Day 73: Joy Division – Closer

Wherein I have the daunting task of saying anything clever about one of the most lavishly praised albums in recording history.

Joy Division is one of those bands that for me, despite never having heard more than two of their songs, is so firmly tied to a feeling that it can be hard to appreciate them from without it. That feeling, of course, is sheer, overwhelming depression. However, I know that impression is influenced by having seen Control and seeing the layers of tragedy Curtis would knead into his life, the terrible things he did to the people who cared about him and to himself.

It’s almost too bad that it’s so hard to see Joy Division beyond Curtis, but it’s hard to imagine them without him. (Note: No, I haven’t really listened to New Order, and that ‘really’ is only because that song of theirs that Orgy covered was on the radio a lot when I was young.) I should listen to them for comparison, because I really do wonder how much of the dismal atmosphere of Closer is due to Curtis’ temperament.

Having listened to Closer quite a bit today, I do finally see more of a nuance to the music than I did previously. Joy Division may have been collectively slung with Curtis’ albatross, but the band reacted as a whole against it: The musicians play from opposing sides of some great schism, the instruments reflecting Curtis far too well in their seeming inability to play in anything but lugubrious tones, yet being inspired to use these tones to try to wrest themselves free of this very sadness. Ultimately, that’s what gave Curtis his appeal, too. He sang of shame in “Isolation” but with a strange enthusiasm about it, carrying off a line like “Mother I tried please believe me/I’m doing the best that I can/I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through/I’m ashamed of the person I am” without sounding self-pitying, instead sounding wearied but fully alive. He continues, “But if you could just see the beauty/These things I could never describe/These pleasures a wayward distraction/This is my one lucky prize.”

I’m really glad to say that this album is awesome and that Curtis is the last reason why. Musically, this thing is just spectacular. Every song sounds different, yet all are consistent. It’s a perfect album, where every song fits like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s refreshing to hear something where there’s not one weak moment, nothing inspiring a Next.

Also, on the “discovering old favorites’ origins” note: Interpol, you guys are fucking shameless. I still love you, though.

Day 72: Blackalicious – Blazing Arrow

My favorite days leave me baffled as to why I hadn’t heard the day’s album before. This was one of them.

I’ve heard Gift of Gab spoken of as some sort of master rapper, but I can’t recall ever hearing anything of his before. Blackalicious perfectly represent what I love about hip-hop, though. It’s rare that a hip-hop album comes along where it’s hard to decide whether the music or the lyrics are better, but this is one such album. The best part, though, is that although both aspects are incredibly strong, they don’t jockey for supremacy — they work together in harmony.

Gift of Gab has a virtuosic lyrical talent and sounds like three people rapping simultaneously at times, but has such articulate delivery and concise word usage that he still comes across clear, and you don’t need to feed his lines through a translator or focus intently to understand what words he is using (here’s looking at R.A. The Rugged Man). He weaves his words into inspirational, thoughtful, and most importantly honest reflections that hit really, really hard at times. I can’t tell it any better than he can, and I recommend you listen to “Nowhere Fast“, the track that has stuck with me and demanded incessant replay, where he delivers a heart-felt plea to yesterday, and all the potential he believed existed at the time, to return, finding himself then in the present, swearing off yesterday and promising to do better tomorrow, until at the end of the song he finds tomorrow gone to yet another yesterday. It’s a hell of a song if only because at over 6 minutes long it feels brief — you feel as if you’re going through several songs in a row, but it keeps a cohesive idea from start to finish. If you look at the long-form hip-hop from, say, Kanye West, you’ll see that’s hard to do properly.

