The Year in Music - Belle and Sebastian

Belle and Sebastian are the reason that there's a chapter of my dissertation (and, er, book) devoted to Glasgow. There are sound historiographical reasons for that chapter - which compares Belfast's tradition of violence with the relative tranquility of Glasgow - but the real reason is my longstanding infatuation with this Glaswegian pop band, and my conviction that any place that could spawn the likes of them must be a pretty fabulous place. So I spent a few days there back in 2004 doing research for that chapter, and, while I don't know that the word fabulous is the most accurate adjective to apply to Glasgow, I do remember being perfectly charmed by the place and wishing I had more time to dig through its (frequently grimy) layers.

Belle and Sebastian's songs are anything but grimy, but they are multi-layered - there are all sorts of complicated things going on underneath their shimmery (and, okay, sometimes a bit sugary) surfaces. Their best songs have a morsel of pain, regret, guilt, or simple sadness hiding just below the bouncy melodies and wispy, fragile vocals, and they grab me inside, just above the stomach, in a way that no other music ever has. They are my desert-island songs, my life-preserver songs, the songs among all other songs that I'd choose to save from destruction should some future Republican administration decree that all but a handful of the world's songs must be destroyed in a bonfire. Years ago, a beautiful barista in a Boston coffee shop told me - after I complained when she cut short the Belle and Sebastian album she'd been playing - that Belle and Sebastian were like chocolate cake to her, that she couldn't consume too much at one time without getting sick. That's when I knew that it would never work out between the two of us.

Joey liked Belle and Sebastian, though probably not as much as I did. I suspect that I was the one who introduced him to them, for I have been known to proselytize a little on this topic (see above), but I can't be sure about that. He did have a soft spot for that peculiarly British strand of cleverness and tweeness (look it up) that they represent: one of his favorite movies, for example, was Love, Actually, which is essentially the cinematic equivalent of a Belle and Sebastian album. So I'm pretty sure he would have liked their latest release, Write About Love, which came out in October. On the first listen I found it a little too syrupy, and there are a few songs that, after repeated listens, still get me thinking about that barista with her chocolate cake, but it gradually won me over. Many of the songs are about romantic relationships, many of them relationships that have soured or are in the process of souring, and so they don't evoke anything specific about Joey for me, but there's a general tone of wistfulness and longing that plucks at the usual heartstrings.

The opener, "I Didn't See It Coming," is about a failed relationship. It didn't really grab me at first, but I've come to love it - the lines "Make me dance, I want to surrender," repeated with varying degrees of urgency throughout the song, remind me of our wedding in September, when the joy of the celebration managed to overwhelm the pain of Joey's absence. And it did so largely on the dance floor, where I saw Tina dancing to the Snoopy Song and to Okkervil River, and where I saw my father dance for the first time in my life. The song also has these words:

Everybody's talking about you.
Every word's a whisper without you.


Here it is (sorry, the video is a little lame):

The song that really fills me to overflowing shows up late in the album. It's called "Ghost of Rockschool," and it's about God. Or, more accurately, it conjures that attitude that William James (I think) once described as the essential characteristic of a religious sensibility: to stare in open-mouthed wonder at the things of this world. It starts like this:

I've seen God in the sun, I've seen God in the street
God before bed and the promise of sleep
God in my dreams and the free ride of grace
But it all disappears and then I wake up.


Towards the end, when the song begins to lift off, those last two lines change to:

God in the puddles and the lane beside her
Yes, I've seen God shining up from her reflection.

And this also makes me think of our wedding, and of my wife, and of how both things, together, have been my salvation. And it recalls how Joey approached life with a similar wide-eyed (if smirking) wonder, and of his quirky enthusiasms, and of how he loved and was loved, and all of this becomes a sort of levee that keeps the despair from overflowing its banks. There are days when the whole world seems gray and one-dimensional, when all the mystery seems to have drained away and left nothing but randomly colliding molecules, but this song offers another way of seeing things. It reminds me to be awestruck - by the world's wonderfulness, by the places I've gone and the things I've done, by Joey, by Kate - and it makes me feel like being awestruck is quite an okay way to be.

Sorry, there's no actual video for this one, but here's the song:

Okay, one last song: it's an older one, from the album Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2003), and I came across it while searching for these other videos. I hadn't seen the video in some time, but I now believe that if Joey had ever made a music video, it would have looked a lot like this. The song is called "Wrapped Up in Books."

The Year in Music - The Tallest Man on Earth

Just a short post tonight, about a little guy with a big voice who goes by the name The Tallest Man on Earth.

