Add Some Music To Your Day
The little that I am, the little that I am hoping to be, I owe to music. I am where I am today because of music. It has defined my relationships, platonic and otherwise, influenced my career path as well as my education. Middle school onward it became my greatest passion and while other interests took precedence —basketball, film — it always had a spot in the rotation.
Music surrounded me as a kid, my mom listened to the radio and her cassettes and sang along to both. At mass, she would often get compliments on her voice. When it came time to plan her funeral mass, I selected all the songs I remembered that she loved and I chose a reading from Ecclesiastes, the source for the majority of the lyrics in “Turn! Turn! Turn!”
The earliest moment I can recall where I really paid attention to music was in kindergarten. We were living in La Porte, Indiana at the time. My bus driver had the radio tuned to an oldies station based in Chicago. For the life of me, I can’t recall hearing The Beatles or The Beach Boys. What I do recall hearing is Motown, specifically The Supremes, The Temptations and The Four Tops. That was the foundation and epitomizes what I value in song craft.
Country music was another important early influence on my musical tastes. It was the music my mother listened to on the radio. My mother was born and raised in Brooklyn, so I’m not sure how she got interested in country music. It might have stemmed from when she went line dancing in the early 90s. I heard all the fixtures of 90s country: George Strait, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, etc.
The group that really launched me into orbit as a music fan was The Beatles. Despite not recalling hearing any of their music on the bus to kindergarten, I know I had some sense of them, because I asked my mother about them on a family trip to Walt Disney World in April 1995.
She was still driving the white Chevrolet Astro van then. It had a cassette deck and on long haul trips, mom would bring her cassette case. Among her tapes was a Journey greatest hits compilation. I couldn’t read at the time, so I assumed that the scarab beetle on the cover meant that it was a Beatles tape. No idea how I knew about them, Anthology was months away.
I asked my mom about them and she told me that one of them had made music with his wife and was now dead. No mention of the circumstances of his death or his name, I don’t think I knew their names until much later. I imagined him and his wife seated side-by-side at a piano and his death as a peaceful: an old man falling asleep in his bed. Little did I know…
Like many people my age or close, 1 was the album that made me a fan. I got it and All That You Can’t Leave Behind on the same day. I had been watching a lot of VH1 then in an ill-fated attempt to listen to contemporary music and ingratiate myself with my peers. Something about The Beatles lit up my brain and made me respond in a way I never had before. I went from getting a modified flattop at the barber shop to growing my hair into a moptop because of The Beatles. The year I became a fan is the year George Harrison died.
I recall reading an article in The Indianapolis Star about George’s death and one person interviewed was a college professor who taught a class on The Beatles. Five years later I would sit in on that class during a college visit to Indiana University and it ultimately factored into my college choice.
Five years later, I was set on becoming a music journalist. I watched Almost Famous and knew what I wanted to do with my life. IU had a great journalism program, had a course on The Beatles and its school colors featured my favorite hue. It was an easy decision.
My taste in music grew and grew during my time in Bloomington thanks to courses on popular music such as Rock Music in the 70s and 80s and from volunteering my time at the student radio station, where I reviewed CDs and worked as a music librarian. I used those shifts to sift through the massive library of promos CDs, grabbing ones that sounded interesting and looking up the albums on AllMusic.
The radio station is where I met most of my college friends and it was during one shift that I became friends with a guy who ultimately changed my life for the better. I knew he and I would be friends because he played Big Star on his radio show. He was a friend of a friend, a name I’d heard but had never put a face to. Our first meeting was like that of Homer and Gerald Ford, but we bonded over The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and Big Star instead of beer, nachos and football.
The first person I loved I met because of music. I caught her attention in the cafe in our dorm. She was a freshman and I was a senior. My Pet Sounds shirt is what made her notice me. I remember seeing her but assumed she was looking at me because I was looking at her. We became acquainted via Tumblr and naturally, this occurred when I had moved to Brooklyn for grad school. I was there for a musicology program and my thesis was on The Beach Boys.
