Mary Chapin Carpenter : Grow Old with Me

Grow old with me
The best is yet to be

"Grow Old with Me" is a tune penned by John Lennon.  He never really made an official recording of it, but it showed up on his posthumous 1984 album, Milk and Honey.  John was never really about the love songs.  Not like Paul.  Or even George.  He was a cynical bastard with shitty parents.  At five, they forced him to choose between them, and he ended up with his mom, who a year later gave him to her sister.  Most of his songs betray those never-healing wounds.  They're full of the anger and condescension of a hurt little boy who suddenly finds himself with a megaphone and a world stage to shout from.  But then, something weird happened.  He grew up.  Maybe it was just his getting older, maybe it was his deep, loving relationship with Yoko Ono, but half his songs after the Beatles broke up are simple  paeans to love.  "Jealous Guy", "Beautiful Boy", "(Just Like) Starting Over", "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)".  Sure there's still some cynicism, but it's tempered through the lens of peace and love, less angry than bemused and bewildered at the idiocy of a world's populace that is so eager to destroy itself.

"Grow Old with Me" as recorded by John is a horribly produced song.  He clearly recorded it on an old Radio Shack tape recorder that was completely in another room under a pillow or something, because it sounds awful.  It's dressed up with the worst kind of schlocky strings and orchestra you can imagine, and is just by all accounts horrible.  Had I heard that song alone, I would have skipped past it after the first few seconds.

But props to Mary Chapin Carpenter, another of those "country" artists who are about as country as Michael Bolton.  She digs it out, strips it down, shines it up, and offers a beautiful little diamond in the rough.  With her simple (though slightly sappy) orchestration, she allows the song itself, the lyrics and melody, to shine through.  And shine it does.

This one is dedicated to my wife of 14 years.  God bless our love.

"Grow Old with Me" is from Mary Chapin Carpenter's 1989 release, Party Doll and Other Favorites.  The original can be found on John Lennon's posthumous Milk and Honey.

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Ben Folds Five : Mess

Back in 2000, I had been married for a few years, had four kids, was working for a stupid-ass contractor at an insurance company, and I just couldn't get it. The stress was high, my job sucked, my marriage was rocky and I was going through a bit of an early mid-life crisis. Worse, from the outside, it looked like everything was going right. It really wasn't that bad. Nobody died, no floods, fires or earthquakes. But it still felt crappy, and that brought extra confusion, guilt and stress. The stress of being stressed and depressed when you really have so much to be happy about.

I'm much better now. I understand my goals, I know who I am and know my direction. My marriage is fantastic, my kids are great, and I'm at a place where I'm truly comfortable with myself. You really can't ask for much more.

But back then, I felt like a bit of a mess.

There aren't many artists who really grab my heart strings. A lot of people expound the lyrical virtues of Springsteen and Dylan, but for me, the guy who grasps the middle-class white boy angst I was growing old with, the guy who ever came the closest to 'speaking to me' through music, was Ben Folds. Some how, he managed to grasp nail the turmoil I was going through at the time. There are a handful of songs of his, both with the "Five" and solo, that just open my heart and let the tears of joy and pain flow out.

I know that's pretty emo or whatever, but that's how it is.  What can you do?

"Mess" is a fantastic song, ostensibly about taking stock and accepting the mistakes you've made. But it's really about the hopelessness and futility of wallowing in your 'mess'. A mess is a point of view, a state of mind. Where you see a mess, I might see an opportunity, something that needs a little work.  But in the song the protagonist is not fixing the mess he's created.  He's not even considering that there might be something to fix.  He's decided somewhere along the way that it's a lost cause, and he's just learned to live with it.  Or so he pretends.  And that's just terrible.

I think the reason this song hit me so hard was that I felt like my mess was hopeless as well, that it was the inevitable result of the decisions I'd made and things that were out of my control.  I felt trapped in the mess I had made, and I used to turn it up and cry and cry on the way home from work.
 
Like I said, emo.  I'm much better now and while it doesn't strike me so close to home any longer, it's still a great song.

The song itself has a quiet urgency, mimicking the inescapable progress of time and fate that the singer is caught up in.  And Ben's calmly plaintive vocals carry just the right amount of despair and resignation, without being sappy or overbearing. You can hear the weariness in his voice especially clearly when it breaks while singing the lone word "again".

I've always thought "Mess" would be a great bluegrass song. They sing that sweet close harmony in the chorus and all that busy piano work could easily be picked up by banjo. And that "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town" shuffle beat could drop into a country two-step. It'd be great. Seriously.  Somebody do that.

You can find "Mess" on Ben Folds Five's 1999 release, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. There's a funny story about Reinhold Messner, but I'll let you read it on Wikipedia rather than retelling it here. The album is great, probably the best of the bunch from those guys, and I love them all.

[You can listen to Ben Folds Five's "Mess" by navigating to the post "Song059" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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Nicolas Collins : Strange Heaven

Nicolas Collins is an electronic music composer who deals primarily with sampled and re-sampled sound and homemade electronics. He experimented for a while with a setup he called "trombone-propelled electronics" where he uses the slide of the trombone as an analog controller for on-the-fly digital sampling. It's pretty cool, really, to a geek like me.

