Day 56: Nick Drake – Five Leaves Left

I liked Bryter Layter so much that I found it hard to imagine his other two albums, and that was made more difficult by how highly everyone I talked to spoke of them. Bryter Layter sounded perfect, and I almost dreaded hearing the others because I figured there was no way they could compare, or that they would go some other avenue that would challenge my opinion of Nick Drake himself.

Fortunately that wasn’t the case. Five Leaves Left actually raises my opinion of Drake significantly, because it has everything that made Bryter so good (the dazzling emotion) and executes it in basically a whole different style, losing the jazz sound of Bryter and using more baroque chamber instruments. The result is even more elegiac, with several songs retrospectively sounding like suicide notes. However, Drake had a way of making a suicide note sound somehow life-affirming and inspirational. I attribute it to his voice. He sings rainbows, as far as I’m concerned. His voice was a force bigger than any one man should probably be allowed to have.  “River Man” is, to me, the quintessential Nick Drake: attention-catching guitar rhythm, rambunctious string arrangements that fight for and against tonality, and that voice, whispering as loud as it can. I absolutely adored this album through and through.

Day 54: Le Loup – The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly

When I start in on an album and something like this , I get incredibly relieved. “Oh,” I think, “Something I would listen to.” Le Loup are a breath of familiar air.

Le Loup is the project of Sam Simkoff, a Washington, D.C. based artist, and that doesn’t matter. I just learned that from Allmusic and it has nothing to do with anything. The Throne… matters, though, but what matters about it is within, not without. It is an album that is deeper than it is tall, the kind of thing measured in how far into it you can sink. It contains every quality I can think of to describe what kind of music I like: compelling rhythms, soothing vocals layer-caked in overdubs, banjo with restraint; it is an amalgamation of elements from existing music, rearranged artfully into something generous and unfamiliar. You can isolate discrete threads, like Sufjan’s rippling banjo, the breathy whispers and coos of Simkoff’s multiplicitous voice. This music is gorgeous, desolate and sweet. I try harder and care more about music like this than I do the other days. I almost just opened a thesaurus. I am a subjective animal let loose upon a keyboard. I like this more than I liked many other albums because it reminds me of the albums I am not listening to because of this project.

I have not mustered even one useful smidgen of Stockholm’s syndrome. Rather, this project has so far been a sort of self-imposed musical exile. The project is analogous to my real life in a way that is a bit painfully obvious: Tiring of the routine of my hometown and the waning novelty of everyday life, and drunk on the notion of what progress might lie westward, I abscond to Seattle to start a new chapter, removing myself from the lives of everyone I had grown to love. And ending up here, finding many nourishing pockets of happiness every day, but being hounded by this idea that maybe this was wrong? Should I be here? What great things lie waiting for me at “home” if I just go back? If I just turn off this fucking album and put on Spoon or something, just scratch that itch, relent and return to the familiar, surely I would feel so much better, right?

This is not some “Fuck I’m so unhappy”  plea, because I’m not — every day I’m not. I enjoy life, I enjoy being me, and I can be me anywhere. The more time, though, I spend wondering what kind of alternate universe is running in parallel 7 hours and 45 minutes of frantic, homesick driving away, the less time I spend trying to get to know any of these new (musical, if you lost the rambling metaphor) friends, and the more assured I am to fail to become happier with my position. In living with my toe-tips in this imagined idyll of “home,” I deprive myself the full experience of being right here, right now, in a magical city in the prime years of my life. And the more time I spend refusing to acknowledge the beauty in the struggle of creating my life, day by day, the more certain anything I sculpt is to crack and crumble away.

And this album, then, is not a doppelgänger for someone I’d rather be spending time with. It is a beautiful, unique creature, rich with promise.

Day 27: Ray LaMontagne – Gossip in the Grain

I guess something I never noticed before this project is how often I don’t listen to music. When I didn’t feel like I was responsible for spending as much time with music throughout the day, the times when I barely got through a long-player in a day’s revolution glossed right on by. But on a day like today, I felt absolutely irresponsible.

What’s odd to me is that I felt like I was abdicating from my responsibility, but my responsibility would have pushed me into isolation and shut me out of several opportunities for curious interaction. When I got on the bus this morning and saw a coworker, I could have kept walking, head down, and found a seat by myself to sit and devote my focus to listening to my music, but I sat with her and took my earphones out. On lunch, I had a half an hour to listen and spent the rest of my break talking to a friend. After work, I listened for a few minutes before I struck up a conversation with another coworker at the bus stop. Then we went to a karaoke bar. Then on the way home, I realized I knew a guy who was standing at the bus stop with me, and we talked for most of the ride. All day, fate transpired to keep me from this album.

And I wonder how much the album had to do with it. I was going to go out last night, and was originally waffling on the idea because I wanted to go home and put in some serious listening time with Harvest. Listening to it attentively in the privacy of my home felt that important. Eventually, I begrudgingly decided to go out after all. Tellingly, today I never felt like taking out the earphones was a sacrifice. I was not exactly happy to do so, but at no point today did I feel like my listening was vital.

And maybe that says as much about my moods’ vacillations as it does about the quality of company this album provided, but I don’t know. This morning I listened to the first couple of tracks as I prepared breakfast (a grossly over-topped PB&J and a serious guzzling of 2% milk) and was untouched. The album did nothing to endear itself to me. And this is one of those days where my approach to this project has to go much more subjective, since as of this writing I have made it through the album maybe three times total. Each time, I had a hard time paying attention to it. Maybe the last two days of really enthusiastic, intensive listening fried my brain. Maybe today was a musical refractory period.

I once had to take an alcohol serving safety course (T.I.P.S. in Idaho) when I got a job that involved selling canned/bottled beer. My sleep schedule was hellacious at the time, and I went to the class powered only by the emissions that result from burning fumes for fuel. About an hour of unintentionally funny training videos in a darkened room later, I was falling asleep in my chair. I woke from a sleep I didn’t remember slipping into, and panicked. I had to quickly assess the situation: I was in a fluorescent room surrounded by my coworkers, who were stifling giggles, and there was a perturbed-looking authority figure.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I stammered. “It’s not your fault.” And then I just about fell back asleep. Everyone laughed, but I felt genuinely guilty for falling asleep in the middle of her talking. I can’t imagine how insulting that would feel. And that’s the same guilt I feel with this album. From first to last, I failed to like it. Worse still, I failed to dislike it. Nothing in me bridged the gap between it and myself; it’s rated very highly on Amazon and Allmusic, yet I have failed to remember more than a second of it. It has been utterly unrelatable, and I’m loath to blame the album.

I will say this: closing track “Gossip In The Grain” is such a good song that it makes me sure, even though I have given this a few solid listens now, that there was something about today that was just keeping me from it. There is some flaw in timing, some antonym of serendipity by which this album and I never properly met. I feel confident that one day I will put it on and wonder, where the hell was my head at when I listened to this before?