“It’s music inspired by Disney films.” — Annie Clark on her new album, Actor (recorded as St. Vincent)

“One would hardly expect the phrase ‘Technicolor Disney nightmare’ to become an overused idiom anytime soon, but it’s a good bet you’ll see some iteration of it, written or otherwise, in just about every reference to this album.” — No Ripcord

“if it sounds a bit like the kind of dark, violent fairy tale Disney might have made had they not strayed so far from their Grimm roots, well, that’s a pretty fair take on the album as a whole.” — The Hurst Review

“imagine Trent Reznor scoring an old Disney movie—princesses and demons battling in a swirl of distorted synth noises, orchestral strings and pianos.” — Culture Bully

“Marrow is the perfect mix of Disney musical meets rock n’ roll.” — Sputnik Music

“The sophomore album from St. Vincent employs a cacaphony of sounds to create its Grimms brothers atmosphere. And indeed, Clark even looks like a Disney heroine.” — AOL Music

“The way that Clark’s trilling voice delivers melodies that skip and soars overtop richly-appointed arrangements, you could imagine these songs soundtracking any animated Disney film” — Chromewaves

“Estas canciones nacen como un score imaginario para escenas de cintas como Badlands, Picnic at Hanging Rock y algunos clásicos de Disney como La Bella Durmiente y La Dama y el Vagabundo.” — Flaming Milk

“And like a Disney flick, the tune has a happy ending, with a soothing mix of accordion, acoustic guitar, and skyward vocals. However, Michey Mouse [sic] probably won’t approve of Clark’s lyrics about ‘painting the black hole blacker,’ quarreling with a lover, and keeping secrets in a relationship. Oh, well.” — Spin

“Clark’s sweet vocals carry a tinge of malice, and set against the fanciful, dreamy arrangements, they often recall a golden-era Disney-villain.” — Tiny Mix Tapes

“Annie Clark may look like an animated Disney heroine sprung to life, and the influence of willowy, ethereal singers and songwriters such as Feist and Tori Amos is obvious.” — STNG

“The whole project at times seems Disney-ish in its aims, soaring with its whimsical orchestral arrangements and painting scenes that you really want to see brought to life in animation.” — Express Night Out

“‘The Stranger’, the ambulatory opening track of Actor, is indicative of St Vincent’s efforts: kitsch strings, reminiscent of 60’s easy listening or a mournful Disney soundtrack, give way to a storm of fuzzed-up guitar.” — Wireless Bollinger

“Even when the music is at its most dramatic, as when songs slip out of placid, Disney-esque string accompaniment into jagged, distorted guitar passages, Clark consistently understates her characters’ angst, and buries their negative emotions under layers of denial, stoicism, and subservience to the desire of others.” — Pitchfork

Okay, I like this one: “The fantasy of Disney is juxtaposed with the sweep of Morricone, David Mamet’s unsettling dramatic form and the alienation of Philip Roth.” — Music Remedy

