I’m thrilled to report that in the span of one month, I’ve already hit over 13,000 words for the Meet the Lidwells project, averaging around 500 to 700 words day. I’m still on track for a fall release at this point, as I think I’m about a fifth of the way done already!
Meanwhile, here’s a few songs I’ve used for inspiration and reference so far. As you can see, there’s definitely a deep Britpop influence going on.
The Stone Roses, “I Am the Resurrection”: The four-to-the-floor beat of this track was part of the inspiration for the Lidwells’ first major hit, “Grapevine”. Theirs is a catchy track that captures the interest of not just their younger teen fans but also the older ones, thanks to their ability to cleverly mix pop stylings and creative alternative rock. The Lidwells were known for stretching out “Grapevine” live, much like how The Stone Roses did with this song.
The Charlatans UK, “Opportunity”: Keyboardist Danny Lidwell wrote a groovy deep track called “Trust” for their debut album inspired by the keyboard-heavy Manchester bands like The Charlatans and Inspiral Carpets. He claims that “Trust” was when he deliberately decided to stop being self-conscious about his playing and just powered through it, revealing his own unique style in the process.
The Real People, “Window Pane”: I’m using this song as a sort of template as to what the early Lidwells sound like aurally: a lot of harmony, a positive and funky vibe, and definitely catchy and fun to dance to.
The House of Love, “You Don’t Understand”: This would be a good example of the type of song they would write, especially eldest member and band leader Jason. In fact, Jason will end up writing a song similar-sounding to this one by their third album.
Veruca Salt, “Volcano Girls”: This is definitely a great example of how I picture the two women in the band, Hannah and Amy, rocking out. Hannah is a badass drummer with no fear, and Amy is one hell of a shredder. They’re both solid songwriters with no filter at all.
The La’s, “Looking Glass”: If A Division of Souls had Failure’s “Daylight” as the soundtrack for the final scene, this is the one for MtL‘s finale. This would be Thomas, the youngest Lidwell, singing this as the final song on their final show on their last tour, going out on one hell of a high.
Sorry for another fly-by folks…between Day Jobbery and feeling absolutely knackered the last few days, I don’t have much energy to post anything too intensive.
That said, I’ve strangely been on a Dickies kick lately. Not sure why. I think it’s that their quite excellent cover of The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” popped into my head the other day. They’re part of that early 80s Silly American Punk scene that gave us bands like Blotto and The Meatmen.
Speaking of 90s music, I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff lately that came out while I was in Boston, college and post-college. The city has a fascinating musical history, especially where rock and radio is concerned. [I highly suggest looking for Carter Alan’s Radio Free Boston: The Rise and Fall of WBCN and Brett Milano’s The Sound of Our Town for a great overview.] There’s always been a scene of some kind in the city over the years, and it’s always been great. A lot of it is due to its eclectic mix of blue-collar families and college students.
I was glad to be able to listen to, if not go see, a lot of the local bands while going to Emerson College in the early 90s. Here’s a few of my favorites from that era…hope you enjoy!
April is always an odd month musically — it’s the start of Q2 but a lot of the biggest releases won’t be coming out until the end of May or mid-June. Still, a lot of great stuff that came out this past month that’s getting a lot of play on my player (when I’m not listening to 90s stuff for my writing)!
K Flay, Every Where Is Some Where (released 7 April)
Future Islands, The Far Field (released 7 April)
The New Pornographers, Whiteout Conditions (released 7 April)
Incubus, 8 (released 21 April)
Charly Bliss, Guppy (released 21 April)
Maximo Park, Risk to Exist (released 21 April)
Sylvan Esso, What Now (released 28 April)
…and of course, the long-awaited and welcome return of…
Gorillaz, Humanz (released 28 April)
Coming up for May:
–Slowdive, Slowdive (!!)
