I'll be turning 24 tomorrow. A lot of the people I know my current age (23) and below are complete losers. I'm pretty much a complete loser, as well, but I hold myself in high regard among losers. I'm sure tomorrow when I turn 24 I will be super awesome and cast my shroud of loserdom aside.

We're all lethargic, apathetic, and unmotivated, with zero confidence, and maybe, just maybe, endless potential lurking under the surface. (Although with some of us I am uncertain.) Sometimes I wonder if it's a Los Angeles Suburb thing that has effected all adults who have grown up in the LA area, but I've also seen it with people younger and older in various places, all born within the last 30 years. We're raised to feel like we can do anything we want, but we're also infused with so much anxiety about it that we can't ever pick one thing to do. We end up stagnating in pools of half-acquired skills. Now it seems like a lot of us are just shutting down.

It's sad because all you've got to do is realize how easy it is.

There's this stuff called beeline hemp rope (with a brand new snazzy website it seems) that people who, say, smoke things, like cigarettes, or other things, use in lieu of a butane lighter. The website claims that constantly inhaling all that butane and flint induced flame causes headaches (something that I will totally agree on) and that by lighting your whatever with this hemp stuff, it's all natural and better for you.

Is it really? I don't know. I use it, and I like it. Lighters definitely leave a certain taste in your mouth, even when lighting a cigarette, and this hemp rope stuff just makes things smell a little like a snuffed out candle (which I don't find unpleasant at all). They sold me on it, they totally sold me on it, and then I started thinking about what their costs are.

A 400 foot roll of thin hemp string costs about $10. You can buy blocks of organic beeswax from a variety of online shops (and oddly, the top Google result for organic beeswax sells impurity-free blocks that look like what is on the Beeline website, but they're all sold out of bulk sizes) for $40 or less depending on how much you wanna make. So far that's $50 total cost.

I figure the process of making the stuff just involves heating up the beeswax until it's liquidy, tossing the hemp string into it, and then automatically pulling it through some sponges or a small hole to scrape the string back down to size with the wax soaked into it. You could have a blow dryer running on cool set up to blow on the string as you roll it onto another spool. How hard could that be? You have a one man operation here. No employment costs.

A 400ft roll could cut down into 40 9ft packs you could sell by hand for $3 a pack. That's about $120 in profit on $50 and your own time. Admittedly that's a somewhat unrealistic way of looking at it. (They sell a box of 189 feet in packs for $26 [with shipping], and that includes little folded cards with a staple and graphics on them made out of recycled paper, so there are extra costs involved.) But as the volume you produce goes up, your costs go way down, and if you just spend a few hours making hemp rope on a single day you probably have a four month supply.

Point is: whoever this beeline guy is, he operates with zero competition. If I suddenly decided to make hemp rope locally and sell it to various shops around my entire area, I could totally take over the whole market here. It's almost so ridiculously easy that I feel like a moron for not doing it myself. Any one of my friends think of this, and could do this, but they don't. I don't know why.

I read this article in the LA Times yesterday about how incredibly awesome Tyler Perry is. I'm white, and most of his movies seem to cater to older black women, so it's just natural that I would have no idea who Tyler Perry is, but I saw his name so many places over the course of the last two years and always wondered if he was some sort of millionaire cinema star I had never heard of.

Guess what the article said? He is. Tyler Perry has made seven films in the last four years that have all grossed over $45 million, and they're all made for under $10 million. The guy has his own 30-acre movie studio. His new movie, Madea Goes to Jail, which I'm sure no one reading this site has seen, made $41 million on it's opening weekend, the biggest weekend since Twilight came out a long while ago.

Tyler Perry saw an opportunity. He discovered some skill in himself to entertain a certain demographic of people that no one else catered to, and then he pursued his vision. Now the guy is a multimillionaire with nowhere to go but up. How can you top that? Tyler Perry is already a legend, and he doesn't really seem like the kind of guy who is going to throw it all away on a drug habit or weird plastic surgery.

In short: That guy's pretty fucking G.

That's your job. My birthday present from you all will be your eventual success. You'll read this and you'll think, "You know what, there's this small demographic I could exploit to massive gains if only I marketed the exactly right thing to them, and I know what that right thing is, and I am going to exploit it like a madman."

Stoner eco-friendly hippies or middle-aged black women. Just do it.

Music Note: I was told by twitter follower @SaltyDroid that I was to post Sunset Rubdown by the end of the month or I am fucked and I want to respond.

1.) I listened to the first song off Random Spirit Lover and it was interesting. I didn't like it, but it was interesting enough to make me eager listen to more of the album at some point. However, obviously I did not make it in within the month time period allotted, so I have failed.

2.) I have been fucked. You have some crazy psychic salty powers or something, Droid.

Bonus Note: Even in this global recession, Netflix is showing huge gains, and all they do is send DVDs to people so they don't have to leave their houses. Imagine how much more money there is in ensuring that depressed people with no money don't have to leave their houses? Eventually we'll all be so busy getting rich off making sure we don't go outside that it'll be just like The Machine Stops! I'm excited!

I know very a little about Modest Mouse, but here are the few things I know:

1.) I don't like Modest Mouse. For the most part their music simply annoys me. I remember the first time I heard Dance Hall, I woke up three hours later covered in vomit. Not sure if it was mine. Perhaps some random passerby heard it, became enraged, knocked me out, and then vomited on me in retaliation for forcing such music upon him.

2.) They're a bunch of meth addicts, which I've heard from a large enough group of people to accept it as fact. I'm pretty sure this is why all their songs sound like they were written by meth addicts, (kind of like how Green Day's Insomniac sounds like it was written by meth addicts). This is probably why everyone I know who listens to Modest Mouse are either meth addicts or completely ridiculous hipsters who should die.

3.) They're a completely 100% mainstream major label "indie band". Does that mean their music inherently sucks? I don't know. I feel kind of like it does. Isn't Arcade Fire all xbox huge now, too? What can we do? I guess we have no choice, we must nuke from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

4.) Bukowski writes great novels but his poetry is largely ridiculous and only entertaining when being read drunkenly by him in front of rowdy college students, and Kerouac's On The Road was largely unreadable past the first couple pages. Perhaps all great major label artists are meth or shoe addicts.

