Portland

As previously foreshadowed, the idea was placed in his head back in the 90s to eventually move to the Pacific Northwest.  Inception.  But he never pursued that impulse and instead remained settled in the Southeast, first buying a condo and then later a house in Atlanta, and settling into a career serving clients along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts.

He had started working for a new firm at the beginning of 2007, and one day toward the middle of the year, the owner of the company walked into his office unannounced and made him an offer: they had a large project that needed his help over in Portland, Oregon, and would he be willing to go out there for a couple of months and help out?  He was told that his skill set, such as it was, would make a good addition to the Portland office, and if it all worked out and everyone in the office got along, there was even the potential to permanently relocate out to Portland.

Even though the original vision was to move to somewhere near the Puget Sound in Washington State, in a startlingly short amount of time he found himself over in Portland, living in a Pearl District corporate condominium, working on the large Oregon project, meeting the office's Northwestern clients, and getting along quite well with the staff in Portland.  By the end of the year, an offer was made to relocate to Oregon, and they even offered to let him move to the Seattle office instead, if that was his preference. But by that time, he had already tasted enough of the Portland experience to choose Oregon over Washington.   All he had to do was sell the house in Atlanta.  

All this was just before the 2008 collapse of the real estate market.

In other news, the Toronto band Metric finally released the album Grow Up and Blow Away in 2007  Even though the album had originally been recorded in 2001, it was still one of his favorites of that year.

Streets of Laredo at 529, Atlanta, July 5, 2014

Last night, the Fifth of July, New-Zealand-by-way-of-Brooklyn's Streets of Laredo played at 529.  In what may become an annual tradition, Atlanta's Book of Colors opened.

Book of Colors is the project of vocalist/guitarist André Paraguassu.  It was exactly one year ago last night - July 5, 2013, to be exact - that we last heard Book of Colors, coincidentally, in the very same room. Members of Little Tybee, including Brock Scott and Nirvana Kelly, were in the audience for last year's performance, but they're now on tour now somewhere out west.  

Photo by Alex Weiss

Last year, Book of Colors had a violin and lap steel to flesh out their songs, and flautist Teresa Lemaire was off somewhere in Brazil. Last night, she was back with the band, but this time the violin was absent and the band was supported by lap steel and flute.  The set was good, but the volume was higher than it needed to be for a folk-rock set, and André's vocals and guitar drowned out most of the rest of the band, muffling the textures and flavors that the other instruments brought to the songs. 

Chesapeake, Virginia's The Hunts were up next.  The Hunts are a family band consisting of seven siblings, Jennifer, Jessica, Joshua, Jonathan, Jordan, Justin, and Jamison, and play folk rock in the style of Freelance Whales and The Lumineers.

They all appeared to be about the same general age (young), and it was a little hard for me to reconcile how they all could be siblings.  However, according to a 2013 profile, the oldest are twins, the two girls, Jenni and Jessi, and are now 24.  They're followed chronologically by brothers Joshua, 22, Jonathan, 21, Jordan, 19, Justin, 17, and Jamison, 16, so I guess it's possible for one mother to have birthed so many children.

I was surprised by how much I liked them. When it comes to folk rock, one of the things that I like is diverse instrumentation, and The Hunts played guitars, banjos, violins, mandolins, and a few stringed instruments I didn't even recognize.  I like harmony and when you have a seven-member family band, harmony pretty much goes with the territory.  I like good songwriting, and despite their tender age, they've written some pretty good songs.  One of their songs, Make This Leap, has even been picked up for a Milk Bone commercial.

They have a certain youthful wholesomeness that I thought might be disguising some sort of evangelical bent, and my radar started to go off when they announced that one song was based on a Bible story, but it turns out that the story was just The Prodigal Son and their take on it was that as a sibling band, they're always ready to take back an errant brother or sister.  So that was okay and they didn't start passing out copies of The Watchtower or the Book of Mormon or anything, and didn't sing about Jesus, so everything was cool.

The Hunts are currently touring with Streets of Laredo and after their set, they took a group picture of the two bands on the tiny 529 stage.

  

Frankly, I thought the youngsters stole the show from Streets of Laredo, who are also a seven-piece band fronted by family members, a husband and wife, and the brother of the husband.  The Streets play a more rock-influenced brand of folk rock, accentuated with electric guitars and drum pads rather than Appalachian string instruments, but the inventiveness of The Hunts' instrumentation and songwriting and harmonies had me won over. 

For what it's worth, the audience seemed to prefer Streets of Laredo, and were whooping and hollering and dancing along from the very first song.  "You're the flint that started the fire," percussionist Dave Gibson declared, but apparently they say that at all their gigs. 

It didn't take too long for me to get caught up in the audience's enthusiasm, and during one song, members of The Hunts came bursting out of the dressing room and danced along with the Streets' music at the front of the stage.  They disappeared soon after into the warm Atlanta night, but the audience kept the energy level up, dancing and buying shots for keyboardist Sarahjane Gibson (it was her birthday) and surprising the band with a two-beat clap-along to close out their set.

