is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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How You Know You Love It.
I�ve had Seatbacks and Traytables stuck in my head for days now. Not like I�ve been in a plane crash (which reminds me of that great Joe Henry song �Ohio Air Show Plane Crash�) and actually have seatbacks and traytables rammed into my head. Why so literal?! No, Seatbacks and Traytables is a song on the new FoW album. And it is rammed into my head. Gus managed to get rid of it for me for a few hours this morning with some choice song selections. But as soon as I got back to my house and started to work, there it was again, interrupting my students� papers.
It�s not such a bad thing. In fact it is a very good song. However, if I ask myself why it is a good song, and why it won�t leave me to my work, I realize that my love for it might have to be filed under the category: idiosyncratic. The song can, I assure you, stand on its own as a good song, worth listening to over and over and perhaps having rammed into one�s head for days at a time. (Perhaps you have thoughts on this?) But my own reasons for dwelling with it comprise the strange experience of finding one�s �personal� mixed with what is unmistakably public� as when someone you care about makes a widely available product of something that you also value as meaningful when you have time alone or in a small group with that person. Knowing musicians and writers makes this happen all the time.
In this instance what I mean is that there�s something about the way Chris puts words together, the order in which he does so, and the rhythms he falls into, that I find compelling, and that sticks with me. That is true also of all my good friends, and of all my favorite writers whether I know them or not. Their words and their rhythms inhabit my brain space and affect my own (words, rhythms, thoughts), so that it�s never clear who is the author of anything. Except that often, in the most simple sense, it is clear who is the author of what. For instance, I am writing this right now. But in the background there are so many other voices: writers, philosophers, poets, friends, regional forms of diction, the indecision of nature/nurture that is the effect of being raised in a place by people with their own influences and ideas. All that.
(Think of how, when Josiah wrote in response to my post on Wallace Stevens, there was something Stevensish in not only the timbre but the content of what he said. Same with Sara when she wrote to me: �i still get lines of stevens running through my mind, especially �blessed rage for order, pale ramon, our maker's rage to order words of the sea� or something like that, from �the idea of order at key west.� very nietzschean. i also loved �sunday morning.� that wide water, without sound.�)
For me, with Stevens, it�s more like this: �Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea / Of this invention, this invented world, / The inconceivable idea of the sun. // You must become an ignorant man again / And see the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see it clearly in the idea of it. // Never suppose an inventing mind as source / Of this idea nor for that mind compose / A voluminous master folded in his fire. // How clean the sun when seen in its idea, / Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven / That has expelled us and our images � // The death of one god is the death of all. / Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest, / Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber, // Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was / a name for something that never could be named. / There was a project for the sun and is. // There is a project for the sun. The sun / Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be / In the difficulty of what it is to be.� (First section of the part of �Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction� called �It must be abstract.�)
You think this isn�t related but it is! All it takes is me hearing the words �Seatbacks and traytables up / Stow your newspapers and cups,� sung in a certain kind of voice in a certain kind of melody, and my heart gets all melty and slightly alone-feeling, despite the obvious lack of melt-causing sentiment in those words. It is impossible to say for certain whether this all occurs because I know Chris and his words, or whether there is just something in his choices of musical phrasing that prey on certain loves I have of music�another indecision of nature/nurture that I feel no compulsion to push into further discernibility. Because loves are things that can�t (or, more precisely, shouldn�t) be pushed like that.
Anyway, I love Adam�s crazy-prolific-prodigious reference-tastic funny-smart songwriting (for instance, this, on the new album: �I saw you / holding hands / with some guy wearing light blue dockers pants / and I thought / that I might just give you a chance / to explain / what the hell is in your brain�� Now that is something I would definitely sing more than once while riding in a car with someone like Jeff, who would just look at me like he couldn�t understand how I could be smart and so silly all at once. It�s a particular look that I like pulling out of his face whenever I can.), and his skill to the point of emotional-manipulation with pop-musical phrasing. But I think FoW might be best when the tendencies of both Adam and Chris balance each other and work together, rather than inhabiting different spheres so that each is experienced as a break from the other. Is that what has happened? I�m not sure. One can never really be clear�and, really, why should one have to be clear on such a thing�in an Adam-and-Chris teaming, whose humor and whose intelligence and whose skill with musical reference and composition is at front at any given point. They're quite a team, and I can't pretend to know much at all about the songwriting process undertaken by the band. I�m not yet sure what I think about Traffic and Weather overall. It is certainly getting wildly mixed reviews, from pans to praising. I think that must be a good thing. Better to be loved and hated than to be so universally palatable that admiration amounts to a kind of indifference after some passing of time. So far all I can say is this: I lovelove a couple of the songs. I know I will really like a few others. I appreciate the overt 60s and 70s thing that happens in a lot of the songs, heading towards cleaned-up psychedelia or even hitting us with Chicago-style horns. Well, the horns do freak me out on some level but I appreciate the Chicagoisms at the same time. There are some different things happening on this record, and I like it when bands do that. But there are also some things I don�t like, and I haven�t quite formulated what they are yet.
But here�s another good thing: What was evidence of Chris� C&W tendencies on FoW�s last album �ever since you hung up on me / I�m hung up on you� is better because less cleverish this time: �was it driving together / that drove us apart / or did we change direction / chasing arrows and hearts?� Really good.
However, on the topic of chasing hearts, right now the album I�m really in love with is A.C. Newman�s The Slow Wonder. Sure, it�s a few years old, but I�m not hip anymore so none of that matters. You should get it. Not only is it full of great songs, but there�s a cute photo of a cat�s nose in the cover. It may take you more than one listen to recognize how much you love it. But sometimes it�s good when something has to win you over, rather than just coming at you all assured of its own charms, no?
3:55 p.m. - April 08, 2007
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