I'm in a bit of a rut these last two days, I've been listening to a certain set of music in circles for the last two weeks and it's starting to get to me, I think. Thus, Green Day, to mix things up a bit.

Green Day gets kind of a bad rap. I want to set things straight, even though I am not a big Green Day fan and do feel a little negatively toward them myself. Green Day is a good band. They make good music. This song doesn't sound at all punk to me, it's just a well written rock song with hints of grunge, which is OK because you don't have to be one thing forever. As it is, it's a kick ass song and while I didn't like it in middle school (in contrast to how much I loved Insomniac at that retarded age), I love it now.

American Idiot really impressed me all those years ago now, I was effectively completely isolated from the media so I never got to see how absolutely retarded they looked while touring in support of it. It wasn't until I moved back to Los Angeles that I started to be exposed to how absolutely ridiculously Green Day is marketed. If you're wondering why Green Day gets so much hate, look no further than Billy Joe's black eyeliner. I'm not entirely sure why they dress like they're in some other ridiculous looking band.

Green Day's one problem is that they are a band that the label system has always worked for. They make loud fun music, that while containing some artist merit, can be so perfectly shoveled by the major labels in various countries that they would be absolute fools to not conform to it. In the end, who cares what they look like? All that ridiculousness is for the Japanese, I'm sure. Forget the album art and the appearances on Nickolodeon, forget the fact that a couple years ago you couldn't escape from hearing "Time Of Your Life" at least once a day for weeks straight, forget all that, and just enjoy Green Day.

Site News: Cool, it's Day 80! Only ∞ to go!

Sometimes this song picking thing is difficult, because I feel like I have to make a choice between a new song I am really into, without any sort of decent story to tell about it; or an old song I don't like as much, with a great story behind it.

Then sometimes I worry further and think, if I keep discovering new music so rapidly I will never have time to develop specific memories for certain songs. On top of that, as I grow older my life seems to become more routine, thus further minimizing the chance that I will experience something interesting and exciting while listening to a certain artist or song.

I write about this not because it's day seventy-something and I'm already worrying about having nothing to say, but because it is something to say. (Gotcha!) This song, also, seems to be about the random / unexpected loss of idealism. (Someone on SongMeanings links the song up with loss of childhood dreams, but I don't see how the metaphor for freedom suggested by the eucalyptus stumps & venturing out after distant lights can at all relate to the loss of dreams. I'd say that their Eucalyptus fortress was something that enclosed a maintained idealistic lifestyle.)

Or, maybe it's all just about trading safety, security and stability away for freedom, albeit to an uncertain end.

Music is crazy.

Twitter Note: Internet buddy of mine Marq "Monohymn" Gould (as I have so decided to christen him) did the second piece of staires_!_ fan art. I'm touched in ways that I can't even begin to understand.

This jump in styles is going to sound lousy in the February playlist.

I tend to listen to music that no one else I know listens to. Sometimes I'll admit it's on purpose, that I purposefully seek out artists no one knows about, but other times I'll say that I just seem to be naturally drawn to music that I have never heard of before from anyone. I didn't think about it too deeply until I stumbled back onto this song in my playlist and it dawned on me.

Popular music is used so often in other mediums that it's almost impossible to not have your memory of the song co-opted in some way. There was a time that listening to Jacksonville made me think of sunny days driving around with ex-girlfriends, of feeling alive by myself and enjoying the wind blowing through my hair. Now when I hear it, I think, oh, they used that other Sufjan song (Chicago) in Little Miss Sunshine. Now I associate Sufjan Stevens with a so-so indie movie that got eighty billion Oscar nominations. Is that fair?

I guess this is also why it's hard for me to accept and even begin to appreciate recommendations from people I know personally. (Aside from the fact that recommending that I listen to MGMT is pretty stupid.) I don't want to listen to something I already associate with a person. I want to create my own interpretation, independent of everyone else. I'm creating my own memories.

This is going to make me sound pretentious (which I am, obviously, I run a website where I write nonsense for everyone to read and ask people to read it and say 'hey hey look at me isn't my taste awesome?'), but it also just blows when music gets popular, period. I remember digging this album and then six months later suddenly it was getting played at the houses of people I didn't respect. Nothing can ruin music more than a bunch of shitty people listening to it because it's suddenly popular in some scene. Now I associate Sufjan Stevens with greasy date-rapist Mexican assholes. Thanks, popularity.

Recommendations from the internet is different. Everyone listens to everything on the internet, you're not going to listen to something that at least five people currently on the internet haven't already heard (or are currently listening to), but everyone is faceless and you don't know anything about them. You can associate a recommendation with a name, but there aren't already memories there about that person. Yay, internet.

Song Note: This song is about the underground railroad. Yay!

Change of musical pace today.

There are a few artists now that I consider spectacles, wonders of the music world, that everyone should see at least once regardless of taste or personal ethics. One of those bands is Electric Six, which absolutely floored me late last year. (The other two bands are The Polyphonic Spree, and just recently, Andrew Bird. I thought Local H could be entertaining to everyone but I took a bunch of people to a Local H show once, one girl was a big Neil Young fan, and everyone I brought walked out of the show a few songs in. I was pretty offended.)

Dick Valentine, front man and creative force behind the whole thing, seems like he was born to entertain. I'd presuppose that aside from recording albums and performing on a stage, Dick Valentine is probably retarded, and I don't mean like "ha ha you're an idiot" but that he's actually retarded. I bet God got all fucked up one night and was like "I'm going to take an empty shell of a person and put this amazing gift of entertainment in him, and NOTHING ELSE, BWHAAHA let's see what happens it'll be fun!" Then Dick Valentine was born.

I wrote a review of the show I saw, somewhere, I think, let me find it. Found it! I'll just blockquote it.

I am not an Electric Six fan. I went to go see Local H and took a friend of mine who is a partial-fan of the Six.