1. “Artistry in Rhythm” by Stan Kenton
   I am my father’s son. He still tells the story of how when he and my mom would put me down for naps, they’d tune the radio to the easy listening station and leave it beside the crib. I’ve been listening to Stan Kenton, The Four Freshman, Burt Bacharach, and a hundred big bands since I was in utero, and I suspect it’s the main reason I still need musicianship, harmonic complexity, and melody in my music. It’s certainly to blame for my too-long obsession with prog rock, but we’ll save that for another day (or three) midway through the month. This recording of “Artistry in Rhythm” now sounds to me like the soundtrack of a killer film noir — something with Ann Savage and Glenn Ford, maybe. And that piano break? Kenton’s hands must have been massive.
2. “Flowers on the Wall” by The Statler Brothers
   I doubt I heard “Flowers on the Wall” more than once or twice between 1979 and 1994. As a kid, though, in the late-’70s, I used to pull out my parents’ Statler Brothers record, place it as delicately as I could on dad’s console turntable, and lower the needle again and again on this song. I think my audiophilia was probably born in those moments. Those of us who are buying up vinyl today — or, at least those of us over the age of 30 — are all nostalgists. We’ll argue the necessity of dynamic range and the virtues of old school mastering, but I think we’re really after the physical gestures — lifting the turntable cover, choosing a side, dropping the tonearm, reading the liner notes. It’s only fitting then, I guess, that cinema’s nostalgist par excellence, Quentin Tarantino, would drop the needle on “Flowers on the Wall” in Pulp Fiction. Sitting in that Tallahassee theater in 1994, I was shocked to discover I still knew all the words.
3. “Tom Sawyer” by Rush
   I’ve written about this song before, but the short version of the story is this: a week or two after the release of Rush’s Moving Pictures I was at my friend Dave’s house, and his older brother played “Tom Sawyer” for us. I don’t remember now if we listened to the rest of the record, but we listened to “Tom Sawyer” over and over. And then I went home and told my mom I needed a copy of that Rush record — the one with the creepy cover and that awesome song on it. “Tom Sawyer” is probably more responsible for my love of rock music than any other song. Seven years later Rush was also my first big rock show — the “Hold Your Fire” Tour, featuring a video display, laser lights, an epic drum solo, and all the decadence a 15-year-old could handle. I still don’t have a f—ing clue what this song means.
4. “Magic” by Olivia Newton-John
   When I began mapping out a playlist for this blipiography, the two periods that were hardest to pin down to just a few songs were my college years and pre-adolescence. College makes sense. I left home, started forging my own life, fell in love. Pre-adolescence came as a surprise, though. I suspect the music of that time is so vivid because it’s the moment when we first become aware of popular culture as an identity-defining marker (not that kids are able to describe it that way, of course). There are, for the first time, “cool” songs and “not cool” songs. Songs become directly associated with social experiences in ways they never have before. Picking one pop single from 1980-81 was tricky because all of them invoke for me the same kind of nostalgia. They all taste like pizza, sound like Space Invaders, and smell like roller skates. I settled on “Magic” partly because, like “Flowers on the Wall,” I haven’t heard it often over the years, so its affect hasn’t been softened by repetition — certainly not in the same way Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” and Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” have. Also, it’s a nice tune. And Olivia in 1980? Hot.
5. “Rosanna” by Toto
   Again, I could have chosen a dozen other songs. I turned 10 in 1982 and got a small stack of classic rock albums for my birthday — Led Zeppelin IV, Van Halen I, Exit . . . Stage Left, Blizzard of Oz — but I was totally obsessed with pop music. On the way to church every Sunday morning I’d hear numbers 40-37 of Casey Kasem’s countdown, and we’d be back in the car, headed for lunch, just as he began the top 10. I mean, just look at the top songs of 1982. “I Love Rock and Roll,” “Centerfold,” “Don’t You Want Me?” “Eye in the Sky”! “Rosanna” is a big one for me, though, because: a. Toto IV was one of the first cassette tapes I owned and b. that synth solo. I was five years into my failed life as a pianist then and already owned my first Casio keyboard. The guys in Toto, I could tell, were musicians in a way that, say, Human League clearly weren’t. “Rosanna” is still a great pop song. Plus, it gets extra props for giving us the Porcaro shuffle.
6. “Panama” by Van Halen
   I can so clearly picture me and my seven friends sitting around a table in the Magothy Middle School cafeteria, all of us wearing identical Van Halen concert t-shirts. They were baseball-style t’s, with 3/4-length black sleeves and a white body. It was the 1984 tour, the last one with Diamond Dave, and it made a one-night stop at the Capital Centre over in Largo. They played “Running with the Devil” and “Jamie’s Crying” and “Jump” and all of our favorites. It was awesome. Probably. I wouldn’t know, actually, because I didn’t go. In fact, only one of us went — Jason, who had an older brother and was willing to collect our money and buy our shirts. He handed them out the next day in our first period history class, and each of us walked a bit taller for a couple hours. In my memory, I associate all early-80s pop metal (VH, Def Leppard, Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot) with that history class. We talked about music constantly in there and did our best to dress the part, which, regrettably, in 1984 meant leather Nike hightops with dayglo laces, denim jackets with rock band pins (pre-Facebook flair), and, occasionally, tiger-striped bandanas. Yes, really. Eddie Van Halen was not only our guitar god; he was a fashion icon. Good times.
7. “Pleasant Valley Sunday” by The Monkees
   In the summer of 1986 Mtv ran a Monkees marathon, and like thousands of other kids here in status symbol land, my sister and I became obsessed fans. My dad had the patience of Job on our family vacation that year — 14 hours from Maryland to the midwest, 14 hours back, and all we wanted to listen to were the two Monkees tapes we’d been able to find. (Mickey, Peter, and Davey were as shocked as anyone by their newfound fame. Most of their music had gone out of print.) In late-August, just before school started, we even managed to see them in concert (my first) on a bill with Herman’s Hermits (minus Peter Noone, a.k.a. Herman), The Grass Roots, and Gary Puckett & the Union Gap. Like most young crushes, my interest in The Monkees faded quickly. But years later, after I went off to college, I heard a band cover “Pleasant Valley Sunday” and realized for the first time what a smart and killer pop song it is. Like so many of The Monkee’s hits it was written by hired guns, in this case Gerry Goffin and Carole King. For the record, my favorite Monkees song is still Mike Nesmith’s “Sweet Young Thing,” which, unfortunately, can’t be found by Blip right now.
8. “Pretty in Pink” by The Psychedelic Furs
   That John Hughes wrote and produced a film of the same name in 1986 is totally a coincidence, I assure you. Thanks to the greatest radio station ever, WHFS 99.1, I’d been made aware of the Furs long before Molly Ringwald sewed that dress and broke Duckie’s heart. Young love is the reason for this selection, though. In the spring of ’87 my folks took my sister and me on a European vacation, and while there I met a girl in our tour group. My first real crush. She was there with her high school French class, and by the end of the second day of the trip we were sitting together on every tour bus, learning how to talk to each other. It all came rather easily, which was a pleasant surprise given how shy I was. We exchanged letters for several months afterwards and then, eventually, inevitably, fell out of contact. I bought two tapes in a little store near Canterbury Cathedral, U2′s The Joshua Tree and The Psychedelic Furs’ Talk Talk, and listened to them constantly that summer. Every song from both albums, but especially “Pretty in Pink” and the last few tracks on side 2 of Joshua Tree, still remind me of young love, which is a feeling worth remembering, I think.
9. “Sheep” by Pink Floyd
   So many ways to write about this song. There’s my first job at Subway, where I worked with a girl who had a huge music collection and who one day handed me a 90-minute cassette tape with Animals and Wish You Were Here on it back-to-back. There’s the night in the spring of ’88 when I stood somewhere around the 50 yard line of RFK Stadium and watched the reunited Pink Floyd work through so many of their songs (though not this one, regrettably). There’s all those nights throughout high school when we’d listen to this and other albums in Paul’s bedroom or while driving around in his old Camry. I hope all young music fans still go through a Pink Floyd phase, and I hope they still listen to Animals. I picked “Sheep” because of Rick Wright’s opening solo (I still play it to test a keyboard’s Fender Rhodes patch) and because it’s Roger Waters at his most misanthropic.
10. “Medicine Show” by Big Audio Dynamite
    I could put together an exhaustive “Darren working fast food jobs” playlist, but no one would want to hear it because it would consist mostly of late-’80s pop hits like “Never Gonna Give You Up,” “Got My Mind Set On You,” “Wind Beneath My Wings,” and “My Prerogative.” Lord help me. How did pop music get so bad, so fast? Fortunately, someone at Subway had managed to wire an old tape deck into the store’s audio system, so we’d get a reprieve from the “freshest mix of 80s hits!” as soon as the manager left. One of my coworkers at Subway — the same girl who gave me the Pink Floyd cassette — brought in This is Big Audio Dynamite one night, and it was really unlike anything I’d heard before. Like every other suburban white kid in the ’80s I’d learned about sampling from Fat Boys records and Licensed to Ill, but I’d never heard it used in the context of rock or new wave music. I wonder how much cred I’ll sacrifice by admitting that I came to The Clash by way of B.A.D.?
11. “Heart of the Sunrise”
    Next week, when I get to the college years, I’ll probably be so distracted with all the talk of meeting Joanna and falling in love and, oh yeah, going through my jam band phase, that I might forget to mention the fact that for two years there I planned to become a composer. I managed to not suck just enough in my audition to be admitted to Florida State’s music school but quickly discovered, upon arriving there, that I did not — and would not ever — possess either the chops or the desire necessary to be anything more than a casual musician. For a short time, that realization broke my Rick Wakeman-loving heart. In high school nearly all of my closest friends were musicians (and I’m pleased to discover through the magic of Facebook that many of them have managed to make a career of it). And because we were real musicians, we loved prog rock — the more obscure, syncopated, and navel-gazing, the better. Incomprehensible lyrics? Yes, please! Concerts performed on ice? Absolutely! Tolkein-like album covers? Totally! I still pull out several of those records from time to time — the first King Crimson album holds up really well, as do the ones from the 80s with Adrian Belew and Tony Levin; I like parts of the Gabriel-era Genesis records; and there are three or four Yes albums that still make me want to get out my Hanon. “Heart of the Sunrise” is as good as prog rock will ever get.