His album Sound without Picture is a selection of spoken word pieces he's collected, each of which has to do with a sense, or the lack thereof: sight, blindness, touch, smell, sound, deafness, taste. These are read over different electronic backdrops that he creates. In one piece he uses a broken CD player playing a string quartet which creates the backdrop for a live trumpeter, all of which creates a backdrop for the reading. On a different track, he has a real string quartet recreate the effect of the broken CD player, along with the trumpet and the reading. Very sweet. So much so that this was almost the track I picked for you.

But instead, I'm going with a different track. For one, the track was, on the surface, very similar to "Mom's" which we debuted a few days ago. (I think the interplay of the broken robotic digital repetition and the live analog is cool enough to warrant a new post, but that will have to be some other day.)

For another, the track I chose uses the aforementioned tricky trombone to manipulate the sound of the spoken parts which is then used as the bed for the actual spoken word. The voice is stretched and warped, digitally processed almost beyond recognition, but there's a ghostly hint of the source that wafts through and really underscores the intangible dreaminess of the pitch black world of the blind and the purposeful daydream of memory, both of which are subjects for the spoken part of the piece.

The composition has plenty of space around the vocals where there is just that ethereal sound and the source material he reads is really touching. On top of which, he has a great speaking voice, solid without being overtly dramatic. It's really a great composition all around.

"Strange Heaven" can be found on Nicolas Collins' 1999 release, Sound Without Picture. It's a fantastic CD. Highly recommended.

And once again, the piece is 13 minutes long, so I downsampled it. I couldn't go to mono though, as stereo is an important part of the piece, so it still ended up being 13mb. Sorry.

[You can listen to Nicolas Collins' "Strange Heaven" by navigating to the post "Song045" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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Blackalicious : Alphabet Aerobics (The Cut Chemist 2½ Minute Workout)

I don't know much about Blackalicious. I first heard this song on one of our Dance Dance Revolution games, believe it or not. There's not much to this song musically. The beats are pretty stripped down, with just drums, a piano stab and some bass, although it does steadily increase in tempo, which is odd for a rap song. But where the song really excels is in its lyrics.

The lyrics are all rhyming couplets, which is pretty standard, I suppose, if you're rapping in 1981. And the content is also pretty standard, just a litany of syllables explaining why Gift of Gab is so much better than all those other wack MC's. But as you're listening to it, you might start to see a pattern. Yes, Tim is spiraling through the alphabet, one letter at a time. Each two-line verse consists primarily of words that begin with the letter of choice. It ends up sounding like a series of tongue-twisters, which I suppose it is, especially since the beat keeps getting faster and faster.

Oh, also, apparently this song was produced by Cut Chemist from Jurassic 5, not Blackalicious' normal DJ, Chief Xcel.

Anyway, it's a fun listen, quite enjoyable. "Alphabet Aerobics" can be found on Blackalicious' 1999 EP A2G.

[#44]

Testament : Riding the Snake

Let's kick the week off with a bang. I first heard this song on the metal channel on Sirius Satellite Radio and it blew me away. It was heavy without being too metally, like early Metallica or Helmet, and they've got Dave Lombardo drumming for them on this album.

Dave is a drumming machine. He started with Slayer and currently performs with Fantômas. His technique is perfect, while still being super-fast and phenomenally heavy. Every beat is perfectly in place, but he still manages to avoid sounding like a machine. Part of conveying "heaviness" in music is using what John Cage once called "grace". It's the ability to play around a note, to add just a little syncopation, to bring life to the music. In this case to drag it a little behind the rhythm, which builds the weight behind the beat. John Bonham was a master at this, which is why he is the best rock drummer to ever walk the earth. Neil Peart, while being a technical master, does not understand grace and does sound like a machine, which is why he is not the best rock drummer (Q.E.D.).

Dave is up there as far as drummers go. He would certainly give John a run for his money, but then Dave never drank himself to death by choking on his own vomit. So John's got him on that one.

Regardless, the entire album is just super-heavy & technically flawless and it rocks like nobody's business. Definitely one of my favorite finds in the past couple of years and it easily ranks in my top 100, although it probably tops the list for ugliest album covers of all time. From 1999, Testament's The Gathering.

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Marden Hill : Slalom

There is a weird subset of songs that are from Christmas albums but that aren't per se about Christmas or even winter. Sometimes they don't even have jingle bells. Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy" is probably the most famous example, inextricably linked to Christmas via A Charlie Brown Christmas for the rest of time.

"Slalom" is from a band called Marden Hill. I couldn't find much out about them, except that they are apparently Él label stalwarts. It sounds like these guys did Shibuya-kei influenced easy listening. As I do research for this essay, I realize, I need to learn way more about these guys and this label.

Regardless, the piece is a bright piece of vocal fluff, along the lines of the Manhattan Transfer, the Swingle Singers or Anita Kerr at her best. The harmonies are sweet and pretty, like a high school crush, and the song does somehow invoke a wintery feel. There are jingle bells in the first few seconds, and an occasional high piano trill to help you imagine falling snow, so it'd probably make a good soundtrack for a romantic evening sleigh ride.

The piece can be found on the Él Records winter compilation, Él Christmas: The World in Winter. You can grab it from Amazon, or directly from the label (scroll down), although I think the "9.95" might be pounds, not dollars.

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