Local H rocked. Way better than they were at the Troubadour, but I attribute that to a shitty audience and a shitty venue (the Troubadour can suck cocks and die, i have seen three shows there and they were all bullshit thanks to a lousy fucking crowd and shitty acoustics) but they rocked at the Key Club the same way they did three+ years ago when I saw them touring for PJ Soles. They were great, so great.

But what was better was Dick Valentine walking out on stage in a big red cape and the band launching into some the the loudest danciest coolest rock whatever-the-fuck music I've ever heard. When the bassist took off Valentine's cape just to reveal another one underneath, complete with a big SHOWTIME reveal on the back during the second song, oh man.

We Were Witchy Witchy White Women is the song that made me realize that this band is something significant that I should be listening to. The synth/vocal 'riff' that runs through the end of the song is so amazingly powerful that I could do nothing but stand in awe of the things that were unfolding around me.

Women were dancing, the entire floor was jumping and people were crowd surfing. This is a band that knows how to get people pumped up. Maybe it's because their music appeals to something deeply stupid and primal in all of us, and maybe that's why I never gave them a shot: they do play stupid dancy music, but they're not Andrew W.K., they're sarcastic. They're, or I should say Dick Valentine is a showman.

No amount of listening to Electric Six albums will recapture how amazing they were live. I will just be forced to go see them again and again.

That's all.

Go see Electric Six if you have a chance. They're really quite amazing.

This album has a really negative review on Amazon, and then a really positive one, which say opposite things. The negative one says this album hardly qualifies as music and is hardly listenable, while the positive one says that this album pushes the limits of music and is a true beauty.

What do I think? I don't even know if I listened to the album. I figure if I did and I liked it, I would listen to more than just this song (which, I am pretty sure, I heard in an episode of Reaper). Usually if I don't like something, I just forget about it completely, so I doubt I am a fan of the album. Who knows. Find out and let me know, yeah? With our luck the next person who reviews it will give it a 3.5 and then I'll just get really angry.

This is a good Sunday song, and that's all. It's fun (again) for sunny or cloudy day canyon drives. Load this song up, (run Genius on it just in case,) go for a Sunday drive, that is my advice to you. No story today or anything, I am sleepy / headachey / hungry.

This seventeen year old Jewish punk kid got into an argument with me as to whether or not, after suffering a "technological apocalypse", humanity would be able to survive. He said that if one day, suddenly, and completely improbably (which made me not want to argue with him at all because there is no reality to this argument at all), humanity lost all our technical innovations, we would be powerless to defend ourselves against nature because technology has caused our bodies to devolve.

I disagreed, in a somewhat "I am older and I know better" sort of way, by attempting to state that his "technological apocalypse" is completely impossible because our technology involves our evolution. There's nothing that is going to happen that is going to remove everyone's understanding of engineering, at this point the concepts that create easy land irrigation are instinctual (and you'd have to literally erase decades of knowledge from everyone's minds), and we've always been able to kill things without much trouble.

Disagreeing with me, he says: our bodies are no longer adapted to natural survival. Which I scoffed at, because we were just as weak and flimsy, if not weaker and flimsier, than we were 1,000 years ago, probably. Not that I was there.

I think what he was trying to explain was something that maybe he saw in himself, or in others, something that I worry about from time to time (in a "how would things be different?" sort of way), something that I think this song, Century Eyes, is discussing:

Is the internet killing us? Admittedly, if there was a World War 3 and the majority of government was utterly wiped out, where would the accountants go? How about the computer programmers? If there's no electricity, and no easy way to make it, where would all the technical employees go? Do you think the kind of person who hides in his cubical for 8 hours, then goes home and hides in front of World of Warcraft for another 8 hours is going to survive in the wild? Probably not. He probably doesn't even know how to fish without a mouse and keyboard.

This thinking, however, is rather flawed. Even amid a complete technological or real apocalypse, people can band together. We're not cats and dogs, we're all people, and when the shit goes down we can get along, but that isn't really my point. We're so surrounded with information at all times, it's hard for us not to pick up random survival skills:

I know how to catch fish out of a river. I know what the proper kind of trap looks like and if I was stuck somewhere where I needed to catch fish (or other food) to survive, I'd be able to do it. (I owe this to watching Limbo over and over, and other survival skills I know you can thank Discovery and Les Stroud for, etc.) I'm a music listening geek with a sick monitor tan, finger tips as smooth and uncalloused as polished ivory, but when shit goes down, I am eating some fucking animals and I am not screwing around. If I can kill it, I will eat it. I don't doubt my ability to survive without computers.

I think it's important to realize that a lot of the things that really keep our world going are jobs performed by people who don't use computers, who haven't been blinded by looking through century eyes (to reference the song again). Mechanics, carpenters, plumbers, engineers, architects, these are all jobs that existed before computers and the internet, and they are jobs that will exist long since.

Our lives may be distinctly different from just forty years ago, we're over-entertained and over-informed in comparison, but we're not useless and broken. Admittedly the weak and useless will bite the bullet pretty quick when shit goes down, but they'd be dead already if it weren't for all our enlightenment and triumphs over beasts. Yeah, we let the weak and feeble survive and flourish these days, but that doesn't mean humanity is without the strong and able.

~fin

Song Note: This song could be about eight times longer and I wouldn't mind.

I was walking past my bedroom, it was probably late at night, or early in the day, I don't know, but MTV was on my television and so was Gomez, in the music video for this song. It was 1998, and I was thirteen, and I totally dug this song. I guess I still do, but as my love for Gomez grew, this song and I grew apart. It's been on my iPod since the very beginning, but never got a rating, never got to dance around my playlists like various other (not as good) Gomez songs.

My love for Gomez stops at about four songs into Split The Difference, and I like to pretend that their output after that album doesn't exist. Admittedly, they were kids about my age now when they started making music back when I was thirteen. They're in their 30's now and maybe their priorities have changed, instead of writing dumb fun songs about being affluent retarded kids in their mid-twenties, they're interested in other things... like making rubbish music to make money (kind of like Weezer, another band who were great in their early twenties but now churns out rubbish like an infernal machine, and even openly admits to the fact that Weezer exists solely as a commercial enterprise in SPIN and no one notices or cares).