After grad school, I returned back to Indiana and freelanced as a music journalist at a few publications and even interned at an indie record label. I got to live out my dream of covering music, which ultimately led me to a staff job at a local newspaper. After my mom died, I wasn’t sure if I would ever write again. That wasn’t true and I got my way back into journalism through a position as the managing editor of a weekly newspaper in rural North Dakota.
One of the earliest stories I did was a profile on a piano tuner. A fascinating man who tuned pianos at the Bismarck Civic Center. He tuned the pianos of numerous stars, but the most interesting one was John Lennon’s piano. A doctor’s wife had won it in a contest. I found it poetic that the piano had its way from The Dakota to a Dakota.
From there, I landed in Pasadena, a city originally founded by Hoosiers and the dwelling place of Beach Boys collaborator Van Dyke Parks and Domenic Priore, whose books were key sources for my thesis. That relocation would not have happened without my radio station friend who very kindly hosted me for a week and showed me his version of Los Angeles.
I saw Almost Famous on the big screen for the first time recently and it was the impetus for me to launch this newsletter
What You Leave Out
This section is inspired by an exchange in Untitled, the director’s cut of Almost Famous.
In the film, the song is “What's Happening Brother.” What I love about that exchange is how it captures something very real about being a music fan. It’s those little moments that elevate a song and take it from good to great. Sometimes they’re things you notice right away, others are only revealed through repeat listening.
Burt Bacharach passed away on Wednesday, in honor of his memory, I have chosen him for the first installment of a segment I’ll call What You Leave Out.
“This Guy’s In Love With You” I consider to be one of the most romantic songs of all time, perfect fodder for a mixtape intended to convey feelings you otherwise can’t even begin to articulate. Art fills the void when words fail.
It captures a feeling of wistfulness and yearning through Herb Alpert’s vocals and the backing tracks. The moment that makes this song comes just under two minutes in, when the orchestra recedes and it’s just Herb singing and the piano. After he sings “If not, I’ll just die” there is a moment with no sound and then a trumpet joins in.
It elevates the song because it captures that moment where you wait for a response after divulging your feelings. The state of your world hinges on how they respond. Schrödinger’s paramour.
Movie Recommendation
Beautifully shot, haunting and thought-provoking. See it when you are able.
Hungry Heart
Over the course of my life, I have found that a comparison that sounds asinine on paper can at times reveal much about the subjects in question. While taking a course of Maurice Ravel, I decided to have fun with my final paper by writing about Frank Zappa and Ravel. My initial inspiration was Zappa’s cover of Bolero from The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life.
While digging into it, I learned that there were a lot of similarities to how the two composers approached their work.
Which brings me to this stroke of genius I had: Bruce Sprginsteen’s The River and Nebraska embody the characteristics of two fast food chicken tender franchises.
The River is Zaxby’s both for the blue color scheme and size. The River is a double album and Zaxby’s has an extensive menu.
Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers features red as its primary color and a stripped down approach, both very similar to Nebraska.
Cane’s has a super small menu in comparison, but the one element common to both, the Ties That Bind, some would say, is the sauce. Zaxby’s and Cane’s tastes nearly identical and I suppose that makes Bruce the sauce in this analogy.
Fast Facts
Throughout its existence McDonald’s has had it share of success and misfires. For every Big Mac, there is an Arch Deluxe.
I feel the McDLT falls somewhere in between. As the name suggests, the emphasis for that sandwich is on lettuce and tomato, which is why it came packaged in a two-part container. One half contained the meat and bottom bun while the other half contained the toppings. The hot stayed hot and the cool stayed cool, though I think it was an unforced era to not have the cheese on the hot side.
It was successful as far as sandwiches go, but its death knell was the very thing that set it apart as something of a fast food novelty: its container. The styrofoam was an environmental and therefor PR disaster. It was phased out. Its enduring legacy is that of a Jason Alexander-adjacent curio.