Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH3t3ua68Qg

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them."  — Brian Eno

This is a song in which something terrible has happened.

Saturday Come Slow — Massive Attack

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnE8dxbonDQ

Massive Attack has this wonderful control over their tone and timbre — they are a band that could make me believe in magic, I think. It's hyperbole, but it's all I've got to describe the sound, immersive and full of quiet, subtle power, bass and strings and swells and releases. The lyrics are a mystery, unpredictable and full, warm and cool and breathless, about things bigger and more important that human love and hate, and yet inextricably tied to them. I love it so much, but I don't know what it's about. The lyrics are poetry, to be felt and heard, not understood.

Skinny Love — Bon Iver

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssdgFoHLwnk

I don't care about the lore around this album. Well, obviously I must, I'm talking about it. Legend has it that Bon Iver, following a breakup (what a perfect origin story for a teenage indie idol) sequestered himself in a cabin in the woods in upstate somewhere, chopping wood and hunting for food and recording a slow, delicate album of emotional betrayal. Isn't that perfect wish-fulfillment? Isn't that just masturbatory? Except that it's true — Justin Vernon, sick with mono recorded For Emma, Forever Ago in a cabin in Medford, Wisconsin.

Which makes it worse.

I love this song on a musical level — it's well-recorded and well-sung and the lyrics are fine and expressive and hardly whiny — the instrumentation is powerful and shiny, drab as it needs to be; he does a whole lot, and he's the only one on the record, multitracked into oblivion. It is great music.

But I don't like to listen to it. Where I am in my life, I need to use prescriptive music, not descriptive music. I've written about it twice, here and here. Perhaps I should make it clearer.

Descriptive music is music to listen to that shows how you feel. If you're happy, listen to happy music. If you're sad, dig your teeth in and listen to sad music. It feels great to be mad as hell and listen to punk music, or to feel confused and listen to strange muddled pop, or to be sleepy and listen to quiet, slow music. And, for the most part, this is fine.

Except that, when I'm sad or angry, I don't want to feel that way for very long. It's not a great feeling, and I don't want to keep it. So there's Prescriptive music, music designed to transition you from one state to another. Music that is a vector, pointing firm towards one headspace. And this song isn't that.

Which is no fault of its own. But it's why I stopped listening.

Lovecraft in Brooklyn — The Mountain Goats

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrHgZRGLgo0

The second Mountain Goats I ever heard, and the first I ever heard knowingly. A school play used Your Belgian Things in a scene, and I remember it vividly, but it doesn't count. This song was a song I heard of choice, knowingly and in full control; and yet the song takes so much of that away. This is a song I like and understand and relate to, despite its inherent refusal to be understood and related to.

In short, it is a man in Brooklyn for whom Lovecraftian Horror is at first a metaphor for, and then a real description of, his personal anxieties. It plays a bait-and-switch; what is first analogy becomes very real; the music goes buck wild, flailing and screaming and whining as the ocean rises over his head, crossing galaxies to tie the incoming alien invasion of winged monster-demons to the man's own fear at walking on the street, or having people over for dinner, or ordering coffee. And, as such, of course I'd love it.

Kate — Ben Folds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7BUG8LOd8A

I've written before about Ben Folds; once overwhelmingly positively, and once less so. This song, Kate, is less tainted for me, so to speak. It's not as emotionally immature. If we move past the idea that it's a 31-year-old man (well, at the time) singing about having a crush, it spoke directly to me when I listened to it in 2009, nearly twelve years later. Scary to think it's been four years.

I could talk musically about this — it has some funny tricks with counterpoint and meter; a rhythm section with cowbell I really like; fuzzy guitar and sharp high piano; call-and-response; harmonies and dynamics, clever composition and clever arrangement. But I'm afraid on re-listen it doesn't hold up for me — the lyrics seem shallow, in comparison. Perhaps it's because everything I've listened to after (with the exception of Maroon 5, maybe) has been more lyrically complex (look at any of the other songs on this site). But I think Ben Folds knows about this weakness.