So, yeah, Gomez. They won the Mercury Prize for this album, beating Massive Attack's Mezzanine and The Verve's Urban Hymns (by no means small albums to overcome). That's pretty rad. Good job, Gomez.

I'm breaking my repeat rules to do what I said I'd do yesterday, so here's another Andrew Bird song, and what I'll consider my review of Noble Beast and his live show! You get a two for one.

Yesterday I talked about how Noble Beast's linear sections are basically the death of the album, and that while all the songs are uniquely beautiful in their own Andrew Bird-y way, there's no rhythm to the album, there's almost no flow to it. You can't rock out, except maybe for a split second at the beginning of Fitz & Dizzyspells, and maybe when Anonanimal (this song) gets going at 2:52, but like everything else on the album, the song-y part is short-lived and veers off in some other direction far too soon. (I should make special mention of Not a Robot, But a Ghost, which is pretty song-like but so fucking weird and long that it's almost uncomfortable to listen to.)

I enjoy Noble Beast, and don't get me wrong, you probably will, too, but don't take it in the car with you, and don't expect to score any sort of party with it. This is an album to be listened to while you're lounging in your favorite chair, in front of a fire, with a glass of wine (or a joint), and maybe (maybe) with a group of similarly minded people (silent people! there will be NO TALKING during this album, you must announce). Sadly, I don't really have a lot of space in my listening habits for a good album. I need good songs. I need something that grabs at my soul for three to four minutes, and not slowly over the course of an hour.

However.

Andrew Bird needs to be seen live. There's a quality in him, live, that isn't there on his albums. His voice is absolutely unbelievable, smooth, even in a full wail. I had warned my girlfriend that "you are going to witness some pretty extreme virtuoso whistling," she didn't believe me, laughed it off, but two songs in she was, quite loudly, proclaiming his proficiency at whistling. He took off his shoes after the first song (to expose pink and brown striped socks, which totally set off my hipster jealousy alarm), which he played on his own using only his violin, his looping pedals, and this weird speaker box with two Yellow Submarine-styled cones on it that spun past a microphone. It was utterly beautiful. I have no idea what song it was.

The pure skill Andrew Bird displays almost makes the long linear sections of Noble Beast worth it. The guy is composing beautiful music, and admittedly it doesn't adhere to any sort of conventional verse-chorus-verse songwriting, but to sit in an audience full of people (and we were all sitting the whole time, which was nice) and watch him (and three others) perform these complex and beautiful songs in a live setting is something to be witnessed.

Thankfully he played a few older album tracks (not much older, though) and the four-piece version of Fake Palindromes was completely unbelievably awesome, it rocked, far harder than any allusions to rocking that are in the album version, it was hard and fast and totally sublime. Tables and Chairs has certainly gotten a lot better, especially with Bird's stage antics / theatrics / nervous tics.

That's the best thing, clearly, about seeing Bird live: he doesn't seem to be afraid to change or improve his songs. He didn't have to reinvent Fake Palindromes for the four-piece, he didn't have to do that utterly adorable nuanced way he sang "there will be snacks!" at the end of Tables and Chairs, but he did and by doing so he probably ruined the album versions for me forever.

I was hoping that seeing Andrew Bird live would open a door for me, a door to loving Andrew Bird's full discography, even the weird stuff that I can't listen to while I'm driving, but what I really came away with was an appreciation for Bird's live show. (The albums almost seem superfluous now, although Noble Beast does accurately capture the beauty of Bird's live vocal, whistling, and violin playing.) These were the most expensive tickets I've purchased, I think, for an artist I wasn't sure I would totally enjoy, and it was totally worth it and I totally enjoyed it and then some (yeah, I jizzed in my pants, what of it?).

I'll definitely go see him in the future.

If his next album is less like Noble Beast, anyway.

I'll be seeing Andrew Bird tonight at the Orpheum Theatre here in LA. (I saw The Dresden Dolls there and it's a nice venue, but it's Ticketmaster only which makes the tickets ridiculously expensive, I paid nearly the full price of the ticket itself in service charges, effectively doubling the cost of the ticket.) If you're there and want to give me any candy or cookies or drugs or something, just say hello.

The other day I mentioned thinking it's necessary to go back through albums you have previously enjoyed years ago looking for songs that you enjoy more now that your taste has developed in other directions. (I assume, I guess, that most people who would read staires_!_ are people who (like me) feverishly seek out new music constantly and consider their library and taste to be continuously developing.)

Although this album, Armchair Apocrypha, didn't come out that long ago (a month short of two years ago), somehow I totally overlooked this song on my repeated listens. The trio of Imitosis / Plasticities / Heretics got into my rotation but nothing else from the album. I don't know how, I guess I just wasn't that into the album at the time.

Perhaps it's the oddness of Bird's new album, Noble Beast, that makes me appreciate his previous album that much more. Noble Beast is largely devoid of songs that fall anywhere within the realm of traditional pop songwriting. Fitz & Dizzyspells comes as close as anything, but then immediately splits off into a bunch of linear sections that, despite being absolutely beautiful, completely ruin any sweet groove you were feeling. (This makes Noble Beast a particularly lousy driving album.)

Darkmatter's rather traditional sweeping epic indie pop song sound is a nice contrast to Noble Beast's peculiarities. But, maybe I'm doing the same thing with Noble Beast that I did with Armchair Apocrypha? Perhaps I am not listening to it right, and will, in a year or two, discover it anew and be amazed with it.

I'm hoping to expedite this process by seeing Bird live tonight. Generally seeing an artist live gives me an appreciation for material of theirs that I didn't like previously. It gives me a new angle in, like when I saw Rilo Kiley live years ago before they started to suck (this is a theme, you see) and suddenly More Adventurous made so much more sense. I guess we'll see. I suppose if I fall in love with Andrew Bird tonight, as in love as I am with other artists (Amanda Palmer, Eels, The Polyphonic Spree), I'll just post a song off Noble Beast tomorrow as well.

Twitter Note: Welcome new followers! If I followed you randomly, it's because I'm using Twollo to find people, like you, who are talking about "indie music". If you don't follow me back, I'll eventually unfollow you, so don't worry about it if you're not interested in my daily ramblings and music. I'm not selling anything but new experiences (oh lord) so you should hang around.