That leads to the most impressive part of this album. It’s the maximum CD length (74 minutes) and feels short. Each song does something different, and finds some new way to entertain, whether it’s merely kevlar-woven rhymes or full-band jazz scale run exercises, and the beats keep the experience rolling like it’s nothing. Blackalicious throw a party on this disc, and simultaneously manage to satisfy every possible taste in hip-hop: meticulously produced beats that amplify rather than leech the soul they sample and would sound good hissing from the worst soundsystem ever; lapidary rhymes; guest spots that don’t for one second detract or distract from the message of the whole album, which is put in the forefront on “Purest Love“:

The greatest expression is love, happiness, and laughter
See life is a book and this song is just another chapter
I’ll stay down to earth and real if you speak I’ll speak back
I’m not a preacher or a scholar, I’m merely just a rapper

I probably don’t fit in to the current state of –
– what you consider that to be
So you ask how can I rap
If I ain’t thugged out, pimpin’, flossin’ my ice, packin a gat?

Man if this is what I got, I want dough I can’t lie
But never sell my soul ‘n front inside mainstream’s eyes
The purest love is how I’m driven, sent, and reach for my goals
If nothing else I’ll leave the world some songs that speak from the soul

A masterful album that deserves to be heard front to back, in and out, and studied and cherished, but it’ll be cool if you just wanna crank it at the beach.

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 45: Nick Drake – Bryter Layter

Oh, my.

Here’s a good example of how important context can be when it comes to first impressions. I had only encountered Nick Drake in two soundtrack appearances: “One of These Things First” in Garden State, and “Fly” in The Royal Tenenbaums. Both songs were colored by their placement in the movie, and the tone of the story, and in both cases the movie ended up giving Drake’s tunes a sour taste for me.

In Garden State, the placement of “One of These Things First” echoes Wes Anderson’s characteristic use of songs, except without a touch of the nuance — the song’s lyrics line up with the curious adventure the protagonist finds himself drawn toward with the pixieish female lead, and the upbeat guitar pattern gives legs to a transitional scene. Neat, effective, and comes across as smug. I don’t remember where exactly “Fly” appears in The Royal Tenenbaums, but in that movie’s case it’s less a case of how the song appears than the movie itself. I love The Royal Tenenbaums, but the whole movie evokes a world that seems unreal; a quaint, insular, tweed-draped romance of eccentric people living in a fantastical brick walk-up in some abandoned corner of what is presumably New York, a world so effectively created that it has a gravity that pulls down any object placed near it. For the same reason I can’t stand hearing Nico or “Needle in the Hay”, hearing Nick Drake just makes me recall Tenenbaums. You’d think that would be a good thing, seeing as, I remind you, I did love that movie — its insistence upon its own aesthetic couldn’t undermine the simplistic brute force of the story and the inspired performances that carried it off — but the movie was so rebarbatively pretentious that anything associated with it has a wretched taint about it forever.

None of this is Nick Drake’s fault, anyway. But it did keep me from ever wanting to hear one of his albums. And as I’m learning more and more throughout the course of this project, I see this was folly, since Bryter Layter would have easily insinuated itself as a treasured piece of my musical experience at just about any point in my life. It says a lot, and says it better than I could here. Most albums I have gotten through in this project have had one or two tracks that I wanted to listen to over and over; this one had four (“At The Chime of a City Clock”, “Hazy Jane I”, “Fly”, and stand-out “Northern Sky”). The whole thing is unbearably pretty, and contains so many little musical jewels that I could quote them like hilarious lines from a movie (the captivatingly expressive piano in “Northern Sky”, the redemption of that most repugnant of instruments, the harpsichord, in “Fly”, the way Drake delivers the line “And now if it’s time for recompense for what’s done, come, come sit down on a fence in the sun” in a talk-sing tone that gives me chills). But moreover, it has a mood and style so definitive that listening to “Fly” now almost makes me wonder if Wes Anderson made a movie around it.

Drake’s suicide paints a grim retrospective picture of this album, but even if Drake had lived to get over feeling “so sorry for himself” (“Poor Boy”) this would have stood as a testament to the tense expressiveness of the depressive mind as it writhes against the chains it binds itself in. A masterpiece.