–Day Wave, The Days We Had
–Linkin Park, One More Light
–New Order, NOMC15 —The Beatles, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band remix/reissue
…and I’m sure there will be a lot more on that list by the end of the month! 🙂
Alas, my recent fascination with 70s music has been sidetracked due to my starting in on the Meet the Lidwells project; in this case, I am now immersing myself in the poppier side of alternative rock circa 1990-1996. Not complaining, considering.
I’m trying to avoid the expected hits, the songs that still pop up from time to time: “Unbelievable” and “Right Here Right Now”, Achtung Baby and Nevermind, and so on. I’d like to dig just a little deeper than expected — something I am wont to do for my writing projects anyway — and bring back some of the tunes that were on my Walkman during my college years.
Sure, I’ve often said that the early 90s was definitely an unpredictable era of great highs and miserable lows for me personally, but that’s not the story I’m writing here. [And that’s another blog post entirely anyway.] I’m reconnecting with a lot of the great music that came out at the time, and channeling that energy into the Lidwells story.
The early 90s was an interesting time, for a multitude of reasons anyway. Musically, post-punk and college rock was becoming the new mainstream, 80s pop was aging a bit (sometimes not that well at all), and new voices and sounds were popping up from around the globe. Politically, old walls (literal and figurative) were being torn down, and soon a new President would be entering the White House. It felt like there was a weird positivity in the air that we’d almost forgotten about.
It may have been the political sea change, or it may have been something else. For me at any rate, I was thinking this was the last decade in the millennium, and that we were all looking forward to a more positive future than the sometimes dreary one we’d been recently subjected to.
Musically, I was getting into the wave of Britpop that WFNX was playing (when they weren’t playing grunge, which took me a lot longer to get into). In addition to that, Boston was experiencing a small renaissance of sorts with a hell of a lot of great local bands old and new getting some serious airplay — Manufacture, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Tribe, Heretix, The 360s, Think Tree…a bunch of bands I may not have been able to see live, but I certainly bought most of their releases when I could.
I was also doing a lot of shorter writing at the time — my fiddling with the Infamous War Novel had faded into the background; I’d created my comic character Murph and put him through all kinds of weird universes; I’d finally gotten out of the ‘doom poetry’ phase I’d put myself through and was writing some solid Flying Bohemians lyrics; I was also pushing myself to play around with new story ideas.
This is the energy that I want to use for Meet the Lidwells; a feeling of optimism and strong bursts of creativity. Sure, my story will deal with their personal ups and downs and their eventual demise as a band, but that’s only part of it. This is about celebration as much as it is about struggle.
It’s about the love (the characters’ and mine) of music. 🙂
Over the last few weeks, there’s been an uptick of newly uploaded videos on the 120 Memories YouTube channel that feature almost-full episodes of the venerated show. There’s a few other channels out there showing partial episodes (usually the host segments but no music videos) like MrBriefcaseTV2 and other users. There’s also the great reference website The 120 Minutes Archive, which provides extensive playlists of nearly every episode*, and links to the videos if they’re available.
* – Back when this site was first being built sometime in 2004 or so, I still had a lot of my old VHS tapes with many of the episodes, so I was able to provide them with a lot of playlist information. A lot of the 1987-1989 episodes have my name listed on the site.
It’s fun watching some of these now, nearly thirty years later…
For instance, I remember watching the above episode as Dave Kendall (at that point still only the producer and doing the countdowns and new releases) featuring a segment on the then-new Sisters of Mercy album, Floodland. Even though he treated it in his usual over-the-top way, dripping with snark and pomposity and just a hint of humor, that segment actually convinced me to go out and buy the album.
I’d say Kevin Seal was my favorite host, considering he played it like the student doing a show on college radio: the barest of preparation, rehearsal or professionalism, but he was having a hell of a fun time doing it. It also helped that he was also the class weirdo out of all the veejays there at the time. Dave Kendall was the station manager, doing what he could with what little he had on hand, more focused on providing awesome music than decent production.
