Discography Year Two - Week 29

The esteemed Cyndi B. and I returned from Jordan less than a week ago.  It was an extraordinary trip, the best one I've ever run, for any number of reasons.  If you follow this blog along its non-musical paths you'll eventually get more Jordan than you can handle.  It is my favorite place,  not simply my favorite overseas location, but my favorite spot here on Allah's green earth (although there's not a lot of green there).  While we were exploring the northern city of Jerash (home of the best-preserved Roman ruins in the world) we stumbled across a family of Syrian refugees from the city of Alleppo.  Our most excellent guide Mahmoud arranged for us to talk to them.  The discussion started off with the Syrian mother, through translation, telling us that some westerner walking around the ruins have given her daughter money and she wanted to know if it was us.  We had to tell her no.  She wanted to know because she was insistent on giving the money back.  It was important to her - and her mind important for us to know - that they weren't there in Jordan not because they were looking for a handout, but simply because they didn't want to be slaughtered.  We talked for a goodly amount of time, and as we were leaving the mother said to us, without a hint of irony, "Do you have Syrian refugees in America?"  The students grew very quiet.  As we were walking down a Roman road in the gloaming one of the students came up to me and said, "You know, we just suck as a country.  Seriously, we suck."  As I am wont to opine. trips are planned on epic adventures but determined by small moments; this was one of those moments that the students will never forget.

Our student Hannah taking the lead talking to the Syrian family.

Dave Wallace

The National - Squalor Victoria

I've already posted about my love for Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-bred The National, and I'm very excited that they are going to be curating and headlining a two-day festival in Cincinnati at the end of April.  They'll be the closing act both nights and, on the second evening, they'll be playing The Boxer in its entirety.  While High Violet is probably my favorite album by The National, The Boxer is also terrific.  In anticipation of the show, I've chosen Squalor Victoria from that album.

Dave Kelley

"But I ride by night

and I travel in fear

That in this darkness

I might just disappear"

"Stolen Car"  Alternate version  Bruce Springsteen

     Cars are obviously an image used by Bruce many times over the years.  Often the car is a symbol of freedom and endless possibilities.  With the right girl and the right car and an the right stretch of road, everything is possible.  "We're pulling out of here to win."  That metaphor almost became a cliché in his work.  Increasingly though, his references to cars and the open road have become much more somber and melancholy.  In "A Cautious Man" the protagonist who is starting to feel trapped by his marriage leaves his sleeping wife in bed and walks down to the highway in the middle of the night.  Yet when he got there "he didn't find nothing but road."   Bruce put a bullet in the head of the romance of the car in his music right there.

     Isolation is virtually always a very dark and dangerous thing in Bruce world.  In some ways, a motor vehicle is isolation personified.  It can just be you, your bad intentions, and nothing else.  "State Trooper" off of "Nebraska" is just a terrifying song.  The protagonist is a man filled with rage and violence who is hoping that the cop does not pull him over, because that would be a mistake that the officer would not be likely to survive.  Steve Earle once said that if the Townes Van Zant song "Lungs" doesn't scare the shit out of you, you need to listed harder.  I would put State Trooper in that category as well.  The protagonist isn't traveling, he is metastasizing.  

     I have always really liked the version of "Stolen Car" from "The River" record.  However, I much prefer the alternate take released on "The Promise" which came out several years ago.  The singer's marriage has fallen apart, and he spends his nights driving around in stolen cars hoping to be caught.  He is both longing for and terrified of oblivion.  I totally get that dichotomy in my weaker moments.  Plus, any chance to hear Roy Bittan step out on the piano is always a good thing.

     I am not sure what put this song in my head.  Those of us in town who loved the late great Gary Beatrice got together over the weekend to informally celebrate what a fun and funny person he was.  We have all really struggled with what happened to him and continue to do so.  It was very nice to spend a few hours enjoying the companionship of others who share the pain as well as the great memories.  It was quite the opposite of the isolation expressed by the protagonist from "Stolen Car."  Maybe that is what made me choose this song.  As with most things involving my thought process, who the fuck really knows.     

Alice Neiley

Hello fellow blog-contributors! Sorry about my absence last week, but I believe (unlike others, Scudder) that my excuse was legitimate. 

Anyway, I'd planned to continue my 90s shtick this week with the top 5 of what I call the Barely-Rock-and-Rollers (dudes who have great songs, hits even, but songs that can't in any good conscience be called rock, and thus have no real genre), but I'll have to save that for another time. 

Instead, I'm borrowing a page from Scudder's "whatever I'm listening to at the moment inspires my post" book. 

I was driving home to Ottawa this evening, listening a half-completed Spotify playlist I'm working on, and trying to imagine what other songs should be on it, when Spotify did that thing where it starts to offer songs it thinks you might enjoy. I'll be honest, I like only about half their recommendations, but man did the algorithm nail it this time. 

I'm familiar with the band, Joseph, but was not familiar with their song "Honest" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qracGc_Taog, which, if I was in my usual melancholy driving mood, would have probably made me cry. 

 It isn't particularly sad in melody (though it is in a minor key: Em), nor are the lyrics sad, but they're so TRUE. So, if I'd been in my usual mood, I would have likely teared up, once again, because music (especially certain music) has always made me feel so darn understood, more understood than I feel with most people. 

Perhaps it feels extra true because we're deep into a discussion of duality in my Heroes and Heroines course, and while the idea of two seemingly contradictory thoughts or emotions being true at once is often a hard thing for me to accept, I know deep down that the moments when that becomes clear represent existence at its finest. 

I know I'm pretending
When I try to have an answer
It's not what I intended
And I don't know what comes after

There's always two thoughts
One after the other:
I'm alone
No you're not
I'm alone no you're not

Those lyrics in combination with the way the song shifts back and forth from gentle to more aggressive instrumentation, and from a haunting single voice to vocal harmonies that have a pulse all their own, well...it's just so...ablaze with humanness. 

(Btw...here's the acoustic version, which might even be better? I can't quite decide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eGVGwuNukU)

Gary Scudder

Neil Young, The Restless Consumer

This song is both typically and atypically Neil Young.  It certainly doesn't sound like a NY song, but the theme is classic Young.  Even if you don't like Young you have to admit that few people have provided a more consistent and sincere clarion call for what is right, even if it often left him a very lonely voice in the wilderness.  The Restless Consumer is from the underrated Living With War album.  I don't know if there are truly any great songs on the album, but Young was focused in like a laser in ways that were rare on his later work.   It's an honest to goodness, unabashed anti-war album in an age when not only do we unconsciously live with war, but also consciously and deliberately, and almost priapically, celebrate it.  It's a sad reflection of our age that the album was just viewed as the ranting of an old hippie who didn't understand the changing world.  Living With War, indeed. Essentially, I think this ties back to the comments that started this posting: we suck. It's fifteen years since the start of the disastrous invasion of Iraq that Young raged against in Living With War, and people are still dying because of that vanity project.