One of my favorite albums of all time, without exception, is his fake leak to Way to Normal. The story goes, he decided on a whim to record a fake version of the album with the same track names but different, terrible music and lyrics, and release it for free as a leak of the real thing on torrent sites. His band got together and recorded the album in a few hours — the lyrics are dumb and repetitive and sung with the voice and intentions of a middle-schooler; the music is simple and poppy and dumb. But somehow it all comes together to be satisfying in the way that only pop can be — he screams and simpers and the piano is dumber and poppier than ever, but it's hilarious and poignant and a good reminder of what it's like to be in middle school, where that sort of feeling seemed like all there was.

Wayne Shorter Quartet: Footprints

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCyGBNKlrPI

 

Don't you feel so gifted to be able to watch what is clearly a moment of revelation for these people?

Don't you feel so gifted to live in a world where there are people who can do this five nights a week, two sets each night, for their entire lives?

After Hours — A Tribe Called Quest

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG8OyVN0wQA

A Tribe Called Quest is one of those hip-hop groups from the late 80s and 90s that embodies the most false nostalgia for me. It's such an overwhelmingly positive, cheerful tone; lyrically positive, musically tenacious, complex and simple and truly great songwriting. I wasn't alive in the 80s and 90s, but if I were, this is what I would've listened to, I'd like to think. Moreover, it samples, heavily: but the samples aren't immediately recognizable. The modern trend in sampling is to use the background for an entire song and to perhaps use another song for the chorus; Quest uses bits and pieces of other songs, chopped up and put together and truly composing with the samples, not just laying them under the verses. They weren't the first, but they emulate a tone I really like — the low-key, simple, relaxed smooth-jazz tones, but with the churning, pounding rhythms that hip-hop needs.

Corsair — Boards of Canada

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=CZHS52l-4Nw

This song unnerves me. I’m always amazed at how much emotion Boards of Canada can bring from lyric-devoid synth-scapes like this, but I’m doubly surprised at how I can get an entirely different sensation from this song than I do from, say, (Kid for Today). I think it comes down to less apparent aspects of the music – the dynamics, the volume, the tone. There’s a constant swell-and-shrink to this track, coming off a smooth BoC-signature synthesizer, but something about the “peak” feels constricting, claustrophobic. Like a sunny day that’s just a little too bright, or a smile that’s just a little too wide – pleasing at first, but you shortly realize that something’s not right.

Redford (For Yia-Yia & Pappou) — Sufjan Stevens

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=0-SKD2D6cBA

Coming in at a whopping two minutes, having only two distinct instruments and repeating itself without much variation, this is an exceedingly simple song. And yet, there’s the distinct feeling of a heartstring being tugged whenever I listen to it. Why? It’s hardly even a sketch of a song – almost a sketch of a sketch. So many of Sufjan’s songs are stories, fleshed out in varying degrees of detail, and I think of this song as the most fundamental level of that spectrum – a sentiment. One word comes to my mind with this song: plaintive. The title adds details that one can build off of in their own minds.

What happened in Redford? Who are Yia-Yia and Pappou? Nobody can certainly say what this song is about, perhaps not even Stevens. But with what little we’re given – the chords, the pace, the chorus of aaahhs – we can construct our own stories.

The Streets of Whiterun — The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim OST

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo3VAltxlr8

I don't know a thing about the game this song is from. I don't know the world or the characters or the plot; I don't know the history or the scope of the game, whether it's meant to be epic or dramatic or tongue-in-cheek. I don't know if this music is in-game or out-of-game; whether it's dramatic to match the plot or the location; whether it's regional music which changes as you move about, or whether it's a constant theme. All I know is that it's powerful music, evocative even without specifics, painting a landscape and a time and a place, like an old movie or a new movie made to look old; worn, with history, family, wars; epic but personal, deep and moving and spiritual and intimate, and full of tricks. How can a song evoke all this with just musical structure? How much of it is based on our society's conventionalities? Are minor chords always sad? Do the deep strings remind me of nature, but others of high society?

Yankee Bayonet — The Decemberists

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03eo0asomyM

I was lucky — I heard this album in the nor'east, in Massachusetts, on vacation, by the seaside and surrounded by the old America — museums, vintage downs, thrift shops, history in action and the smell of the salt. And the album became vintage, 1700s. It helps that it has a mood and a place and a theme, but it was more than that — it's about roots. Knowing who you are and what you're from — it stretches the boundaries of empathy. We keep to ourselves. It's hard to think of our ancestors as people with struggles — overarching ones like marriage and death, and tiny ones like market squabbles and leaky faucets. This could have been a pop song for one of them — if I were a DAR, or a WASP, not a Jew.