12. “Terrapin Station” by The Grateful Dead
    To quote our President, “I inhaled frequently. That was the point.”
13. “Three Days” by Jane’s Addiction
    Like every other 19-year-old music fan in 1991, I played the hell out of Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s 10, but I never felt a connection with the grunge movement. I was still living at home in our middle class neighborhood, going to a community college, and feeling relatively content. I was too pampered and naive to be alienated. It was only a couple years later, after I met Joanna and inherited her copies of Facelift and Dirt, that I made any personal connection to the Seattle sound. It’s still a good day for us whenever “Man in the Box” comes on the radio. In the summer of ’91, I did go to the first Lollapalooza, though. A couple random memories: drinking beer in the parking lot beforehand and regretting it almost immediately; watching my friend Andy run headlong into the pit during Henry Rollins’ opening set and not finding him again until eight hours later; chatting up Ice-T, who was out exploring the fest after his set with Body Count; seeing thousands of empty water bottles being tossed around while Siouxsie and the Banshees were on stage; retreating to a tent during Nine Inch Nails, due to a screaming headache (beer + heat = wicked dehydration); finding a comfortable spot 100 yards from the stage, taking a seat, and watching Jane’s Addiction close out the night.
14. “Two Trains” by Little Feat
    I’ve written several times before about my deep love for Little Feat, so I’ll keep it short. If told to pick just one album before shipping off to a deserted island, I’d almost definitely grab my copy of Waiting for Columbus, their epic live recording from 1978. Lowell George died too young, damnit. He was barely 34, two-and-a-half years younger than I am now, and still had so much great music left in him. (Plus, I bet he would have gotten a real kick out of seeing his daughter’s recent successes.) This live recording of “Two Trains” from 1974 catches him near his peak.
15. “I Got the News” by Steely Dan
    Yes, this blipiography now includes a guest vocal from Michael McDonald. Somewhere, Joanna is rolling her eyes. My love of Steely Dan is untarnished by irony, I assure you. Midway through my first year at the local community college, I abandoned my efforts to swallow the overwhelming, soul-destroying boredom I experienced each time I walked in to Calc 2 and, in the process, also abandoned my plans of becoming an engineer. Instead, I found the music department, registered for a couple theory and history courses, joined the jazz band, and declared myself a music major. All of us in the rhythm section were rock fans first, jazz second, and Steely Dan was the perfect middle ground. One day one of the guitarists (there were three, as I recall) challenged me to pick out the chord clusters in “I Got the News,” which I proceeded to do, and we hacked our way through a few measures. Aja is still one of my favorite albums.
16. “Goodbye” by The Sundays
    Today’s selection came down to a three-way race between “Sister Cry” from Hollywood Town Hall by The Jayhawks, “Try Not to Breathe” from Automatic for the People by R.E.M., and this great track from The Sundays’ second album, Blind. All three came out in 1992, and all three were in heavy rotation in my Cawthon Hall dorm room. Although it’s been a while since I tried, I bet I can still sing along with every word of that Jayhawks record, which was my first exposure to alt-country and which is full of brilliant pop songs that even a hack like me could play on an acoustic guitar. I remember buying the R.E.M. album solely on the strength of the 5-star review in Rolling Stone. It’s still my favorite of theirs. I went with The Sundays, though, because many of my fondest memories of that first year away at school revolve around live music. The Sundays played a show at The Moon in early-’93, and it was on that night, standing just a few feet from Harriet Wheeler, that I first understood the groupie phenomenon.
17. “Driving Song” by Widespread Panic
    I think I may have mentioned earlier that I smoked quite a bit of weed in the early-90s. Hence my jam band phase. It all started with the first Blues Traveler record, which led me to the first H.O.R.D.E. festival, which led to The Aquarium Rescue Unit and Phish and, yes, The Spin Doctors, all of whom made frequent stops in Tallahassee. My favorite, though, was Widespread Panic, who I must have seen 7 or 8 times, including once at the legendary and long-demolished Hammerjacks in Baltimore, where John Bell and I drank some beer together. I totally get the jam band scene — I remember experiencing some fairly ecstatic moments at those shows — but even a relatively interesting track like “Driving Song” just doesn’t do much for me these days.
18. “A Different Drum” by Peter Gabriel
    One of the bigger challenges of this blipiography was deciding where to insert Peter Gabriel. I considered mentioning the release of So in 1986, which was the first album of his I ever owned. Or I could have put him in my high school years, when I threw myself into his earlier releases (Security remains one of my desert island discs). Us is another album I associate with dorm life, and that tour was the only time I’ve ever seen him live. But Passion, Gabriel’s soundtrack for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, is probably the recording I’ve listed to most often over the years, and it’s also the first CD I ever gave to Joanna. We were just hanging out together as friends then, and I remember suggesting it might be good music to help her fight through some writer’s block. The next semester she used another track from the album to score her first short project in film school. This will be the first of three or four entries that all remind me of young love.
19. “When It’s Raining” by The Samples
    I think I first heard The Samples in the summer of ’93, when they played at the second H.O.R.D.E. festival. That was a tough summer. Joanna and I had begun seeing each other as friends that spring, so the last thing I wanted to do was return to Maryland for three months of summer school at the community college. I’d get up most mornings around 10, make deliveries on the lunch shift at Pizza Hut, sleepwalk through physics class, then go out with friends. I remember coming home one night and telling my mom I might be having a breakdown. I spent a lot of time alone in my car that summer, listening to the Cocteau Twins, Chris Isaak, the massive collection of Stax singles, and No Room by The Samples. That CD remained a permanent fixture in my car throughout the fall, when I returned to Tallahassee and fell desperately in love with my wife.
20. “Possession” by Sarah McLachlan
    Sarah McLachlan’s 1997 release, Surfacing, won a couple Grammys and sold 11 million copies, and that success repositioned her in the music marketplace. Her first two records were played on college radio stations, and her early vidoes (“Into the Fire”) could only be spotted on Mtv’s 120 Minutes. I say all of that to say this: It’s difficult now, more than a decade after McLachlan became Ms. Lilith Fair and that singer your aunt really likes, to remember how impressive a single “Possession” was when it was first released. I still don’t know how to write about love, but it occurs to me suddenly that Fumbling Toward Ecstasy was an appropriately-titled soundtrack for Joanna’s and my early years together, when we struggled to drop our guards and trust each other.
21. “Strange Waters” by Bruce Cockburn
    After we got married, Joanna and I moved to Wilmington, NC, where I spent a year-and-a-half enjoying myself in graduate school and she spent way too many days working crap jobs and praying for it all to end. God bless her. Wilmington just wasn’t the right place for us. It never felt like home. Which is maybe why I’m only picking one song to represent our time there. “Strange Waters” is one of my favorite songs, and I’m in the habit of calling it my all-time favorite hymn. “Everything is bullshit but the open hand” is just about a perfect summary of my theology. When I asked Bruce about the song years later, he said, “I’m saying to God, [laughs] ‘Somebody said you would lead me beside still waters.’ But that hasn’t been my experience. These waters are fairly troubling. And yet it’s going where it has to go, and so clearly. It feels clear to me, anyway.”
22. “Pyramid Song” by Radiohead
    I lost track of Radiohead between “Creep” and Amnesiac, which is the album that made me a fan. And, honestly, I might not have paid too much attention to it either if some editor at TCM hadn’t cut together this brilliant promo for their Tarkovsky series. I launched Long Pauses in 2001, inspired largely by my obsession with Tarkovsky’s films. At the time, only a few were yet available on DVD, so TCM’s series was an event for me. It was my first opportunity to see Ivan’s Childhood and Chris Marker’s brilliant essay, One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, and was a significant catalyst in my cinephilia. Generally, Joanna is not a great fan of live music, but seeing Radiohead a couple years later was a thrill for both of us.
23. “Lowdown” by Wire
    I was a late-comer to punk and post-punk. Maybe this is related to my earlier comment about grunge — that my life was too sheltered and polite to ever allow any acknowledgment of profane emotion (not that the exercise of profane emotion is the only appeal of loud, fast rock and roll). Anyway, through an alignment of the stars I can only describe as Divine, I happened upon punk and post-punk just as Napster hit, which meant that I suddenly had a hard drive full of The Clash, Pavement, The Fall, The Minutemen, Television, The Stooges, and The Ramones. But Wire’s Pink Flag was, and is, my favorite of the lot. “Lowdown” gets the nod for its unexpected and miraculous appearance in Pedro Costa’s film Ossos.
24. “I Heard You Looking” by Yo La Tengo
    Years ago, I wrote about my first Yo La Tengo show, which also happened to be the first and only time anyone has ever threatened to kick my ass. I’d made the mistake of telling some drunk asshole to shut up. Didn’t he notice that Ira was singing a quiet song? Or that Ira was standing ten feet away? Anyway, my newfound love of YLT seven or eight years ago coincided with my newfound love of noise, and Ira can orchestrate distortion with the best of ‘em. Painful remains my favorite of their albums.
25. “This Is Love” by PJ Harvey
26. “Carry Me Ohio” by Sun Kil Moon
27. “Political Scientist” by Ryan Adams
28. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Sufjan Stevens
29. “Drunken Butterfly” by Sonic Youth
30. “Remember the Mountain Bed” by Billy Bragg and Wilco
31. “Like a Rolling Stone (live)” by Bob Dylan

