2009

In 2009, he found only one excuse to take a business trip out to his beloved Oregon.  His visit included a treacherous drive over the Cascades range in a developing blizzard that even had most seasoned Oregonians staying in the safety of their homes.

He survived.  By the end of that year, his ears were wide open and he was discovering dozens of new bands.  He came to realize that he was lucky enough to recognize that he was living in the middle of one of those revolutions in popular music not unlike the rock explosion of the 60s, and that the 2000's, and especially the late 2000s, were one of the most creative and extraordinary periods in modern musical history.

Not only was there great new music from the bands that he had discovered mid-decade - The Decemberists, Spoon, Metric, and Black Mountain - but newer bands (at least to him) like Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, and Animal Collective.  Their music wasn't being played on the radio, his old reliable source of new music, but spread word of mouth on music blogs, web sites, and Usenet message boards.

He had various theories as to why so much good music was being produced at that time.  One held that with the collapse of the record industry and the mega-profits that hit bands could expect, the businessmen had all left the music industry leaving only the true artists behind.  Another held that with the advent of low cost to free MP3, more kinds of music were getting in more ears, and bands were informed by any and everything from ambient to zydeco, from folk to classical to metal to psych to pop to electronica and on and on, all getting melded together in new and surprising ways.  Another theory held that with the rise of rap and EDM, rock music was no longer burdened with being the preferred means for young people to shock and drive the adults away, leaving it free for a purer artistic expression unimpeded by the need to repel a segment of the audience.  

Maybe it was all of these things, or none of these things, or some ersatz combination of parts of these things, but in any event, it all sounded good to him, and 2009 marks the year he finally started listening to new and interesting music again.

His Year In Lists

He spent most of the first half of 2008 in Portland living in the corporate condo while his house was on the market back in Atlanta.  But the real estate market was so bad, that not only could he not sell the house, he couldn't get anybody to come by and even look at the place, despite the best efforts of one of the top realtors in town.  He couldn't afford to keep a house in Atlanta and live in Portland, and he soon realized that his long-sought-after relocation to the Pacific Northwest wasn't going to happen and he had to turn down the offer to move to Portland, another victim, he felt, of the Bush Administration.

To say he was disappointed was an understatement, but he chose to not play the victim and consider himself to be "trapped" in Atlanta, but instead to make the best of his life there and appreciate what he had, not pine for what he didn't.

Vancouver's Black Mountain released In the Future that year, their follow-up to 2005's self-titled debut, and it was one his favorite records of that year.

But that's not all that he listened to in 2008 - it was a transitional year for him musically.  Earlier in the decade, he tried to act his age and listen to so-called "adult contemporary," even going to a Norah Jones concert and buying Jill Scott and Anita Baker CDs, but it didn't really work for him.  It was not what he liked or what he wanted to listen to.  

He was still downloading and listening to a lot of electronic music from the 90s and early 2000s, particularly The Orb and Pete Namlook, but he was aware there was a lot of new music being released in 2008.  He felt like there was something great out there but he just hadn't found it yet, or maybe it hadn't yet been recorded, but in either event he knew that something big was on the verge of breaking.

Doing research for this post (yes, I do research these things), I came across some CDs that he burned that year, including a two-disk set titled Best of 2008.  Most of the songs are hook-filled pop-rock and shoegaze, and music downloaded from Sirius XMU playlists, but while it all still sounds vaguely familiar to me today, I honestly don't recognize the names of three quarters of the bands.  But there was some Radiohead in there from 2007's In Rainbows, a little Feist, Scars on Broadway, and various, assorted late 2000s alt-rock bands.

Here are the three songs from those disks that resonate the most with me now, that most make me recall the year 2008:

1.  Silversun Pickups' Lazy Eye, which actually came out in 2006, but which he only discovered in 2008:

2.  There were a lot of songs on the disks by The Ting Tings, but this is the one that stands out:

3.  The wit and energy of the Wales' Los Campesinos! made a big impression on him that year as well.

Another transitional year, and even though he ultimately wound up not moving to Portland, he was changed by his experience there and was not going to be the same again.  Yet another new incarnation, and this time without all that boring being dead in between.

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.