39 Thieves (feat. El-P) — Aesop Rock

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4i2qFzbUfF4

 

One of dozens of songs inextricably tied to a place, for better or worse. In high school, I made a commute every few weeks from Baltimore to Chester County, PA to visit a girlfriend – this involved a drive to the bus station, a bus ride to Philadelphia and another bus or train to her vicinity, cutting straight through the heart of southeast PA. I didn’t adore it, but the journey and the music I listened to clung together in my mind. The sounds of this song, this entire album, imbued my surroundings, and vice versa. The sleazy brass, the rhythmic basslines, Aesop’s loop-de-loop flow dictating stories of a festering urban underground – it felt like the perfect soundtrack to the dingy SEPTA train, graffiti-coated concrete sprawls and droves of youths going about their Friday night revelry. Put together, I always had this peculiar sense that I was on the set of a shitty crime B-movie.

Now, do I really know southeast PA, in any genuine sense? Certainly not – I only rode through as an observer at best. But the glue has set; every time I hear this song I feel like I’m on the train to Paoli again, and it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

June Evenings — Air France

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqkH9iDxqaI

Winters, where work is concentrated, have years of their own — winters exist distinctly, settling into that years' burrow. You hovel up for the winter, enclose yourself with friends and family. But all summers are the same.

This is a summer in 2009, connecting genres back and forward in time — modern music that sounds like soul, funk, electronica — timeless, echoing instruments, my soundtrack for many hours of fuddling with programs and machines and tools, of riding the subway and watching things, of trying to deal with sudden bursts of teenage drama. I tie a song to stability (although I know that's not what it's about), and then it holds me down during instability. If I put in the time; if I am true to it, it is true to me.

Ada — The National

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aV0Ka-SSEU

A song about cutting it too close — the phase 'on the edge' can't capture the dread, only the excitement. Juggling things, trying to keep seven, eight balls in the air, knowing one'll drop. Use paper and markers and computers and set out your life — become fast and diligent and efficient, know and trust the people in your life, stave off loneliness. Things catch up to you if you don't do them right the first time. Hold yourself together, hold yourself together, hold yourself together, or things will all fall apart.

To Build A Home — The Cinematic Orchestra

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB0ordd2nOI

I didn't need to hear this song. I wasn't ready, where I was, to hear it. Not the time or the place or the person — to or from. But I did, and it stuck like a burr. First innocuous, then diligent, then permanent, a seed, growing roots in me, shaping my tastes and my abilities and my desires — I played this song on the piano, it was memetic, a virus. And I shared it. So it accomplished what it wanted and left me an empty husk — metaphorically, as a virus. But it took its toll — I don't like the artist's other work, and I don't like the room I first heard the song in. I was never comfortable there again.

Maybe it's not even the song. The song is just a timestamp, like a smell or a sight, to cement in how I felt one summer. The chords don't matter at all. But that's how it is.

Let The Music Play — Barry White

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2zBvX89hV0

Music is feelings and dynamics, and feelings have power, have volume, have emphasis. Some feelings are stronger than others; this is a sense of contentment and happiness that is so, so, incredibly strong, it can knock you down — not confidence, but assurance. It's t

The Wilhelm Scream — James Blake

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isIABK-0ohQ

James Blake is a mountain, an island, simple and natural and isolated, untraceable in influences and uninterpreted in meaning; pure and electronic and subtle, evocative - but what of? - and an absolutely impossible musician to relate to. If you like him, too bad, I don't know who else sounds like him. He's blue-eyed soul, he's ambient techno, he's neoclassical, he's dramatic and flamboyant and very quiet, an indie darling and a quiet, reclusive mixer of sound, like Imogen Heap. And this song, the first of his that ever came to fruition and popularity, an unlikely single with a slow, dark, horrid build, like Ben Frost, a build to nothing at all. Hold on.

