I stopped listening to The Cure so much probably about the time 1996’s Wild Mood Swings came out, and for a few reasons: one, I’d long grown out of my penchant for sinking into a depressive spiral with Pornography and Disintegration as its soundtrack, and two, WMS was just not a Cure album I could sink my teeth into no matter how much I tried. [In hindsight, I think it was a mix of it being too long and it feeling a bit too overproduced.]
So when 2000’s Bloodflowers was announced — and billed as a spiritual link to those two classic dark and gloomy albums I just mentioned — I looked forward to hearing it. It was released in my final year working at HMV, so as you can well imagine, it got a lot of play in the back office where I worked, as well as in the Belfry where I was just about to embark on writing the Bridgetown Trilogy. To me, Bloodflowers was a long-awaited return to form that I’d missed.
It’s an album that was purposely written to be listened to as a full album, and there were no official singles released from it, although the meandering “Out of This World” and the catchy “Maybe Someday” were both provided with promotional edits for radio play. The latter got significant play on WFNX at the time.
And thankfully, the rest of the album features some absolutely lovely deep cuts that became favorites, like the song “There Is No If…” which Robert Smith had written during his late teens but never tried recording, fearing that it was too cheesy, until he delivered a devastatingly desperate version here.
There’s also the other rarity here: Smith singing about getting older. “39” was written about him slowly approaching his forties. Would he continue down this road of writing his patented doom and gloom, or write something uplifting and trite? There’s also a little bit of concern here: he’s honestly surprised he’s lasted this long, given his drug and alcohol infused past.
I remember the critical response to this album being mixed: some were absolutely thrilled that they’d returned somewhat to form, while some felt a bit like they’d heard this many times before. I can definitely feel its similarity to Disintegration — minus the reverb-drenched echoes on everything — in that it felt like something coming to a close. Whether it was youth, bacchanalia, or goth gloom, it definitely felt like closure.
It would be another four years before their next album, although they would spend most of that time going on extended tours and releasing a greatest hits album with two new songs and a box set of b-sides and rarities.
I used to hate Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” for years. I always thought it was a terrible song. Terrible lyrics, terrible vocals, and extremely cheesy production. And I never could figure out why so many people loved it, why it was used in Trainspotting, and why Duran Duran did a cover of it!
Well, if you’re someone like me, if you hear it enough times, you eventually come around to it. I know a ton of songs like that, where I actively disliked them at first then slowly started to appreciate them. [The fact that this song is used in the new Wim Wenders movie has nothing to do with this, actually…I’d come around to it a few years ago.]
I mean, take Bakar for instance.
I thought this song was terrible as well. To me he sounded like Seal with a head cold and a sore throat. But for some reason I kept on coming back to it, partly because it had been on Live 105’s heavy rotation for a few months and I couldn’t really escape it. I came to appreciate it. Still not the biggest fan, but I’ve finally heard a few more songs of his and he’s sort of…odd yet intriguing.
Sure, there are still a few extremely popular singers out there that make me twitch (looking at you, Tones & I and Lana Del Rey) but I’ve learned never to say never. Who knows, maybe they’ll have a song or two that works for me!
So what’s one of my favorite love songs? You’d be surprised. It’s actually not a Beatles song!
The first time I heard Alanis Morissette’s “Head Over Feet” I immediately thought wow, yeah, I would love to have that as a song written about/to/for me. It’s simple and yet so heartfelt and kind. It’s not about sex or having a good time or mind-blowing emotion or anything. It just…is. No strings attached. Just one person saying how awesome their lover — and friend — is.
And to me, that’s one of the best kinds of love songs there is.
While going through some of my mp3s the other day I was thinking about the music that inspired some of the novels I’d written. They weren’t completely inspired by just one song of course, but there was that one track that was pretty much the stepping stone that got the project started in earnest. It got me thinking about some of my other projects and how they got their (musical) start.
The Phoenix Effect / The Bridgetown Trilogy. Poe’s ‘band version’ of her single “Hello” dropped probably a couple of weeks before I started writing The Phoenix Effect in March 1997. I’d had a vague idea of the story I wanted to write for at least a few months, but it was this song that made me realize I was ready to do it. The song itself is very Johnny Mnemonic in its theme — and I had a soft spot for that enjoyable but extremely flawed film — and I realized that movie had a similar mood I was aiming for with this new project. Darker, edgier, angrier. Those weren’t words you’d use to describe my previous writing, to be honest, but I was willing to give it a go. This single got my creative blood pumping enough that it ended up as the first track on the first Songs from the Eden Cycle mixtape.