Site Note: I managed, finally, to add proper archive links since we're on Day 72 at this point. (Oh my god, I have to change the archive pages so they give a Day ## instead of the date! That'd be so awesome!) Let me know what you think, would it be better for archive pages just to be a list of all the posts in the month so you can pick and choose? Also, who here votes for a search box over in the sidebar somewhere?

Update: I did the whole "day ##" thing, you'll see it on single posts and archive pages. Pretty cool. I'll be adding a search box at some point today, I'll announce it on Twitter later when it's done.

Originally I was going to post "King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1" and wrote this opening paragraph about it:

If hearing this song doesn't immediately make you want to do one of two things, being 1) find this album and then listen to the rest of it, or 2) find your copy of this album and then listen to it again sometime today, then get off my website and never come back.

But then I realized that hearing King of Carrot Flowers doesn't so much make me want to listen to the whole album, so then 1) I am breaking my own made up rule about my own website, and 2) I'm not really staying true to my goal then, because I'm not posting a song that makes me want to listen to more of the artist if this was my first time. Holland, 1945 is the Neutral Milk Hotel song that could get me into them if I wasn't already, if I heard it at this point in time.

The people on SongMeanings say this song is all about Anne Frank and the Jews. I don't know anything about that, but their arguments are convincing, so let's believe them and move on. (Sorry, Jews!)

I was at a 50th birthday party for the father of a friend of mine, and this scenester kid picked up an acoustic guitar randomly and played through a literally perfect rendition of Two-Headed Boy (also off this album, also beautiful and awesome) with a voice like a younger Jeff Magnum, and it was stupendous. It almost made me cry, it was so good.

(There was some kid there trying to talk shit near me during the guy's performance of it, saying, "Why's he sound like shit, this guy can't sing!" and I got to be the pretentious indie music fan who says, "Actually he's pulling off this song rather beautifully and this is how the original sounds! So show some respect and shut your fucking mouth.")

Afterward I walked up to the singer and started quizzing him about Neutral Milk Hotel, The Elephant Six Collective, The Olivia Tremor Control, Jeff Magnum, and neo-psychedelia in general. Sadly, he was totally clueless. He looked a little saddened by the fact that he didn't understand anything I was saying and could only offer, "Yeah a friend gave me the album and I like it a lot, but I've never listened to anything else by them. I don't really explore much, I just listen to what people give me."

These last two days can be themed as "People Who Are Supposed To Know Something About Music Disappoint Me At Every Turn".

I've got this friend, he's a cool guy, kind of funny (in the way that he's constantly spouting pop culture references, in such an amount that I have taken to calling him "the Family Guy Jukebox") and he plays drums in metal bands (I'd say his favorite band would be Slipknot, so that kind of metal). Out of all the people I know, he's the most musically inclined and in 'the know'.

For some reason, though, when this song played he said something like, "I'm waiting for my man?" and looked at me in that way that guys look at each other when they're trying to silently communicate, "This shit is gay, fool."

And, I'm, like, you know, a little flabbergasted, because my friend does drugs (everyone cool does, if you didn't know) and I can't imagine he's never heard the term "man" applied to a dealer before? I guess it's kind of a 70's thing maybe. On top of that, I'm a little disappointed that he couldn't just listen to the lyrics and suss out that the whole song is about buying drugs. No, instead he heard a guy (poorly) singing "my man" and got all weird about it.

"Dude, no, man, it's his dealer, he's waiting to buy drugs, listen to the song."

"Oh, okaaaaay... Who is this?"

"The Velvet Underground? You know, like, Lou Reed?"

"Who's Lou Reed?"

Sometimes the world strikes me as a really sad place, especially when the Family Guy Jukebox doesn't know who Lou Reed is.

A bit of everything today.

1.) I'm not a fan of Elvis Costello, but he's one of those artists who is so random/diverse in some of the songs he makes (and I guess you could probably owe a lot of this [like Green Shirt] to Nick Lowe early on in Costello's career) that I've got a few (3) in my collection that totally fit what I think is great. I can just discard the rest of his stuff. (I don't care for stuff like Alison...)

2.) This song was used in the intro sequence to Jake Kasdan's massive failure and Bill Pullman's massive success, Zero Effect. This is a fun movie but it requires patience, because it's not very good and it's very slow moving, but Bill Pullman is so great in it and his hair is awesome. So awesome. Also, he drinks Tab and eats tuna right from the can with a fork. So awesome.

3.) When I heard this song for the first time in that movie, I'd swear I'd had exhausted Costello's discography of significant tracks but this one wowed me. This exposed an effect I have to play with more: seems to me that as your tastes change, you should revisit old albums, and this iTunes/MP3 age makes this so much more difficult.

I get locked into listening to the same tracks off an album all the time because it's so easy to. I add them to a playlist and there they are. In the old days I'd have to put in the album, and I'd end up listening to full albums. These days I listen to an album a couple times through, pick the songs I like off of it, and then forget about the rest. Just the other day I discovered an Andrew Bird song that I didn't like two years ago but think is ridiculously awesome now. It was like finding a twenty dollar bill in my pocket that I didn't know I had.

Be careful, hardcore listeners of the digital age, because we're killing the art of the album, I think.

4.) I think growing up on the internet really killed my "awkward sexual confusion" days early on. With a brief Yahoo search I could find detailed descriptions, diagrams, and videos all about how it went down. My parents never gave me a talking to, and when it finally came time for me to put my wanger in a hoo-hah there was no mystery, wonder, or confusion to it. It was just a dance I'd been watching videos of & reading about on the internet for a couple years.

The National are one of my top artists, with tons of plays on Last.FM, I think they come in at number four or five, but I'm only really a fan of their two most recent albums. I've never sat down and given their earlier work much of a fair listen because I am fickle and Alligator and Boxer are so excellent it almost seems unnecessary to listen to their other stuff as well.