Saturday Sun — Nick Drake

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXLWH2IAEN0

This, another song tied irrevocably to a summer and a place and a mood; I played this song on a grand piano in the empty main lounge of a hall in upstate New York; I imagined the campus in the 1960s; the vibraphones fit right in. The summer sunlight streaming in wide through the windows, and it had such mood, the perfect bildungsroman. It transcended era, it transcended angst or depression; I didn't care about Nick Drake's history. I cared about my own, and the song was a blank canvas for me to map out my life thus far on; to figure out who I was, what I wanted, where I was going.

This was the first song I ever recorded; on a friend's iPhone, with a good microphone. Sent online, bounced off an email server and played in secret, very late at night, for a confidential opinion.

Jesus Christ Was An Only Child — Modest Mouse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQLgDbs-8AI

I've written before about Modest Mouse's dry, contemporary tone; mixing bitter redneck sentiments with highbrow content and literary criticism. Perhaps there is no line between high and low art; there is only art, and those with influences, be they one or the other. For any one crowd, the other parts of the song scream — this is not for me — and this is the desired effect, for all parties to feel like an outsider, observant and attentive, unable to immerse yourself in music for which there is no perfect audience. There is a violin solo in a song about Jesus Christ; scratching and whining in the background, lyrics about internet cash. It's phenomenal.

When You're Smiling — Louis Armstrong

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOH_mioL3TU

This song conjures around it a soundtrack, complete and self-sufficient, contained and immersive; New York in the 30s, driving across bridges towards the skyline, black-and-white, maybe a Woody Allen movie. Happy and happy and happy, the day after it rains, driving through and through, onwards to Coney Island, a distraction, a destination, and an era to sink into like a big old couch, still as good as the day it was new. There's no urgency at all in this song — it is a treasure, played by people with nothing to prove; deliberate and unambitious and quietly, distinctively brilliant.

Bodysnatchers — Radiohead

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVDSdDoD4Sg

Stepping outside of the lore and myth around Radiohead, this is a damn good rock song, loud and fast and sharp and in motion, delicate and precise and industrial, with anger and love and confusion at its core, twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom. I read — and I don't care if it's true, but I feel like it might be — that they recorded this one in an old abandoned house they found; lugged in the equipment, got the echo just the way they wanted. It doesn't matter if I can hear what they heard, because I can hear them play the way they wanted to play based on what they heard, if that makes sense. I don't know what the song means or what it does, but I know how it feels, and I could dance to it.

Remind Me — Royksopp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gy_zq_YuQQ

In praise of air travel and public transportation: of one-hit wonders and songs I'll never hear twice, played on the radio in a train station or an airport, remembering only a vague snippet, frantic googling, excited to see you've truly found it; in praise of listening to the rest of the song and readjusting your expectations to its reality; in praise of music from other parts of the world and other other sensibilities. This is trip-hop, European, chill-out music, electronic and humanized, a driving beat and a jaunty melody, but with intonations and subtleties all its own, defying analysis or description, only enjoyment.

Time — Ben Folds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmE4r7i-rLY

I don't know how I feel about Ben Folds. At a time, I loved him — thought his music was perfection, produced and measured and talented (it still is) — thought his lyrics were heart-wrenchingly honest, confessional, true and observant and relevant (they still are) — thought his content was brilliant and prescriptive, the way life really was, helpful to listen to (it isn't). I've changed my mind, I think. Talent nonwithstanding, his meditations on relationships (especially this song) are unhealthy, condescending, counterproductive, and just generally shitty. There's a heavy undercurrent of preachy, holier-than-thou in his work, and it's hard to notice when you're a preachy, holier-than-thou middle-schooler. I still love it, and it's still great, but it's no longer prescriptive — now it's descriptive, music I listen to when I'm feeling blue or bitter or mad. Not music to be in love to.

Einstein On The Beach — Counting Crows

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsW1rdT-K2w

One more sun comes sliding down the sky

One more shadow leans against a wall

This is a song out of nowhere — not off a best-selling album by a best-selling band, but a rarities mix — it made it to the charts, to the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks number-one single position. It's not related to the opera of the same name. It's not overtly about anything, it's not eminently decipherable. The song was an outtake from August and Everything After. It never should have made it big.

I knew, at first listen, it was golden. I think it's about Albert Einstein (of course) and his uncertainty for his contributions to the a-bomb, for his own personal triumphs and failures. I think it's a careful meditation on the psyche of a man the band hardly knew — so, a fictionalized version, but one that is just as meaningful. The lyrics are clear — he has that capacity to do great or terrible things, and it's ripping him apart — he'll get help, but he'll never be together again.