Two Thousand. This trunked novel was to be my Gen-X ‘becoming an adult without a direction’ story that never quite panned out, based on several related ideas: a close circle of friends regularly meeting up at a bench in Back Bay; a trio of musicians starting a local indie band; the frustrations of following your dreams versus going into the workplace and which obviously paid the rent. The Wolfgang Press’ cover of Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come” was on their brilliant album Queer, which got played incessantly in The Shoebox apartment while I worked on this. I felt it was the perfect theme song for the project.
Can’t Find My Way Home. I’d come up with the idea for this time travel idea during my time at HMV, when I’d first heard this phenomenal cover of the Blind Faith tune. That gorgeous intro played by Johnny Marr screamed ‘opening theme song’ in my head. It took a few years for me to come up with a story behind it, and it’s gone through various versions and has been trunked multiple times. I’ve recently had a few ideas on a new approach to the story, however, so perhaps this may surface one last time…
Love Like Blood. My trunked vampire novel (it’s there for a good reason in that it’s terrible despite a lot of really good ideas) had been started back in 2004 when I’d been frustrated by my inability to finish The Balance of Light, and I’d been reading a few vampire novels at the time, so I figured, why the hell not? Let’s give it a try, something to focus on so I can at least keep working? This Killing Joke song wasn’t just the opening theme of the novel (the first chapter has a band playing it live at the Paradise in Boston) but it was to set the mood with its ridiculous take on goth tropes. [I haven’t read it in years, so now I’m curious to see how bad it is and if it’s salvageable. I’m in no rush, however.]
Meet the Lidwells!I’ve mentioned before that a lot of MtL borrows from ideas that I’d used in Two Thousand (hey, I wasn’t going to be using them, so…). One of the biggest moments I’d planned in TT was a pivotal ‘make or break’ scene for the lead character and his band, in which they did a blistering cover of this final track off The La’s self-titled album. Years later when I started MtL, I knew that I’d be using that same idea for a pivotal scene, this time pinpointing The Lidwells’ highest career moment they’d ever achieved. It’s the scene near the end of the novel where Thomas Lidwell describes the band performing a live version of their song “Listening” that becomes his all-time favorite moment in the band’s career.
In My Blue World.This one’s a bit obvious, but yes, it was indeed this song that came to mind when I first started writing the novel. At the time I’d just been on an ELO kick and was playing several of their albums when I was planning out the novel itself, but once I started it, I knew this was going to be the opening theme song. For those playing along, in my head there’s a crossfade right at the end of the first scene where Zuze appears for the first time, and the theme song fades in with the movie credits!
Theadia. My space opera was kicked off by this Fuzzbox deep cut off of their second album Big Bang!, one of my favorites despite its 80s pop cheesiness. I just knew that the story was going to revolve around our two nerdy heroes who are trying to save the universe but would really rather be hanging out with close friends and having a good time. I wanted this novel to not be hard sf or steeped in Doctorow levels of tech geekdom. This was the album — and the song — that I put on when I started writing the novel in the last few days of my stay at the former day job at the bank, to remind me that despite how desperate things might become in the story, these two will always find time to be true to themselves. I’m really looking forward to getting this one out as well!
Queen Ophelia’s War. I’d said before that I wrote this novel with the plan of Dialing It Back, just like I had with Diwa & Kaffi. It has its moments of tension and conflict, sure, but I wanted to write something that could also be seen as pastoral as well. And to do that I realized that I also wanted a mixtape that would be similar in feel to what it felt like when I used to listen to Cocteau Twins when I was a teenager. The mood of both the novel and the mixtape then was about the wonders of the unknown and the willingness to get lost in them for a while. Thus putting “Blue Bell Knoll” as the first track on its mixtape!
…Idiosyncrosanct by You Shriek, which dropped right on New Year’s Day. I knew this guy in passing from my college years when he started this music project in his dorm room at Charlesgate — he was a friend of a friend so I didn’t know him too personally, but I remembered the distinctive band name and followed him since. It’s been quite a few years since his last release, but he sounds better than ever. Last year he dropped a teaser single that would be the lead-off track for this album, “Dead Pilots”. Great darkwave stuff worth checking out.
There are many different ways I could go about relearning how to listen to music that resonates with me, and I’ve been thinking that perhaps it’s to do it like I did before: one song, one resonance at a time.