1. “Moneda Sucia” by Flormaleva (opening title music from Liverpool)
2. “Magick” by Ryan Adams & The Cardinals (from Cardinology)
3. “Replica” by Beck (from Modern Guilt)
4. “Jazz” by Esbjorn Svensson Trio (from Leucocyte)
5. “Lassoo” by The Duke Spirit (from Neptune)
6. “Strange Overtones” by David Byrne and Brian Eno (from Everything That Happens Will Happen Today)
7. “Man Made Lake” by Calexico (from Carried to the Dust)
8. “Betray” by Son Lux (from At War with Walls and Mazes)
9. “Mississippi Goddam” (by Nina Simone from To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story)

Side B

1. “Only for a Moment” by Black Taj (from Beyonder)
2. “We Call Upon the Author” by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (from DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!)
3. “Gold for Bread” by Blitzen Trapper (from Furr)
4. “Threads” by Portishead (from Third)
5. “Blue Ridge Mountains” by Fleet Foxes (from Fleet Foxes)
6. “Inside a Boy” by My Brightest Diamond (from A Thousand Shark’s Teeth)
7. “De bonnes raisons” by Louis Garrel and Ludivine Sagnier (from the soundtrack of Love Songs)
8. “Dreamin’ of You” by Bob Dylan (from Tell Tale Signs)
9. “Eat Yourself” by Goldfrapp (from Seventh Tree)
10. “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke

If the Side A/Side B thing seems pretentious, there’s at least a little method to my (nostalgic) madness. See, ideally, one who listens to this mix will take a short break after Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.” Frankly, I don’t know how anyone could hear that song and not need to stand up, walk around, pour a stiff drink, smoke a cigarette, something. Recorded live just a few days after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., it’s as painful an expression of rage and sorrow and disillusionment as you’re ever likely to hear. The lyrics alone are enough to get me, but, goddam, listen to Nina’s voice when she sings (at 6:17):

Why don’t you see it?
Why don’t you feel it?
I don’t know . . .
I don’t know.

Nina’s mourning Medgar Evers, four little girls, and, as she calls him, “the King of Love.” I won’t pretend I can empathize with her, and I don’t mean to strike a ridiculous pose of suffering (is there anything more insufferable from a wealthy white guy?), but I offer this recording as a summation of my myriad feelings about the George W. Bush era and about this strange and terrible place that I love and where I have chosen to make my home. To paraphrase another blogger, “If you hear this song and feel moved to tears, then you are a kindred spirit.” Actually, I’d be content to reduce this entire mix down to just three songs: “Mississippi Goddam,” “We Call Upon the Author,” and, for obvious reasons, “A Change is Gonna Come,” which is not a new song, of course, but which has become new in a new context.

2008 is dead. Long live 2008.

Long Pauses was inspired, years ago now, by a Denise Levertov poem that compares the act of writing to the existential adventure of composing of one’s life. “Making Peace” opens with the image of “A voice” calling out from the darkness, which I’ve always taken as an allusion to God; like Levertov in her later years, I still call myself a Christian, even if a somewhat unorthodox one. By Levertov’s calculus, “the poet” — whether a literal artist or, figuratively, an individual composing her life — is imbued with a creative imagination and the will to exercise it. We are holy potential. We are capable of great things, she suggests — “peace,” “justice,” “mutual aid” — if only we choose to shake our lives free of “the imagination of disaster.” It’s all a beautiful extended metaphor, culminating in this description of something like grace:

        A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light–facets
of the forming crystal.

Lovely. And still inspiring after all these years. But after listening to “We Call Upon the Author” twenty or thirty times, I’m tempted to start another blog that shifts Long Pauses 20 or 30 degrees on its axis — a site that is more profane and bitter and funny. I’d call it “Prolix!!!! Prolix!!!!” and it would be a kind of fiery Jeremiad. It would be considerably less lovely. In “We Call Upon the Author” Nick Cave also calls out to the Author/Creator but he finds one with a bit of an “imagination of disaster” problem Himself. There’s no vibrating lights or facets of forming crystals in Cave’s America. It’s a much more recognizable place: “rampant discrimination, mass poverty, third world debt, infectious disease, global inequality, and deepening socio-economic divisions.” Come on, Author, can’t you cut some of this shit? “Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!”

In other sounds . . .

I haven’t heard enough new music this year to justify putting together a Top 10, but the other 16 songs here represent a good deal of what I’ve been listening to. According to iTunes, “Inside a Boy” wins the “play count” race for the year, which seems about right. “Strange Overtones” is my favorite pop single (if it’s accurate to call a Byrne/Eno song a pop single) since Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You Been Gone.” “Magick” is a pretty great pop song, too — one of many on Cardinology, the tightest collection Ryan Adams has ever released. And “Dreamin’ of You” proves, to no one’s surprise, that Bob Dylan’s rejects and cutouts are golden.

Beck, Son Lux, Portishead, and Goldfrapp all put out really good records that find crazy beauty in electronic noises. Calexico, along with new-comers Fleet Foxes and Blitzen Trapper, mined different veins of Americana and found some jewels. The Duke Spirit and Black Taj made two of the best guitar-driven rock albums I’ve heard in quite a while. And as a film guy, I also had to include two cuts from movies I loved this year: “Moneda Sucia,” Flormaleva’s surf-y opener from Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool, and “De bonnes raisons,” Louis Garrel and Ludivine Sagnier’s pop-y duet that opens Christoph Honore’s Love Songs. Ah, Ludivine. Be still my beating heart.

The much-coveted “Long Pauses Song of the Year Award” goes to “Premonition: I. Earth” by The Esbjorn Svennson Trio (E.S.T.), which wasn’t included in the mix because, at more than 17 minutes, it would have eaten up a fourth of the disc. I added “Jazz,” instead, which is a somewhat more traditional piano trio performance. “Premonition: I. Earth” is like something from another planet. E.S.T. was formed 15 years ago, and Svennson and drummer Magnus Ostrom played together even longer. You can hear that history in the precision and invention of their improvisations. I only wish I’d had a chance to see Svennson perform live.

Top 10 Live Shows of 2008

The ordering of this list is determined largely, I’ve realized, by where I was sitting and by the energy in the room. Sonic Youth is the only band that still makes me bounce around in a pit with kids half my age; Wilco, who are probably America’s Great Rock Band right now, put on an amazing performance, but I was too far away from it and spent too much of the night feeling like a spectator rather than a participant.

1. Sonic Youth
2. Tom Waits
3. Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin, and Buddy Miller
4. My Brightest Diamond and Clare & The Reasons
5. The Duke Spirit and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
6. Lou Reed
7. David Byrne
8. Elvis Costello
9. Iron & Wine and Blitzen Trapper
10. Wilco and John Doe

Send me your mailing address if you want a copy of the mix. I’d love to get something in return, but it’s not necessary.

• • •

“If ever there was a need for a Jeremiah to come along and to rant at us, it’s now.”

I actually laughed when he said it—partly because, in context, it was funny (he laughed too); partly because it’s exactly the type of thing one expects to hear from Bruce Cockburn, a songwriter who has devoted the bulk of his four-decade career to documenting our many strange failings and fears. The temptation when writing about Cockburn is to transform him into just such a prophet, to imbue his songs and his public persona with a moral seriousness that unfairly eclipses all that makes his music so wonderfully human. If Cockburn’s characters, like the Old Testament Jeremiah, occasionally weep and wail against some approaching doom, they are just as likely to be touched by humor or mischief or lust, and they nearly always manage to transcend the circumstances of their daily lives, if only for a moment.