Iris — Goo Goo Dolls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdYWuo9OFAw

This song has so much meaning for my crowd, part of the Canon, imbued with summers of lust and hormones, and years more of nostalgia. Could the Dolls themselves have known that their whiny pop song would be a veritable anthem for its unintended audience? I remember a particular dance, the last year, torn between choices — a question of girls in middle school, but moreover torn between homesickness, wanting to go home so badly, and not wanting to go home, not wanting the feeling of homesickness to end. This was a new feeling; not good, not bad, but angsty, distraught, without a root. And there was a girl at home I was thinking of, and there was a girl here at the camp I was thinking of, and I was caught like a mule between, staring up at the rafters of the enormous gymnasium, swaying in the dark, lost in the thought that I could see, through the skylight, the same sky that everyone else did, everywhere in the world — pushing back the notion that it was overtly romantic, ridiculous, thinking it was the same sky she might be looking up at, at the same time.

One Man Wrecking Machine — Guster

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxyw3Ew5LGw

Dad folk, dad rock, full of regrets and symbolism, striving to justify its own existence, careful and measured and inventive, but not music with nothing to lose — this is rock by and for a crowd that isn't free to experiment. And the song reflects that — the song is nostalgia, weird and cute and sad and whatever, this is the way it is. A younger person would look back and say — no, this was wrong, I can fix this, I can do better next time. But I get the sense from these guys that it's just longing — they wouldn't want to change anything. They've become complacent, they've become happy with their lives, warts and all, and while they may like thinking about the past, it's just a pasttime, a hobby, not a fixation, an obsession.

Girl In The War — Josh Ritter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqLssKusGzM

The first music dumps of my youth, flash drives carried in the keys pocket of my jeans from Brooklyn home each month for a year — a friend, older, with a full library that years of experience gives, living in an apartment, working and feeding himself and living free, after college, and this is what he listens to. Is his music prescriptive or descriptive? High schoolers, college kids, you can ask — are you happy with your life? How are you feeling? What's wrong? They have time left to change, to fix, to build. But adults, in steady jobs with steady girlfriends and steady apartments; habits and TV shows and bars, you can't ask them.

So, was his music prescriptive or descriptive? If he listens to silly music, is it because he's silly or because he's afraid he's losing the silly parts of him with age? If he listens to sad music, does he like the balance or does he really feel sad? If he listens to strange vague folk, like this — sad and happy, poetry and Americana, reminiscent of another time and place, not a flat in Brooklyn — is he longing for it, does he miss it, or is it just variety? How should I use my music as a tool, and how does he, a real adult?

Mercy Street — Peter Gabriel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoVVxom8GpY

Here, a tied experience: working late in the ACES library near Allen, doing CS or something, not particularly impossible, but a challenge — due at 8:00 am, working overnight to get it done. It's possible, it's doable, I'm getting help online, but it still feels like an island — it's midnight, 1am, 2am, and I'm looking out over the dark fields around the library, the greenhouses full of weird light, and my dorm out there in the distance like a beacon, a reward for when I'm finished with this assignment. You get the sleeplessness, eyes waxy, thinking is fuzzy, words read screamed inside your head, and you get dizzy, thirsty, tired, but you can't sleep yet, there's more to be done, swearing off this, never again. You snap back to attention for a moment, focus in on the problem, work steady for 10, 15 minutes, and then it gets worse, you realize how little time is left, and how much there is; how could you have waited this long?

This was the song playing. It's gorgeous and slow and beautiful and secret.

Harder To Breathe — Maroon 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV8NHsmVMPE

With pop music like this, I have trouble articulating exactly what I see in a song — it's candy. The rhythms and dynamics satisfy a very basic part of my ear, the part that likes explosions and whispers and the part where everything drops out except one thing. These are basic desires of music. At the same time, they're basic, and I feel some shame listening to pop like this. Why? It's clearly good music — it's well-intentioned, talented, clever production, popular, and critically acclaimed. But to admit to liking pop — I'll be writing about N'Sync and The Backstreet Boys in a bit, I'm sure — is a difficult thing. I don't know why — whether it has to do with a musical ego, or what your friends think of your musical tastes — music is inherently confessional, a very personal part of yourself which it takes time to make public.

Good Friday — Why?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXmCIlGstfY

Why? is indie hip-hop, rock and pop and rap and weird, confessional, dirty secrets and wordplay, jazz rhythms and one of the best singers — and worst singers — I've ever heard, evocative and specific and tuned in to just the right weird, dark frequency, talented beyond measure and yet almost impossibly rough around the edges. This music is produced and careful, maybe samples, maybe synths — it sounds like Beck and Aesop Rock and Andrew Jackson Jihad — and, like a lot of modern hip-hop, it gets its rocks off on being nasty and different. Like punk, it doesn't care. Like pop, it needs riffs, bells, backing vocals. And it's relaxed and frantic and listenable, different from almost everything else — not easy to listen to, but worth the while, as so much music is.

Idioteque — Obadiah Parker (Radiohead cover)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El3ivyKx2oo

This is a cover that comes along to change everything about a song — already a stretch from the usual repertoire, Radiohead's Idioteque is techno, synth-poppy, weird and paranoid and seemingly as unmelodic as a song can get, at least at first. But Obadiah Parker's band here takes the frantic rhythms and absolutely brings them to life, turning whatever Radiohead is into indie pop, orchestral and brilliant and choppy — and, above all, melodic. Despite the normal chord sequences, the normal meter, the standard drumming and piano — it comes together in a syncopated way, like birdsong, repetitive and predictable but always new, just one or two beats ahead of where you think it should be.

Down By The Water — The Decemberists

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR9DjdMrpHg

A departure, unlike anything that came before; this is rustic, more folk, more natural; more produced, yet more realistic. Just as a low-budget home-movie film will seem vintage, personal, and uncomplex, yet a professionally-shot film with color-correction, soundtrack, and makeup can seem more like real life; this album is not vintage, not folk, not Americana; yet, it exudes those things. It wants me to think of it as a classic (I do!) and it wants me to know it was there first (it wasn't!).

This song is a folk shanty, set in the 1800s (back when they had accordions and, I guess, jangly electric guitars); a riveting tale of a port town with riotous youth; drugs, sex, and rock'n'roll of the literary schools of the Nor'east; it's anachronistic, but charming and perfect.

Donovan's Colours — Van Dyke Parks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hzCw0_E_nOc

I'll be the first to admit that my music tastes are skewed top-heavily towards the last twenty years - my parents were never lifelong devotees of any particular bands, and we haven't had a record player as long as I've been alive. I ended up mostly self-educating myself with contemporary groups, with only a passing familiarity of anything before 1990. So it's usually tough for me to seriously relate to music before my time - I sink in the quicksand of "how can I relate to this when I wasn't even alive?", turning over old songs in my head like antiques that just didn't age very well. But this song is one of the first I've heard in a long time that really captivated for me. It's whimsical without it being funny; a little unorthodox-sounding, but not in a dismissible way. It's the soundtrack to a spring fair or a movie montage or a jaunt through idyllic realms, and it's also fascinating in itself: it pinballs between all kinds of moods, it weaves through its melodies without retreading on itself. It's a song that reminds me of my own short-sightedness in this context, something way out of left field that's not only charming but truly evocative too.

There Is A Mountain — Donovan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWkGs6MxATc

This song is not about sex, it's about Zen philosophy, but I understand the confusion. This song is a koan: a poem or story designed to elicit an instinctual solution to a problem, rather than a rational one. It is not easy to understand, and it is not designed to be understood. The song is a hippie song, about nature and change and the world outside your house.

I listened to this on the midnight road trip up to Chicago this winter: it was grooving and it carried on, past the red and orange streetlights at 4am in Eastern Illinois, out in nowhere, and the music filled the entire sky.

Take Off Your Cool — OutKast feat. Norah Jones

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUQHFqO6HvY

This is a very brave song, a jazz song on a big hip-hop album; a song about one thing and one thing only; a song about being brave and letting down your guard; a bold stylistic and lyrical choice, to bring a brilliant vocalist, but a female jazz vocalist, onto a testosterone-heavy hip-hop album, and it pays off: it's easily the most memorable song on the album, short and sweet and to the point and even a little romantic, musically proficient and just generally incredible. It has this sense of timelessness. Hiding behind a persona, as an actor, a musician, even just a person — this is common, it's always been common, it'll always be common. And begging someone to let that down and show their true self for even a moment, to stop pretending to be cool, that's touching. Hip-hop and especially OutKast-style hip-hop, about being sexy and rich and talented, it so built up on itself, a balancing act that says this guy is great because he's rich because he's talented because he doesn't try because he's great, this is promotional. There are no people like Kanye West. It's braggadocio. But this is not a song that pretends to be honest. This is a song that is honest.

A Thing For Me — Metronomy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYB2Mqs24ss

Let it never be said I don't post enough British eurotrash electrosynthpop. With the quirky bassline and the falsetto and the drumline chorus and the low baritone verses and the delightfully inventive video, it's just all too much. I can't figure out the influences; I have no idea who these guys listened to as kids, or the history of the part of England they're from, or whether the song or band has any cares beyond the stark relationship drama of the song. And maybe that's for the best — not all music is deep and thorough. This is a party song, danceable and maybe even listenable — enough new sounds to be interesting but not enough to be shocking. It's a dance around the edges of what's traditional and what's unheard of, and it does it well.

Masterswarm — Andrew Bird

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgKokFIn3_U

This was the first album I ever bought, I think. It was 2009, and I was at the Strand bookstore downtown. It was my birthday, and I had a bit of money to spend on things I liked — books, music, anything. And I was discovering agency — rather than getting music other people liked and seeing if I liked it, I got to decide. I saw this album on the shelf: I'd heard of Andrew Bird very tangentially, and I really liked the album art. The title songs looked interesting and — this was all it took. It was summer in New York, but I was realizing there were totally immersive environments elsewhere in the world. I bought a Borges collection that day, too — I would read it and pretend I was in Buenos Aires, with all its metaphysics. And this album, this remained (remains!) unintelligible.

I don't have a clue what it's about. There's imagery of parasites, homunculi, life cycles, hive minds; it's comprehensive and complete and impenetrable.

Home — Great Northern

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTNf0nkSXdM

Another song off iTunes, purchased when I was in 7th grade. I liked the guitar and rhythms; the smooth voice like none I'd ever heard; I liked the switching off between male and female voices; I liked that it was busy and complex and somehow relaxing; it sounded like the immersive sounds I heard in movies. I would ride the bus to camp in the summers and listen to — oh, god, my iPod shuffle, the one like a stick of gum — and find songs that fit whatever we were passing, trying to link up the inside and outside worlds, to enforce order. And this song was that — it was happy, it sounded happy, it was about happy things, yet the tempo and instrumentation, the minor chords: it has malaise, a sort of beat-down sadness to it. And I loved this song.

Mr. Hurricane — Beast

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eHaps3Ykqk

In the very beginning, I discovered new music through iTunes — there would be free singles each week, one famous, ten or twelve not-so-much. I was young (8th grade or so) and I picked the songs which I liked the most. This, I judged from the 30-second clips they played; a song had to have lyrics I wanted to know more about, a sound I was interested in, and a name I liked. I didn't know you could look up full songs on YouTube (did YouTube even exist then?) so if I wanted a song, that was the one and only way to get it — and I did agonize over the free downloads, wanting to be discerning even then. This was one that stuck with me — my first taste of trip-hop, music that was modern, neither jazz nor rock nor classical. There were banging drums, a chorus, angry sounds and smooth sounds and a syncopation I loved. That was all it took for me to like a song then — I didn't know the context, I didn't know whether my friends knew or liked it. I didn't even care what it was about.

Nuthinduan Waltz — Andrew Bird

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n01Vwr1Wj7Y

Beware music analysis; I knew so much about Andrew Bird. I knew he was 23 when the album came out; it was real, traditional folk, before any of Andrew Bird's later, more experimental work; I knew it was self-released; I knew the genre and the influences and the weird imagery of the cover art. And I showed it to people; it was (is) a gorgeous song, deliberate and musically satisfying.

I showed it to a friend; she saw the song title and began to laugh; I'd missed the pun entirely, assumed nuthinduan was a region, a place, a genre. It wasn't. Nothin' Doin'. I didn't have a clue.