My old-school style of finding writing inspiration in music used to be like this. A song that attracted my attention would then make me think okay, how can this song inspire a scene in the novel I’m writing? I haven’t done that in decades actually, but that’s how it used to work. It evolved in the 90s to ‘Belfry Soundtracks’ — the albums that would get heavy rotation during my writing sessions. They weren’t so much inspiration as they were setting moods, or simply pleasant to hear while working.
Life encroaches sometimes. I lack the time or the patience to pay attention. Or maybe the style or the genre evolves in a direction that doesn’t sing to me for a time. There are many reasons for that disconnect, and other reasons for trying to catch up afterwards.
Relearning sometimes requires unlearning. Stop focusing on the bulk of the chronology and the discography, and focus on the immediate that’s coming across. Discover something that passed me by, or be the first one in, it doesn’t matter, as long as we listen to the single song at that moment, and relate or react with the resonance. Pass it by if there’s nothing to feel, or hold onto it for a later time.
Just allow it to resonate, and that’s the most important and the most true emotional response.
It’s been a few weeks, hasn’t it? What’s been going on?
Well, aside from the PC issues (which have since been thankfully resolved), I’ve been dealing with the holiday rush at the Day Job and squeezing in my 750 Words, and taking it easy. Catching up on a few things and deciding that other things can wait until the new year.
I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do here at Walk in Silence, because I feel it obviously needs a major change. On the one hand I’d been hyperfocusing through numerous entries about older music connected to certain parts of my past, and I’ve decided I’d rather not go that route anymore. I don’t need to post that kind of self-induced therapy anymore now, do I? But on the other hand, I’ve also been frustrated by my ‘new release posts’ which, let’s face it, are sounding a bit repetitious with not a lot of follow-through.
I’ve discovered that I’ve tied myself too closely to time management here, so to speak. I’m either talking about the personal past or talking about the immediate present. And I’m in dire need of untying myself from all of that. All of it has become less enjoyable and more…rote and uninteresting. It’s my own fault, really. I was just focusing too much on the acquiring of the music and not giving myself enough time to let it resonate with me. And that’s a problem when you acquire an album you like at the time but only vaguely remember any of the songs from it a few months down the line.
I want to change that.
You may have noticed that I haven’t posted my end-of year list here, and that’s partly due to my inability to focus on new releases much this year. Sure, I do have a few favorites from this year (the above Lucinda Chua album, YIAN, is one of my favorites of the year, and of course I’ve had the ‘last’ Beatles song “Now and Then” floating through my head since it dropped). But…do I even have a countdown? Or a mixtape, for that matter?
I don’t, but I’m going to change that come the new year. I want to stop focusing on the acquiring and return to the resonance.
Until then, see you on the flip side, same schedule as always!
I did have part of a year-end review post in the making yesterday that I was going to post today, but about halfway through writing it my PC suddenly decided that it no longer wanted to read the externals, including my music library which I’d been using to reference said blog post.
Concerned but not overly so, I tried all sorts of things to get them readable again — as well as checking them against my laptop to make sure that it wasn’t the externals that got borked (they aren’t, and I AM VERY THANKFUL ABOUT THAT RIGHT NOW.). After completely wasting time that could have been used for a writing session, turned the PC off and hoped that letting it rest might help.
Aaaaand lo and behold, after restarting the PC after work today, I got a bluescreen.
As I said: well, shit.
I kept my old Lenovo PC for just this sort of thing, to be honest. [I like to joke that my family members are natural EMPs as our computer problems are rarely ever ‘oh you forgot to install this thingie’ and more ‘…good gravy, what the hell did you do to this?’ even though we hadn’t done a thing other than, y’know, use it as intended.] I just excavated it from Spare Oom closet, in hopes that it still works okay, considering it was behaving for the most part (it was just four years old and retired). We shall see where this leads.
[EDIT: Yay, it works! Boo, the USB hub I’d been using refuses to read anything! Yay, the externals work on their own! Boo, for some reason it won’t read the music library external and the film/tv external at the same time! And finally, shrug-emoji, now to wait for Lenovo to contact me about getting the new one fixed/replaced.]
In the meantime, I’d started thinking about what would happen if I had lost my music library. It is indeed ridiculously huge. But at the same time, I thought…well, this would be the end of an era, wouldn’t it? I’d be bummed, sure, but would it affect me as deeply as, say, losing my longhand writing forever? Hard to say, but maybe not? It got me thinking that maybe it’s time to pare it down and clean it up a bit. I’ve been contemplating having two versions of the collection: one that’s full and complete, and one that’s much smaller and for everyday use.
Something else to think about at the end of the year, at any rate.
Walk In Silence 