Cockburn also writes great love songs and plays a mean guitar.

After studying at the Berklee School of Music in Boston and gigging with a string of rock bands around Ottawa, Cockburn released his first collection of original material in 1970. His list of accomplishments since includes more than 25 albums, eleven Juno Awards, three honorary Ph.D.s., and a membership in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. Cockburn has also been honored for his humanitarian work, which has taken him, among other places, to Nicaragua, Mozambique, Cambodia, communist Europe, and, most recently, Iraq. Each experience has eventually found its way into songs like “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” which rages against the injustice of America’s military intervention in Central America, or “Last Night of the World,” which marvels at an encounter with “hope among the hopeless.”

Violence shone a different light on everything

Suddenly it’s repression, moratorium on rights
What did they think the politics of panic would invite?
Person in the street shrugs — “Security comes first”
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse

– The Trouble with Normal” (1981)

Cockburn is finally home again. In June 2003, he set off on tour in support of his latest CD, You’ve Never Seen Everything. It’s a typical Bruce Cockburn album: a collection of songs built from journalistic images and virtuoso musicianship that documents our world with equal measures of wonder, anger, awe, and exasperation. The post-9/11 world, these songs suggest, is a place of grave danger, irrational fear, and, as Cockburn sings in the title track, “unbelievable indifference.” But there is also, despite it all, a blossoming potential for spiritual and political awakening. “I’m still here,” Cockburn intones on the opening cut. “I’m still here.”

After nearly a year-and-a-half and multiple swings through North America, Europe, and Australia, Cockburn’s tour wrapped in November 2004, the same month that saw the re-election of George W. Bush. Given the timing of our conversation and the content of You’ve Never Seen Everything, the U.S. presidential election seemed a logical place for us to begin.

Beyond: Does the political climate in which you’re touring affect the shows in any specific ways?

Cockburn: Normally not, really. I guess it obviously affects the mood of the audience to some degree, but I don’t notice that when I’m on stage. I mean, people are into the show or they’re not. And most of time they are, so that’s what you feel, more than the specifics of what they brought with them.

But it affects me, too. I wasn’t totally surprised by the outcome of the election, but obviously it was disappointing. We have to live with what we have to live with for the foreseeable future. Another four years is going to take a long time to correct. We’re going to be living with the Bush world for a long time. That’s the way it is, and it’s regrettable, but we have to find some way to deal with it.

Beyond: There’s something especially maddening about Bush’s use of “moral values” rhetoric to sell a political ideology.

Cockburn: It’s toxic as all get-out. These guys, these smug [pause] people—polyester-clad people … [laughs] I guess it’s not fair to imply that kind of designation because other kinds of people wear polyester, but, you know, it’s the smugness that is just rank. If ever there was a need for a Jeremiah to come along and to rant at us, it’s now. These people need to be shaken, and I’m afraid that they will get shaken, but in the process they’re going to make sure that the rest of us get shaken too. And in some very ugly ways. It’s worrisome.

Beyond: I would imagine that there are particular songs that people want to hear right now. Like, I think I would be disappointed if you didn’t play “The Trouble with Normal.”

Cockburn: [laughs] Well, the same old, same old. That song’s twenty years old and it still fits. It could be fifty years old and it would still fit, probably.

People have their own particular preferences. The songs I hear people hollering out for most are the personal songs: “All the Diamonds,” “Pacing the Cage,” “Waiting for a Miracle.” Occasionally, someone will call out for “The Trouble with Normal.” And “Rocket Launcher,” of course. If I haven’t played it in the show, it’ll get a big howl for the encore. A lot of people are relating to that song. Everybody associates the frustration and anger they feel with “Rocket Launcher,” I think.

Beyond: Generally speaking, it seems that your more explicitly political songs take one of two paths. One path I think of as “snapshot songs,” where you just shine a light on a particular moment and bring it to life. Like, I was thinking of “Dust and Diesel,” where you capture something of the political climate of Nicaragua in that image of a smiling girl directing traffic with a .45 strapped to her cotton dress. And then there are songs like “The Trouble with Normal” that seem to be a more polemical voice of righteous anger.

Cockburn: Yeah, and they’re more general in their targeting. “Call It Democracy” would be in that category, too. It’s specifically aimed at the policies of the International Monetary Fund, but that’s representative of a whole system of things, which is the real problem. “Rocket Launcher” fits that former category, too, of trying to capture a moment. It was how I felt when I experienced a particular . . . the sense of being with those refugees who had experienced those things.

I don’t rationalize that much before I write a song. After the fact I can kind of tell what, if any, category it belongs in. But when I’m writing a song, I’m thinking about whatever feelings I have that want to be written down. Sometimes it’s anger, sometimes it’s hope, sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s sex, sometimes it’s encounters with the Divine, which certainly qualify as expressions of a moment because the contact generally doesn’t last long. I write all of the songs the same way, the mechanism’s the same. Different feelings come up, different triggers switch that get those feelings moving.

Beyond: You seem to have an obsession with images of light and dark. There’s a certain metaphorical quality to that, of course, but what most attracts me to those moments is that so many of your songs are composed like a photograph or like a sequence in a film. Was that an organic development for you?

Cockburn: It grew over time. I don’t think it started out like that. “Going to the Country” [from Cockburn’s debut album] is sort of a proto-version of that approach, maybe. Most of the songs on that album are a bit less focused. “The Bicycle Trip” is sort of goofy, and I don’t really count that, but “Spring Song,” “Man of a Thousand Faces,” “The Thirteenth Mountain”—they’re describing a state of things, and it’s a state that is sometimes sought after, it’s a state that happened already.

But over time the angle of approach shifted slightly, and I began to write more and more in a style that I think you rightly described as “cinematic.” I think of it that way, sometimes, when I’m thinking about it at all. It’s evident to me that that’s what I’m doing. Putting a song together in terms of little scenes. And the chorus, if there’s a chorus, will tie them together or bridge them. I do that a lot. I watch a lot of movies. Maybe that’s why. [laughs]

Beyond: “Tokyo” seems to fit that category. There’s even a line where you’re describing a car accident and it actually says, just like a screenplay, “Cut to crumbling guard rail.”

Cockburn: I started writing “Tokyo” on a plane home from what I think was probably the second trip to Japan, in the late-‘70s. That accident scene that it describes—I mean, I didn’t actually see it going into the river—but, on the way to the airport, we drove past that. I don’t know if it’s as true now as it once was, but touring in a place like Japan made one’s emotions open, made your heart open, because you’re so dependent on people. Not only do you not understand the words that you’re reading, but you can’t understand the letters they’re written in. So you’re completely dependent upon the people around you for everything. That state of dependency, I found, made me particularly vulnerable. So passing that accident scene at the end of what was really the fantastic experience of this whole tour seemed to . . . well, it was particularly intense because of that state.

I was feeling it out on the plane after I’d left and just tried to capture something of what it felt to be in Tokyo with that included. The accident scene stood in stark contrast to everything else about Japan. Everything else that I experienced was positive, pretty much. Even the drunk guys pissing in the street. It was colorful and amusing and down-home in a funny kind of way—all these guys in business suits acting like this. So even that was positive. And here was the violence of this accident, which shone a different light on everything.

