Where Have You Been?

I’ve been busy. With school. With work. With life.

But I’m back. If you were wondering…

…but I doubt you were.

What’s Happening!?

In Which I Discuss The Things I Am Excited About.

The new Cure single.
It’s everything I’ve ever loved about the Cure. I love it; especially Smith’s guitar.
Nifty.
But this makes me wonder two things:
1) exactly how old is Robert Smith nowadays?
2) what does he look like without all that makeup?
On second thought, perhaps it’s best I don’t know.

NarrowfuckingStairs
I don’t care what the hell anyone else says. I love this album something fierce. I think it is one of the greatest albums DCFC has ever put out.
And I love Ben Gibbard.

Flavors Of Entanglement
Oh, Alanis. You’ve got my head over feet, for cereal. Why won’t you be gay?

My Sixth Row Tickets To Death Cab in June
For cereal. When you get reviews like this, how could your fans NOT be excited within an inch of their lives?

Ticketmaster is the devil

I need to be stopped.

I think I need to be restrained from accessing the site because it’s a money suck. Some people gamble. Others get shitfaced until they’re pockets are empty. I wait in an electronic queue, eager like a little child when they’ve just seen their parents come home with large bags a few weeks before Christmas, knowing that it means they’re going to get to snoop around the house till they’ve found their new gifts.

I have managed to refrain myself so far cos I have a bunch of gigs coming up in the next month to satisfy my gig hunger for now. But once they’re all over…it’s hard to tell. I live for that rush, that thrill of a live concert. There is nothing else in the world that I have experienced that is quite like it.

You can grow so close and intimate with an album in the weeks or years after you first buy hear it. It becomes a friend who you can go talk to when you’ve had a bad day at work, or when all your real friends have let you down. It’s that constant, unwaivering presence that will never, ever let you down. Some people prefer dogs or cats or other animals. I prefer music.

But when you see an artist live — one that you really, really love — those same songs that you thought you knew so well become something new and profoundly more affecting than you could have ever thought possible.

Sometimes it’s the way the artist performs them. Sometimes it the camaraderie you share with the people you go with – whether you know them or not. Sometimes it’s just the vibe. You just feel good in the time and place that the show is happening. Sometimes it’s the artist: they’re funnier/smarter/better/hotter/{insert adjective here} than you expected. Sometimes there is no reason. Sometimes it just is.

The thing I love the most is the way the music can fill you. It can start in your ears. It seeps into your veins and pulses through you until you can feel the drums and the guitar and the big motherfuckin’ bass throbbing in every last finger and toe, to the tip of your nose to the backs of your ankles. It fills you. Fills you everywhere.

It is more amazing than I could ever express.

It’s what I live for.

The Scot’s Too Hot

KT Tunstall (w/Paddy Casey) @ Historic State Theater
14 May 2008 @ 7:30 PM

CLIP – “Suddenly I See”

Real World Examples of Felicitious Tempilocity: Sufjan Stevens Edition

Felicitous Tempilocity:

n. 1: being in the right place at the right time for a delightful discovery by complete accident; 2: an incident in which all actions leading up to the event were intentional, but where the event itself was not the intention.

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Today I ventured on to the St. Thomas campus for some poster whoring for a local non-profit event I had volunteered for. It was a largely uneventful adventure and it went exactly the way I had planned…until the last 15 minutes of my trip. As I was sitting at the bus stop outside of the St. Thomas library, I was letting my MP3 player take me on a delightful, chillaxed journey away from the ever growing concern that I would not make it back to my own campus for my 6 o’clock class with the Dean of Scholarly Detattchment.*

I was led through a progression of places and times, from the Southern porch of Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins down the sun-lit post-rain alley of Snow Patrol into the grassy backyard of Jason Mraz’s avocado farm, where I was led up to the familiar tree house of Death Cab For Cutie. As the KT Tunstall afternoon turned into a dark, star-filled Ryan Adams night, I slept through the darkness to finally awake to a beautiful, crystal clear Sufjan Stevens sunrise. As the breeze was tossing my hair about and the sun was shining down on recently rejuvinated lawns, Sufjan’s mild voice began to serenade me about his road trip to Chicago (all things go, all things go).**

The next thing to happen stunned me into silence. I looked up and the very first person I saw was a student who would have ordinarily never even hit my radar. He had the age-old, patented College Student look about him: t-shirt, shorts, near-bursting backpack and Apple ‘phones. But it was his bright emerald green T-Shirt that caught me off guard: in white lettering in the top-center of a white outline of the state of Illinois read the words:

COME ON! FEEL THE ILLINOISE!