I'd never heard this song until today. It's Valentine's Day, and I'm feeling kind of like I want to crawl away from the world at large (by Modest Mouse, of course). I'm not lonely (my girlfriend gave me a bag of candy, so I'm not one of those Valentine's Day haters spouting "It's not because I'm single, it's just such a ridiculous holiday!") but I just kind of want to die inside! Fuck all if I am not going to try to take some people with me.

So, then, this song, for you, on Valentine's Day.

Think about how tenuous your link to your significant other really is.

One day you will be alone again.

Lying naked on the floor, all sick with it like Natalie Imbruglia.

Amazon Note: This album is only $7. OK, it's more an EP, but still, it's 29 minutes of music in eight songs, including a cool live version of Murder Me Rachael, which is worth the purchase alone, if a little bassy (will probably sound awesome in a car on the freeway!), so buy it, guy.

P.S. Nothing's fine, I'm torn! I'm all out of faith! This is how I feel!

Maybe I could be a fan of Built to Spill. I'm not, I just like this song a lot, but maybe my taste has changed so much since the time I initially listened to them that it would be beneficial to check them out now. (Update: I listened to their most popular songs on Last.FM and I have to say, nope, don't like them.)

Built to Spill is one of those bands I've always heard about from other people, spoken in hushed tones, reverence in their voices. I've always wanted to understand, kind of like how I want to understand Sonic Youth, but I'm too scared to just dive into it without some sort of personal guide tailored to my taste so I am most inclined to enjoy them. If I had entered XTC from The Big Express, I probably would have never discovered Apple Venus; if I had entered Tool at 10,000 Days, I would have thought they were giant piles of crap.

Maybe Built to Spill is one of those bands you need to hear when you're young and impressionable, one of those bands that forms you and influences you for your whole life, kind of like what Eels is for me. Out there in the world is some 24 year old dude just like me, but his number one band is Built to Spill. This song goes out to you, dude who is just like me but likes Built to Spill.

Next time you're driving down the freeway at leisurely 75 miles per hour, roll down all your windows a little bit and crank this song way up. Make sure there's sunlight and a cool breeze. I know I say this a lot, but some songs are just made to do things to, and I drive a lot, so that's what I associate music with.

Twitter Note: Twitter friend curlybap cornified this site to the max and posted a screenshot of it, which I will consider as our first official piece of fan art here at staires_!_

Site Note: Perceptive readers may have noticed that the site changed a bit. It should be a lot easier to navigate (with 'next' and 'previous' links) and (hopefully) more pleasing on the eyes. As usual some things look a bit wonky in Internet Explorer (nothing important), and because I decided to use tables to construct this design, it looks a little wonky on mobile browsers (or at least on my G1) but maybe I'll crank out some special mobile only design once Flash works on my G1 and I can actually test that sort of functionality.

If you have any recommendations or suggestions, let me know through a comment or an @staires on Twitter. The album art happened because of a twitterer's request!

Author's Note: Yay Friday Yay!

I'll be seeing The Airborne Toxic Event tonight at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles. Supposedly my girlfriend is going to wear a dress. How exciting!

I have nothing to say about this song! I'm sorry! I was going to post a Sleater-Kinney song but then I realized I have this concert tonight and it seems appropriate to post a song by the band I am seeing. Unfortunately Airborne Toxic Event plays this sort of emasculated insecure guy rock music and while I can kind of relate to it (guilty), I have no real personal connection to it at all.

I saw these guys (and girl, on violin) live a few months ago with a friend of mine, and the singer was obviously drunk and flubbed the lyrics a good couple of times, and the violin girl had taken to collapsing dramatically to her knees on the side of the stage while otherwise doing nothing else. It was entertaining, at the very least, though they didn't really do service to their music.

I'm hoping they're better tonight, since they are headlining and it's sold out. Maybe they rehearsed. Maybe they got drunk last night so they don't have to do it tonight.

In my last dysfunctional relationship, this was set as the girl's ringtone on my phone early on. I always thought it was a bit of a message to her, because she was always fighting against our relationship (stating, knowingly, repeatedly, that long distance never works and that she didn't like me that much anyway) but this song summed it up so perfectly to me at the time: love, love, love, this isn't it. You don't even know, girl!

And it wasn't it. It kept going, and eventually I got a new phone and it didn't have Giant Drag ringtones at first so she ended up with Stand By Me or something, so I guess I was right but eventually there was an it (and it was lousy) and it would have been avoided entirely if I had just bothered to look up what people think this song means.

I quote from SongMeanings user lovelornloser:

to me this song seems to be about an over obsessive person who deludes infactuation with love and hates the other person for not liking them back.

Well, shit.

This happens a lot (some day I will write about Helena by Nickel Creek), I love some song at a certain point in my life but never really pay any attention to it, and then it ends up perfectly describing my problems to me. It's a shame I didn't realize this one until right now.

I am a crazy person.

Update: This post is less confusing if I explain that I never hunderstood that "This Isn't It" means "this isn't love". I always assumed "love, this isn't it" meant, like, "darling, this isn't all there is to this". Yeah, I am dumb.

I chose this song just so that I could tell this story about when I saw The Essex Green live, but that story involves another song by them (Sixties, a song that I love infinitely more than this one). I don't feel like posting that song today, so you get this one, and no story.

You should feel lucky, because this song is smooth, smooth like butter. Buttery goodness. It's good for driving, turned up loudly, and it's good for earphones, listening to fingers slide across strings, and the way their voices rise together. All in all this is a pretty genius song.

Before they released this album (in 2006) they streamed it online for free. I listened, and at the half-way point I ordered the album from them (though I could have easily downloaded it) and wrote a little review on one of my former journals saying this is going to be the bestest album ever. They actually found me on MySpace (from my site they had to have followed at least three links to get to it so they definitely searched me out) and left a comment thanking me for the kind words I said about them on my journal. It was pretty sweet of them.

Too bad my story about Sixties is about how they pissed me off big time at their concert but that's for another time.

If this website has done anything for me so far, it's that I've realized that for a guy who hates nonsense lyrics, I listen to a lot of music that has nonsense lyrics. I guess it's inescapable. Not everyone can write tales into their songs like The Boss (and I'm sure someone is going to say "And Decemberists!" and then I'll vomit). It's teaching me to appreciate them, though, and I think this song perfectly demonstrates what can be accomplished with nonsense lyrics.

In an interview with Pitchfork, Tapes 'n Tapes singer/guitarist Josh Grier said...

Pitchfork: Aside from Ben Affleck, what inspires you to write songs?

JG: [laughs] That's tough, Ben Affleck's really quite an inspiration.

Pitchfork: Well, he's so versatile...

JG: It's more his pompadour. I don't know. Generally, I'll just sit around and play guitar, and I definitely try to come up with music first, and then after I have a core idea of how I want the song to sound, I'll start forming the words. And I definitely say it's more like words than lyrics. I don't fancy myself as a poet or really articulate. But writing lyrics, I'll kind of mumble stuff when we sing, in the sound of where the words should go, and form words that would fit in there, and hopefully don't sound totally idiotic. The whole idea is to have words that don't detract from the music, but hopefully will enhance it.

I respect that. Despite my hatred of nonsense lyrics (and my creeping appreciation for them), I can dig it, because Insistor is such an over-the-top song (complete with vocals and a vibe that remind me a lot of Pixies) and the semi-nonsense lyrics are perfect for it. I don't know why this guy will be a badger, or how someone can be someone's bail bond, or what the hell Kelly has to do with anything, and is she sleeping with a logger? Why's she gotta hold her water? What's going on!

I don't care!

This song is fun to rock out to while driving down the street, smoking a cigarette all cool and hipster looking.

This song reminds me a bit of the time back in the day when The Dandy Warhols were a good band, back when they played shoegaze with 60's-70's rock influences. At least up until the vocal starts, at which point it's all Black Angels.

I liked this album a lot, which is why it is such a shame that their second album suffers from a sever case of sophomore slump, where there are no longer songs but just walls of shoegaze guitar droning on and on. There are no hooks, no catchy lyrics, nothing you can dance to for the most part, just the same endlessly wailing guitars.

This song, off their first album, is a good example of why The Black Angels are a band who need to release a "return to form" third album, full of 70's rock and summer of love psych-outs. Give us something we can dance to, hell, give us something we can sing along with. Give us back our Black Angels.

Site Note: staires_!_, now with "more" hyperbole!

Author's Note: It's Sunday! Everyone reads this on Sundays. Most people, for the first time! Sigh.

At first you could say there is something sweet about this song. It's not that he's jealous, he just wants to protect her, keep her away from people with diseases and all that. He doesn't want her back, he knows that they don't work, but he still wants to kill whatever motherfucker is trying to bed her currently.

But as the song plays on (and any guy listening to this should get it way before he reveals it in the song) you learn he's lying. He's not protecting her, he's trying to possess her still, insisting he doesn't want her but all the while trying to guide her back into his good arms.

A guy on Songmeanings points out that it sounds like, from the lyrics, that he broke up with her ("I decided this decision some six months ago") and can't handle watching her move on. I didn't get that, though it makes perfect sense, so I am sharing it.

I dumped a girl who I still wanted once and it totally ruined the relationship. Also, everyone in the whole world can say "I can relate to wanting to kill someone else's partner," so I don't really need to say that.

P.S. This is a pretty song.

Unfortunately it looks like Amazon MP3 has everything by 16 Horsepower except for the album this song is on. Furthermore, the album seems to be entirely out of print on Amazon. So, I'm linking to one of their earlier albums which feature American Wheeze and Black Soul Choir, two other songs by this band that I like a lot.

This is, I think, the ultimate outlaw song. I almost went on for a paragraph giving amazing credit to singer David Eugene Edwards for writing such an awesome song, but a quick glance on Wikipedia reveals this to be a traditional folk song! I did not know that. The rest of the internet attributes it to 16 Horsepower, so who knows.

But, to give proper credit to David Eugene Edwards, I think his voice defines this song's awesomeness. He sounds like a regular joe, maybe a little scrawny and filthy, venturing out in the west somewhere. He probably doesn't look like much, but he's good with a gun and he has no conscience. When the law comes upon him, he does what he has to, and Edwards voice conveys that, I think, it becomes powerful when the character in the song becomes powerful. His accent is probably fake (being that he's from Colorado) but I really don't give a shit because it sounds awesome in this song.

Anyway, this song is bad ass.

Site Note: I'm working on a refined version of this design. If you wanna take a look and tell me what you think, you can see it here. I upload it periodically as I change and add things. I never realized how shitty the title font looks in Internet Explorer. That should be fixed in this new version.

Sometimes I think I've got it hard, and sometimes I think I've got it easy. Today I wanted to write something epic, something grand and sweeping, something describing some deep relationship I have with a song (I'm going to predict that about as deep as it ever gets is "one time I fucked a chick to this song in my car and it was rad and now when I hear this song I think about fucking her and I feel kind of ill" when I post an A Perfect Circle song in the coming years) but instead no inspiration came as I scanned my song list.

I chose this song because I've listened to it a lot (probably over 70 times) in a short amount of time (10 months). When I can't think of anything decent to write, all I have to do is pick a song I like, and then I can write something like, "Hey, I like this song." I guess I have I have it pretty easy.

Hey, I like this song. An ex-girlfriend introduced me to it, saying that it sounded like something I would like. Usually nobody ever gets it right, ("You should listen to Flobots, man!") but this song was totally on the money. Good job, ex-girlfriend.

I've got a love/hate relationship with people, meaning that I love to hate them. Ha ha! I'll be here all wee--ah, well, forever... people.

I was going to write something really emo here, about how it seems like my early twenties have been largely consumed by becoming increasingly detached from reality and emotion while becoming more involved in reality than ever before, and acting healthier (emotionally), actually somewhat maintaining relationships. I don't get it, but I'm not going to write about that.

I heard this song in a movie that I never finished watching about pot farmers and some med student in Humboldt County. I'm not even going to link to it because it was lousy. I'm sure they got the whole Humboldt Pot Culture thing somewhat right, maybe, (if, and I somewhat refuse to believe this, the majority of people farming pot in Humboldt are peace loving "we only grow what we need to survive here" hippies who occasionally shoot people, but I've heard from people who've actually lived and grown in Humboldt that for the most part there are big fields and sometimes kids venture into them to steal buds and they never come back, they're never seen again. So, put that in your pipe and smoke it, writer and director of Humboldt County.)

This song is fun. I've never sat down and listened to any Earlimart albums. Well, I tried, once, and it didn't go well, but usually with bands like that I end up finding a "gateway drug" into them, like one song that really grabs my attention and makes me take notice. I figure that eventually, since I've been listening to this song for 30 minutes straight while fiddling with this post, Happy Alone will lead me into the rest of Earlimart's music.

Have a good day. Try to be happy alone.

P.S. I put this in parenthesis and then I drew this graph and I don't want to not include it because I worked so hard on it. Here's what I edited out.

(I don't like big concerts, because of the mass of people, but also how does it make since that... well, this...)

[caption id="attachment_291" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="what the fuck is up with this?"][/caption]

4.) There are tits on the cover of this album. That is awesome. I did not know that.

8.) This song reminds me a lot of 311, which makes me inclined to dislike it quite a bit, but I've had a few other people listen to it, people who used to listen to 311, and no one agrees with me. Am I crazy? Does it not have that sort of middle class white boy reggae vibe?

15.) I got this free song out of a free sampler of free music from Seattle that was largely terrible, but still free if I remember correctly. However, let that not discourage you Seattle..ers..ites.. whatever you call yourselves, because there is plenty of good music coming out of Seattle, like pretty much everything on Hardly Art, like The Moondoggies and The Dutchess and the Duke, which is not a typo.

16.) The lyrics on Songmeanings say that they are "they were only there to break my toast" but that makes no sense at all. I am reasonably certain he is saying "break my toes". What do you think?

23.) I like upbeat music on occasion, but due to the aforementioned 311 vibe, I don't fully enjoy this song. I think it stays in my collection and I enjoy listening to it because guilty pleasures are fun and the lyrics are pretty rad. They got that whole weird poetry thing going on again, like Michael Penn. They sound good and it doesn't matter what the song sounds like as a whole.

42.) I really don't like the whole "uh uh i like this girl uhh so i'm telling you uh" bullshit at the end of this song. The upside is that while this song isn't particularly fun to listen to while sitting in front of a computer, it works out beautifully for sunny California day driving (if it is snowing where you are, hah, it was 80 degrees here yesterday, I was sweating!) and in that situation you can't even hear the dumb shit at the end of the song.

I've never listened to this album through headphones, and that was such a terrible mistake. It was such a coincidence, a happenstance occurrence, that my girlfriend is here on a Monday morning, taking up my desktop computer, so I'm on my laptop sitting on the bed. These laptop speakers suck, even with decent EQ (whoa! did you know shift+tab backs up in the tab order? cool) so I grabbed some earphones.

If you're playing the song, pause it, and put in some headphones. (If you're not, do step one.) I hope you've got decent ones. (If you're looking for sub-$50 headphones, I recommend these Sony fontopias. If you want better headphones, get a proper custom made headphone amp [it'll be way cheaper than buying retail] and some Sennheiser HD-595s.)

Now play it.

Stop reading and listen!

I guess it is said that this band is unique because they construct their songs on mixing software, but then they learn to play the songs live and record that. You can hear it, because the music definitely has that constructed loop-based feeling but everything feels organic and alive.

It's a shame, then, that other bands can't figure this out. Imagine how little Radiohead would suck right now if they would just play real instruments on their records? Or at least not try to make them sound like robotic computer generated bullshit. Not to get down on Radiohead randomly, but I remember when they made music, you know? Stuff that sounded organic and alive, full of beauty. Listening to Radiohead now is like walking through the Blade Runner set, awkward Vangelis synths hounding you, big black emotionless buildings towering over you, et al.

Menomena, by comparison, sound rich and lovely. Their music is probably no less weird (if not weirder), but when you listen closely you can hear all the attention to detail. You can hear breathing, fingers sliding across strings, they play with echos, and place sounds around your head in various ways. Their songs live. They might have been gestated within a computer but they have emerged screaming organic little shits that kick ass.

It's February! Happy February. Why is February spelled so strangely? I just doesn't look right. Shouldn't it be Feburary? Am I pronouncing it wrong?

I saw Akron/Family play at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum (at about this position, looming elephants, bowing giraffes, and dignified looking whatever those things are on the right and all) and they were fantastic. Their albums tend to be kind of noodly (if you understand what I mean by that, then yay!) but in a live context their music takes on a vibe more akin to... this song!

(OH MY GOD! I never saw the huge walking dinosaur while I was there? I would have shit myself! I was not in my right mind at all. I probably would have ran screaming from the building if I had seen that thing coming at me. Man. They serve alcohol there. What are they thinking, walking a dinosaur through the halls?)

(Also that guy complains about The Dodos' front man sitting through his whole set. I only mention it because it struck me as odd, to complain about that. You better stand up while you play unless you're 70! Like, what? Let the guy sit. Maybe he has some sort of... sitting disease. Where he has to sit.)

(There was indeed a dancing circle of "hippies" [actually it was a bunch of teenage blonde girls wearing outfits straight out of the 80's] during their set, which became greatly amusing when this tall, let's say Armenian, guy with sunglasses on decided to dance by them, after joking about it with his friends, and within seconds the entire gaggle of girls were dancing around him as one swirling mass. After a minute he walked off, thoroughly amused. [Minutes later two skinny white boys dancing like punk rockers but dressed like they were from Hogwarts (kill me for that reference) bounded into the group of girls and, again, it only lasted briefly.])

(That paragraph was so rife with typos on my initial publish! God! Dropped words everywhere.)

This is the best song ever. I hope it sets the tone for February.

It's Sunday! No one reads this on Sundays.

Song Note: I was supposed to post this forever ago, back when I posted Johnny Appleseed by Joe Strummer. So go listen to that one too. Hopefully it shows up in the "Related Songs" box so I don't have to manually link it because I am lazy. I'll say it some more: Joe Strummer. Johnny Appleseed. Ah-ha, there!