Jun 20th, 2008 • Response
Categories • Songdiary
Tags • Chesney Hawkes, Color Me Badd, Danville, Dire Straits, EMF, Guns 'N' Roses, Jesus Jones, Johnee Pitdylidhink, list, Lists, Little Shawn, MTV, nostalgia, R.E.M., radio, Scorpions, Simply Red, WDNL
This is a repost of an article I wrote very shortly after starting up this website. I've gone back through and made some changes and clarifications, and thought it deserved a spot back at the top of the pile. :)
Click here to browse the weeklies.
Conceived and launched at the age of twelve, the Song Diary project has been around in various incarnations since 1991. It’s a record of my weekly listening habits and a timeline to reference particular points in my life as they correlate to the music I was listening to. The songs chosen may be new discoveries of mine or songs I'm already acquainted with that are significant for that particular week.
WHAT'S THE POINT?
There really isn't a point to it all. But there is a madness behind it! My personality is such that I feel compelled to chronicle items and events for later reference. Fortunately, I tend to be practical enough in deciding what should merit such time and energy, in my own opinion at least. Now, add to this a nostalgic obsession, and there you have it!
This is my excuse.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY "VARIOUS INCARNATIONS"?
Well, I haven't always approached the task the way I do now. Since about 2001, I have been keeping a record of songs on a weekly basis, but prior to that it was really more of a monthly, or seasonal thing. The change really came about when I made the switch from analog tapes to CDs. As any practiced mixtaper can tell you, making a mixtape is—in comparison to a mix CD—difficult business, requiring (among other things) a great deal of time. Back when I was using tapes, I simply didn't have the time or patience to invest on a weekly basis.
WHAT HAPPENED IN 1991 TO BRING ABOUT THIS ABERRANT BEHAVIOR?
That seems so long ago, being eleven years old. The details are hazy to say the least. I can't say for certain why it was that I began doing this, but I suspect that I was inspired by seeing various countdown-type segments on MTV. This was also around the same time that my interest in music really started to escalate. I was graduating from the role of 'passive listener' to 'active listener' – actively seeking out stuff to listen to whether it was newly released, top 40 radio fodder or not. It was also becoming clear at this point in my life that I was destined to a future of compulsive list-making, as evidenced by my well-preserved, top-left-corner stapled, multiple-page digest of any-and-all toll-free telephone numbers I could get my hands on. If you don't believe me, it's okay. While most preteen boys were out doing whatever it is that most preteen boys do, I was back at home jotting down phone numbers from TV and radio commercials, leaflets, pamphlets, brochures, food boxes, et al. Maybe someday I'll get around to providing actual examples. Maybe.
My memory of the project's inception is fuzzy to say the least, so I shall relate to you the contents of a handful of documents that I have kept all these years, and which are now sitting on the table in front of me. Since I have only a faint recollection for most of the details of these papers, there is an awkward detachment present, as I feel as though I should be able to confidently and succinctly explain this to you, but cannot meet that expectation without "filling in the blanks" to some degree.
Take, for example, the first page, which says:
Johnee Pitdylidhink
** Music Countdown **
for the MONTH of:
NOVEMBER
It should pain me to confess to you that I can offer no insight as to where I came up with the name Johnee Pitdylidhink or, moreover, why I felt the need to take such frivolous liberty in the spelling of the name. My previous stint as "Resident Poetry Analyst" for local radio station D-102 at the ripe age of ten might offer some clues, as I was consistently known to use the alias of Joe Stevenz during those broadcasts, and was, therefore, no stranger to the use of assumed names. I will detail these events in a separate post at some later date. Promise, promise.
That being said, I have flipped the page over, and will now share with you what is, by all accounts, the very first entry in the annals of the Songdiary. As a sidenote, I remember special ordering #3 and #4 from a local record shop when I was still living in Illinois, the name of which I can't recall at the moment.
J.Pitdylidhink Countdown:
Week of 11/03/91
Top 10 CASSETTE SINGLES
1. Color Me Badd - "All 4 Love"
2. EMF - "Lies"
3. R.E.M. - "Losing My Religion"
4. Dire Straits - "Money For Nothing"
5. R.E.M. - "Radio Song"
6. Guns 'N' Roses - "Don't Cry"
7. Scorpions - "Send Me An Angel"
8. Simply Red - "Something Got Me Started"
9. Jesus Jones - "Real Real Real"
10. Chesney Hawkes - "The One & Only"
May 8th, 2008 • Response
Categories • Music Reviews
Tags • R.E.M.
ALBUM REVIEW
The 14th album from R.E.M. succeeds in putting the band back on the right path. "Accelerate" holds it down rather well, drawing heavily from the voracity of "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" and the noisier moments of "Monster" and "Green". Buck-Mills-Stipe switch producers for this one, welcoming Jacknife Lee to the fold and closing out a ten-year run with Pat McCarthy; a pretty wise move if the stodgy clumsiness of the last two records are any indicator of the direction this album could’ve gone.
Notable Tracks:
1. Living Well Is The Best Revenge
3. Supernatural Superserious
6. Accelerate
8. Mr. Richards
9. Sing For The Submarine
Oct 10th, 2007 • Response
Categories • Lists, Music
Tags • Kate Bush, list, R.E.M., Sigur Rós, The Chameleons, The Sleepy Jackson
Can you spare five words for five of your favorite artists/bands? I'm using the top five from my Most Played Artists list courtesy of last.fm, but I suppose you could come up with a Top 5 of your own.
Post yours as a comment? Or as a link to your list on your own page? Maybe? Yes?
Kate Bush
Nothing quite like The Dreaming
Sigur Rós
My wondrous, private frozen utopia
The Sleepy Jackson
Soundtrack to teenage photo album
R.E.M.
Walkman saved me from somnolence
The Chameleons
Lifelong despair teeters on vindictiveness
May 10th, 2005 • Response
Categories • Unspecified
Tags • Colony Club, Livejournal, R.E.M.
I just realized that the quote I have taped to my bedroom window (facing out to the parking lot) from an R.E.M. song could be horribly misconstrued.
"Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy." "What's The Frequency, Kenneth?"
excerpt from lyrics
R.E.M.
Monster (1994)
While it is true that I am not very social when it comes to goings-on at the apartment with my 3 other roommates, and that I do tend to hole myself up in this room working on this or that, I'm now concerned that people seeing it might immediately assume that I am making some sort of statement about "me in my world" vs. "the world of everyone else in the apartment and the guests that come over that I haven't made much of an effort to get to know."
I certainly never meant it to mean that. I've just always liked that line. Could it have been an unconcious statement?
I took it down today.
Mar 21st, 2004 • Response
Categories • Lists, Music
Tags • 10‚000 Maniacs, Alice Cooper, Arab Strap, Bauhaus, Belle and Sebastian, Billy Bragg, Björk, Bright Eyes, Camelot Music, Cass McCombs, Chumbawamba, Crass, Dead Kennedys, Destroyer, Felt, highlight, Interpol, Jeffrey Lewis, John Lennon, Joy Division, Klaus Nomi, Kraftwerk, Less Than Jake, list, Livejournal, Madness, Madonna, Múm, Morrissey, Ms. John Soda, Neutral Milk Hotel, Nick Drake, Nirvana, Pet Shop Boys, Phantom Buffalo, Pink Floyd, Plastic Ono Band, Pork Pie Tribe, R.E.M., Radiohead, Serge Gainsbourg, Sigur Rós, Silver Jews, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sonic Youth, Talking Heads, The Beatles, The Cure, The Divine Comedy, The Doors, The Mountain Goats, The Pixies, The Specials, The Sugarcubes, The Toasters, The Vaselines, They Might Be Giants, Tina Turner, Tones On Tail, Tori Amos, Will Oldham, Yoko Ono
Destroyer is an unbelievable band.
All through my life, there have been these phases I've gone through.. with certain music artists. Because the mood strikes me right now, I am going to list them, my musical milestones, in order of exposure, to the best of my memory. I am only going to list the ones that are highly notable. There will of course be some oversights and omissions, which I will allow myself to correct whenever I notice them, by editing this entry. So, here goes…
Alice Cooper
This is notable because prior to Alice Cooper my musical exposure and taste had been completely a product of television and radio. Ever since I was very young (age six maybe?) I bought 45's at record stores and at places like Target and Kmart: Madonna, Tina Turner, the occasional one-hit wonder. When I was ten, I went to this summer day-camp at the YMCA in Illinois where I was living at the time. Everyday I would get dropped off at the YMCA in the morning and get picked up at about 5:00. Most of the time, us kids would ride out in the morning to Kickapoo State Park in two huge passenger vans, driven by the camp counselors. On our way there and on the way back in the afternoon, we would always listen to music, and it was seldom the radio. Kids would bring tapes to play, and the counselors had some of their own too. One tape that I remember the most was Alice Cooper's Trash. I don't recall who it belonged to and I can't say exactly why it appealed to me so much, but it really did. I ended up buying a copy for myself not too long after that, so between the bus rides and time spent alone in my room, I was listening to it a lot. The Alice Cooper story is still fun to relay to people to this day. I guess because it is such an unusual thing for me to have found myself immersed in at such a young age. The songs on Trash are explicitly adult in content; strong sexual and drug references and I must admit that at the time, I was completely oblivious. Choice tracks include "Poison," "Spark in the Dark" and "Hell Is Living Without Your Love."
R.E.M.
R.E.M. was huge in my life, and remained so for a very long time. I still listen to them but only occasionally. There was a time I would listen to them and only them. I have one thing in common with most R.E.M. fans I know, and that is my infatuation with them began in 1991 with the release of Out of Time and the single and video for "Losing My Religion." MTV and radio both played it to death but it was forgivable because it was such a good song and video. The song came out during a time in my life where I was still buying singles (though I had moved from vinyl to cassette by this point). The very special thing about my indoctrination into R.E.M. was that I found myself not only buying the entire album (on cassette of course) but also every cassette single I could find. Whenever they'd release a new song, I'd buy the single, mostly just for the sake of owning it. I was always very protective of my tapes, going so far as to be certain that the cassettes were inserted into the cardboard cover (remember: cassette singles) the same way each time so that the fatter side of the cassette (the bottom) always ran up and down the right-hand side of the cardboard cover. Things like this were extremely important to me, but I see that I am going off on a long tangent here. So anyway; Again, like most R.E.M. fans I know, from the release of Out of Time I proceeded to seek out and acquire as much of their back-catalog as I could find. Green came second, Eponymous came third and Document came fourth. The rest I am not certain about. R.E.M. were my first deeply impassioned musical interest; the first in a long line to come.
The Beatles
I remember going through this oldies phase, probably at the beginning of my 8th grade year. I can only attribute it to the fact that our family had just moved to Florida from Illinois, and the city we moved to (Naples) just so happened to have a really great oldies radio station. The Beatles were not a new name to me, by age fourteen I think it would be near-impossible to find someone who had not heard of The Beatles and knew at least some history behind them. They have such a mystique about them to someone who didn't know much about them or had heard little or none of their music. It was, I think, a John Lennon song that actually pushed my curiosity into a full-fledged search for both music and information. It was "Imagine." I remember calling the radio station to request it, and sitting there with a blank tape in the record deck waiting for it to come on. I would listen to it over and over, laying in bed at night, wondering what the goosebumps on my body were all about. The first albums I bought were the Greatest Hits albums 1964-1966 and 1967-1970. After that came Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Simultaneously, I was also learning as much as I could about the band and the individual members. The story of Lennon's death upset me terribly when I was first reading about it. John has always been my favorite. Around the same time I bought Shaved Fish by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band. After that came Double Fantasy by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. I even special-ordered Two Virgins from a local music store because of the controversy I had read about the album (John and Yoko appeared naked on the front cover and the inside sleeve and as a result, at the time of its original release the album was sold on store shelves in brown paper wrap). The funny thing was that it could only be ordered on CD and I did not have a CD player yet (one of those wouldn't come for several years after that). Nevertheless, I got the album, marveled at the cover and wondered what the music on the disc might sound like. (I did eventually get to hear the album which is entirely raw and experimental; depending on your definition, it might not best be called "music")
Other significant discoveries from this period of time that should be mentioned are the Pet Shop Boys (as well as a lot of popular music from the 80s), Pink Floyd and Sonic Youth.
The Smiths
Imagine yourself at fifteen years old, sexually curious and confused, entirely disillusioned by society as you know it (high school), far more cognitive than physically competitive and running to music and art like they were bomb shelters. The Smiths were the perfect soundtrack for my life at the time. The story of how I came to know them goes like this: I was shopping at Camelot, a music store in the mall, looking for Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation when I heard "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" playing overhead. I had no idea what it was so I walked up to the check-out counter and asked some guy what was playing. He told me, and although I initially heard him wrong, I did end up walking out of the store with Singles after spending probably about ten minutes looking for an album that had "I Have a Nose, I'm Miserable Now" on it.. before realizing my mistake and having a short, quiet laugh. Since that day, I've managed to get everything they ever released. The order as I remember it was Singles, Hatful of Hollow, Strangeways Here We Come, The Queen is Dead, Louder Than Bombs, The Smiths and Meat is Murder. After all of that came the realization that I had heard it all and that there was no more to be heard. I apprehensively started to listen to Morrissey's solo material, initially quite disappointed and opposed to the stuff, but eventually appreciating it just the same. Bona Drag and Vauxhall and I were the first to serenade me in my post-Smiths anxiety, and were followed closely by everything else. Surprisingly, it took me several years to appreciate Viva Hate, his first solo release.
Other significant discoveries from this period of time that should be mentioned are Nirvana, The Pixies, Radiohead, Tori Amos, Joy Division, The Vaselines and The Cure.
Then came a long slew of other discoveries which included an introduction to ska (Less Than Jake, Pork Pie Tribe, Madness, The Toasters and The Specials) as well as some other notable bands: Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Tones on Tail, Sisters of Mercy, Talking Heads, Bjork/The Sugarcubes, They Might Be Giants, The Doors and the Dead Kennedys.
Belle and Sebastian
My introduction to Belle and Sebastian marks the beginning of a series of prominent discoveries attributed entirely to my friend Kevin and certain circulating mix tapes. He had (what I would much later learn to be) If You're Feeling Sininster on one side of a cassette and selected tracks from the Lazy Line Painter Jane; Dog On Wheels; and 3..6..9 Seconds of Light! EPs on the other side. This tape was circulated around a lot and played in the background at different friends' houses. It initially struck me as the most darling thing I had ever heard; the poetic intellect and wit of The Smiths but without the outright cynicism and pessimism that Morrissey is known for. Soon I had everything they had released up to that point and ever since I have eagerly awaited new releases.
Other significant discoveries from this period of time that should be mentioned are Billy Bragg, 10,000 Maniacs, Crass and The Mountain Goats.
Yet another long list of discoveries which came after: Bright Eyes, Nick Drake, Neutral Milk Hotel, Chumbawamba, Felt, The Divine Comedy and Serge Gainsbourg.
Will Oldham
It should be said that prior to the Silver Jews and Will Oldham, I was vehemently opposed to anything that even resembled "country music." For reasons which I assume to be obvious, this type of music just wasn't for me. It didn't speak to me and I could not relate to it at all. There is something ingenious about Will Oldham (he has released music under a variety of monikers, either solo or in collaboration with other people: Bonnie Prince Billy, Palace, Palace Music, the Palace Brothers.. to name the prominent ones). His music is so versatile and his lyrics weave stories that are both captivating and eloquently emotional. Will Oldham came to me by way of a mix CD that I copied from my friend Amy (who would play a vital role in the next two years (and beyond..) in introducing me to new music) who had copied it from her friend Matt who lived in the same residence hall that she did at FSU in Tallahassee (Deviney Hall). I would later learn that the mix CD was simply two albums on one CD, with a couple tracks missing: Ease Down the Road and I See a Darkness. This has led to years of seeking out other Will Oldham material on the Internet, and forging a new path into other artists who sound similar.
Other significant discoveries from this period of time that should be mentioned are Interpol, Sigur Ros, Kraftwerk, Silver Jews, Mum and Ms. John Soda.
Destroyer
Another product of my undying friendship with Amy was Destroyer. Initially, I copied a CD she had; Destroyer's This Night. The album was immediately cherished, my favorite songs being "Chosen Few" and "Students Carve Hearts Out of Coal." I have since acquired all of their releases prior to This Night, and am presently immersed in their new release Your Blues, which is nothing short of amazing!
Other artists that have come into my life lately (this would be in the last year) who deserve mention are Cass McCombs, Jeffrey Lewis, The Ponys Postscript Sometime after this article was created, the Portland, Maine band The Ponys changed their name to Phantom Buffalo. , Arab Strap and Klaus Nomi.
