Words that inspire a feeling of impending doom

"Is this ad relevant to you?"

"Art can be a slippery slope"

Pretty much anything involving the word "evoke"

"World music"

"Whether or not"

"Recommended for you"

"Activist"

"An Open Letter to..."

"I'm sorry, but..."

"MFW/MRW"

"Retweet"

"That awkward moment" [oh god, this is a movie]

Music described as "lush" and "sprawling"

"An air of sophistication"

Alright that's probably enough doom for one day.

Sure you do, pal. Suurrre you do.

Man, everybody's so smart on the Internet! It can be pretty daunting to even know what to write about sometimes. You don't have to search that deep and you can find basically any opinion on any topic, and of course a bunch of folks arguing about it all, sounding so sure of themselves.

What if you've never felt quite so sure about yourself? Or anything, for that matter. What do you write about? And where do you write about it? Is anyone interested in hiring a writer who has only questions and not answers? I have a few strong opinions, but not really too much drive to convince people of them, because I'm not entirely sure (ha) that type of stuff matters at all. I get confused by people who seem to spend a solid chunk of their lives working to convince others of their version of the Truth (which may not necessarily be bad. Though, don't a lot of those people seem to be pushing some kind of short-term agenda? It's very small numbers of these folks who appear to care about You.) So, let's say you convince enough people of your agenda, and then let's say you get some money, or time in the spotlight, or whatever the hell it is that you wanted. Then what? I'd guess that feels good for a while. But does it feel good enough? Isn't it way more exciting to want than to have? It feels like history has that pretty much proven solid. So, what do you want next after you got what you wanted?

I think I'd love it, for instance, if people listened to way less digital music and spent more time with what I think is a more fulfilling sound (records and tapes), but I don't have any desire to be the kind of guy who tells you what's best, because I really only know what's best for me, given 30 years of experience living inside this body and mind. I have yet to live inside someone else's body/brain, as far as I know. Even if I did honestly feel like I knew what was best for you, I'd rather you discovered it on your own anyway.

This seems to be turning into an exercise in writing whatever pops into my noggin.

I think what I wanted when I was younger was to tour in a rock band and write novels and stories, and my desires didn't really go much farther than that. So far I've done both of those to varying degrees of success, depending on your perspective. I consider myself truly lucky, so I'm a happy guy (I'm also in a fair amount of debt). When I think about it, I'm utterly overwhelmed by how many folks want to do these things that I love, by how much media gets created on an hourly basis. A lot of it's completely devoid of actual human feelings and just wants to be noticed, a lot of it is truly fantastic, and potentially the cream eventually rises to the top, but I am becoming less sure (here were are again) of that. I love what I'm creating, but it's hard to feel good about adding even more to the big ol' pile of creativity.

I don't enjoy self-promotion, though I still do it from time to time. It's a strange space to be in, wanting simultaneously to be noticed for things I've created and for everyone to just go away and leave me in my imagined writer's cabin (but please oh please come back and purchase my things so I can eat and pay off that debt!). And then there's the anxiety that my negative desire to self-promote could be interpreted by my friends and family as a fervent desire to keep them utterly in the dark about the things I've created. That's so far from the truth it's kind of funny, and somehow I doubt anyone I know believes that about me, but that's the thing about anxiety...it lies to you.

This post is a lot like most of the things I create in that it's purest intention is just to be something for me, and I'd usually tuck it away without posting. But I'm beginning to want to share all these thoughts, and share more of the stuff I've been creating for the last 10 years or so. Maybe in 2014 I'll actually share this novel I've been working on for so long. It could happen! Anyway, in the sharing spirit here's a couple tunes I was a part of that came out in 2013, and I am Quite proud to share them with ya'll.

MoneyMoneyMoney...I'm Bored

Ahh, music & money. I love it when these two things mix and everyone gets all InternetIndignant. There's this latest article about Spotify that folks are talking about, and it's the same ol' stuff about how the artist gets screwed. The artist sure does get completely man-handled, but I'd be very excited for someone to point me to a time in the history of our world where the majority of artists weren't entirely bonked over the head financially. Maybe this time exists; I have not found it.

