So, I fucked up yesterday, by not posting a song. So, this is going up in it’s stead.

I couldn’t stop listening to this song the other day. I wish I could find lyrics to it, because I swear it sounds like they say “A HORSE STATUE WILL APPEAR, A GEESE …” and so on, but I am not sure. It doesn’t matter: it’s got the same kind of vibe that Ed is a Portal does, those Lovecraftian reference’s that Akron/Family seem to be down with.

Yes, it hasn’t even been a week since I posted a song from this album, but I figure today can be considered a “bonus day” since I was a bit late. The mood on it is too great, especially in the last frantic three minutes when it turns into a funky prog-rock epic.

Enjoy! I’m glad it took me so long to finally miss a day.

Charles Spearin is a mustached Canadian man who would be better known as a part of both Broken Social Scene and Do Make Say Think, two bands that I am not very appreciative of. Imagine my shock, then, that I enjoy his The Happiness Project so much.

The idea is simple: create songs based around bits of ordinary speech. The whole album is like this, but he has some fun with it on certain tracks, like Vittoria, which made me burst into laughter the first time I heard it. I was going to do a DoubleTake! today and post the song Vittoria as well but I just don’t feel it’s really necessary. If this track doesn’t inspire you to check out the rest of the album, nothing will.

In his own words:

These are my neighbours. My wife and I have two little kids and live downtown Toronto. In the summertime, all the kids in the neighbourhood play outside together and everyone is out on their porch enjoying each other’s company, telling stories and sharing thoughts. A year or so ago, I began inviting some of them over to the house for a casual interview vaguely centered around the subject of happiness. In some cases we never broached the subject directly but nonetheless my friends began to call it my ‘Happiness Project.’ After each interview I would listen back to the recording for moments that were interesting in both meaning and melody. By meaning I mean the thoughts expressed, by melody I mean the cadence and inflection that give the voice a singsong quality. It has always been interesting to me how we use sounds to convey concepts. Normally, we don’t pay any attention to the movement of our lips and tongue, and the rising and falling of our voices as we toss our thoughts back and forth, just as we don’t pay attention to the curl and swing of the letters as we read. I wanted to see if I could blur the line between speaking and singing and write music based on these accidental melodies. So, I had some musician friends play these neighborhood melodies as close as they could on different instruments (the tenor saxophone as Mrs. Morris, the harp as Marisa, etc.) and then I arranged them as though they were songs. The result is a beautiful and unique collection of songs, blissfully blurring the lines between jazz, folk, indie rock, and inspirational improvisation.

This song feeds, of course, into my recent blatherings, which I will spare you. (Really, I just deleted 2 paragraphs of blathering.)

It’s just amazing to me how good this song feels. It’s not my style, whatever my style is, and I guess that’s because it’s jazzy? I don’t know, but it feels good. Each section of it is a minor revelation of feeling, bird chirps and horns. If Spearin was shooting for happiness, I think he caught it right in the face. Good job!

Enjoy your Saturday! And every other day, for that matter!

I’m stuck in an emotional loop: I’m upset that I am getting attacked from almost all sides on this internet thing by people who have known me for a long time on it, and part of me doesn’t really understand it, because all I’m trying to do is encourage, lead by example. Is there something wrong with being excited about life? Why does stating it cause people to start listing reasons you shouldn’t be happy?

Luckily reality is a much better experience than the internet. In reality I have friends who act like friends, you know, they’re nice, and they don’t talk down on you. I’ve noticed, most of my friends I’ve got now I made in the last year or so, and they all seem to like me and appreciate who I am. (The friends in real life who didn’t seem to like me, I stopped spending time with naturally just because of time constraints.)

The internet people, however, and we’ll just extend this to say, instead: The people who have known me the longest seem to be the least appreciative of my latest attitudes. I think it’s an issue of preconceived notions: they got used to me being a certain way, and now that I am changing and they’re staying exactly the same they’re offended. “How dare this guy do what I can’t!”

Or I’m just self-centered and for some reason they’re just so absolutely bored and have nothing better to do with their time than insult me on the internet. Which, I think, still makes me the winner.

When I talk about the things I do on my livejournal, or I twitter what I’m up to, and I use superfluous words like, “I am awesome!” and “This thing I am doing is awesome!” or “This girl I am fucking is awesome!” what I really mean is:

This shit is awesome! You should do it!

I’m not trying to convey to the world: Hey, look at me, come suck my dick. The other night someone tried to say the only reason I learned how to ride freeline skates was so that I could do something cool that other people couldn’t. I said, “No, because then I wouldn’t be encouraging you guys to learn how to do them too.”

When I got into an argument with one of my internet friends about them, his stance was “they’re stupid” and I spent all my time trying to make him understand that nothing is stupid, but he didn’t get that. I tried to make him understand how I feel about them, but his only reply was that they were gay and unpopular. I tried to draw parallels, so maybe he could link an emotion he has about something with the way that I feel. Then it dawned on me: this guy has absolutely no idea how I feel. Maybe he’s never actually felt this way about something.

And that makes me sad.

If there’s one thing I want to do, it’s figure out how to help people feel awesome. You should feel awesome all the time. Based on the outline I’ve been constructing in my head, there are a lot of steps to achieving a consistent feeling of awesomeness, but we’ll start with something related to this:

Misery is the same for everyone. When you’re sad, it’s generally the same sort of sad that everyone else feels. No one feels a different kind of sad when a lover leaves them, it hurts basically the same way for everyone. You’re never alone when you’re sad, because everyone has been there, unless they haven’t. This means that your sorrow is not unique. There is nothing about you that is genuinely sadder than another person. You’re not less motivated than the next sad sack, even if he’s skinny and has good skin and you’re fat and covered in acne. That guy is just as fucked up as you are. I promise you.

Happiness is different for everyone. This is why misery is a great uniter, why such large groups can exist based around a central complaint, because everyone can feel the same sort of sadness, the same sort of anger, but happiness is a tricky beast to handle. You can’t just get ten random people in the room and have them all agree on what makes them happy, but you can get them all bitching about their exes if you prompt them.

We did a little experiment in a psychology class I took once, where we were separated into two groups based on our shoes. One group wore flipflops and generally open shoes, and my group were wearing regular shoes or boots. We were told to list the differences as to why we thought the other group wore shoes different than ours. Once we were done, both lists started rather benignly, but then gradually grew more and more insulting. I thought this was mainly amusing because, in my group, I was the person who said, “Guys, we have to start being mean, or else this will be boring.” We easily found a common ground to harmonize on: anger, sadness, and negativity. We had these things in common.

Maybe this song isn’t about being unhappy. There’s a reason you can put this song on when you’re driving down the road and it can make you feel good. Tom Petty isn’t singing about how you can’t possibly understand his misery, because you can, that’s why you can relate to that perspective on the song. You do know how it feels, as it were. What you don’t know is how he feels happy, what drives him to keep going. Maybe it’s simple, like rolling a joint with a good friend and driving somewhere with the radio loud, just enjoying the company and the wind in your hair.

If there’s something to take from this, it’s these things:

1.) No matter who you are and what you’re going through, chances are you’re an arm’s length away from someone who has gone through something similar. You’re never alone in the pain you feel, and this should give you strength to move away from pitying yourself and your situation. Millions of people have moved past it, you can, too, so buck up.

2.) It’s going to be difficult to find people who share your happiness. It’s going to be especially difficult because it seems to be hard to find out what really makes you happy, and a lot of things in your life will hold you back from it (poor relationships, filling your time with things merely meant to pass it as quickly as possible) but once you figure it out, start waving it around and see if there are other people already in your life who think that is happiness for them, too. The people who don’t share your perspective on happiness, especially if they aren’t appreciative and try to hold you back from it, will have to be disposed of. You can do this however you like. Have enough respect for yourself to not allow people into your life who don’t respect you.

3.) Nobody really wants to hear about your happiness. Seeing it is much more effective. Unhappy people like to feel alienated, it keeps them unhappy, so the best thing you can do with them is make them feel completely welcome and comfortable by being completely at ease yourself. This will annoy the piss out of them but eventually it’ll become infectious and they’ll like to be around you. When it doubt, shut the fuck up about yourself. (Fat people don’t like to hear about how much weight you lost recently. Poor people don’t like to hear about or even see how much money you have.) It’s a good rule.

Good luck! Unless something interesting happens to me today I figure my next couple songs will be coupled with entries kind of like this one. It’s this one-track mind of mine.

My new goal is to convince people that they should chase after the things that would make them feel good about themselves. I’ve spent this last week running into people who seem to think that all these external forces mean a lot. “My viewpoint is justifiable because others have it.” “Things that are widely popular have more value.” “I won’t do that because I think it’s for children.”

Mostly I got into a fight with a long-term internet friend, and otherwise I occasionally hang out with people who’s favorite pass time seems to be to talk shit on everything that passes in front of them. When it comes to the internet friend, I told him to fuck off, because clearly there’s not a lot of “friend” in “internet friend” when all they can do is say bad things about your interests. With the people I deal with in reality and can’t just stop talking to, I’m trying to keep an open mind.

Clearly these people hate themselves.

It’s understandable. They’re losers. They back up their shit talk with arguments and justifications that merely make them look worse, such as calling age an issue (“I’m too grown up to do THAT, but I will play videogames!”) or citing difficulty level (because clearly anything that is hard to learn isn’t worth doing) or even saying such activities seem like a waste of time (even though they’ll gladly sit for hours in front of a television set).

So, what can I do? What is the problem with these people? How did they wind up full of so many reasons not to do things? Have they spent their whole lives talking themselves out of doing things they enjoy, so now it’s just natural that they try to bag on everyone else’s interests?

My friends who are merely sad, who aren’t raging assholes, seem to suffer from a similar problem, except it’s directed inwardly. The things they enjoy aren’t “acceptable” for various reasons so they don’t do them, and spend all their time wishing they would. A lot of the time the reasons are foolish: It would take too much time (it’ll take even longer if you keep waiting). I’m too fat to start (then start losing weight now?). I don’t have the time (how about you turn off the television or stop browsing the net for hours for no reason?). I would look foolish or people wouldn’t appreciate what I do (who the fuck cares! be a fucking adult!).

Think about the things that you spend your day doing, and think about what do you do that actually makes you happy. What do you do when you first wake up in the morning? I used to sit on the internet for a couple hours, randomly browsing stuff and reading things. Did this make me happy? No. It helped my bide time to get through my day. Reading books make me happy, but I was allowing myself to be distracted by something that didn’t actually make me feel accomplished at all. Accomplishment makes me feel something, probably you too, so maybe you should look for that.

Other than that, when I was at home, I’d play video games, which I think are turning into an even bigger waste of time than the internet and television as a whole. The purpose of a videogame is to fill you with a false sense of accomplishment, and it is false, because it wanes very quickly and the actual feeling is completely empty. I didn’t actually do anything, but I did something. Now I’ll go play a different game and do something different all over again but by doing the same thing.

It’s the ultimate idiot machine. So many people sit around and get fat, loading themselves up on all this false accomplishment, when they could challenge themselves to games that improve themselves in the real world. Instead of getting a high score in Halo 3 today, how about you see how many times you can walk around the block before you get tired? It’s surprising, but exercise actually helps increase confidence, especially when you’re doing it when striving for a goal. Slowly increase the number of push ups you can do on a daily basis.

Just… if you see something that you think you’d like to do, then do it. Don’t make excuses, don’t put it off, just do it. Sometimes you can’t just immediately jump into things (flying a plane, swimming across the Bering Strait) but those things require practice and discipline and that, all by itself, is fun, too.

Next time you want to sit around and play a game of Halo with your buddies, go to a park and throw a baseball around, or kick a soccer ball back and forth. Go outside and enjoy your life. If you spend too much time sitting around not doing anything, you’re just going to forget what living is all about and waste your time (while telling others their lives are wastes of time) wishing you were different from the way you are. Stop being scared!

Practice writing, start jogging, talk to more women/men, figure skate, do yoga, take skydiving lessons, read a book, sit and think about the life you’ve lived and how lucky you are to still be alive. Now, fucking use it. Go out there and be an awesome sexy person. Listen to music, love somebody, be loved by somebody.

Relax and live, people. There aren’t any mulligans in real life. You’ve got one shot at every day, and you better nail it. If you keep lying to yourself by telling yourself that it’s OK that you didn’t do “that one thing” today, then you’re cheating yourself out of a whole lot of awesome.

Song Note: This album is named after The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation’s Millennium General Assembly, which is an elaborate work of “art” built entirely in private by a simple dude who was maybe a little bit crazy, but damn if he didn’t do what made him happy: building this stuff out of junk for 6 hours a night for over 14 years. Good for him.

Today was a lousy day. That’s not why this is late, and I’m not sure if this would be any different if I had written it 7 hours ago at the normal time.

