1: It's time, again, for a new beginning
As usual, the rich get richer and the quarantine has been a godsend for me. It has given me plenty of free time, in the truest sense, to do something I don't normally do: concentrate on myself. It would be so easy to have a midlife crisis right now, and because I've been stable for so long no one could begrudge me. Right?
But instead, in a Shyamalan-style twist, I've actually gotten some clarity on what I'd like to accomplish on a daily basis.
With that in mind, I've started this blog on a whim. I was pretty surprised to see the domain name was only $12/year. When I registered my first domain almost twenty years ago, it cost more than five times that. The savings alone was enough to make me finally pull the trigger on a new project.
I have some big picture goals for this project that I'm sharing here. In a perfect world, some years from now, I can look back on this post with pride. Or I can delete it.
GOALS
1) Create and share original music and writing, improving through practice
2) Connect with other people
3) Express myself by sharing music and videos that have moved or influenced me
One thing I'm not going to do is take the journey as seriously as I normally would. It has been more than ten years since I've been in a gigging band or published writing to a significant readership. How this happens is not important; but it must happen.
I'll never forget how much I cared what people thought about me back then. Wanting to prove some people wrong and impress others was both the driving force and the fatal flaw behind my creativity. Now, I'm doing it for me...because I feel like I have to. ...and the reason I feel that I have to is because I'm still moved on a daily basis by art.
Music, specifically. I've been a fanatic and critical consumer of music for more than thirty years. A few key dates:
1988 (Five years old) - Super early memory of shopping for 7" singles with my mom and dad at Radio Doctors Records in Milwaukee. My pick was Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" with the instrumental on the b-side. My mom and dad got a pile of records that I listened to countless times. My sister probably remembers them all but at the moment I can only remember The Moody Blues "Your Wildest Dreams" and Fine Young Cannibals "She Drives Me Crazy". Everyone in the family loved "She Drives Me Crazy" so much we actually bought the entire album later on CD, and that was a big deal back then!
1989 - I heard Carl Douglas' "Kung Fu Fighting" randomly on the radio and became absolutely crazed. It was the coolest, catchiest, most written-for-a-six-year-old song I'd ever heard and I absolutely needed it. In a hilarious throwback to pre-internet suffering, I essentially took my father hostage and forced him to drive me around for days looking for a copy of the record...which for some reason was hard to find? We finally found a guy at an Appleton record store (an hour from home round trip) who agreed to dub the song onto a blank cassette for us from his record and my poor father fired up the Corolla and promptly drove me over there. As usual, my parents were crazy supportive when it came to my interest in music and I love them for it. And, for the record, I played the fuck out of that tape!
1990 - At this point I was officially living for music and I had my tape player going every second I wasn't in class. First grade with Mrs. Franz, I think. I had an absolutely incredible 7th birthday party at our house on Fiesta in Green Bay. My parents did an incredible job inviting all my friends, all my sister's friends, all of their friends. It was a banger! I had given a list of all the stuff I wanted to my parents and they had gotten it to my friends' parents, so my gifts were spot on with what I wanted: squirt guns, gross snot-related puddies and goos, and hot action figures like Battle Beasts and Super Naturals. The last gift was from my friend Nick Hendricks who was a close friend and key music related connection for a huge part of my life. He got me Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" on tape at Sam Goody. After everyone left, I listened to the tape twice and promptly threw out my squirt guns and action figures. I kept the goos.
I could go on, and I will in future posts. What's important right now, on May 3rd, 2020, is that I'm moved by music and art now more than ever. At night, as I'm getting ready to fall asleep, I often feel a strong sadness that I'm not writing and performing music for a living. The rub is that I absolutely love my life and, outside of the actual creation and performance of music, I doubt I would enjoy being a musician. I tried it twice and it was a difficult, lonely, incredibly unreliable profession. But I can't escape that sadness, the dream of being a musician like a phantom limb.
I'm really excited to not take this project too seriously and let it be what it is. I have a strange feeling that it'll be easier to achieve my goals if I start at the beginning.
With all that said, as much for myself as for anyone else who may be reading this, I'm going to conclude with a few songs that have been inspiring and impressing me recently. Some of these will not be for everyone, and some of them may even be for no one, but I'm really into capturing a snapshot of place and time, and once again music does that best for me.