I first heard about him via NPR's All Songs Considered podcast, which is where I discover quite a bit of the music I listen to. Joey didn't listen to podcasts - as with NPR itself, he had a hard time concentrating on spoken-word productions, preferring to listen only to music while driving, wandering, etc - so he didn't hear about The Tallest Man on Earth in the same way I did, but he was a big fan. A bigger fan, indeed, than I.

The Tallest Man on Earth is the stage name of Kristian Matsson, a Swedish guy who is not, in fact, very tall at all.  He's about my height, 5' 8" or so. This makes his stage name doubly ironic, for not only is he not really the tallest man on earth, he's also probably the shortest guy in all of Sweden (I've been to Sweden - with Joey and Tina, a couple of years ago, for the better part of an afternoon - so I know what I'm talking about). I suspect this is partly why Joey liked him.

When I first heard him I thought he sounded an awful lot like Bob Dylan - too much like Bob Dylan - and his first album, released in 2008, didn't really move me. It's called "Shallow Grave," and I listened to it quite a bit, waiting for the (numerous) lyrics to awaken something in me, but inevitably my mind would drift, and before I knew it the album would be over. It sounded, to me, like a watered-down Dylan without the latter's urgency or ability to paint pretty pictures, and his sound was too jagged and abrasive to make for pleasant background music, so I filed it away and didn't think too much more about it.

On the last road trip we took together, from Nashville to Oklahoma for Christmas last winter, Joey put the CD on, and I tried again. It was clear that this was one of Joey's new favorite discoveries, but it still didn't take me anywhere. I wasn't at all surprised that he liked it, though. It pushed all the right buttons for him: the sound is rustic and folksy, there are lots of lyrics that require close attention (and would repay repeated listens), there's a banjo, and, of course, there's the aforementioned irony (Joey was a great connoisseur of irony). So I figured this would just be something on which we'd agree to disagree.

Matsson's latest album came out in April, and I didn't buy it right away. Joey must have, though, because I remember him posting a video of one of the new songs on Facebook. It's called "The King of Spain," and it is the very definition of a Joey song. He was, of course, planning to go to Spain this past fall to study law, so his post said something to the effect that this song sums up what he'd be doing in a few months. It's a brash, forceful, slightly silly song, and I can easily picture him lip-syncing the bit that goes "I'll disappear in some flamenco" and fluttering his arms in a muted little cha-cha flourish. Here it is:

I remember listening to the song when it came out and thinking that I'd have to revise my attitude toward this guy: he's a lot more charismatic here than in the earlier stuff, and somehow he makes you care more about what's gonna come next. Now, of course, I can hardly listen to it without shedding a tear, but it's a half-happy tear, because the song sounds so much like Joey. The whole album, called "The Wild Hunt", which I bought sometime after July, is either a lot better than the earlier one or simply more emotionally resonant for me now. Or both. I listen to it often, whenever I feel like I can take it, and it makes me feel like I'm with my brother.

When Tina was in Istanbul some months back she sent me a text message saying that she was on the ferry to the Asian side, listening to The Tallest Man on Earth, and thinking about Joe (all of Joey's post-Oklahoma friends know him as Joe). He had planned to go to Istanbul but never did - he had, in fact, borrowed some Istanbul guide books from Kate and me after our own trip there a while back - and so Tina had gone there anyway, because he never got the chance. I got the message and thought: well, yes, there really is no better way to cross to the Asian side of Istanbul than to listen to some music by The Tallest Man on Earth.

The Year in Music - The National

End-of-year roundups were all the rage last month, as they are every December. All across the internet, as far as the eye could see, were piles and piles of lists - lists of the year's best books, best book jackets, best fake rumors, best companies to work for, best high schools, best Japanese phrases, least misogynistic rap lyrics, best movies, best tech products, best sports cars under $50,000, best adoption-friendly workplaces, and on and on and on. Many of these lists, of course, were about music - best albums, best songs, best releases within any number of genres and sub-genres - and this reminded me that sometimes I like to make up my own little list (in my head) of the best new albums I acquired over the past year. This year that's kind of difficult, though, partly because everything that happened before July happened in a previous life, and partly because everything that's happened since July has been filtered through what happened in July.

I did listen to lots of music in the second half of the year, however, probably for the same reason that I read lots of books: it enabled me to shut out the world and to burrow into someone else's feelings or ideas or moods for a while, and, through them, to burrow into my own. As I've mentioned, lots of the music I listen to is associated with Joey in some way - we had similar tastes and frequently discussed and shared music with one another - and so closely intertwined is my music with my brother that my iPod can barely shuffle through two or three of its (at the time of writing) 9,434 songs without prompting one Joey memory or another. Even music that has been released since July, music that he never had a chance to hear, can do this - either because it's something he would have liked, or it's from a band that he did like, or because the lyrics evoke him somehow, or something.