 

Day 43: Paul McCartney – Ram

After yesterday, just about anything would have been a treat. Living in Lou Reed’s aural hell for a day made me crave something less epileptic-seizure-y. This was good enough.

I’ve never listened to any of The Beatles’ solo work, mostly because I wore out enough Beatles tapes during my childhood that the songs are codified in my brain, and besides that I’ve almost gotten sick of them. I still love The Beatles and enjoy listening to them, but the solo stuff is in some separate category in my mind, and doesn’t feel necessary.

Plus, over the years I have associated the worst song of all time with McCartney/Lennon’s solo work, and have thus assumed that, subtracted from the beautiful equation of The Beatles, the members individually were some sort of perverse music rapists who delighted in ruining every happy memory their voices had ever forged.

So this morning, I started this up — noticing the album was credited to Paul & Linda McCartney, which for some reason made my knee jerk even harder — with serious apprehension, expecting something worse than yesterday. After two tracks I was relieved, to say the least. And then track three came on.

“Ram On” is one of the nicest goddamn songs I have ever heard. I feel like I am making this statement regardless of the context of my recent listening. It is wonderful. Almost every second of it is magical. From the studio chatter at the beginning, to the do-over Paul pulls on the ukelele part, the song seems to happen spontaneously. At the same time, it is lavishly decorated — McCartney paints the back of the soundspace with rich ribbons of voice, and the percussion in the song is all handclaps and whisper-quiet drums that quake with bass. It’s a truly fantastic song, and to be honest it’s almost kept me from even hearing the rest of the album. With each listen I just find myself getting impatient, waiting for it to come back around. And that’s after earlier today when I just repeated “Ram On” for about an hour.

What’s most striking to me is that it sets a number of precedents for most of the indie music I’ve loved in the last year. That’s probably a big part of why I like it so much. The backing vocals, with their unmiked-in-the-back-of-the-room sound and their ethereal tremulousness, are a precursor to the vocal arrangements of Grizzly Bear, and the ukelele part that drives the song could have come off of any Pitchfork top 10 album in the last 4 years. And the rest of the album, too. “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey” plays at Pet Sounds’ “pocket symphonies” in its languid first half, before taking an absurd detour into a medley of almost-rock styles. “Dear Boy” is a nervy, bitter tune that teems with voices, all applied gorgeously and faultlessly. The use of studio effects on this track, as well as most of the album, is a big stand-out here. “Dear Boy” opens with the lead voice and the piano stuffed and compressed into a jar somewhere in the right channel, while in the left channel a lightly-touched conga drum sets the beat and its echo is allowed to ring out, lonely. When the song eventually grows into all of this space that these two effects created, it makes the whole song seem to have a real definable space. The album abounds with clever craft like this.

Which really gets at what’s interesting about this album, for me. For all the schmaltz — which is there — and the grating songs (“Long Haired Lady”, and “Monkberry Moon Delight”, which appears to be some sort of horrific Tom Waits tribute), there’s a “Dear Boy”, “Ram On”, or “Heart of The Country” that has enough great tricks or just plain lovely shit in it to make the whole thing shine. And though at its worst moments the album can be a bit trite (“Heart of The Country”, “3 Legs”), it just sounds so fucking good that the sometimes questionable content of the songs seems kind of beside the point.

And supposedly Linda McCartney was involved in this? I only noticed a female voice on one track. Oh well.

Day 37: Kashiwa Daisuke – Program Music I

I put this one on as I left the house and by the time I walked to the bus stop, made the 15 minute ride, and got to work, the first track still wasn’t over. I think the only thing I can say about this album with any certainty is that it is long. It’s actually only 61 minutes long, but that 61 minutes consists of two tracks (35:57 and 25:59).

When I saw the run times, I expected wide open, droning soundscapes with little ado, and I was surprised. What this album is is hard to summarize in any lucid way; the closest I can come is ‘electronic post-classical’. The music is reminiscent of the long, emotional narratives of post-rock, except propelled by a conductor, a symphony, and a drum machine that is being eaten alive by some sort of computer virus.