Beyond: Like “Tokyo,” so many of these “snapshot” songs are tied to the place that either inspired them or where they’re actually located. Inner City Front, for example, plays like a map of Toronto.

Cockburn: Yeah, it’s really geographically specific, down to the street names. I was living on Smithern Avenue when I wrote that, in the neighborhood that it’s describing. That “cinematic” thing, it may have started with the Humans album: “Tokyo” and a few other songs on that album. I’m not sure. I’d have to dig back and see if it was as apparent before that. But by the time we get to Inner City Front, it’s really full-on, conscious, “I’m painting a scene now, and the next verse is going to be a different scene, and they’re related in various ways.”

The eternal things are eternal

There’s a rainbow shining in a bead of spittle
Falling diamonds in rattling rain
Light flexed on moving muscle
I stand here dazzled with my heart in flames

– “World of Wonders” (1985)

“You Pay Your Money and You Take Your Chance,” the opening track of Inner City Front, includes one of Cockburn’s most striking images. It’s a street scene at night, and the narrator has been drawn from his apartment by the sound of a screaming woman.

By the time I reach the corner they’ve all vanished
Just a deaf kid talking like Popeye to a large fleshy laughing man in a blue shirt

Like a Flannery O’Connor story, the song is an intersection of grotesque characters that ends with an unexpected glimpse of grace: “And through it all, somehow, this willingness that asks no questions.”

Cockburn: Yeah, well, grace. Grace lives in the dirt, you know?

Beyond: Right.

Cockburn: If you want to call it “dirt.” I don’t know if that’s exactly how I think about it. If you’ve got to wait until you’re sitting out on a mountaintop somewhere to experience grace, you’re probably going to miss it. [laughs] It’s not really grace then. You’ve constructed an atmosphere for yourself to get in touch with an aspect of yourself. But it’s that gleam in a “bead of spittle.” That’s where the grace is. It’s all over the place.

Seeing it in other people, for me, has always been more difficult than finding it in a landscape or in something that happens to me or in some other subjective thing. But occasionally I get lucky and I get to see it in people, too. Or, at least—I mean, I see it in people fairly often—but I see it in a way that can be translated into part of a song.

Beyond: Those moments are sprinkled throughout your songs. Like, “In the Falling Dark,” with its images of the “hard-shelled husbands and wives”—these mundane images of everyday life that are illumined by something sacred. And then all the way up to You’ve Never Seen Everything with “Everywhere Dance”: “The Dance is truth, and it’s everywhere.”

Cockburn: Not everybody hears this, but I think the song “You’ve Never Seen Everything” is talking about that, too. The whole point of that song is, this shit is happening all around us and we can’t ignore it. And we shouldn’t try to ignore it. We should deal with it. But you’ve got to remember that that’s not the only thing there is. The song kind of goes at it from a negative perspective, because it’s saying “here’s all this stuff and we don’t see the light coming down everywhere,” but it is. The implication is that it is coming down everywhere, but we’re not looking.

Beyond: You seem to retain a sense of hope despite it all.

Cockburn: Well, the eternal things are eternal. [laughs] Love and God and even the planet, in any terms that matter to us. I mean, the planet will go on without us, if need be. Indefinitely. Until the sun dies, or whatever. But there’s a rhythm to things and . . . I’m getting tired of using the word “interconnectedness,” but it’s the only word I can think of. The realities of life are so much bigger than the shit we’re stepping in that it just doesn’t matter.

Nobody makes a living being a poet

Don’t let the system fool you
All it wants to do is rule you
Pay attention to the poet
You need him and you know it

– “Maybe the Poet” (1982)

In January 2004, Cockburn visited Iraq as part of a delegation whose purpose was to assess and document the humanitarian situation there, or, as he would later describe it, to experience “American empire building” first-hand. By the following summer, he had added a new song to his touring repertoire: “This is Baghdad,” which he describes as a “landscape,” like “Tokyo.” Cockburn has consistently shrugged off suggestions that his political engagement is some kind of mission, instead comparing it to an “organic urge” to tell the truth about important—and often unreported—aspects of human experience.

Beyond: In “Maybe the Poet,” you remind us that “the poet shows you new ways to see.”

Cockburn: At the time I wrote that I was aware of the phenomenon in the Soviet Union of dissidents being incarcerated in psychiatric institutions, which, of course, is utterly sinister. An evil way of treating dissidents. And, of course, poets tend to be dissidents if they’re saying anything truthful because the truth is always inimical to authoritarian regimes and to people who like power, generally. So you go telling the truth and you get in trouble.

In the Soviet Union they were institutionalizing people and really fucking them over, but in North America we don’t do that. We just buy them off. Or bury them under layers of the commercially available substitute. And so you take someone like Allen Ginsburg, who was as much a prophet as anyone in the Bible. Here’s a guy who is really saying what people need to hear, and some people are listening but not the majority. Of course, there are far more poets, and Ginsberg was good enough and lucky enough to get some sort of public profile early on and to keep it, to a certain degree. But there are all those people trying to tell the truth as they understand it.

Nobody makes a living being a poet. [laughs] You do something else, and you do that on the side. Or you do something on the side to put food on the table. That’s where I was coming from [in “Maybe the Poet”]. Illustrations of how we shut out people who are trying to tell the truth.

I sang that song in East Berlin. We had an East German translator—this is in the early-80s, before we had even a hint that the wall was going to come down—and I was told later by people who were in the audience that the translator was doing a pretty good job of summarizing what I was singing about and talking about until we got to that song. I said something about the Soviet Union, basically what I just told you, and that part didn’t get translated. [laughs]

Beyond: Your career has taken you to some remarkable places, which leads me to my last question. I have to ask you about “Strange Waters,” which is a song that I can’t seem to stop listening to. It’s another of those “cinematic” lyrics.

Cockburn: “Strange Waters” was a reflection on something that was another recurring thought. Around the time that I first started thinking of myself as a Christian, I tried to understand what that was by reading the books that were available and by listening to a lot of people. In a way I tried to be a fundamentalist, but it didn’t really take.

One reason it didn’t really take was that, over time . . . I officially became a Christian in ’73 or ’74, but by the end of the ‘70s, I’m watching these . . . I turn on the TV and I see these people coming on shows like 100 Huntley Street and they’re testifying that they were an alcoholic, they’d lost their job, and then they found Jesus and everything was okay now. He’s healthy. He’s working again. He’s not drinking.

And my experience was the exact opposite. It was just so obvious that the journey that we are invited to embark on as spiritual beings—whether we approach it through Christianity or anything else, any other door—that journey is a journey fraught with peril. It’s intense, it’s not . . . in no way are you ever invited to sit back and go, “Whoo, I’m okay now.” It’s just not part of it.

“Strange Waters” is really addressing that. It’s just a list of all these bizarre things I’ve encountered, and I’m saying to God, [laughs] “Somebody said you would lead me beside still waters.” But that hasn’t been my experience. These waters are fairly troubling. And yet it’s going where it has to go, and so clearly. It feels clear to me, anyway.

Sidebar: Recommended Albums

In the Falling Dark (1976)
A landmark album both because it signaled a transition from Cockburn’s earlier acoustic music to the jazz- and rock-infused sound of the 1980s and because it is generally considered the most eloquent exploration of his newfound Christian faith. Cockburn calls “Silver Wheels” an ode to the “headlong, highway rush-type poetry” that Allen Ginsburg was writing at the time.