For the next few posts, I'd like to share a little of what I've been listening to over the past year, mostly the new stuff that I never had a chance to share with him but that nevertheless makes me think of him, and invite others to do the same in the comments section. This is not the music I play to escape - there's plenty of that, too - but the stuff I listen to when I want to reflect, cry, or sing very loudly, on my own, in my car.

The album that I've probably come back to more than any other is "High Violet" by The National. The album came out in May, but I didn't get it until July, and I never discussed it with Joey. In fact, I don't remember ever discussing The National with him, although I've been a big fan for a long time. They do broody, moody songs about failed dreams, urban alienation, and the reckless or paranoid behavior of people crippled with one variety of angst or another. Not exactly glee club material, then, but it's really not as dark as it sounds, either - there's just enough irony and self-mockery, in both their lyrics and their pose, to keep you from taking it all too seriously. The singer, Matt Berninger, sings in a languid, almost reluctant baritone that is so sophisticated and detached that it's like the rest of the band (made up of two sets of brothers, Aaron and Bryce Dessner, and Scott and Bryan Devendorf) is having to drag the words out of him - except when he drops the baritone and begins, briefly, to scream. When that happens it's both shocking and amusing, and it reminds me of the first time I watched Joey play football, when I saw my normally languid, sophisticated brother - from whom you usually had to drag absolutely everything - explode with such force and speed that I wondered if it was really him out there.

There aren't any screamy moments on the new National album, but there are many Joey moments, moments that evoke both his life and his death. There's the song "Anyone's Ghost," the refrain of which is simply

Didn't want to be your ghost
Didn't want to be anyone's ghost


and which contains the lines

Go out at night with your headphones on, again
And walk through the Manhattan valleys of, the dead.


Joey was always walking through cities, including Manhattan, with his headphones on. Always. When I listen to this song I can picture him walking through, say, the East Village (through which an ex-girlfriend and I once spent the better part of an afternoon chasing him and his friend Ben, as they hopped from dive bar to dive bar [with the help of a NYC dive-bar guide I'd lent them] and repeatedly failed either to linger long enough for us to catch up or to keep us apprised of their next move), weaving his way through the crowds of NYU students, getting annoyed with the tourists, searching for some hot dog cart or a bakery he'd read about, and listening to this song on his iPod.

Here's a video:

Watching this, I notice that Berninger (the singer) not only acts and sounds like Joey, but he looks a little like him, too.

Mostly I've been listening to The National so much not because it has anything directly to do with Joey, but because their tone suits my own mood much of the time. Kate and I saw them when they came to Nashville in October. They were nattily dressed, they made snarky jokes to one another, Berninger was sloshing wine everywhere, and they made me cry with this song:

I'll leave you with this one, the standout track on the new album and one that most of you probably know. It makes me think of a) road trips and b) returning home to a place somewhere in the middle of the country that you left many years ago.

Bloodbuzz, Ohio:

The Road

Joey and I drove many times across the eastern half of the United States.  Even now, when I think about road trips, he is my default partner, the Smith to my Jones, the Pancho to my Lefty.  As children and teenagers we rode and drove all over the place - up to Colorado, out to California, across the Midwest to Philadelphia and back home through Virginia and Tennessee.  We first visited Charlottesville, VA, where he would end up attending college, on an early road trip together.  We stopped there with our grandfather on our way back from a visit to the ancestral homeland of Doylesburg, PA, where we had gone for the dedication of a new headstone for an ancestor who had fought in the American Revolution.  In Charlottesville, we stayed in a run-down Knight's Inn done up halfheartedly in Arthurian decor - wall sconces, exposed beams, pointed arches - where I vowed (falsely, as it would turn out) to one day spend my honeymoon.  Later on that trip, at a Cracker Barrel somewhere in Tennessee, Grandpa caused a slight stir when he objected vociferously to the green beans that they tried to serve him.  Grandpa did not like green beans.

When we were both living on the east coast - Joey in DC and Virginia, I in Boston and Philly and Western Mass. - we frequently arranged to drive home for Christmas together.  We tried to vary our route each time.  Once we headed due west across upstate New York and the tip-tops of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, in order to reach Iowa, where we had never been.  It was on this trip that we both visited Michigan for the first time, scooting across the Indiana border to a little town called Sturgis, where we ate some atrocious Chinese buffet food before scooting back over to I-90.  It remains my sole experience of Michigan.  Later that day we were chased across the campus of the University of Notre Dame by a foul-tempered red squirrel, an event that began with some slightly perplexed trotting and ended with a full-bore sprint into the bookstore, where we remained until the coast was clear.  We ended that day with burgers and beers in a quiet pub in Iowa City, a town full of Christmas cheer but utterly devoid of people, all of the university students having left town.  We really liked Iowa City.