The opener (heh, heh), “Stella”, is definitely my favorite track here. From start to finish it radiates brilliance. The first ten minutes alone are so pure and so dense with creativity that you could cut it with baby laxative and make three great long-players out of it. The first minute makes overtures at what is to come, but does so timidly, carried on a dripping-faucet piano pattern that rings over samples of water running, a train chugging, women giggling tentatively — all of which are subject to abrupt, cd-skip glitches and static. The sound is at once organic, tender, mechanical, and cold. After the 3 minute mark, guitars pan in and out of your ears, overfull with notes and spilling, and like that the album sneaks up on you: what sounds like a full orchestra emerges, as the previously desolate lead voices (the piano, the guitar figures) disappear into the crowd. As their forms become hard to discern, the orchestra takes up the pattern they’ve been playing for minutes now and becomes enormous. The dynamics hit the ceiling, and the drums stop sputtering, and everything achieves a cathartic clarity, and you look and realize the song still has 28 minutes to go.

I was gonna write this post a few hours ago, but for the first time in the life of this project I wanted to put it off so that I could get more listening in first, because honestly this album stumped me. I could not figure out what there was to say about it. It feels completely outside my ability to judge this in any way. I am in love with it. It is a shambling monstrosity, so full of grandeur that it is incomprehensible that it even exists. It is baffling to imagine this 60 insane minutes composed by one man. These two long pieces actually have continuity, and recurring themes. They juggle tempos and moods in a way that could be mistaken for fickleness, but once the shock of the initial listen is through and you really sink into it, and focus on it, there is an apparent momentum.

Making a 36 minute song could easily end up an act of wanton arrogance. It means you think what you have to say is so important that you can take as much time as you want and it will be alright. While this might typically be folly, in Kashiwa Daisuke’s case it is absolutely true, and that’s really what’s so breathtaking about this goddamn thing. After laying still, headphones on, and listening through the whole thing, I felt like I had heard more music than I have in the last few years combined. There’s a moment around 21:45 in “Stella” where the music climaxes and then recedes, leaving a lonely music box chiming in a woozy pixellated soundscape, seeming lost, the song’s pinnacle seeming abandoned, until with the slow twist of a volume knob it rises, tattered by distortion, the orchestra playing as the tape burns. In its finest moments, which are plentiful, Program Music I explodes with feeling. And not sadness, but feeling. Humanity. You are on an adventure, as the song refuses again and again to end or resolve in any big way, and you are attacked by crescendo after crescendo. By its end, when Daisuke applies his glitchy effects to the sounds of people getting up out of creaky wooden chairs and leaving the orchestra room, you realize just how far you have come. And half an hour later, you’re back in a room with a mic somewhere up near the ceiling above a piano where someone is again playing the intro’s plaintive figure and the room noise becomes a howling vacuum.

I haven’t said a word about the 2nd track, but everything that’s wonderful about the first applies. This album has earned a descriptor that I find hard to apply: ‘unique’. It is a bountiful, generous hour of unrestrained genius, that, once you can learn to stop expecting some kind of verse-chorus-verse cyclicity, once you can surrender yourself to it, proves itself capable of rewarding active and attentive listening better than almost anything else out there. An absolute must-hear, and an album I expect to revisit frequently later on in life.

Day 26: Neil Young – Harvest

This album was ubiquitous to me before I even put it on for the first time this morning. As has happened a few times so far, I had the fun “Oh, this song and this song were from this album?” experience as I ran through Heart of Gold, Old Man, and The Needle And The Damage Done. I remember those songs as tepid radio noise, songs I’d heard filtered through FM decay too many times to take seriously.

So when I fired this up and “Out On The Weekend” came through my earphones, I discovered that the notes I had heard played in those aforementioned hits when they appeared on the radio were only peaks jutting from a murky surface. “Out On The Weekend” deftly uses space as an instrument, thrusting you into a cavernous sound stage where the bass and drums are the only concrete sounds. Instruments are placed very delicately: Neil’s voice, a soulful harmonica, a restless acoustic guitar, and dizzyingly dissonant peals of pedal-steel guitar cry, kept discrete enough to keep from muddling together. You are put into the room with him, especially when you hear what sounds like his harmonica scraping against the microphone (around the 2:00 mark). It’s a killer opener, as it establishes a trusting intimacy that is maintained through the album. Young’s voice has a way of sounding forced but better for it, as if he knows he can’t vibrato as well as he wants to but knows the song needs it, and the opener’s sleeve-hearted lyrics seem to get lost somewhere between the banalities on the page (“See the lonely boy, out on the weekend/Trying to make it pay./Can’t relate to joy, he tries to speak and/Can’t begin to say”) and the sounds he emits. I could’ve actually just listened to this song all day.

The album keeps it up, running through styles in pairs of tracks. The most contentious numbers, “A Man Needs A Maid” and “There’s A World”, are constantly maligned for the inclusion of the London Symphony Orchestra. On the former, Young tries to scale a certain height with his voice, sounding low in the mix the whole time, fighting to be heard, but by the end of the song when the orchestral accompaniment is crashing down, he tries to sing against it and is drowned out. This is largely due to mastering limitations at the time: to make Young properly audible during the very loud section of the song, the volume of his voice would have to be cranked to uncomfortable levels. However, that this was not fixed on the remaster reflects on an important effect this imbalance contributed to the song. When Young cryptically confronts the difficulty of letting a woman into his life (the actress mentioned in the lyrics, his wife), the song bowls him over with its beauty, drowning out his plaintive reassurance to himself that “a man needs a maid”.

Hit or miss, every track lands somewhere and penetrates deeply. “Heart of Gold”, a true classic, teems with activity that radio over-play has made hard to notice. Young manages to fill every song with detail that manages never to sound busy. Even on his straightforward tunes, like “Are You Ready For The Country?”, the band sounds in perfect lockstep, playing off of and around each other, filling every second with shit that just plain sounds great. No matter the effect his band could have, no matter the recording techniques, it all goes out the window on “The Needle And The Damage Done”, where Young sings about losing his friends and fellow artists to drugs. He sounds like he’s in that delirium beyond despair, where one’s feelings couldn’t possibly surmount the bleakness they face. And this is where you see what lies behind all the recording techniques, the orchestra, the gleaming radio gold. Behind it all is a man exhuming an unfathomably deep store of pain, and using a pluckish guitar melody to burrow deep inside you and see whether you have it too.

Day 3: The Helio Sequence – Keep Your Eyes Ahead

I was pretty fortunate to pull this album this morning, I must say. Which is an odd thing to say, because until I started in on it this morning I hated these guys.

A few months ago, right when I got to Seattle, I went to see The Walkmen at Showbox. They’ve been one of my favorite bands for a while now; they’ve gotten me through some damned unpleasant times, and their You & Me on repeat soundtracked the writing of the latter half of my novel. I was looking forward to the show for months beforehand. I showed up a bit early so that I could get up nice and close, and was relieved to find there was only going to be one opener.

The Helio Sequence took stage, and stepped into the unenviable position of being the only thing standing between me and something I was excited and impatient for. The band consisted of a drummer and a guitarist/singer. They both looked uninteresting and proceeded to play some shitty repetitive guitar-pedal music like where the guitarist hits a note and it sounds like a chorus of dolphins complaining about the sardines they just received. The vocals sounded like the guy from Sunny Day Real Estate and it had no movement or passion. Overall I hated it and it was very shitty. The only saving grace to their unbearably tedious set was the drummer. Once he began playing his faced locked into a grim rictus, like a laughing skull baring all its teeth and straining against the definition of a smile. He played wonderfully, and was hypnotic to watch. Almost as if to caricaturize the term “drum machine” his movements were rigidly mechanical. In playing he’d move his limbs flamboyantly to hit the different parts of his set, and then repeat it exactly each bar, showing no emotion. It reminded me of watching a TV special about robotic arms assembling Nissans.