It was a golden moment.

I am sure that the young wearer of this shirt thinks me a fool, as I was unable to do anything but stare and gleefully grin at him. By the time my Sufjan-induced stupor had worn off and I had regained my bloody sense and the use of my own vocal chords, he was too far away for me to approach him. Not that I would have said anything to him had I been in full possession of my own facilities. It doesn’t really matter anyway. Sometimes all you need is some beautiful weather and good tunes to make everything seem OK, even when it isn’t. I don’t know if it was my already acheived sense of contentment or a surprising alignment of the planets that caused this to occur; either way it was enough.

Enough.

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*I did make it to class, in case you were wondering. Which you probably weren’t.

**The playlist referred to above is as follows:
STEP BACK, CHILLAX
1. Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins – Handle With Care
2. Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins – The Charging Sky
3. Snow Patrol – How To Be Dead
4. Snow Patrol – You Could Be Happy
5. Jason Mraz – I’m Yours
6. Jason Mraz – Live High
7. Jason Mraz – After An Afternoon
8. Death Cab For Cutie – Title and Registration
9. Death Cab For Cutie – Crooked Teeth
10. Death Cab for Cutie – A Movie Script Ending
11. KT Tunstall – Stoppin’ The Love
12. KT Tunstall – Beauty of Uncertainty
13. Ryan Adams – When The Stars Go Blue
14. Ryan Adams – Wonderwall
15. Ryan Adams – La Cienega Just Smiled
16. Sufjan Stevens – The Dress Looks Nice On You
17. Sufjan Stevens – Chicago
18. Nickel Creek – When You Come Back Down
19. Nickel Creek – The Hand Song
20. Belle and Sebastian – Don’t Leave The Light On, Baby
21. Belle and Sebastian – Waiting For The Moon To Rise

Matchmaker!

THE EQUATION:

Ben Gibbard + Regina Spektor x sweet, sweet love

THE RESULTS:

an epic love affair, as outlined below:

1. a critically-acclaimed collaboration effort, full of soulful lyrics and unique piano.

2. A sold-out-in-two-hours international tour. The two become millionaires, but stay humble.

3. Wedding bells! There is a small ceremony in Seattle, family and friends only. The music is mellow and elegant, and the vows are almost heartbreaking.

4. A love child (who will undoubtedly grow up to be the most innovative and talented muscian we’ve seen in years) is born. They name him John, after Regina’s favorite Beatle.

5. They buy a house in a small suburb of Seattle and settle down. No albums are made; fans are disappointed.

6. Infidelity! In a moment of ill-advised desperation, Ben has a one night stand with Jenny Lewis (of Rilo Kiley fame). Regina finds out and they have an angry sing-off. Regina wins and leaves with John.

7. Two solo albums are released: an album-long love poem to a lost soulmate that walks “the lyrical line between understanding and confusion, beauty and brokenness”, and a emotional, self-empowering, fish-without-a-bicycle with and underlying twinge of sadness beneath the electric piano riffs. Both albums are wildly successful.

8. The studios encourage a reunion tour in light of the wild success. Ben and Regina both begrudgingly agree. The tour sucks, but they reconcile at a Flaming Lips concert. 9 months later, John is a big brother.

9. Regina moves back into with Ben. The kids grow up: John drops out of college to be in a band, becomes a huge success, and goes back to school to teach music in New York City; Sarah goes on to write a book that dominates the New York Times Bestseller list for 3 consecutive years.

10. At the age of 98, Ben Gibbard dies from natural causes. Regina is heartbroken. Eight days later, she follows him into the dark.

I don’t know sh*t about music. True story.

I don’t know shit about music. I was under the impression that my musical knowledge was moderately vast, but in the past month or two I have come to realize that how very wrong I was. It’s an unfamiliar kind of startling. I have been thinking about it a lot and the best way I can describe it is as follows:

It’s like you’ve been looking out through a skylight for years and then one day, out of the blue, someone takes you outside and you suddenly realize how little you know about the sky. It doesn’t make what you already knew about the sky any less true or relevant, but it suddenly occurs to you that what you thought was a lot is really only very little, a mere fraction of the bigger picture.

And I guess that puts you at a crossroads: you can break-up with your skylight, promise to stay friend and go out into the world to study astronomy, or you can go back home to your skylight and pretend like nothing ever happened.

But….where does this leave me?