2006 (Singles)

Spooning

Let's see now, what happened in 2005?  He visited his sister in San Francisco and came down with a case of the flu that he thought was going to kill him (it didn't).  He led several hikes up to the North Georgia mountains for the Zen Center and he spent a lot of that summer working at a large petroleum refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi until Hurricane Katrina came along and pretty much shut that whole project down. 

He finally ended - for good this time - the on-again, off-again relationship with the girlfriend he had traveled with and feuded with back in 2003 and 2004, and by that point he had came to consider his lovers not as life partners or potential life partners but more as pleasant companions for whatever particular incarnation he was experiencing at that time.

He had spent a lot of 2005 downloading box sets of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He had amassed the complete discographies of The Orb, Orbital, and Underworld, as well as the bizarre avant-garde music of The Residents. He was collecting electronica by prolific German composer Pete Namlook and the numerous Buddha Bar chill-out CDs by French producer Claude Challe.

The most significant musical event of 2005 happened for him late in the year. One winter morning, he saw an on-line post titled "Best Albums of 1995" and to his surprise realized that he didn't recognize the names of any of the bands. Spoon? Bloc Party? Black Mountain? Metric? Who were these guys? He hadn't heard of any of them, and yet the poster was saying these were the best albums of the year.

Caught up in downloading all of that increasingly obscure or vintage music from the internet and listening to whatever KCRW happened to be playing that week, had he really fallen so out of touch with current music that he had zero name recognition with the best new bands of the year?

It was a wake-up call, what an alcoholic might call a moment of clarity.  He downloaded all four albums and found that he really liked them all, a lot, but especially Spoon, who's Gimme Fiction stands out to to him now as the best of that bunch of the best.

But more importantly, he realized that even though it was readily available for free downloading on the internet, he needed to stop focusing so much on obscure, collector's item records, and start listening to contemporary music again.  There was a lot going on, and it was sounding pretty good.

He got busy looking for earlier recordings by those particular bands and simultaneously started seeking out new sources of new music.  It didn't take him long to rediscover his old forgotten friend, WRAS Album 88, who were playing this new indie rock on a regular basis. 

Speaking of Spoon, here's their latest song, from their forthcoming They Want My Soul:

Golden

In 2004, he bought the house that he's living in now and also stated the Water Dissolves Water blog.  It was 10 years ago, and he turned 50 that year.

Despite the constant tension in Corsica and Florence the year before, they traveled together again the next year (2004), this time to Budapest, where they missed the Beastie Boys by a week, but apparently managed to catch some busking violinist instead.

He was still listening to KCRW in 2004, who were playing a seemingly endless series of remixes of Jill Scott's neo-soul hit, Golden, that year.  So for lack of anything else that he can recall, the song for 2004, the Golden Anniversary of his life, is Jill Scott's Golden. 

Hundred Waters and GEMS at The Earl, Atlanta, July 1, 2014

Before fully returning back to the here and now from our nostalgic look back at the 2000s, let's reflect for a moment on last March's incredible show by St. Vincent at The Tabernacle.  After that show, I declared in a Facebook post that "If I'm lucky enough to see another show this good this year, the year will be a very good year indeed!"  After last night's Hundred Waters and GEMS show at The Earl, I can say that this is, in fact, a very good year indeed.

Opener was Atlanta's Suno Deko, a one-man experimental rock band employing lots of loops and overdubs, and a good start to an evening of electronic pop. 

D.C.'s GEMS are touring with Hundred Waters, and performed an excellent set of dream pop in front of a screen showing videos of roses with subliminal skulls spliced in. 

GEMS are the attractive duo of Lindsay Pitts (vocals, keyboards) and Clifford Usher (guitar, vocals).  

For just a duo, they produce a lot of sound, and play an ethereal, richly textured brand of dream pop.  At times, they sounded a little like Zola Jesus, at others, a little like Purity Ring, and at others like nobody else. You can hear traces of Beach House in their song Pegasus, but the recorded version doesn't do justice to the intensity of the live version of the song.

GEMS' set was great, and they won't be playing the opener much longer.  I thought that they had stolen the show for the night, and even though I've seen Hundred Waters twice before, once at 529 and again opening for Alt-J, and am a big fan (a recent post about them has garnered more hits this month than any other post on this blog) and came to last night's show specifically to see them, I didn't think they could do anything that could top GEMS' marvelous set.  

They proved me wrong.  Hundred Waters played a mind-blowing set of wonderfully psychedelic electronic ambient folk rock with neo-classical and prog rock overtones, with so many shifting sounds and changing textures that you never felt quite sure from moment to moment what you had just heard or what you'd hear next.

They played what was clearly the most full-bodied, most fully-realized version of their music I've heard yet, and last night was by far the best Hundred Waters set I've heard.  I'd have to go back to Junip at Terminal West to recall an equally mesmerizing set, or maybe Julianna Barwick at The Goat Farm.  At one point, the thought occurred to me that they sounded like what Animal Collective must hear in their heads.

Part of the magic was due to their incredible lighting.  Using only two projectors mounted on the stage with them, they created effects ranging from shimmering sheets of light floating across the stage and audience to 2001 Space Odyssey-like twin walls of light, to atmospheric cones or tunnels of light.  It was all very simple and not at all distracting, but definitely added to the experience.