Take Off The Blues — The Foreign Exchange

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a6OueWQ0O4

Ah, R+B. My guilty pleasure. I have no idea where I got this song (it doesn't show up in any of my playlists), but it stumbled into my Genius playlists one day. It fits perfectly; it's the modern successor to Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson, Sam Cooke. Or, iTunes seems to think so.

I know exactly what I see in R+B — it's catchy, jazzy, soulful and meaningful; about feelings or sex, always. It's talented and danceable and I do love the timbres of it — but I'm more interested in why that timbre sounds so good. Is it because it's so different from the indie rock I'm used to?

Guilty Cocker Spaniels — Modest Mouse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igXIB2ArH8c

I was used to the tone and structure of a typical song at this point. Modest Mouse were verbose, redneck, literary and uncultured; clever and professional and yet so rusty and loose. But I was adjusted at this point, so I got to listen to these songs with open ears, listening for songwriting, dynamics; how they'd perform them, how I'd cover them; what they meant and what they did and if they matched; what was a choice and what was interpretation; how they wanted me to see it and how I really did. This song is clever; it has wordplay and nice swells and swoops of phrase; it has Isaac Brock's unusual exaggerated vocals; it's more melodic and yet somehow more full, more wall-of-sound than most; further from trucker rock and more into indie pop, but never twee. I like it a lot, and it was one of those new songs. The ones you listen to and you must share.

Little Bribes — Death Cab for Cutie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uNZuKCSDtw

This affection for music comes and goes in waves. I listen to new music all in rushes; I discover a band and dwell on them for months, and then I reject them and move on. The same for this blog — it's never been reviews, but it's moved away from analysis and journalism into real journaling, a diary of my experiences, a soundtrack; the songs are secondary to my stories.

This was the beginning of a new wave. In middle school, I got myself a new album each of Decemberists, Death Cab, Modest Mouse, Counting Crows — I actively decided to sit down and listen to them. A conscious discovery effort. It was new and exciting and I felt full; each new song had a tone I was used to, from the band; it was educated listening, music appreciation rather than intake. This song marks that. I was in Borders, 9th grade, a reunion; I began to realize that I recognized the CDs on the shelves; these weren't new things any more.

Coney Island — Van Morrison

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPfybDTJ-Bo

And all the time going to Coney Island, I'm thinking,
Wouldn't it be great if it was like this all the time?

Summer is coming and I'm growing up by the seat of my pants — in a few weeks I'll have a paying job, an apartment on campus, a roommate; I'll have to pay bills and buy groceries, ration money and figure out what to do with my free time. It's not hard, everybody does it. Still, it feels real and important and exciting, moving house and figuring things out.

Plus, the feelings of summer — peace and sun and warmth, intrinsic natural human responses — and plenty of time for my work, my research, my hobbies. This is what I want it to feel like.

Senseless Sentences — Second Person

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac1zKX3Z2nM

I don't like most of the rest of Chromatography, but I do like this.

I finally found a word for this sort of music — I may have described it as cohesive before, but I think a better phrase for it is exists in a vacuum. This music exists in a vacuum. If I don't know the context; if the production is quiet except the essential elements; if the lyrics present a coherent and complete worldview, the music can be said to exist in a vacuum. You can escape into it; it has room for you and all your baggage. It threatens to infringe upon the real world; it can be addictive. This is dangerous music, a complete story with no room for interpretation. It bites down and won't let go.

They Stood Up For Love — Live

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK463fcJebI

I've never heard the end of this song. I got it from the library back in middle school, I ripped the CD, there was dust on it, the song skips and cuts out at 3:53, abrupt and like a record, cutting right to the next song in iTunes. I never bothered to fix it.

Looking back now at what I listened to in middle school, it's super embarrassing. It's a new-age neo-rock band with heavily spiritual lyrics, overproduced and underwritten, vague and sentimental and catchy as all hell — I loved that organ riff, the clean drums, the dramatic vocals — all the things I like about Scissor Sisters, actually — but didn't notice the overt undertones (overtones?). Now it's just weird and uncomfortable to listen to, but I still do love it — if only for its context, the CD rack at the Morningside Heights library back when I was 10 or 11, going to the library every Sunday morning for years, without fail.