Some days you just wake up and you know they’re going to be bad. It’s not so much waking up on the wrong side, it’s not your disposition, but it’s just a looming dread that horrible things are going to happen to you all day that are entirely out of your control. Then they do happen, and it sucks a lot.

In short! I should not have gotten out of bed today.

But all in all I am happy with how the day has gone, and where it will probably lead. There was a rough patch there, and it was pretty damn rough really quickly all out of nowhere, but then everything was fine.

Look, I just wrote about a whole lot of nothing. Pretty cool.

This song is kind of about nothing, which is fitting, I guess. It’s just, like, you know, emotive. Like, “fuck the shit that sucks, I’m still here, and maybe I’m gonna be happy about it just to spite you. but also, fuck you.”

Insert some sort of commentary about how I don’t like Grandaddy right here. OK? Cool.

Going to go eat some pizza now.

For all the passion I have for several of Akron/Family’s songs, I’ve never really considered myself a fan of their albums. It usually ends up just being one or two songs I take from each album (or in the case of Meek Warrior, I took none and hardly listened to the thing) and love intensely (Ed Is A Portal) or merely enjoy within the mix of the rest of my music (Before & Again) or just listen to for the novelty (Running, Returning’s wailing at the end of the track always makes people in my car go “what the fuck who would listen to a cat dying?”).

And, so far, I’m going to say my reaction to Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free is going to be largely similar. I haven’t even gotten through a complete listen yet, so I can’t say for sure, but I already know one of the songs is obnoxious and I’ll never want to listen to it.

My point is, Akron/Family crafts songs that are pure genius and then they fuck around, I think maybe just because they can. When I saw them live, they had a three night residency at the Center for Inquiry West, they did sort of the same thing: they lured the crowd into a marvelous groove by playing this song and others that have a somewhat danceable beat. At one point most of the crowd was dancing around a little bit to them.

But then the tone shifted, and the second half of the set turned into an overwhelming noisy experimental explosion where you could hear bits and pieces of songs taking shape but then they would distort them back into repetitious noise. By the end of the set, no one had walked out, but only because we were all waiting for the band to take a turn back into the beautiful stuff they had been playing earlier, a turn that they never took, leaving most of us (I think) scratching our heads as to what just happened.

When I saw them at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum they did no such thing, but that was prior to the departure of guitarist Ryan Vanderhoof. If I had to choose between the two live shows, the Natural History Museum one was far superior, and the version of Ed Is A Portal they played their was inspiring, while the version at the Center of Inquiry left me feeling kind of empty.

Still, I bought one of their shirts, and a set of their pens. The shirt is now one of my favorites, being some sort of 50/50 blend from American Apparel, it is an absolute joy to wear and I love it. I wear the pen with this album’s art on it on my jacket, because what could be cooler than a tie-dye flag?

The point of this post, however, wasn’t to talk about the band, and for all intents and purposes I should probably just erase all that, but I won’t. The point of this post is, quite simply:

This song is fucking awesome.

Oh my fucking god, it is so awesome!

I love it when I get excited about music, because it makes me feel like I could burst, and this song does this. It’s just so… beautiful, you know, man? This song reminds me of what it feels like to be in love; to live a day that was so powerful that you can’t help but smile at the end of it all. It’s a sunset on an empty beach; it’s staring into a pretty girl’s eyes and actually being able to see her in them; it’s sitting around a fire with a bunch of friends after spending a long and entirely pleasant adventurous day together, clearing the day out of your lungs and head; it’s lying in the back of your car with a girl at a drive-in theater. This song is all these things, to me, right now.

Thank you, Akron/Family, for taking me to places in my mind that the day has yet to carry me to, for inspiring my feet to take me to places that remind me of the way this song makes me feel. Thank you for making music that can make me feel full of life even when I’m just driving around by myself.

In 1986, Dan Rather was attacked by William Tager in New York City, who believed that Rather had been taken control of by the media. Whilst beating Rather, Tager repeatedly shouted, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?”

According to Michael Stipe, this song is more about someone desperately trying to understand what motivates youth culture but coming up empty handed over and over again.

Most importantly this song contains the line:

you said that irony was the shackles of youth

Which is so sad because it’s true.

I’ve always secretly hoped I would somehow turn “what’s the frequency?” into slang for “what’s going on?” but it just feels unnatural to say. It sounds cool, but… it hasn’t got that west coast vibe.

Have a fun Monday.