WORM OUROBOROS - A BIRTH AND A DEATH
I had seen the name of this band several times over the years, they are/were on one of my favorite metal labels but I had never actually heard them. When I finally listened to their albums I was both surprised and impressed. While they do have some loud metal passages the music is mostly neo-folk with delicate vocals and lots of open space. I feel like this would be played the best renaissance fair imaginable. It'll be one of my go-to "metal" recommendations for people that don't like loud music going forward.
LA Priest - OCCASION
I found this artist by way of a Brazilian music blog and this song made it into heavy rotation around our house. It is like listening to Prince without Prince, and since Prince is dead I think that's OK. One area I'm really looking to improve my songwriting is atmosphere, empty space. Basically musical patience - and this song is a great slow burn with plenty of room to breathe. "That's baby-makin' music, that's what that is."
PULLEY - GONE
Yes, I will still be listening to skate punk when I'm 80 years old, god willing. Thirty years into a genre that only lasted ten, I'm still finding new songs that I love. This song is an absolute rager that, in typical pop-punk fashion, only needs two minutes to get its entire point across. Fun trivia: the lead singer is Scott Radinsky, who was an MLB relief pitcher for eleven years. Talented fucking guy. "Save it for later - that's what we always said."
STARKWEATHER - SLITHER
This band (and song) have been around forever and I remember hearing about how loud and insane they were way back in 1995. The local skate shop "Surfin' Bird" had a copy of their album "Into the Wire" which featured a seriously gruesome cover and macabre song titles like "Murder in Technicolor" and "Shards". To the absolute delight of 12-year-old me, the store had placed a handwritten warning sticker on the CD that said, "NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART". My god were they right! They rerecorded and fleshed out their old song "Slither" for their 2005 album "Croatoan" and it is an appropriately winding, hard to grasp song with a soul rending conclusion that makes it hard not to lose your mind.
BRANDON FLOWERS - DIGGIN' UP THE HEART
Just as I was getting serious about songwriting, The Killers were hitting it big and ushering in a very brief but awesome revival of 80s pop-rock that was actually GOOD. Their singles were catchy and likable and really appealed to everyone. This is from Brandon's second solo album and it is a seriously competent throwback to 80s rock, specifically what I like to think of as the golden age of movie soundtracks like Footloose and Top Gun, where the songs felt like stories and you could see the movie in your head. This song is catchy, unique, and feels more like a movie than a song.
Thank you very much for reading some or all of this, the first post of my new project. Lots of love from me, my wife, and our cats.
-Jack
But instead, in a Shyamalan-style twist, I've actually gotten some clarity on what I'd like to accomplish on a daily basis.
With that in mind, I've started this blog on a whim. I was pretty surprised to see the domain name was only $12/year. When I registered my first domain almost twenty years ago, it cost more than five times that. The savings alone was enough to make me finally pull the trigger on a new project.
I have some big picture goals for this project that I'm sharing here. In a perfect world, some years from now, I can look back on this post with pride. Or I can delete it.
GOALS
1) Create and share original music and writing, improving through practice
2) Connect with other people
3) Express myself by sharing music and videos that have moved or influenced me
One thing I'm not going to do is take the journey as seriously as I normally would. It has been more than ten years since I've been in a gigging band or published writing to a significant readership. How this happens is not important; but it must happen.
I'll never forget how much I cared what people thought about me back then. Wanting to prove some people wrong and impress others was both the driving force and the fatal flaw behind my creativity. Now, I'm doing it for me...because I feel like I have to. ...and the reason I feel that I have to is because I'm still moved on a daily basis by art.
Music, specifically. I've been a fanatic and critical consumer of music for more than thirty years. A few key dates:
1988 (Five years old) - Super early memory of shopping for 7" singles with my mom and dad at Radio Doctors Records in Milwaukee. My pick was Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" with the instrumental on the b-side. My mom and dad got a pile of records that I listened to countless times. My sister probably remembers them all but at the moment I can only remember The Moody Blues "Your Wildest Dreams" and Fine Young Cannibals "She Drives Me Crazy". Everyone in the family loved "She Drives Me Crazy" so much we actually bought the entire album later on CD, and that was a big deal back then!
1989 - I heard Carl Douglas' "Kung Fu Fighting" randomly on the radio and became absolutely crazed. It was the coolest, catchiest, most written-for-a-six-year-old song I'd ever heard and I absolutely needed it. In a hilarious throwback to pre-internet suffering, I essentially took my father hostage and forced him to drive me around for days looking for a copy of the record...which for some reason was hard to find? We finally found a guy at an Appleton record store (an hour from home round trip) who agreed to dub the song onto a blank cassette for us from his record and my poor father fired up the Corolla and promptly drove me over there. As usual, my parents were crazy supportive when it came to my interest in music and I love them for it. And, for the record, I played the fuck out of that tape!