Those early years were definitely lo-fi. They’d become more slick during the early 90s when Nirvana & Co came in, followed by the Ultimate Music Nerd in the shape of Matt Pinfield in the mid to late 90s. But those early years, that era from 1986 to about 1990 when it was still all about whatever was playing on college radio at the time, that was where it worked best. It was the visual equivalent of turning on your favorite college station for two hours after everyone else had gone to bed.
A kinda-sorta fly-by here, as I’m afk today to head into the office for my Day Job. In the meantime, here’s a few of my latest musical obsessions. Hope you enjoy! 🙂
Status: back half of sophomore year in high school. Writing: finishing up the Infamous War Novel; starting Belief in Fate; trying out various ideas but not getting too far with them. Radio: splitting time between college radio (WAMH and WMUA), AOR (WMDK and WRSI), rock (WAQY and WAAF), and a few pop stations. TV: Still watching USA Network’s Night Flight occasionally. Taping episodes of 120 Minutes and watching them the following afternoon, plus numerous rewatches of Monty Python and other British alternative comedies. Personal: single and sick of feeling sorry for myself; getting rid of my 80s spiky ‘do and letting my hair grow out a bit; just about sick of these damn braces. Social: bouncing between two different social circles. Music Collection: Approximately two milk crates full of vinyl, a small collection of singles, and a quickly growing cassette collection. At least a few dozen ‘radio tape’ mix tapes at this point.
Listening to…
…which, if you think about it, is not that different from the sounds I’m currently listening to. 🙂
D’OH! Forgot to do one of these last month, so here you go. I’ll have April’s up in a few weeks.
This year is continuing to surprise and delight me with some absolutely solid albums. A lot of new albums by old favorites, and numerous releases by bands I hadn’t heard of previously. I’m looking forward to more of this!
Minus the Bear, Voids (released 3 March). I’ve been hitting this one hard lately…they kind of remind me of Shearwater, with the odd melodies that somehow fit together perfectly. LOVE this album.
Bush, Black and White Rainbows (released 10 March). Glad to see them having a second life with a consistent run of excellent new albums.
The Creation, Action Painting (released 17 March). A fascinating garage band from the UK, this one packages their single 60s album (We Are Paintermen) and the singles from the same era. They were influential to a hell of a lot of UK musicians, from Jimmy Page to Paul Weller. [And yes, the UK record label was named after them.]
Spoon, Hot Thoughts (released 17 March). Probably my favorite Spoon album since Kill the Moonlight back in ’02. It’s weird, heavy, and there’s a hell of a lot of funk going on as well.
Lloyd Cole, In New York (Collected Recordings 1988-1996) (released 17 March). A lovely counterpoint to the box set he released for his Commotions work, this contains his first five albums plus an album of demos. An exellent and underrated songwriter.
Depeche Mode, Spirit (released 17 March). A return to the darker and more electronic DM. I’d say this is on par with Ultra, with its heavier, angrier sound.
The Jesus and Mary Chain, Damage and Joy (released 24 March). Wait, this is 2017, not 1987, right? Seriously, though…it’s a welcome return. It sounds a lot like their mid-era sound, very similar to Honey’s Dead, but that’s definitely a good thing.
Jamiroquai, Automaton (released 31 March). Jay Kay still has the funk, and he doesn’t skimp on it here. I often find myself listening to this in the afternoon as a lift-me-up.
Wire, Silver/Lead (released 31 March). What can I say? I will buy anything and everything by this band. They’ve never let me down once.
You may have heard the BIG NEWS from hither and yon that Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is getting a super deluxe edition from Apple in celebration of the album turning 50. It’s BIG NEWS because this is the first Beatles album to get this kind of remaster/expanded reissue. The deluxe edition will contain a new remix from Giles Martin, two discs of outtakes, and a dvd and blu-ray of even more goodies — including a 5.1 mix (!!) and the Making of Sgt Pepper documentary from 1987. The new stereo remix, per Martin, is not the original remaster we heard on the 2009 box set, but a true remix, in which he shifted the sounds to make it sound more like the original mono mix.*
Yer darn tootin’ I pre-ordered it as soon as I heard about it!
