Hey, remember when I did Blogging the Beatles way back in the day? Where I went through the entire official discography and geeked out on one of my all-time favorite bands? (If not, find the tag for it at the bottom of my blog and give it a read!)
So lately I’ve been going through my mp3 library doing a bit of clean-up and reorganizing, and I landed on my Depeche Mode collection, and it dawned on me: I really loved this band back inthe day. Like, they got me through a lot of emotional crap during my teen years, inspired a lot of my creativity, and if they’re ever on the radio I will most definitely be singing along. They’re also the band I’ve seen live the most.
And it dawned on me: maybe I should do another Blogging the… for this band! Going through those early albums and singles, I suddenly remembered all these deep cuts and multiple remixes and realized that I really have not given them the love I once did, not in a long time. While this version won’t be as musically nerdy as the Beatles one was, it will most likely be a lot more emotional and personal.
As I’d mentioned earlier, JA played matchmaker between me and D in March of 1994. It was a strange whirlwind of a relationship and, as I’ve also mentioned in the past, we inspired both the best and the worst in each other. In retrospect we probably could have been great friends if we hadn’t hooked up. I see now that my then circle of friends weren’t the best fit for me but I was just too emotionally desperate for connection to find anyone else. Both D and JA might have had the best of intentions, but they’d also frequently pushed me out of my comfort zone when it was obvious that I needed to be there for my own mental and emotional sanity. My friendship with them was very similar to one I’d had back in the late 80s with two neighborhood kids that were also not the best influences for me but they were all I had. It was like living that constant discomfort all over again. [And this is why I’ve never completely dissed social media: nearly all my closest and dearest friends are elsewhere in the world and I’m blessed and happy that I can easily talk to them at any time.]
I’d also started that new project while Nocturne continued to simmer on a backburner. Two Thousand was to be my Gen-X coming of age story, grown out of my college friendships and how distinct our generation was from previous ones. It was full of Gen-X tropes: snark, nihilism, music, frustration, and absurdist humor. It focused on a self-inserted character name Stephen (my fallback name for years) trying to figure out what the hell he wanted to do with his life now that he was no longer a student; his circle of friends is splintering off into Real Life Day Jobs and Points Elsewhere and he’s not sure how to process that. He’s also a musician trying to keep his band from falling apart, and frustrated at how fucking hard it is to be creative and still afford to live in a city like Boston. [Stephen’s band Billow would get a cameo years later in my novel Meet the Lidwells.]
Luna, Bewitched, released 1 March 1994. Dean Wareham’s first couple of albums under this moniker sounded very similar to his previous band Galaxie 500: very quiet, almost delicate, and nearly lo-fi. By this album they’d gotten bolder and stronger in sound, but they never quite lost their delicateness.
Beck, Mellow Gold, released 1 March 1994. Beck’s big breakthrough was a huge hit, thanks to having signed to Geffen and getting a giant promotional push with “Loser”. This can pretty much be considered his first professional-sounding record as it’s cleaner and beefier than his previous indie releases, many self-produced.
Blur, “Girls and Boys” single, released 7 March 1994. My favorite Britpop band dropped a teaser single for their next album, Parklife, and it’s one of their finest moments. Addictive, danceable, and a track you need to listen to loud. Definitely a change from their moodier and lighter Modern Life Is Rubbish, that’s for sure.
Failure, Magnified, released 8 March 1994. I loved their first album Comfort, even though they’d been dismissed as Nirvana wannabees, and this one had also been unjustly ignored by most radio stations as well (partly due to the release of the next two albums listed below), even though they’d dropped a video for the single “Undone”. They’d finally achieve critical success a few years later with Fantastic Planet, but at a steep cost. I always recommend anything from this band, to be honest!
Soundgarden, Superunknown, released 8 March 1994. This album won me over immediately. This is one of those ‘they’d done their homework’ albums for me: they had a clear vision and refused to let anything stop them from achieving it, and the result is a damn fine album of brilliant alternative rock. This wasn’t grunge anymore; this was alt-rock meets epic metal with a dusting of their psychedelia roots. Highly recommended.
Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral, released 8 March 1994. I’ve posted about this one recently, in that I haven’t sat down and listened to it from start to finish for quite a few years, but at the time of its release it was on extremely heavy rotation on my Walkman. It resonated heavily with my feelings of frustration and uselessness and I was fine with letting myself simmer in those moods for a bit while this blared through my headphones.
Morrissey, Vauxhall and I, 14 March 1994. On the other side of the mood spectrum was everyone’s favorite Mancunian curmudgeon recording…somewhat of a lighthearted and fun record? It’s true, when he’s in a great mood he can be quite chipper, even silly at times, and this was a fun change of pace when I was too exhausted to continue dealing with my growly moods.
Alison Moyet, Essex, released 21 March 1994. Alf has consistently been a brilliant singer and songwriter, and “Whispering Your Name” remains one of my favorite tracks of hers. She embraces more of the British dance beats with this album, which may have helped her win more fans in the clubs.
Collective Soul, Hints, Allegations & Things Left Unsaid, released 22 March 1994. Sure, they were Grunge Lite with hints of hippie jam band leanings, but they were catchy as hell and this album was super enjoyable. [Noted, if you want to know what I might have looked like hair and fashionwise in the early 90s, see singer Ed Roland. Heh.]
Phish, Hoist, released 29 March 1994. These semi-local guys from Vermont had always had a strong following in New England, even though you’d rarely hear them on the radio. “Down with Disease” did get a bit of play though, and even got a rare music video out of them as well. WBCN used to play this band when they were feeling more adventurous.
Soundtrack, The Crow, released 29 March 1994. I saw this movie in the huge Loews theater that used to be on the ground floor of the Revere Hotel in Boston. I’d been a fan of the original comic book and while it didn’t quite live up to my high expectations, it was nonetheless an enjoyable film. The soundtrack was amazing, featuring songs from The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Violent Femmes, Stone Temple Pilots and more, and this too got a lot of play on my Walkman.
Pink Floyd, The Division Bell, released 30 March 1994. It took me a few years to get around to buying this record, but I loved hearing the lovely and moody “High Hopes” on WBCN. I felt it wasn’t quite as cohesive as A Momentary Lapse of Reason, which I absolutely loved, but I’ve grown to enjoy it.
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Somewhere in all of this, I ragequit a job. Not the best of ideas and I dug my own hole here, but I’d had enough. It had all come to a head one morning when we’d gotten a huge shipment in and the floor manager for the book section had gotten pissed at me that I hadn’t gotten to his stuff yet. My immediate manager — the one who thought I was simple — literally pulled a weak ‘yeah, what’s wrong with you?’ while giving me a look of better you than me. That was the breaking point and I quit within the hour.
Not the best of ideas when you’re already skint and barely making enough to feed yourself. I let myself cool down for a day or so, and started looking for another job. I’d find it a week or so later at a Brigham’s Ice Cream on Cambridge Street. A closer commute, about the same pay, and I could surreptitiously ‘forage’ (heh) as a way to subvert that ‘affording to feed myself’ problem I’d been having lately. Not the most glamorous of jobs…but one that put me in a better frame of mind.
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Coming up: A creative nudge and a return to…reading?
I’ll be honest, I haven’t been playing much guitar or bass these last couple of months partly because I’ve been busy taking care of two extremely precocious young cats and focusing on other creative avenues. But…and I really hate to admit this…I just haven’t been inspired to play lately, which is bothersome.
I’d say over the last year or so, when I do pick up one of my guitars, I end up playing the same four or five songs or riffs over and over again, and that’s boring. I’m out of practice with writing new songs.
So I’ve decided that one of the projects I’d like to start this year is to go through the… *counts the mp3s* …roughly sixty demo riffs I’ve recorded on my phone over the last five years and make something out of them. They range anywhere from thirty seconds to a few minutes in length. I’ve mentioned before that I’d like to find a cheap multi-track software (and one that doesn’t take up much memory as I don’t have all that much space on my PC, unless I put it on my laptop instead) and lay these down just to see what I can do with them. I’ll start small, just going with instrumentals for now until I feel the need to add lyrics. I’ve even assigned myself Saturdays as Music Day on my whiteboard schedule.
