Everything is falling into place for the 2009 W(a)st(e) Coast Tour and also some really exciting SXSW shows and news. All day long me and Ryan just gchat about escaping our dingy lives and driving around in the sunshine doing whatever the fuck we feel like and also playing shows. Sometime in the next few weeks we'll throw the dates and info up here. Would anyone buy a T-Shirt if we made some, or is that a little presumptuous?
I've spent the last two weeks recording the Silk Flowers LP at Rob's loft. It's fucking amazing. How they pulled off a completely-formed, super solid cohesive collection of songs in such a short time as a band is baffling. I've been pushing my producerly stance on them to make it sound more dense and Martin Hannett-esque by triple-delaying the drums and whatnot, but they always keep me in check and reel me back in. Somehow they've made some music that really doesn't sound like much of anything I can reference, and that's such an accomplishment. You will all flip.At the end of one of the nights, Ethan was making a playlist on his iPod for his bike ride home, and jokingly proclaimed how stoked he was to listen to "Bad Scene, Everyone's Fault" from the major label Jawbreaker record. We of course then sang almost the entire song, laughing at how bad it was, but it made me think about that era of indie/major label style bands (and also how the universal consciousness kind of blazed up on my last blog entry when I mentioned 24 Hour Revenge Therapy and felt a collective exhale from all my friends at once...) There was a moment which can never happen again in the same way, and probably only applies to the people who lived it, but the courtship of major label money (when it existed) and upper-level indie bands was a real phenomenon right after Nirvana. I could actually write a book about the entirety of the moment, and My So-Called Life and Sassy magazine and the scene in the mall parking lot camped out for Lollapalooza tickets, but that's maybe for another time. For now I guess I'm just thinking about how Nirvana wasn't the first band to go from an indie to a major label, just one of the most successful. Dinosaur Jr. was on Warner Bros around the same time, and for my money, for some reason, I think I like those records better than their early stuff and listen to the actually shittier "Where You Been" way more than I ever pull out "Bug". The majority of those types of records have this weird conflicted vibe where they're understandably worse than the indie material, but they grew into the lives of people who experienced them at the time. Like me and Ethan mocked that Jawbreaker song, but part of me loved that record as much as I did any Jawbreaker. In the same way I think Sonic Youth's first few major label records are at least as good as "Daydream Nation" or anything that came before. I know that's crazy, and everyone hates "Dirty", but I remember getting that cassette the day it came out and kind of flipping on the astonishing artwork in a way only a teen could, and listening to it over and over on drives through cornfields into nowhere. How did I ever drive as much as my memories span the time I spent listening to that tape in a car alone, surrounded by my own world of changing feelings? Did I really spend that many hours in cars, and was the moon always orange and was it always almost Halloween and did I really feel so on the cusp of everything while there was nothing in front of me for so many miles into the foreseeable future? Soma talked about how much she loved that Jane's Addiction song "Then She Did" because it felt so teenage and how when he says "She was a nothing just as you were" at the end it summed up the melodrama and less-than feelings of adolescence at once. I told her she misheard the lyrics, but really, it's probably just the same and as close to the intention of that song as any interpretation will ever come.
Check out the new NEW DETROIT message board. It's linked up there ^^^ with all my other homies and loved ones. I like it so far cause it's so basic and like the early days of the internet. Nothing but words and ideas. Killer. ALSO: The new Mountains LP that drops on Thrill Jockey soon is just astonishing. Dream sound in the calmest moment of the forest fire.Here's another short song, just piano.