It was really friggin’ entertaining.

But I was growing increasingly upset with each new song they started, and then when the singer busted out one of those harmonica holders like Dylan used and added some harmonica flourishes to a couple of the songs, I got really fed up. These 18 year olds in front of me were absolutely being robbed of the entirety of their wits; they were ramming their pelvises against the stage and slapping each other and jumping up and down, and singing along so loudly I could hear them better than the band. I was almost more annoyed by them than I was the band.

Finally, they announced they only had two more songs. The end was in sight. Eventually The Walkmen came on, and their set list only contained two songs from the album that made them a band that I like (really exacerbating my pre-existing bad mood, you can imagine).

Ever since then, I totally forgot about The Helio Sequence until I got the suggestion to put them on my list. I fired up the album as I left the house to catch an Amtrak bus to visit friends for the holidays. As I stepped out of the house into the bracing cold and crunched through the brittle snow, the first track kicked on. And goddamn. From the moment the drums started and the guitars materialized, the music just thrilled and invigorated me. I was probably still a bit blunted due to all the Anal Cunt the day before; I listened to that shit for probably 13 hours out of that day.

I got to my bus, settled into my chair, and tried to read, but the music just consumed me. It was exquisitely soothing. As the bus got on the highway bound for eastern Washington and entered some really lovely scenery, I was so blissed out I fell asleep, and the music took me down like a lullaby and spooned with me and then made me breakfast when I woke up. It was goddamn perfect.

It made me curious to see how quickly my perception could change about something like this. This is pretty indisputably good music. They have been at it for nearly a decade, if I remember correctly, and have put a lot of heart and craft into it. It sounds entirely like things I like. Yet when they got on stage in front of hundreds of people and did me the honor of performing it, I self-centeredly ignored it, cast it aside, and hated it, because I was so impatient to get to the part I had wanted to see in the first place.

It made me wonder about older times. Back to the days of chamber music, for instance. What if the only time you could even hear music was when a bunch of people got together and performed it for you? Fast forward to now: I have 90 gigs of music. I forget the exact count but it’s got to be at least a month of music. I can conjure any of it up at any moment and dismiss it at an equally indifferent whim; what does this do to the way I perceive music as a thing in the first place? When I got my first CD, it was the only CD I owned. I could listen the shit out of it and never get tired of it. Same with the first MP3s I ever got. They were scarce in those days and I had maybe five of them. I could listen to them all day even if they weren’t even the songs I liked by that band.

A kid next to me on the bus had his iPhone kickin’ out some jams. I watched the album art change every couple of minutes. Gucci Mane, Sleigh Bells, some other stuff I genuinely like. But I could tell he wasn’t even finishing most of the songs; he changed every other minute or so. He was biting off half of the steak that a musician had spent days poring over in the studio, tweaking and perfecting, and throwing the rest of the steak in the trash.

On the other hand, I was savoring every single bite of an album by a band that months earlier I had impugned with disgust in favor of something else I ended up being dissatisfied with anyway. And I only was allowing myself to accept the music that was being given me because I had no options; I didn’t have the thought of what else I could be instantly listening to instead. This was all I had, and I, being an obsessive lover of music, someone whose brain needs that stimulus, was overjoyed to have it.

P.S., this album’s The Captive Mind is just a fucking ruthlessly good song. I do not ever want to stop listening to it. I envy those 18-year-olds at the show who got this album around the time they were driving around in their parents’ cars way past their bedtimes and telling stories about what they wanna do after college and trying to work up the nerve to take each others’ hands.