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Hey That’s No Way to Say Goodbye - The Decemberists
(Leonard Cohen cover)
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plays: 116
Holocene - Bon Iver
In the end, Bon Iver’s sophomore record didn’t wind up having nearly as much staying power as Justin Vernon’s (still amazing) debut did a few years ago - at least not as a whole. Whereas the first record worked so very well as an entire and self-contained thing, a whole ultimately far greater than any of its (often very good) parts, this year’s follow-up was a different sort of beast, at least to these ears.
It was still, all in all, a good record, but it wasn’t timeless or transcendent in the ways in which its predecessor so often was. It had several interesting, even very good, parts (“Perth”, “Beth/Rest”), but the whole of it just wasn’t quite enough to garner repeated spins in my world, despite several attempts. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s context, maybe it’s the record, maybe it’s the world.
Regardless, though, “Holocene” is perfect - and reason enough to give thanks for the entire record’s existence.
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New Andrew Bird! New record out March 6th!
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Going Home
An exceptional poem by Leonard Cohen entitled “Going Home” has been published in The New Yorker this week. You can read it and listen to an accompanying piece of music here.
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Elliott Smith playing George Harrison’s “Isn’t It A Pity”
(from Strange Parallel)
(Source: youtube.com)
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If Not For You - Bob Dylan & George Harrison
(Source: youtube.com)
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plays: 115
Prelude: Op.28 No.15 in D flat major (‘Raindrop Prelude’) - Frederic Chopin
“Chopin’s Preludes are compositions of an order entirely apart… they are poetic preludes, analogous to those of a great contemporary poet, who cradles the soul in golden dreams…” - Franz Liszt
Written in the winter of 1838, while on a secluded vacation with his lover, George Sand, and her two children, Frederic Chopin’s “Prelude Op.28:No.15 in D flat major” - one of 24 preludes composed within in the same time period in a supposed tribute to Bach - ultimately emerged as one of the best known of all his compositions.
The four stayed in rooms at an old Carthusian monestary at Valldemossa, Chopin himself in a room which he later described as “a strange place”. But out of this “strange place” emerged a beautifully sad masterwork, a barely six minute piano piece that leads one through a lifetime of emotions, anchored by the repeating A-Flat that appears throughout the piece (thought by many to sound much like raindrops, hence its nickname).
The rain-inspired origin of the prelude is a bit hard to pin down, though popular belief is that Chopin composed it in the midst of an intense thunderstorm at Valldemossa in which his lover (Sand) and her son were stuck walking home in. Fearing greatly for their safety, Chopin supposedly calmed himself by improvising music around the sound of the rain falling on the roof of the monastary. Others believe an ailing Chopin actually wrote it while hallucinating in the middle of the night during a particularly powerful storm. And still others insist that Sand, a renowned author herself, had invented the entire thing, creating its myth by mentioning it in a later memoir:
“There is one that came to him through an evening of dismal rain - it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left him in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at out “encampment.” The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful Prelude. Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, “Ah, I was sure that you were dead.” When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguished the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy while playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should intepret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might - and he was right to - against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky…
-Histoire de Ma Vie, 5 vols., Paris, 1902–04, IV, pp. 439–40
Ultimately, origin aside, this nocturnal, rainy prelude made some kind of sense to Chopin on a winter’s night in 1838, and it makes every bit as much sense when I put it on after a particularly long day of work now, in the first month of 2012. No matter when or where you are in time, a song like this has the power, the ability, to hold you.
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plays: 46
Blues Run The Game - Jackson C. Frank
Catch a boat to England, baby
maybe to Spain.
Wherever I’ve been and gone,
the blues are all the same.Jackson C. Frank had one of the most sad, tragic lives of any musician I’ve ever come across, misery piled upon misery, on and on and on. He managed to show up on the folk scene briefly, making a record in 1965 (produced by Paul Simon, who often played shows with him at the time), but it was to be but a small period of success in an otherwise awful life trajectory.
From the horrific school fire that killed several of his classmates and left him with burns over half of his own body at age 11, to a mental health “unraveling” shortly after the release of his only record, to losing his son to cystic fibrosis (which led to a depression so severe he was ultimately committed to an institution in the mid-70s), to an eventual diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and a life of homeless destitution throughout the 1980s, to being accidentally shot with a pellet gun in the left eye (and subsequently blinded) in the early 90s, Frank’s life was a heartbreaking one. He died in 1999, only 56 years old, of pneumonia and cardiac arrest.
His self-titled 1965 record was the only record he would ever make. And, though he was only 22 at the time he recorded this track (“Blues Run the Game”), the world-weary sadness in his voice was already readily apparent.
Just try not to feel it.
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Firefly - Childish Gambino
Donald Glover is an insanely talented man. Very, very few people in this world have ever been able to succeed at both stand-up comedy and a serious musical career - in fact, exactly nobody is coming to mind right now - making Glover’s solid, intelligent Camp a rare thing indeed. A rap record by a funny guy not being funny (and, as he reminded us in a recent interview on Marc Maron’s WTF, he was a musician - and even a serious playwright! - first), he sets the bar incredibly high for himself (just ask Eddie Murphy or Arsenio Hall) and then proceeds to hop right over it.
“Firefly” is a great example as to why the entire record works so well. Clever without joking, serious without preaching, it showcases Glover’s quick-witted lyrics and nimble delivery (try saying “affordable falafal” three times fast) within the context of what is essentially a simple, three minute pop song. And I’m like, okay.
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