I'm only 30 years old and I feel like people have been talking about this forever. 'Member this wonderful article Steve Albini wrote in the 90s about how major labels were totally ravaging most of the bands they signed?

Ben "Ziggy" Franklin by Sergio Rodriguez, via MakeYourFranklin.com

Here's the thing: 99 times out of 100, if you are becoming an artist--more specifically a musician because that's what I can speak to--if you are doing this to make decent sums of money you are borderline insane. I am already skeptical of you. I can smell it in what you create and, 99 times of out 100, your stuff is either trite or it's manipulative in all the wrong ways. It's not you. My band-mates and I last night were talking about Jon Brion, and how somebody somewhere asked him what he looks for in an artist he's hoping to work with; his answer was something along the lines of: I look for folks who aren't trying to be artists. [UPDATE, here's the video with his thoughts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnhbHFgagIM; merci, MrJonBraun]

Speaking of Jon Brion, this is a really wonderful AV Club interview with him.

Is it frustrating that in 10 years of playing and recording music I haven't made a dime? Sure. But do I actually care and am I going to use that as a reason to stop doing it? I'm laughing at that. I'm not in this shit to be "noticed", to have people incessantly Googling my name, to be on the covers of magazines that won't exist in 10 years, to be blogged about by who-even-cares-who. Would that be neat? Hell yes, I am a human being after all. But if that's your main reason for doing this stuff, you are setting yourself up for utter failure and a lifetime of bullshit. Also, we can spot you from a million miles away. You may even get what you want, score that sweet hit Thing, and maybe even McDonald's will help promote your music! Maybe that's what you truly want (??)... even if you do, it's just not going to last very long and you still won't make much money off it.

Here's a big, cold spoon of truth from that Jon Brion interview up there:

"For every Radiohead, there's 10,000 supposedly modern rock bands who aren't a tenth that creative, or a tenth that emotional. For every Elliott Smith, there are 10,000 people who think they're sensitive poets. For every 10,000 people who have a drum machine and run things through a filter box, there's an Aphex Twin." 

I'm already an incredibly lucky person in that I've never truly worried about money, not in the way that people quite literally scrapping by are. Thanks to my parents, and their parents before them, I have a great education, and the even more empowering knowledge that, whatever I think I know, I don't actually know shit.

One of the few things I'm fairly certain I know is how icky it makes me feel that phrases like "you have to market yourself" have leaked into modern vernacular, masked as sage wisdom for how any artist ought to go about presenting themselves. Don't just be you, be the You calculated to generate the most page-views! Awesome.

I make songs and write stories because it feels so good to do it. It gives me Life. It makes me think and feel ways about stuff.

All this talk about money & artists just bores the hell out of me. Feel free to have that discussion, but my eyes will glaze over and I'll eventually melt into a wall. If you need me, I'll be in your basement writing a song or a story about that dusty old 1970s Fisher-Price toy castle you've got down there, or something.

Conspiracies abound/Love is everywhere/Germs, too

Well I've been a little sick like everyone around me and it tends to make my brain work a little differently. It's pretty neat, but also a little frightening when you consider how easily something can make the world's palette look a bit warped.

I've also been diving into JFK assassination conspiracy theory vortices, along with reading articles about how the mind is pretty easily capable of creating false memories, so sometimes I start to feel like the little kid they call "Postal Weight" in Infinite Jest who's just wailing in the locker room, "NOTHING'S TRUE" and has to get comforted by Pemulis.

The novel I'm working on has a lot to do with memory, nostalgia, sentimentality...all that good stuff. I think I'm attacking it pretty well, but really who knows. Then I found another author I love who had a character say some really lovely stuff that hit home, and thought I'd share:

"Perhaps history this century...is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated...at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which comes to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroys any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30s, the curious fashions of the '20s, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see."

Dumb Assumptions

Well it took something that moderately pissed me off to remember that I had a blog.

