODAY.

This is "Acetate," the opening track from METZ II, the second album by the Canadian band METZ. One of my favorite albums of last year.

BECAUSE THIS IS EXACTLY HOW I FEEL TODAY.

This is also exactly how one my college bands used to sound. Except we weren't anywhere this good. But we were noisier.

Al Stewart - Flying Sorcery

When I was about eight or nine, I was really into airplanes. And one of my most treasured books was a book on the history of aviation, which to a nine-year old seemed utterly romantic and adventurous and exciting. Even the names, all difficult to pronounce, of the pioneers, communicated strangeness, a world inaccessible only in dreams by a little boy. I knew all of these names by heart: Icarus, Otto Lilienthal, Louis Bleriot, Amelia Earhart, Amy Johnson (shown left), Hugo Junkers, Samuel Langley, Alberto Santos-Dumont, Thomas Sopwith, and of course, Charles Lindbergh and the Wright Brothers. And the names of the early biplanes and airplanes were imprinted in my brain. I spent a lot of time drawing sketches of airplanes -- ones from the early 20th century -- flying in the sky. Pages and pages. I was fascinated by flight. Of course, I forgot all that and outgrew it soon after. Not sure what happened. I suppose there was puberty, girls and music and other things.

But so it was a strange surprise to hear this song, "Flying Sorcery" by Al Stewart from his classic album Year of the Cat (1976) which some consider a masterpiece of the mid-seventies singer-songwriter genre. "Flying Sorcery" is a song about those early years of aviation and it so perfectly captures my childhood fascination with flight that I almost feel like someone had talked to me when I was nine and wrote that song down. As the song, floating on a lilting melody, coasts along, we hear about Kitty Hawk (where the Wright Brothers flew), Amy Johnson (who flew from Britain to Australia, above), Tiger Moths, Faith, Hope, and Charity (a British biplane fighter), Leonardo da Vinci, and of course Icarus.

So here is a small part of my childhood, explained in 4 minutes and 23 seconds:

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Skeletons

I know I've posted this one before but I love this song by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Skeletons" from their last album It's Blitz! (2010). Not sure what the song is about but it's a really original arrangement for a song, with its faux bagpipes and shuffling drum parts. I have no idea how they reproduce this kind of sound as a 3-piece live. The song overall has a really 1980s pop vibe, something that wouldn't be out of place on MTV in 1985 and yet somehow sounds kind of timeless. The mark of a great pop single.

It's been a while since the band put out a record but if and when they, I'll definitely get it.

Also, I have kind of a big crush on Karen O, who lives in LA.

The Verve

So back in 1994, I went to see the movie Nadja in a movie theater in Northampton, Massachusetts. Really didn't know what to expect, but I liked it. It had a bit of the style of Hal Hartley and a bit of the style of David Lynch but nothing too weird. It was a nice evocative and atmospheric movie about modern day vampires, starring the quite lovely Elina Lowensohn, an American actress of Romanian origin. But what really stayed with me as I exited the movie was the soundtrack, and in particular one scene in which the main character (Nadja) is talking about emotions, a scene that transitions seamlessly into a dance scene between the two lovers. Here is the moment before that transition, where you can hear the beginnings of a dreamy song:



In the background you hear this music and it seemed positively heavenly. I had no idea what it was. And in those pre-internet days, there was really no way to find out. I don't know exactly how but I began to suspect that the music that I wanted to identify was created by a band called the Verve. Fast-forward a year, to 1995, and I ended up buying the Verve's debut album, A Storm in Heaven. By that time, I had moved to Amherst and was living in the "white house," a lovely and strange house populated by a bunch of transient students but whose bedrock were our landlords Pat and Jacqueline.

It was here that I heard that album a thousand times: A Storm In Heaven completely blew my mind. It wasn't particularly original in any fundamental way: basically shoegazer music with the space-y elements maxed out, the rough edges (a la MBV) smoothed out, and fueled by atmospheric guitar courtesy of the Verve's incredibly talented guitarist Nick McCabe. Yet, from the first song to the last, the album felt like a bit of a journey, perfect for late night (very late night) ruminations of twenty-somethings from an inbetween generation. I present here the first and second perfect tracks that set off the album. Just brilliant stuff. This is without par one of the greatest opening album tracks for a new band:



And the second part of the 1-2 punch goes into "Slide Away":



I bring these songs up because the Verve is re-releasing their first two (both wonderful) albums, A Storm in Heaven and A Northern Soul, as deluxe editions. More information here.

Neither of these two albums had the song that I so desperately wanted to identify, that soundtracked the movie Nadja. But I eventually found it, much later, in 1998 or 1999, I think! The song was "One Way To Go," the b-side of their very first single ("All In My Mind"). And when I finally heard the song in full, my expectations were fully justified in the sheer gorgeosity of the sound:

Young Gods - L'amourir

Heavy stuff today. The Young Gods were a band from Switzerland who sang mostly in French. Actually, scratch that, I just discovered that they still exist. In any case, I used to listen to them mostly in the early '90s. Very electronic, very heavy, industrial music but tempered by a bit of experimentation. In other words, it wasn't the kind of industrial made famous by Ministry or Revolting Cocks and bands like that. Although they are not as famous as, say Nine Inch Nails, I would say that Young Gods were incredibly influential for a whole generation of electronic musicians. David Bowie, for example, once name-checked them. The band has been around since 1985, with their tenth and last album, Everybody Knows, out in 2010. There are a lot of good abrasive Young Gods songs but I present here "L'amourir," the second single by the band, from 1988, which was later added to their excellent album L'eau rouge (1989), which in my opinion remains their masterpiece.



The second song is "Pas Mal," the original b-side to "L'amourir." Here is a live version from 1992: