Just listened to: False Lankum (2023) by Lankum. Irish folksters whelming their traditional ballads with walls of dark sound. They start off most tracks playing, singing, and often harmonizing rawly and beautifully. (The color of the harmonies sometimes gives gives a clue of what’s to come.) Then they keep singing while they bury the songs in mountains of dark, wrenching sonic peat harvested from the banks of the five rivers of Hades. They do it often and consistently enough to call it a schtick, but to call it that is to undersell its power. I can’t recommend the whole without reservation because there’s sometimes too much noise for my taste. However, the album deserves the raves it has received, as well as a good single listen from you and a place on your Halloween playlists. As for me, I’m sure as hell going to dig into their back catalog.

🎧 🎵 The Monkees (1966) by The Monkees: Sunshine, melodies, Micky Dolenz’ voice, energetic session musicians, contemporary Beatles imitation, and a heap of goofballism. One of several album-length reasons I count 1966 as my one favorite years in pop.

🎧 🎵 The Band (1969) by The Band: If rock music had emerged in the 19th century instead of the 20th. Rootsy dad-rock of the first order, always loose yet somehow always tight, featuring three different lead vocalists—always a plus in my book—as part of a rock quintet who is also on the record playing fiddle, mandolin, accordion, trombone, tuba, various saxophones, melodica, and slide trumpet.

🎧 🎵 slutte og byne (2020) by Valkyrien Allstars: Generously arranged Norwegian prog folk rock fronted by a winsomely simple-toned, frequently double-tracked alto named Tuva. Winner of a Norwegian Grammy Award in 2020. My favorite musical find during our family time in Norway. Also my most recent CD acquisition.

🎧 🎵 The Score (1996) by Fugees: The beats, the rhymes, the flow, and her singing (sometimes in harmony with herself). A hip-hop feast.

🎧 🎵 Ram (1971) by Paul and Linda McCartney.

An oddball, trifling McCartney album I enjoy front to back. (One of only two.) Proof that music need not be deep to be good. The most Beatlesy of all their solo albums, full of fun melodies, interesting chord progressions, charmingly goofy singing, and production that’s generous without ever falling into schmaltz. It’s fun to picture Paul enjoying cutting records with his wife! (And I’ll listen to Linda over Yoko any day.) The album is not the headwaters of indie pop, as has been claimed; that’s the Beach Boys’ two 1967 albums. But it is a very good early exemplar. The only criticism I’ll brook is that it may come across at times a tinch too self-consciously mannered.

As I age, I find I’m less of a Lennon guy and more of a McCartney guy. Is that progress? Is that common?

🎧 🎵 I’m glad I kept my CD copy of Superchic[k]’s Karaoke Superstars. Cute, catchy, honest, lightly theistic punk-pop whose lead vocalist was clearly in her early twenties when she wrote it but was nevertheless equipped with the kind of wisdom that twenty-somethings need.

🎧 🎵 I happened across a CD copy of local bluegrass stalwarts Tussey Mountain Moonshiners’ 2016 album SHINE last year at the AAUW used book sale. It cost me a dollar. It’s (more than) good enough to make me feel as if I have stolen from them.

On having “enough” time to write songs:

One of the main ways we cheat ourselves out of creating is the widely held belief that we need the right amount of time to make something of value—to make something worthwhile. We often resist a moment of inspiration because we’re aware of a limited time window that might interrupt the flow and therefore think, “It’s not even worth it to get started because I know I won’t be able to finish it.”

— Jeff Tweedy • How to Write One Song: Loving the Things We Create and How They Love Us Back (2020)

On just creating, damnit:

But all the time spent creating, if I’m in the right frame of mind, is not really so much about “Is this good or bad?” There’s just a lot of joy in it, in having created something at all. I don’t feel as bad about other things. I don’t necessarily feel high, or overly joyed. I just feel like, “Oh, I’m not wasting my time.”

— Jeff Tweedy • How to Write One Song: Loving the Things We Create and How They Love Us Back (2020)

On writing without thinking about what you’re writing about:

Creating something out of nothing is the important part. And maybe, like me, you’ll discover that you’re often better off learning how to write without much concern for what you’re writing about. And through that process, you’ll discover what is on your mind. “Jesus, Etc.” was never about anything specific to me until I sang it live for the first time and learned how sincerely it conveyed my wish for a better sense of unity with my extremely devout Christian neighbors. So do some free writing. Write without thinking. I’m sure there will be some things that will surprise you, along with some nonsense.

— Jeff Tweedy • How to Write One Song: Loving the Things We Create and How They Love Us Back (2020)

Just listened to: The Goat Rodeo Sessions (2011) by Stuart Duncan, Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer & Chris Thile. A chamber-grass masterclass. 🎧 🎵

If Spotify “DJ” interrupts my listening one more time, I will switch to Apple Music.

“Orange Crush” (1988) sounds like R.E.M. had been listening to a lot of U2.

I do confess my having daydreamed today about fronting a U2 and Britpop cover band with college friends Aaron G., Jason, Aaron R., and Adam R., with Josh A. joining for acoustic numbers.

Ironically, and with apologies to Josh, it was late U2 (“Red Flag Day”) that first inspired the daydream. Also, friend of friend Chris F. was there, too, but I wasn’t sure how to fit in so many guitarists.

Scott: What needs to happen for a bill to become law?
Éa: Oh, I know! The bill needs to sing a song! 🎵

Things I learned yesterday:

• It is inadvisable to begin working out at 9 PM. Choose sleep over exercise every time.
• Graeme hates the Beatles.
• My “metanoiac” theory of the atonement, which I attempted to explain to Mark Troyer, has legs and probably ought to be written out.
• Wearing masks all day at work feels tiresome.
• The Christmas party at work has been canceled.

Man, that piccolo really makes your biceps pop!

— Sullivan

Oh, that? That’s just smooth jazz. Nothing to worry about.

— Sullivan, replying to an inquiry over his headset while playing Minecraft one night

Remember that if it’s late in the evening and you’re tired but don’t think it best to go to bed just yet, listening to music is the perfect fit.

Perhaps the joy is lost from listening to and making music largely because it feels desultory: There’s no goal. At least, that’s what it seems like the Spirit may be saying as I possibly discerned on my walk to and from Gary Abdullah’s house to drop off an apology note written by Sullivan for his having tripped over an electrical cord and unplugged Inflatable Christmas Countdown Santa. So, here’s a goal in the absence of a relish for musical theatre, anthem gigs at college basketball games, Puddintown Roots, and the Choral Society: Build your repertoire book.

“Being incarnate was an embarrassment, a design-fault that God may have intended in the Italians but surely not in the English.”

On the English supposed “quiet suspicion of sensuality” that he saw in the old English. It made me laugh out loud.

“Sexual puritanism is an attempt to safeguard possessions more valuable than pleasure. The good that it does outweighs the evil, the English knew this. They were seriously repressed, largely because repression prevented them from carelessly throwing away those things—chastity, marriage and the family—which slip so easily from the grasp of people whose natural tendency is to keep each other at a distance.”

This captures why my sexual ethics.

“Much as we should be grateful for the language and liturgy of the Anglican Church, we must deplore the weird interdiction which killed of polyphony at the very moment when Tallis and Byrd…had learned to rival Palestrina and Victoria in this supremely religious art form.”

The Anglicans outlawed polyphony?

“Jesus, the first and last, On thee my soul is cast: Thou didst the work begin By blotting out my sin; Thou wilt the root remove, And perfect me in love.

“Yet when the work is done The work is but begun: Partaker of thy grace, I long to see thy face; The first I prove below, The last I die to know” (105, from the Book of Common Prayer).

It’s the last couplet that excites me most.

“…we belted out this famous hymn…to the music of Mendelssohn, that gentle fellow-traveller of the Christian faith whom Queen Victoria, then head of the Anglican Church, took to her heart, as the Church did also, despite the fact, and also because of the fact, that he was a Jew.”

Mendelssohn was a Jew!? He has written some of the strongest Christian sacred music of all time!

“…and the very irrelevance to the surrounding world of everything he knew made the learning of it all the more rewarding” (167).

Is this true?

“By devoting their formative years to useless things, they made themselves supremely useful” (170).

A rhetorically fun point that Scruton makes about English Liberal Arts education. I do wonder if it’s true.

“How, for example, can you represent the interests of dead and unborn Englishmen, merely by counting the votes of the living? And how, in a system where important issues are determined by majority voting, do we protect the dissident minority, the individual eccentric, the person who will not or cannot conform?” (174)

I love the idea of thinking in terms of representing future, unborn compatriots in one’s government. And I appreciate Scruton’s praise for the common law in England which enables such lawmaking.

“Without what Freud call the ‘work of mourning’ we are diminished by our losses, and unable to live to the full beyond them” (244).

I know this to be true. I wonder whether I’m doing it for my mom. I want to make sure I make plenty space for others to mourn when I die.

“For dead civilizations can speak to living people, and the more conscious they are while dying, the more fertile is their influence thereafter” (244).

The same is true of dead people. I wish to be conscious while I’m dying.

Scruton, Roger. England : an elegy. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000. Print.

Hymns are the way to catechize the kids.

Feminism is chivalry.

This spoken after I saw a gal at Torta’s wearing a “Girls to the Front” jacket, which has something to do with Riot Grrrrls, which is a feminist music movement out of the Pacific Northwest.

Even though my feet ache, I’m still gonna rock and shake!

— Éa, in the middle of a marathon of energetic dancing at Megan’s wedding