I have a VOICE. This is supposedly empowering but I'm not sure.

What pissed me off was this Pitchfork review of The Dismemberment Plan's new LP Uncanney Valley. I'll just tell you straight up I pretty much love this band, grew up listening to them in DC, so obviously I'm biased but so is everybody so that shouldn't matter too much as long as I'm aware of it. Consider me aware.

That the review pans the album with a 4.5 score doesn't really bother me so much, because I generally think music criticism is a waste of time. There's certainly good critical music writing out there, but there's also a whole glut of it that stinks of people thinking and assuming too much, and also trying so very hard to sound like they know something you don't.

What bothers me is something I keep seeing in a lot of music & writing criticism: Why do lots of folks seem to assume that a writer or a lyricist is always writing from their own point of view? I really don't get this. Writers love playing a role, creating characters, acting out, whatever. Why is it assumed these are all the actual thoughts of the writer him/herself and not the writer acting out a role?

Paul Thompson hated Travis Morrison's lyrics on the new 'Plan album. Fine, fair enough. I happen to like them for all their weirdness, but who really cares. I hate pickles and olives and I bet Thompson doesn't really care. But why is he assuming Morrison is singing about himself the whole time? Here's part of his review:

All over Uncanney Valley, Morrison—once one of indie rock's most incisive, identifiable lyricists—cracks wise, veers off erratically, shoehorns in dated slang or beside-the-point chanting. "Well, look who it is—been a little while since you been up in my 'biz," he sputters as "Waiting" whirrs to a start, coming off like a "cool dad" in a lousy sitcom. "I am not an inhibited man—try to keep it in my pants when I can," he admits on lowlight "White Collar White Trash", before rattling off a far-too-long list of places he's been "doin' it in."

I think his use of the superlative "one of rock's most incisive, identifiable lyricists" is a pretty dumb thing to say (to my calculations there's roughly 400 million incisive indie rock lyricists). It's one of those things you can just say and don't have to defend because it's impossible to prove or refute. But whatever to that, too. (P.S. "whirrs" up there with the two Rs is really British usage and somehow I don't think he's British...sorry, can't help myself).

Anyway, I'm not trying to say that I'm sure Morrison isn't singing about himself. You'd have to ask him and if I know anything about writers, I'm pretty sure he won't tell you. But to just assume he's only singing about himself is lazy and surface level.

That's kind of my biggest problem with these real quick reviews that lots of sites like to post. An album gets listened to a few times, maybe, and then you write about it and try to put it in galactic context with superlatives of "Best New" Whatever. Maybe I'm an old fart but that just seems laughably myopic.

Everybody just calm down. Enjoy stuff, or don't. It doesn't matter. Not everything has to be the absolute best or worst. Shh...Shh...It's all gonna be OK.

Melv learns about the Civil War

"Any minute now it would all begin. All hell would break loose and then no more worrying and fretting and fuming; he'd hit straight up that road with everything he had. Never been afraid of that. Never been afraid to lose it all if necessary. Longstreet knew himself. There was no fear there. The only fear was not of death, was not of the war, was of blind stupid human frailty, of blind proud foolishness that could lose it all. He was thinking very clearly now. Mind seemed to uncloud like washed glass. Everything cool and crystal."

--Michael Shaara, from The Killer Angels, channeling a solitary pre-battle moment with Confederate General James Longstreet, possibly the CSA's most logical brain, and the one nobody wanted to listen to.

So many of those battles were fought pretty much right on the land I grew up on, and it's all just utterly fascinating and overwhelmingly tragic.

Friday songs

TW Walsh, a man who shares my family name and one of my brothers' first names, is currently mastering the debut album of a band I'm singing and drumming in called The Most Americans. Check out this Pedro the Lion song (TW, I believe, did the drumming and probably lots of other stuff for that band, since he's a real life Wizard), and try to picture my then-20-year-old jaw dropping at the line "But I trust T. William Walsh, and I'm not afraid to die."



And here's a great solo tune of TW's from looks like late 2011: