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.

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.