I'm sitting down on my couch at my home in Paxton, Massachusetts. I've got the dayweek next two weeks off, and I'm enjoying a nice, lazy morning of being on the internet, listening to music, and drinking iced coffee.
I'm on and off with keeping up with the Twitter Haps, and this morning I've decided to see what people have been twittering about. For me, much of the twitter haps this morning are all about Steven Page's new single "Indecision". This just came out, and I'm actually listening to it now.
I read Steve's blog post about the new record a couple days ago. Somehow, I feel like I've both skimmed it carelessly, and also poured over every word with intense concentration and thought, what does this *mean*. (One of my favorite things about Steve's blog post? He gets the grammar right when he says the song was written by "me and Stephen Duffy.") Steve describes the new song as a "melding of Jobim-style Brazillian pop and classic Steven Page power-pop" and this sounds like a pretty good description of what the song is, except, to me, for the word classic—at least its placement in the description.
When I think of Steven Page, I don't think of power-pop. When I think of power-pop, I think of The Posies. I'd say this track is classic Steven Page wit, lyricism, song structure, and awesomeness. It reminds me of a cross between what could be a Stunt b-side, and a counterpart to "Baby Loves The Radio" from his 2005 release The Vanity Project. This is the kind of song I look forward to listening to in the car when I'm on my way to the beach, and I'm wearing sunglasses and sipping an iced latte and just feeling cool and pumped.
One thing that is always weird is when an artist releases a new single that you know very well isn't new at all. This happens pretty frequently though. A quick google search will yield this performance of "Indecision" from three years back:
It's not the same as the huge re-release of Jason Mraz's "I'm Yours" since this was really just performed in a special, you're getting an acoustic performance of an unreleased song! kind of way, but hearing the full, banded-up version still feels very different after having the acoustic performance sink in.
The beginning of the song is sorta like the intro theme to a TV show. We get a quick blast of the drums, rhythm guitar, and ooooh-oooh back-up vocals, and then it's all taken back as Steve lays down the first two verses for us. I sorta feel like he's saying, Guys, get ready, this chorus is going to totally rock! I'm here to tell you that guys, he'd totally be right if he said that!
Way back when I started listening to music, Steven Page taught me that a song is like a puzzle, and this single is no exception. One of my favorite things that Steven Page is a master of is turning regular, everyday speak upside down, twisting it inside out and making me say, "Oh, so I guess maybe THAT'S what those words actually mean." I hear this most in the two-line bridge and the first half of the final verse,
Leave decisions up to fate
Nothing comes to those who wait
Come see the view from on top of the fence
We'll watch the world unfold its events
This is the kind of cutting, in-your-face lyricism that I've missed for quite some time now. I like how he says, "We'll watch the world unfold its events," as if the "world" he's speaking of has a mind of its own. "Indecision" is a sparkly song with a speaker who wants to forfeit all power by refusing to make a choice, but at the same time, hold onto it as tightly as he can by keeping his world suspended in the limbo of refusing to choose.
In some ways I'm not wild about the production and all the instrumentation and vocals on this song, but that's more a reflection of my tastes than it is of how well this was made (I'm pretty serious here - I think in some rendition of my personal heaven, there's some guy with a sign saying, "Julie, everything here is acoustic and unpolished). And in some ways, I like when "they" release fully produced tracks with all the bells and whistles, because it just makes the stripped down acoustic performances that much more special. More than anything, I'm happy to hear Steve's voice again, and I mean this both literally and figuratively. Over the years, his songs have created a home my mind can travel to at any time, and I'm glad to have that feeling renewed again.
People who follow Steve will have heard a good chunk of the songs on Page One already, and I'm sure there are mixed feelings about it. People want new stuff on a new record. I'm happy with anything. I'm happy to have Steve tie up loose ends, and I'm happy for each song to fall out of acoustic-new-unreleased-but-played-here-or-there limbo and into a real place in Page's musical career. I'm looking forward to hearing what he's done with everything, and I'm sure "Indecision" is just a peek at what is a really fantastic record.
We all have bad habits. When pressed to list my bad habits, everything I list is something that I'm very much aware is bad for me, but I still do anyway. I often find myself in a place where I want to change my behavior, but I feel that I don't know how. Or of course I do know (just stop it, right?) but I'm just not ready to take the step past admitting that what I'm doing is bad for me (and this can be physically, emotionally, mentally, intellectually, and so on). I often make plans with myself to change, which usually involve the words "after today" and then go on to describe exactly what I'm going to do in the future. I'm sure it's not a surprise that this kind of thing usually doesn't work.
I'm aware that this is a common human complex. It's simple even. This is something we all experience. I'm not writing with a perfect solution, but I'd like to share some of my experience.
I think the point is that when you feel this way, you're already at a spot where you know what the solution is, but you hesitate when it comes to execution. I'd like to quote parallels between two songs that I really enjoy:
Through a darkened mirror I have seen my own reflection
And it makes me want to be a better man
…after another drink
The main problem that I understand here is a universal tendency of viewing the present and the future as two distinct realities. I do this all the time. In the spring, I was dead certain that I wanted to spend the vast majority of my summer learning to play piano. I was facing four months of freedom from school, and it seemed obvious to me that I'd find plenty of time in those four months to become rather proficient at piano. But here I am, past the halfway mark, and I've barely made a dent of progress. Why? Because I haven't practiced, obviously.
Practicing piano was something I expected I'd just do when I had time for it. When I was at school this past semester, I'd frequently wander into a practice room (at Smith, a practice room is a beautiful, cozy little place with a piano, a music stand, one or two chairs, a window, and a mirror that you can go into at any time, and we have dozens of them) and sit down at a piano, and feel truly content, and like I could spend an entire day fiddling around, as if I had an entire world in front of me that I was itching to explore. But I was so busy with schoolworkfriendsbabysittingsleepingexercisinglife that I never had time to do this. But I always told myself that I'd do it when I had the time to. This can be a really good way of thinking (setting goals) but I made one big mistake: I made it a priority in my future, but not in my present. At the time, I could only realistically make it a priority in my future. But I never actually shifted my frame of mind into making it a priority in the present.
I've only practiced piano about half a dozen times this summer. And for most of those sessions, I sat down, played through a few familiar things, and gave up after ten minutes because I felt frustrated that I didn't have the focus, or rather the structure, from practicing regularly. Even when I had the time and thought, "I should practice piano now," I'd mess around for a few minutes and then give up. I'd sit back and think that practicing was useless because I'd never get better because I was only practicing once every couple of weeks, and so trying to get better was just a big waste of time. But of course, it's this very attitude that has been stopping me from getting better!
Long-term goals are important and can be both very valuable and useful. But it can be very detrimental to set certain kinds of long-term goals, for example, goals that can be accomplished in a shorter time than you've allotted yourself for the particular task. Stuff like: in two years I'll be in better shape, in five years I won't be a smoker anymore, I'll run every morning next month, I'll stop eating chips tomorrow afternoon… There's a fine line between what are real, productive goals, and what are ways to excuse present harmful behavior masquerading as goals. But I think it's easy to spot the difference. If you have a long-term goal that has you convinced it's okay to slack off now, you're cheating yourself because that's *not* a goal, it's an excuse. Every goal you have should empower you to do something you're proud of, not hold you back by making you think it's okay to be lazy. If you always keep a "goal" tucked safely into the distant future, you'll be just like a dog going after a treat attached to a moving string: moving through time and space, but never really getting anywhere.
I had this same complex with updating and maintaining this website as I did with practicing piano. One of my summer goals was to have a t-shirt. It was something I decided I'd do, and when I looked past the summer and into September, I envisioned my winter cap with a t-shirt for sale. Then I realized that the summer was halfway over and I hadn't done anything to make this a reality. I would think, "It's silly of me to get a t-shirt because I haven't updated in months."
But then one day I decided to make having a t-shirt a priority of my present. And I just jumped into it. Now I've been doing what I can to update the comic, and I've got a t-shirt for sale. This has only been going on for about a week, but it's going well. The most important part about it is it's becoming a habit; it's becoming an engrained part of my present, which gives the habit the power to become a part of my future as well. What I need to do to become better about practicing piano is apply this same mindset there. It's what any of us needs to do with any goal we might have: we've got to stop separating the present and the future, and realize that one is the direct result of the other (and realize this in the present, and not in the future, and…).
I'm pleased to announced that today I'm opening pre-orders for the very first my winter cap t-shirt. The shirt is based off of comic #170 and is about missing someone:
They're available for pre-orderNOW! and will ship as soon as possible. All shirts are $19, plus $5 for shipping.
I'm a big fan of music. I've spent more time listening to music than I have doing any other hobby or interest, even reading. My last.fm bio states, "I think pop music is the greatest thing in the world, and I'll never change my mind about it." I think I put that in a few years ago, and it's still totally true. I have a pretty broad idea of what I consider to be pop music (to me stuff like rock, folk, indie is all included under "pop"). Another way to try to classify it is with use of the term "songwriting", the unique blend of musical composition, poetry, and storytelling.