Humans (1980)
Written during a period of great change in Cockburn’s personal life, the songs on Humans are an expression of his evolving desire to test his faith in action. Along with “Tokyo,” the album also includes “How I Spent My Fall Vacation,” a travelogue from Cockburn’s harrowing encounter with a gun-toting policeman in Rome. “Fascist Architecture” is an audacious allegory for his failed marriage.

Stealing Fire (1984)
The back jacket of Stealing Fire features a portrait of Cockburn in disheveled green fatigues. His 1983 visits to Central American refugee camps generated this, his most vitriolic collection of songs, including “Maybe the Poet,” “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” and “Dust and Diesel.” The success of its single, “Lovers in a Dangerous Times,” made Stealing Fire one of Cockburn’s best sellers as well.

Nothing But a Burning Light (1991)
In the early-1990s, Cockburn signed with Sony, who built his reputation in the U.S. by re-releasing his back catalogue and by actively promoting this album. Produced by T-Bone Burnett and featuring guests such as Jackson Browne, Sam Phillips, and Booker T., Burning Light is a deliberately “rootsy”-sounding album that features a blistering cover of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Soul of a Man.”

The Charity of Night (1996)
Fans at cockburnproject.net recently voted The Charity of Night their favorite Cockburn album. Accented throughout by Gary Burton’s vibraphone and by backing vocals from Ani DiFranco, Jonatha Brooke, Patty Larkin, and Maria Muldaur, it is a jazzy album that features several of Cockburn’s best spoken word songs, including “Get Up Jonah” and “Birmingham Shadows.” Charity closes with “Strange Waters.”

You’ve Never Seen Everything (2003)
Cockburn’s post-9/11 album is by turns angry, exhausted, and hopeful. “Trickle Down” is a seething indictment of globalization and corporate welfare, but it’s balanced by songs like “Open” and “Everywhere Dance,” which direct our attention to the sacred beauty of the everyday. Collaborators here include jazz pianist Andy Milne, who co-wrote two songs, and Emmylou Harris.

Last weekend, when Joanna and I drove down to Chattanooga, we listened to nothing but the first draft of my 5-disc compilation. She was quick to point out a glaring omission, God bless her — “Barracuda” by Heart. I also realized that I’d taken my fondness for ’60s garage rock a bit far and needed to trim some of the fat. Also, we both agreed the collection needed some AC/DC.

Here’s something I’ve learned about AC/DC, though. Apparently they’re one of the final holdouts of the iTunes era. (I assume this goes hand-in-hand with their weird distribution deal with Wal-Mart.) None of my regular sources — eMusic, Amazon, or iTunes — sell AC/DC songs, so, instead, I drove over to Knoxville’s music mecca, The Disc Exchange, and plunked down $7.99 for a brand new copy of Powerage (1978).

Here’s something else I’ve learned about AC/DC. They rock. I mean, I’ve known AC/DC rocks since I was 9 years old and my friend Steve put Back in Black on his turntable and dropped the needle on “You Shook Me All Night Long.” What surprised me, though, is that they still rock, long after the brand of heavy metal they discovered was made into a joke by ’80s hair bands, and long after I “outgrew” my fondness for early metal.

I bought Powerage rather than one of the other, more obvious choices because it includes “Riff Raff,” hands-down my favorite AC/DC song. There’s much to love about this song — the opening crescendo, Angus’s riffs, the driving 8th-note bassline, the unimpeachable beauty of a 3-chord song — but I developed my crush on it after listening to Mark Kozelek’s What’s Next to the Moon for the 15th or 20th time. Moon is an entire album of AC/DC covers, all culled from the Bon Scott era, and all given the full-on Kozelek treatment: soft, acoustic renditions, lovingly and sweetly sung. I’ll be damned if Kozelek doesn’t turn Bon Scott into a kind of Woody Guthrie or Hank Williams — a simple man capable of transforming simple desire and simple language into heartbreaking folk poetry. Check out Kozelek’s version of “Riff Raff.” Both versions, I’ve decided, are going on my nephew’s CDs.

If an alien landed on your doorstep and asked you what a guitar sounds like, what songs would you play?

• “Boots of Spanish Leather” by Bob Dylan
• “Inside a Boy” by My Brightest Diamond
• “Spirits (Having Flown)” by Bee Gees
• “A Letter to Both Sides” by The Fixx
• “Elegie in C Minor, Op. 24″ by Gabriel Faure
• “Tel Que Tu Es” by Charlotte Gainsbourg
• “Revolution Earth” by The B-52s

Bob Dylan

Professor Fury has tagged me with the “7 Songs You’re Into Right Now” meme, which is good because I’ve been looking for an excuse to write about how it’s only now, thirty years after I bought my first pop/rock record, that I’ve finally entered my Bob Dylan phase. I dismissed Dylan for so many years, mostly because of that voice, which I disliked to such an extent that it fooled me into thinking his songs lack melody. I was wrong on both accounts — about the voice (more on that in a second) and the songs, which are, on average, so impossibly good that I actually feel a bit overwhelmed by it all. I could easily name seven Bob Dylan songs that I’m into right now and be done with this damn post, but my wine glass is still more than half full, and, besides, that wouldn’t be much fun, now would it? And so I give you only “Boots of Spanish Leather” from The Times They Are A-Changin’, written in 1963, when Dylan was all of 22 years old. Such a lovely lyric and melody — better than anything crafted by many great songwriters over the course of a lifetime — but what kills me is the vocal performance, which makes the song sound like it’s a hundred years old.

My Brightest Diamond

To the short list of “Darren’s Dream Jobs” you can now add “Shara Worden‘s Bass Player.” My Brightest Diamond’s second album, A Thousand Shark’s Teeth, will reach American store shelves on June 17th, and at this point I’m counting the days. If the first song from the album, “Inside a Boy,” is any indication, it won’t be a great departure from Bring Me the Workhorse, which is just fine by me. Joanna and I have played that album to death. This song is all about the bass line, which is deliriously syncopated and muddied with fuzz. Please play at high volumes.

Bee Gees

If at any point over the past three months you had found yourself in a room with me and a piano, chances are you would have already heard me ramble on about how great a song “Spirits (Having Flown)” is. No, really. You also would have heard me play and sing it. I can’t seem to stop. The lyrics are godawful, even by Barry Gibb standards, and this is one of the few instances where a disco-era Bee Gees song is hindered by the production. (The woodwinds in the bridge disappoint me every time.) But the song is amazing. That each verse includes three different Major-7 chords is enough to earn my affection, but what pushes “Spirits” into the realm of pop music brilliance is the melody, which uses those sevenths — even landing on them at the ends of phrases. (A great example is the short pause after “We go alone” around the 43 second mark. He finishes the phrase by singing an E over an F-Major chord.) “Spirits” also shifts constantly from minor to major tonalities. I especially like the G-Minor to F-Major to G-Major move in the chorus (from 1:37 to 1:43), which is followed immediately by a short key change and a complex but effortless-sounding transition back to the verse. Top-notch songwriting.

The Fixx

Joanna’s new car came with a free trial of XM radio, and I’ve been really enjoying FRED, which plays nothing but New Wave, Post Punk, and British pop of the late-’70s and ’80s. I never imagined I’d hear Husker Du and The Damned on the way to the grocery store. I tend to remember only the tinny, mechanical drumming of those pop records, but FRED has been a fun reminder of how interesting so much of the guitar playing was. Think of the Edge’s playing on War, for example, especially on “Drowning Man.” Or Johnny Marr on The Smiths’ records. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Greatest Hits of The Fixx. Jamie West-Oram has been their guitarist for nearly 30 years, apparently, and he’s a wonderfully tasteful and inventive player. “A Letter to Both Sides,” as I’ve learned while writing this post, was originally included on the Fletch soundtrack, which only adds to its awesomeness as far as I’m concerned. Aside from having the lamest 15-second intro you’re likely to hear in some time, it’s a fantastic song that’s built around a rhythm guitar part that wouldn’t be out of place on a Nile Rodgers record.