We both took great pride in knowing the principal routes to or from places on the east coast.  On the phone, we would often debate the merits of taking I-64 through Kentucky instead of I-81 through Virginia (the consensus was that I-64 was just as pretty and not nearly as crowded) or I-70 rather than I-80/90 through the Midwest.  We both agreed that I-40 - with its heavy truck traffic, frequent construction, and crumbling surfaces - was the worst road in the country (even if it was the one we most frequently traveled).  Underutilized federal highways, such as US-72 through northern Mississippi and Alabama, were among the best.  Whenever possible we tried to escape the interstates and take the scenic route, following the blue highways in order to see something other than guardrails and taillights.  Our bibles were the Roadfood books of Jane and Michael Stern and George Motz's hamburger book, although we gradually decided that the former were much more discerning than the latter.  Joey, a great completer of lists, was especially determined to visit as many places in these books as he could, once spending a couple of weeks rambling through Texas and adjacent states with his friend Patrick eating barbecue, burgers, and anything else the guides pointed them towards.

We went many places on these trips.  Elvis's birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi.  A barbecue festival in Huntsville, Alabama, which we stumbled upon by accident.  Louisville, where we ate large pancakes.  Kansas City, where again we ate barbecue.  The Pie Shop in Devalls Bluff, Arkansas, where the proprietress insisted (despite our firm denials) that we must be twins - it was the first time someone had made that remark since we were little boys and really did look like twins.  Milwaukee was butter burgers and frozen custard.  Minneapolis was pie shakes and cheese-stuffed burgers.  Madison was deep-fried cheese curds.  We once had something called a pigsickle in Clinton, Oklahoma, which was essentially a McDonald's McRib Sandwich, but one that almost certainly came from an actual pig.  This restaurant was called Jiggs, and it was full of pigs of a more metaphorical kind as well - that is, local law enforcement officers.  Joey always made a snorting sound (like a pig) when he spotted a cop setting a speed trap on the highway (a practice that I've also adopted, much to the embarrassment of my wife), but he did not snort at the pigs we saw at Jiggs.

We had other road rituals besides snorting at law officers.  When we crossed a state line we would raise our hands about halfway off our laps and give a small, high-pitched "woo-hoo" (neither of us being too demonstrative, this was about all the enthusiasm we could muster).  This also is a practice that I continue, one in which Kate is a more willing participant.  We also listened to music.  Often we would buy or burn new CDs in anticipation of an upcoming trip, or we would use the long interstate hours to share with one another new albums that we particularly liked.  We usually tried to match the music to our environment: in Minnesota we listened to the Replacements, in Wisconsin it was the Violent Femmes, south of Chicago it was Sufjan Stevens' "Come on Feel the Illinoise."  Bob Dylan could be reliably deployed in just about any landscape, as, indeed, could any number of the country/alt.country/Americana artists we loved: Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Uncle Tupelo, Townes Van Zandt, Terry Allen.

Recently, Tina and Patrick discovered a band called Frontier Ruckus that would almost certainly have been a a Joey band.  It has all the makings: a rustic sound (with banjo, saw, etc), vibrant and intelligent and evocative lyrics, and just enough left-of-centerness to distinguish them from a thousand other rootsy, folksy bands.  Here's a song of theirs that's pretty good:

I listened to this album twice recently, once on my drive home for Christmas (leaving Fort Smith, Arkansas, alone on a foggy morning) and once on the drive back to Nashville (hurtling east out of OKC with Kate by my side).  It was kind of like having Joey in the car.  Kind of.

This summer, before the accident, Joey was planning to swing through Nashville on his way home, where he planned to spend a few weeks.  I was going to join him for the drive, and we were contemplating a side trip up to Omaha, since we'd never been to Nebraska.  He had been to 40 states (I'm still at 39) and intended to hit them all before too much longer - I'm not sure what his deadline was, but I am sure he had one.  I've decided that it's up to me (and anybody else who wants to come along) to complete the list for him, and sometime in the next few years Kate and I are going to head out west (where most of his unvisited states are) and begin crossing them off.  It may not happen all at once, but it might.  We'll start with Nebraska, I think, and try to end up in Alaska.  So that it rhymes.  And we'll bring along his Snoopy doll, and a roadfood book or two, and a bunch of new music that we haven't ever heard before.