I used to buy CDs compulsively. I have about 500 CDs laying around, which I think is a lot when you consider they were mostly purchased when I was between the ages of 7 and 14. I had these huge CD leather books that I would carry around with me everywhere, and every time I got a new disc, I would fervently move everything around so they were perfectly alphabetized. When I traveled to Washington D.C. with my eighth grade class in the spring of 2004, I carried around about 200 of my CDs with me. When I was a freshman in high school, I carried anywhere from 5 to 15 CDs in my backpack every single day. Back then I was frequently sleep-deprived, and the wear on tear on all my CDs began to wear on me, and finally, I bought an iPod. And slowly, I stopped purchasing CDs. My parents stopped paying for my concert tickets, I didn't have a job, and the money I'd received for my bat mitzvah was dwindling. And so I had to make a choice: concerts or CDs.
It was a slow process. The first time I went to New York City (fall of 2005), the thing I was most excited about was buying used CDs at music stores. I still think there's something exciting about making a physical purchase of music. Holding something in your hand, remembering that there's so much to be found in just one album, which isn't as easily visible when it appears to you as just one of a few thousand 12 song playlists in your iTunes library, from which you can tear and shuffle songs from with a few simple taps. But even so, purchasing a physical CD these days is my absolute last resort for acquiring music. Every few months I buy half a dozen CDs from Amazon, but usually because I'm getting stuff that's too unpopular to be found anywhere else (for example, solo Aaron Sprinkle albums, music by songwriter Stephen Duffy, Dryve's first album Hum, and a Japanese import of Fastball's The Harsh Light of Day because it has the bonus track "Love Doesn't Kill You").
I'd like to digress from my personal music listening and purchasing history into a specific story of how I started listening to Kevin Devine. Instead of going on about how downloading music can be a really positive thing, here's a story about how it has been a really positive thing.
Kevin Devine has been my most listened to artist for about 18 months now. The overall time I've spent listening to his music stretches back a few years earlier, but I didn't get really into it until the beginning of 2009. Better late than never. I'm a big fan of Brand New, which is how I first heard of Kevin Devine. It's hard to be a Brand New fan and not know who Kevin Devine is. I'd listened a few times to a few KD albums before a year ago, and I'd actually seen him 2 or 3 times as an opening act. I do remember really enjoying his set. But even so, for some reason or another, it just didn't really click with me at the time. Like it is with any form of art, listening to music is a two-way street. If you're not meeting anything halfway, the greatest record in the world will sound like nothing to you. And what we are ready to meet halfway today might very well be very different from what we will be ready to meet tomorrow.
As an avid listener of music, I sometimes have trouble finding something that really, really hits me. There's so much that I like, but with everything I listen to, after a while, the initial magic eventually fades. That's why it's the initial magic. In my experience, the longer I listen, the more I enjoy stuff, and there's more stuff I find that I enjoy. But it becomes harder to come by that feeling of complete euphoria and absorption in a song, album, or artist. I've heard a thousand well-written songs, but it takes something beyond "well-written" for a song to wow me and stop me in my tracks. I mean listening to an album a dozen times in a row and feeling like you've still only heard it once. Then taking a break for a day, and going back again, and everything sounds not just as new and amazing as the first time, but even better. This is what happens when you discover something that you know you'll keep with you forever.
That's how I felt with Kevin Devine. Feverish.
A blurry shot of Kevin performing in New Haven, CT a month ago
But let's get back to how it unraveled. Kevin's most recent full-length release, Brother's Blood, leaked about two months early. It's common and expected that albums will leak before their official date of release. When I know a record is coming out, one of the first thoughts I have is, "I wonder when it's gonna leak." But two months is a bit premature. I heard about the leak from one of my friends: she'd downloaded it, and scrobbled the tracks on her last.fm. Shortly after, she'd received a message from some folks at Favorite Gentlemen asking her to delete the album from her computer and stop listening to it, and to likewise spread the word. I don't remember if they were especially cheeky, but they were rather upset about the entire ordeal. That's something I do understand. In the past I have debated a lot internally about whether I think downloading music is morally sound, and by last spring, I was 100% decided that it was. It's the industry that needs to change, and not the fans. I have a lot of respect for independent artists, and especially for the folks who run Favorite Gentlemen. But at the time I did feel like their anger about what happened was being taken out too much on the wrong people. So I think I downloaded the album, and left a slightly obnoxious post in Kevin Devine's shoutbox on last.fm advertising that I had the CD, and offering to send it to anyone who wanted to listen. I got flamed a little, and rightfully; I was acting like a jerk. But I've been using the internet for years, and have sometimes been vocal and opinionated, and flaming happens sometimes. So it didn't phase me much.
I actually didn't send the album to anyone, and I didn't even listen to it straight off. But the whole thing put that "Kevin Devine guy I'd seen touring with Jesse Lacey" on my radar, and on a whim I listened to his third album, Split the Country, Split the Streets, because I remembered enjoying that one a few years back. I'd like to say that it blew me away immediately, but as a record, it didn't. It took time still. But "No Time Flat" stuck with me, and soonafter, so did, "Lord, I Know We Don't Talk". A month later it was all I wanted to listen to. Even now, there are some tracks on that record that don't stand out to me; I have mixed feelings about "Afterparty" and about the mesh of Kevin Devine's style with the feel of the typical 6/8 ballad in "Probably". But there's something about him that's just completely captivating, even in those tracks that aren't my favorites. I was sad that the subsequent Put Your Ghost to Rest didn't live up to how great I thought Split was. But then that hit me too (along with his second release, Make the Clocks Move), and I felt the same disappointment in Brother's Blood. Everything hit me so strongly that it fully that it shook my world every time I introduced a new album to my listening schedule. The same way it was difficult for me to read An Acceptable Time by Madeleine L'Engle (which I still haven't finished) because I couldn't cope with seeing Meg Murry as an adult and not the young protagonist.
But a year and thousands of listens later, I'm positive that Brother's Blood is one of the best examples of clear, timeless songwriting that I've ever heard. What I found with Kevin Devine was a feeling I thought I was doomed to never find again. Some people wear their feelings on their sleeves, and I wear my interests (or possibly both). The stuff that really gets me going does it so well that I explode with enthusiasm to nearly every person I converse with. Sometimes I fear that I participate in open, blatant gushing more than I do in any other form of talking. So, what I'm getting at is that most people who know me are aware that I'm a die-hard Barenaked Ladies fan. It's been going on so long that it usually feels like an inherent part of my character as opposed to something that I acquired one day. Some of the best memories I have are of listening to their music. For years, listening to BNL was almost all I did, and it never, ever got old. It only got more exciting. I would sit down and listen to an album and thoroughly enjoy every single second of it. I'd listen five times in a row to the same album because I'd focus my listening on a different instrument each time around, and every time was a different experience. Nowadays, I don't spend a lot of time listening to BNL. I don't want to say it's gotten old, but it's true that as certain magics appear, others fade. As I get older, more songs speak to me in deeper ways, but there's not as much for me to discover anymore. And I listen to so much music that I simply don't have time to listen to a hundred BNL songs every day. (Still, I've never forgotten: the first and most primary reason that I decided to branch out and listen to "other" music was because I felt that I'd reached a point where the best way for me to appreciate BNL's music more was to try to appreciate where it was they were coming from, and I've only branched out farther from there.)
Moving on, I've fallen in love with lots of bands in the past decade. But the further along I get in age and listening, the less frequent it is that I get totally immersed in something for a long period of time. Before I got really hooked on Kevin Devine, I thought I'd never find another band or artist that I was that into. That I'd want to listen to over and over again for year, or that I'd want to see in concert as many times as I could afford. Becoming a Kevin Devine fan was a hugely important event in my life. If you asked me to spout off the most important things to happen in my life in 2009, I'd immediately respond with three things: listening to Kevin Devine, my babysitting job, and rock-climbing. More importantly than giving me something to sing along to, Kevin Devine gave me something to get truly excited, inspired, and passionate about. Kevin Devine's music gave me a place to feel truly alive, and a way to rediscover myself as well as the world around me. And all that is something I might have never found had not Brother's Blood leaked the way it did.
I'm certain that I'll be following Kevin Devine more closely than any other artist I listen to for years to come. And I think I'm a good fan for an artist to have. Once I'm hooked, I'll purchase every release; hunt down every b-side, EP, 7" I can find; see your show as many nights as I can travel to; buy your t-shirts; recommend you endlessly to every person I meet; and always come again next time (for some examples, I've seen Barenaked Ladies 30+ times, and been to dozens of Guster concerts, and seven seems like a sheepishly small number to me when I reflect that that's how many times I've seen Kevin Devine). There are some artists you like to see once in concert, and some that you want to see again and again. For me, Kevin Devine is one of the artists in the second group. There are artists who think what they do is about making music, and others who know that it really boils down to connecting to people. When Kevin Devine takes the stage, he does it as a friendly face, not as a fabricated image of the art he's created. Kevin, when I started listening to your music, I spent zero dollars on your CDs. But in the past month, I've seen your concert 3 times, and spent $90 on your merchandise. And to me, that's only the beginning.
A shot of me with Kevin at one of his recent shows
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