Anyway…I’m looking forward to hearing this new mix. I gave the album a good listen the other day (the mono mix, actually) and it really did break a hell of a lot of rules and boundaries. Hundreds of other bands who heard the album for the first time were completely blown away by it, even more influenced by it. When people call songs ‘Beatlesque’, they usually mean it sounds like something from this album.
Me? I’m looking forward to hearing “A Day in the Life”…it’s what I think of as their finest moment, not just in songwriting but in production. It transcends being just a pop song and turns into an orchestral piece. Hearing a new stereo mix of this song should be a treat.
To quote from my ‘Blogging the Beatles’ series from a few years back, plus a few added notes:
Though this track was recorded relatively early in the sessions (19-20 January, with additional work done a week or so later), by the time they finished recording, they knew that this absolutely had to be the last track on the album, no question. It’s long been considered one of their best compositions, and given the amount of time dedicated to it (a total 34 hours, twenty-two more than the entirety of Please Please Me!), it’s by far one of their most complex productions.
There are three distinct parts – the first and third, written mostly by John and taken from recent newspaper articles (the death of friend Tara Browne in a car accident, the report that the roads in Blackburn were filled with potholes, and so on), and the middle section provided mostly by Paul (a simple nostalgic trip of riding the double-decker bus through Liverpool when he was younger), each with its own personality.
The first part is performed with deliberate slowness, starting quietly but growing increasingly louder until we reach the end. [EDIT: Ringo’s drumming here is to the fore, punctuating each line of the verse, mixed high and given a thunderous echo. The deliberate slowness of this first part adds to its haunting mood, which makes the first orchestral swell sound like a maelstrom.]
The link to part two is via a crazy idea from Paul and Martin, in which an orchestra plays an unscripted rise from the instrument’s lowest E up to its highest in the space of 24 bars. [EDIT: if you listen closely, you can just about hear Mal Evans under the din, counting out said bars, leading up to the alarm clock going off.] That link serves not just to wind up the listener but the speed, as Paul’s section comes in double-time, a bouncy and simple melody meant to evoke a commuter running late.
The second gives way to a third part via an absolutely breathtaking eight bars – it’s not complex, but listen to how Martin takes a simple four-note score and makes it dynamic by gradually increasing the volume of the brass, pulling them from the back to the foreground, while simultaneously pushing John’s angelic ‘aah’s being pushed back into the increasingly echoey mix. [EDIT: In the mono mix, John merely fades into the mix, but in the stereo mix he pans from right to left as well. This entire section is by far one of my favorite moments of any Beatle song ever. A few simple mixing and scoring tricks, but they’re done so beautifully.]
In part three we’ve returned to an abbreviated repeat of John’s first section, played double-time as well…only to be brought back to that nightmarish ascension again. This time, once everyone hits that high E, we’re left floating up in the air for a brief second…only to come crashing down – hard – on a final low E chord. That final breathtaking moment is played by John, Paul, Ringo and Mal Evans on three pianos and George Martin on a harmonium, and is drawn out to nearly forty seconds via the recording level being brought up as high as possible as the piano’s natural reverberation slowly fades.
* Some background here…the Beatles were present for the original mono mix of the album back in ’67, but were not present for the stereo mix, which was done afterwards. Audiophiles often say the mono mix is much better, as it’s closer to what the band wanted. It also has a fuller, tighter sound, whereas the stereo mix feels a bit spacious. Oh–and “She’s Leaving Home” is at the right speed on the mono mix, and in my opinion makes it a stronger song, where the stereo mix was slower and more maudlin, maybe too much so.
Walk In Silence 