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. 🙂