1990 - At this point I was officially living for music and I had my tape player going every second I wasn't in class. First grade with Mrs. Franz, I think. I had an absolutely incredible 7th birthday party at our house on Fiesta in Green Bay. My parents did an incredible job inviting all my friends, all my sister's friends, all of their friends. It was a banger! I had given a list of all the stuff I wanted to my parents and they had gotten it to my friends' parents, so my gifts were spot on with what I wanted: squirt guns, gross snot-related puddies and goos, and hot action figures like Battle Beasts and Super Naturals. The last gift was from my friend Nick Hendricks who was a close friend and key music related connection for a huge part of my life. He got me Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" on tape at Sam Goody. After everyone left, I listened to the tape twice and promptly threw out my squirt guns and action figures. I kept the goos.
I could go on, and I will in future posts. What's important right now, on May 3rd, 2020, is that I'm moved by music and art now more than ever. At night, as I'm getting ready to fall asleep, I often feel a strong sadness that I'm not writing and performing music for a living. The rub is that I absolutely love my life and, outside of the actual creation and performance of music, I doubt I would enjoy being a musician. I tried it twice and it was a difficult, lonely, incredibly unreliable profession. But I can't escape that sadness, the dream of being a musician like a phantom limb.
I'm really excited to not take this project too seriously and let it be what it is. I have a strange feeling that it'll be easier to achieve my goals if I start at the beginning.
With all that said, as much for myself as for anyone else who may be reading this, I'm going to conclude with a few songs that have been inspiring and impressing me recently. Some of these will not be for everyone, and some of them may even be for no one, but I'm really into capturing a snapshot of place and time, and once again music does that best for me.
WORM OUROBOROS - A BIRTH AND A DEATH
I had seen the name of this band several times over the years, they are/were on one of my favorite metal labels but I had never actually heard them. When I finally listened to their albums I was both surprised and impressed. While they do have some loud metal passages the music is mostly neo-folk with delicate vocals and lots of open space. I feel like this would be played the best renaissance fair imaginable. It'll be one of my go-to "metal" recommendations for people that don't like loud music going forward.
LA Priest - OCCASION
I found this artist by way of a Brazilian music blog and this song made it into heavy rotation around our house. It is like listening to Prince without Prince, and since Prince is dead I think that's OK. One area I'm really looking to improve my songwriting is atmosphere, empty space. Basically musical patience - and this song is a great slow burn with plenty of room to breathe. "That's baby-makin' music, that's what that is."
PULLEY - GONE
Yes, I will still be listening to skate punk when I'm 80 years old, god willing. Thirty years into a genre that only lasted ten, I'm still finding new songs that I love. This song is an absolute rager that, in typical pop-punk fashion, only needs two minutes to get its entire point across. Fun trivia: the lead singer is Scott Radinsky, who was an MLB relief pitcher for eleven years. Talented fucking guy. "Save it for later - that's what we always said."
STARKWEATHER - SLITHER
This band (and song) have been around forever and I remember hearing about how loud and insane they were way back in 1995. The local skate shop "Surfin' Bird" had a copy of their album "Into the Wire" which featured a seriously gruesome cover and macabre song titles like "Murder in Technicolor" and "Shards". To the absolute delight of 12-year-old me, the store had placed a handwritten warning sticker on the CD that said, "NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART". My god were they right! They rerecorded and fleshed out their old song "Slither" for their 2005 album "Croatoan" and it is an appropriately winding, hard to grasp song with a soul rending conclusion that makes it hard not to lose your mind.
BRANDON FLOWERS - DIGGIN' UP THE HEART
Just as I was getting serious about songwriting, The Killers were hitting it big and ushering in a very brief but awesome revival of 80s pop-rock that was actually GOOD. Their singles were catchy and likable and really appealed to everyone. This is from Brandon's second solo album and it is a seriously competent throwback to 80s rock, specifically what I like to think of as the golden age of movie soundtracks like Footloose and Top Gun, where the songs felt like stories and you could see the movie in your head. This song is catchy, unique, and feels more like a movie than a song.
Thank you very much for reading some or all of this, the first post of my new project. Lots of love from me, my wife, and our cats.
-Jack
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