The aim here isn’t actually to release or even make any money off them (though if they’re good enough quality I might put them up on Bandcamp for funsies), but to see if I can revive that inspiration. Otherwise these instruments of mine are just gathering dust. And I’d rather not keep doing that, thank you.
As with everyone else, I too have had a bit of a weird 2020, pandemic notwithstanding. I started the year in a foul mood due to a Former Day Job situation, a distinct lack of productivity in my writing (partly due to said situation), and on top of that, I was finally letting myself process a lot of personal issues so I could move on. We flew to New England to visit friends and family on one of the coldest late winter weeks in March. The pandemic did play a significant role in my leaving the FDJ at the end of that month, setting me off on a long stretch of unemployment on the one hand, but a renewed burst of creativity as well as a much needed mental and emotional clarity on the other.
I listened to a lot of music during that time, surprising absolutely no one. The internet radio dial (so to speak) has been permanently stuck at kexp.org, causing any commercial radio listening in the car to feel pathetic and bland in response. I’ve listened to new music on Fridays occasionally downloaded the albums I wanted. I gave my writing process — and the listening habits that often go along with it — a critical rethink as well, spending some time not writing or worrying about productivity. And after a few months, I finally allowed myself to return to the music and creativity with almost no strings attached.
It’s been a long year, and of course I’ve started this month by looking back on all the albums, EPs and singles that have dropped since January. So many release dates changed, tours cancelled or postponed, performances livestreamed. The music industry changed a hell of a lot because of the pandemic. Some of it for the worse, but some of it for the better; it caused a lot of bands and clubs to do a massive rethink in order to survive. A number of bands like Crowded House, Elbow, and even Seatbelts, utilized communications platforms normally used for business to synchronize themselves and perform in the safety of their own homes. In a dark and uncertain time, there was a cloud of determination and creativity that kept things going.
I’m not sure when this uncertainty is going to end, or the pandemic for that matter, but with certain changes in the air, some of them long-awaited and positive, we can move on and even evolve. I’m very curious as to how 2021 will treat us, creatively and productively. Things are definitely different now. The pandemic (and the election, let’s be fair) changed things just enough that I think it gave society a bit of a nudge out of its complacency and stasis. Will it continue in this manner? Who knows, but I’m pretty sure it will at least have inspired enough people to make the next couple of years interesting in a good way.
Recently I’ve been thinking about my creative output. I mean, yeah, I write novels and all that, but that’s over at my other blog. I’m talking about my music and my artwork.
I’ve been focusing on my writing for ages — mainly due to the Great Trilogy Completion and Edit Project Wot Took FAR Too Long — that my love of drawing and playing music fell by the wayside. Ages ago I used to draw maps in my spare time, and I used to write songs for the few bands I’d started. I even added both of them to my whiteboard schedule some years back. But somewhere down the line I chose to focus solely on my writing, ultimately to get better at it and make something of it.
But now that the Trilogy is done and released, and now that I’m working on much smaller projects that aren’t eating up all my time, I find myself itching to return to those two loves. I’ve been wanting to do so for a while (yes, I know I’ve blogged about it before), and now I have the time and the inclination.
So how do I go about it?
Well, I’m thinking that I should do the same thing that I’ve been doing for my writing: open up a playground for it somewhere.
For my writing, I use the 750 Words site to write outtakes and come up with new ideas. I call it my word playground for that purpose; it’s there for me to hit a simple word count goal and try out a few things. So I started thinking: maybe it’s time I do that for the music and the artwork again. Select a few days a week, and dedicate some time — say, a half hour or so — to do nothing but draw or practice on one of my guitars. And as an extra incentive, I can use the mp3 recorder app on my phone to record some of the song demos. [For those playing along: it’s the Hi-Q mp3 recorder app available at the Google store. The free version records up to 10 minutes, and the sound quality is pretty good considering.] The aim is to either finish a completed song or piece of art, or make headway on a possible future project.
It’s not much to ask, and it’ll get me back into the habit of working on such things with more frequency, which is the whole point.
Walk In Silence 