Well done, Hundred Waters!  I look forward to seeing you again.

Come Away With Me

This one's kind of embarrassing to admit, but he promised himself that he would go through this whole retrospective as truthfully and honestly as possible.  Having said that, the song he most remembers from 2003, and which brings the year back to him the most when he hears it, is Norah Jones' saccharine pop ballad Don't Know Why.

By no means was that all he listened to that year.  He was still downloading fast and furiously off of the internet, and he was still listening to Santa Monica's KCRW.  He attended some music event in what looks like Piedmont Park in April - possibly a 420 Fest - and took pictures of these performers, although he doesn't recognize any of them now:

The Music Midtown lineup for 2003 included Medeski, Martin, & Wood, Aimee Mann, Bob Dylan, Ben Harper, Buddy Guy, Crosby, Stills, & Nash, Def Leppard, Godsmack, India.Arie, LL Cool J, Sheryl Crow, Tony Bennett, Ashanti, The B-52s, Drivin N Cryin, Edgar Winter, Everclear, G. Love & Special Sauce, the Isley Brothers, Jack Johnson, Les Claypool's Frog Brigade, Sixpence None The Richer, Steve Winwood, and Cracker (who he saw at the inaugural, 1994 festival), but once again, he didn't go, for all the same reasons that he didn't go in 2002.  Besides, he was busy having fun elsewhere doing other things that year.

He started dating a woman he had met tht year at the Zen Center, and they began an on-again, off-again relationship that lasted for the next couple of years.  One of her favorite CDs was Norah Jones' Come Away With Me, which she frequently played when he came over to visit and that record, and the song Don't Know Why in particular, became their sort of unofficial make-out music.  They even went and saw Jones perform in Atlanta's Chastain Park and even though they left early due to the monotonous nature of her set list, he was still aware of how far his musical tastes had transmorgified in the 15 years since he was listening to Ministry and Nine Inch Nails back in 1988 and '89.  Little did he know at the time, but the Norah Jones concert in Chastain Park would be the last live show he would go to for nearly six years.

In other news, he finally quit working for the environmental engineering company he had worked for since 1984, the firm that had taught him how to consult for a living, had moved him to upstate New York and to Pittsburgh and eventually back to Atlanta again.  Both he and the company had changed quite a bit over the decades since he had first joined, and by 2003 they were no longer a firm he would have joined - or who would have hired him for that matter.  

He took a new job that year opening an Atlanta office for a competitor at a substantial increase in pay, and to celebrate he and the new girlfriend took what turned out to be a disastrous trip to Corsica and Florence that only wound up leading to yet another one of their many breakups.  Despite the art and beauty and history all around them, instead of bonding them closer together, the challenges and tedium of international travel only wound up driving them further apart.  Instead of taking refuge in each others' company, they took their frustration and stress out on each other, and the experience only magnified and emphasized the differences in their personalities. 

But anyway, the point of all this is that while he's sure that there were a lot of interesting musical things going on back in 2003, he was more or less oblivious to most of them, and while in all honesty what he does remember is Norah Jones' Come Away With Me, it's not something he still listens to today and not because of its association with that ill-fated romance, but because laid-back, radio-friendly pop music wasn't really his thing back then and generally speaking still isn't now.

Underworld

Another benefit of being wired (in the on-line, not the high-anxiety, sense) was that in addition to the unlimited quantity of music available for download, he could stream radio stations from across the country. One of his favorite stations in 2002 was probably Santa Monica's KCRW, whom he had discovered from their Morning Becomes Eclectic podcasts.  He listened to the station regularly at work, and due to them he came to regard Underworld's A Hundred Days Off, which they played in heavy rotation that year, as the best record of 2002, or at least the one he most remembers.

Once again he didn't go to Music Midtown that year.  He hadn't been back to the festival since 1995, was two years away from turning 50, and couldn't dance with the energy of the guy in the Underworld video (although he was getting closer to levitating what with the Zen training and all).  For what it's worth, the line up that year included Robert Randolph and the Family Band, War, Jethro Tull, Darius Rucker, Cee-Lo, Francine Reed, Bo Diddley, David Lee Roth, Michelle Malone, Butch Walker, Hoobastank, Incubus, Mark Farmer of Grand Funk Railroad, The Producers, The Georgia Satellites, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Savoy Brown, Joan Jett & The Blackhawks, Bone Thugs n' Harmony, The Ohio Players, Earth Wind & Fire, The Zydeco Boneshakers, O.A.R., Tinsley Ellis, Skid Row, Kid Rock, Dropsonic, 30 Seconds to Mars, Jack Johnson, Pete Yorn, Counting Crows, Bush, Stone Temple Pilots, June Carter Cash, Don McLean, Edwin McCain, Mike Mills, Cindy Wilson, Angie Aparo, Karl Denson's Tiny Universe, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, Bonnie Raitt, Perpetual Groove, Rick James, Ja Rule, Israel Vibration, Joe Bonamassa, Mother's Finest, Better Than Ezra, Journey, Remy Zero, Garbage, Puddle of Mudd, and No Doubt.