Gabriel Faure

Fifteen years ago, when Joanna and I were just beginning to know each other, she invited me to join her in a practice room at the Florida State Music School. I was finishing up my one year as a failed music composition major there, and she was taking cello lessons for fun. We hacked our way through some piece together for about fifteen minutes then spent the next two hours talking. I’m not sure why we never tried playing together again — not seriously, at least. She’s working on Faure’s “Elegie in C Minor, Op. 24″ right now, and last week I decided to join her. We’ve only made it through the first twelve measures so far, but give us time. The cellist in this recording is Steven Isserlis, and the pianist is Pascal Devoyon, from Faure: Complete Cello Works.

Charlotte Gainsbourg

On the I’m Not There DVD, Todd Haynes admits that when he finally met Charlotte Gainsbourg in person, he’d never wanted so badly to be straight. I’ve listened to her album, 5:55, more than any other over the past three or four months, and this song, “Tel Que Tu Es,” never fails to make me . . . what’s the word? . . . horny. It’s an incredibly sexy song, right? All that breath in her voice, and the unapologetically lush string arrangement? Plus, I can’t not imagine Charlotte’s face when I hear the song. Lust at first sight.

The B-52s

And finally, I end with a joke — not the song, which was always my favorite of the B-52s’ comeback singles, but the reason it’s on my mind these days. But first, two warnings: One, I know this is a “you had to be there” kind of joke, and Two, of the forty people who read this site, maybe only two or three will get the reference. So, Joanna and I are driving around one night and “Revolution Earth” comes on the radio. At about the 30 second mark, Joanna, without looking up from her magazine, says, “Is this the song Gaeta was singing after they cut off his leg?” I almost wrecked the car I was laughing so hard.

I warned you.

Edit: A little more context for the joke.

I went to the Lou Reed concert mostly out of curiosity and with no particular expectations. I certainly wasn’t expecting such a stellar band — featuring Rob Wasserman, Kevin Hearn, Tony Smith, and Steve Hunter — or such an affecting experience. Lou and the band ticked through the same twelve songs they’ve played every night on this tour, which meant there was little chance of spontaneity or surprise, but the setlist was tight and had a slow-burning power. (“Slow-burning power”? Really? This is why I don’t write about music.)

Back to the strange association . . .

The fourth song of the set was a 14-minute version of “Ecstasy” that completely transformed the atmosphere in the room. It begins with a drone-like prelude before settling comfortably into a shuffling verse. Lou’s minimalist guitar solo opens things up a bit — God, I love his guitar tone — and then things temporarily explode into a fit of percussion. The part that really got to me, though, was the final verse:

I feel like that car that I saw today, no radio, no engine, no hood
You know, I’m going to that cafe
I hope they got music, I hope those guys can play
But if we have to part, I’ll have a new scar right here, right over my heart
Any you know what I’ll call it? I’ll call it ecstasy.

As he sang, he dragged a line with one finger over his chest and introduced a new idea — or a new sense — to the show. The deep lines in Lou’s face suddenly became more fascinating and hard-earned. There was a new melancholy in the room — a kind of painful pleasure. It’s hard to explain, and perhaps I’m the only one who felt it. A few minutes later, he sang a new song, “The Power of the Heart,” which is sentimental and sweet, even — presumably it’s a gift of sorts for his recent bride, Laurie Anderson — but, somehow, passing through Lou’s body makes the song something else. It’s that same melancholy, the sense that life is long and hard and occasionally beautiful. It’s “magic and loss,” as he sang later in the show. It’s a “halloween parade” — a roaring carnival of lost friends and lost loves.

Thursday Night, The Bijou Theatre, Knoxville, 9:40 – 10: 30 p.m.

If I die having never seen PJ Harvey live, I will at least be able to tell my grandchildren that I saw Liela Moss and The Duke Spirit play their first ever show in Knoxville. Michael Smith has been keeping me up-to-date on all things Spirit-related for the last two years, and after experiencing Liela first-hand, up close and personal, I owe him one. She is such a rock star. In a town like Knoxville, where crowds for this kind of show typically number in the low hundreds, her energy and joy were a real treat. She never stopped playing to the last row of the balcony, even though when the spotlights dimmed, I’m sure she could see that the balcony was empty. From what I could tell, there were maybe only four or five other people there on Thursday night who had heard of The Duke Spirit, but by intermission there was a long line at their merch table and every conversation around me was about the band.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

Thursday Night, The Bijou Theatre, Knoxville, 10:50 p.m. – 12:00 a.m.

The most pleasant surprise of my concert-going year in 2007 was seeing Morrissey. It had been a while since I’d last experienced a rock star extravaganza, complete with wardrobe changes and a light show. (I’m now convinced he’s the Tom Jones of Generation X.) But even Morrissey, at his posing, most calculated best, isn’t as committed to an aesthetic as are the guys in BRMC. Dressed in black and silhouetted by uplighting and a barrage of strobes, they pounded their way through about 70 minutes of music before I left. It was great fun to see a hard working power trio again — bassist Robert Levon Been and guitarist Peter Hayes are both impressive — but especially after The Duke Spirit, BRMC’s act felt too much like a pose. Live music should be fun, right?

Sonic Youth

Friday Night, City Hall, Nashville, 10:20 p.m. – 12:00 a.m.

In a week or two I’m going to turn 36, and I felt it on Thursday night. The BRMC demographic, apparently, skews a bit younger. Which is one of the many reasons it was so much fun to see Sonic Youth just 24 hours later. Among the thousand or so people who packed the room at City Hall in Nashville was a healthy assortment of folks like me who bought Daydream Nation back when it was released, twenty years ago. I’d hoped we might get a surprise encore of their 2007 tour, when they played Daydream front-to-back, but, instead, we got three songs from it — “Hey Joni,” “Candle,” and “‘Cross the Breeze” — several from Rather Ripped (I still really love “Reena”), and an assortment of older material. I’m not complaining. I’m sure that if I had the opportunity to see Sonic Youth live every night for the rest of my life, I’d eventually skip a show or two, but not for some time. Being packed into a sweaty crowd, bouncing to that Sonic Youth noise, is a special kind of euphoria. Kim, Lee, and Thurston are all in their 50s now, so I figure I’ve got another decade or two in me.

Last Year at Marienbad

Saturday Afternoon, The Belcourt Theatre, Nashville, 12:00 p.m. – 1:40 p.m.

One of my secret ambitions is to establish in Knoxville a theater like Nashville’s Belcourt. The last remaining independent theater in the city, The Belcourt is now run as a non-profit and offers a variety of film programming, live music, and drama. Notably, it is often the only theater in the southeast where audiences can see the newly-struck prints that play NYC, Toronto, Chicago, LA, and San Francisco. It’s where I saw Satantango a year-and-a-half ago and where, yesterday, I saw the same 35mm print of Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad that played at the Castro in March. I’d seen Marienbad only one other time — seven or eight years ago when I was just beginning to discover European cinema. I remember thinking at the time, “Hmmmm, I wonder if it’s possible for a film’s drama to be located in the camera rather than in the performances?” It was that kind of breakthrough film for me. And I’m happy to say I’m no nearer to understanding it today.