Day 81: George Strait – 20th Century Masters: The Millenium Collection

Man have I been shit at this for the past week or so. I admit I have totally run out of steam on this project, but the whole point of the project was to learn how to keep doing something even if it’s unpleasant and I don’t want to do it. So I often think about writing, each day, and find the idea of putting together thoughts on an album while saying anything productive or interesting whatsoever to be an insurmountable task. Which is too bad, because for a couple months there, I feel like I was learning a lot, and writing a lot of things I was relatively content with (for what they were).

I’ve been reading a John Barth short story collection called Lost in the Funhouse, and a lot of the stories are about a writer (presumably Barth himself) having trouble writing about anything but the existential stress of writing  — the fact that I am writing about the difficulty I’m having writing and citing that story makes this blog post a few levels of abstraction beyond obnoxious, and I apologize for that. But it’s my main roadblock in this project.

But it’s my big hangup here. This is yet another country album, and it’s hard not to look at it that way. It’s a collection of, honestly, some great songs, with well-written, clever, and most of all sincere lyrics, almost all dealing with heartbreak(/ing), but I’m running out of ways of contextualizing what is essentially reiterations of the same music over and over.

What’s more, I honestly feel like an ignorant prick for so casually condescending to several entire genres of music. I don’t like that, because it runs counter to the whole point of the project: To dig into what other people liked, and figure it out. But it seems like the more I listen to, the more I suspect that my polarities are crossed from my friends’, because I have gone through so many things that people love, and tried to find why and just failed so many times now.

Today I replaced my earphones (which finally succumbed to poorly-made-plug syndrome and went out of service days ago, worsening the prognosis of this blog dramatically). Flippantly forgetting the resolve I had a couple posts ago to not stray from my daily albums, I put on the new Cut Copy. I didn’t even have an album picked out for today until like 7 p.m. Anyway the album started and from about ten seconds into the first track, something happened. I was boxing textbooks to return to the publishers and was alone in the big warehouse, which was so quiet that all the books on the shelves seemed to be in repose. And the music started and it just grabbed the fuck out of me. It flooded me with feeling, and reminded me of listening to LCD Soundsystem last spring, shuffling in a daze out of the woods of a terrible winter, and deciding to make my spring/summer feel as good as that music felt. I danced in place while I worked for the next hour and excitedly queued the album up again, all the while planning out the writing for the Album of the Year accolade I would bestow it in January of 2012.

How do you make someone else feel that? When I fail to connect with an album someone recommended to me that they have that kind of tie with, or even if they don’t, if it’s just something they feel represents what they like, when I fail to see it I feel like I’m driving a stake into so many little hearts. What is important ultimately isn’t whether this music I’m listening to every day is good or bad. The worst music I’ve had to listen to so far wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been (I count maybe five just unredeemable albums, off the top of my head), but my ability to identify, to relate, to what are essentially bewildering strangers, is wearing out and not regenerating.

This project is going to take more than a year, that much is already obvious — and I’m experimenting with being fine with that. I have 284 more albums ahead of me, and I can guess I might not like 84 of them right off the bat. But someone did, and that means something. And if I’m not gonna at least try to figure out what, then I’m wasting everyone’s time here. And I promise to try not to use this space to write about how hard it is to write about these albums.

What a little open-mindedness can do. Here I was thinking this album sounded like generic country. Apparently, if it sounds like that, it’s because George Strait basically created contemporary country.

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 24: Charlie Rich – The Most Beautiful Girl – 20 Greatest Hits

For those unfamiliar with an artist, a best-of album can be immensely useful. It can show the progression an artist has taken from their oldest hit to their newest, and give one a sense of the path the artist has taken. Something like that would be perfect for Charlie Rich, an artist who had to try out quite a few styles. After trying to make an impression with some jazz and blues numbers he was writing, he caught the attention of people at  Sun Records who hired him as a writer and gave him a crash course in writing pop, giving him a stack of Jerry Lee Lewis records to study. Years of middling releases and failed hits later, Sun Records was struggling, and he was taken in by Billy Sherrill, architect of Countrypolitan, a budding genre that took strong Country vocals and put it over songs stacked to the rafters with impenetrable layers of strings and smooth female harmonies.

This tutelage handily synergized two factors: that Rich had a voice so damned sweet that it managed to infuse this repugnantly schmaltzy sound with honest-to-goodness soul, and that he was, by this point in his career, as desperate as he’d ever been. He had made sacrifices of integrity before (his frequent re-recording of his material over the course of his life leaving numerous iterations of his songs before his Countrypolitan makeover as evidence). Originally considering himself a Jazz pianist and having very little interest in Country, he had his piano taken away from him and ended up crooning on Vegas stages like a regular Tom Jones, and all the while plunged further into as many bottles as he could get his hands on.

The evolution of his style and the subsequent repurposing of his back catalog can be seen in the different iterations, recorded a decade apart, of “There Won’t Be Anymore”. The 1960s version is raw and bluesy, and lets his piano playing speak clearly as a fundamental voice in the music. The re-done 1970s version is more of a country ballad, with the Nashville sound starting to creep in. Rich’s voice is pushed toward the front even more, and given a hefty honk of reverb. It turns into into less of a brusque, smoky song and tones it down, remixing it into a saccharine ballad. Fortunately, as I said, Rich’s sonorous voice was seemingly made for this style of music, as it rings true enough to salvage the formulaic piece the song had become.

And this brings me to why this particular disc is somewhat of a disaster. Years after even that second version was recorded, once Rich was playing casinos and nightclubs (and was apparently none too happy about it), he ended up re-recording all of his biggest hits in the style he was playing them at the time, singing his soulful standards like they were just that: Standards, songs that he’s been hired to perform. He does little to take his songs and make them his own, and the saddest thing of all is knowing this was probably not his desire. Singing with a wistful distance from his own music, the whole experience flattens out, robbing the listener of much sense of his range.

However, even with this shortcoming, this album remains enjoyable, because when it came down to it, Rich was a terrific singer with a distinctive voice, who had a great ear for songwriting. Songs like “Rollin’ With The Flow” and “Behind Closed Doors” prop up quaint cliches with an ineffable sincerity that, even on this hi-gloss re-recording, rings true. The album stands as a testament to the talents of one of the most misunderstood artists last century, who, despite continuous mishandling by executives who didn’t know what slot to fit his style into, had one of the best voices around and an ear that knew what to do with it.

Day 23: Alan Jackson – Good Time

“Alan Jackson is pretty well untouchable in Country circles,” a friend told me. I can see why: there’s an apparent craftsmanship to this album that is absolutely assured of its infallibility. Over the course of 17 tracks that pretty much sound the way someone who doesn’t listen to country music would expect country songs to sound, he comes across as someone who knows exactly what he’s doing, and he leaves whether that is a good thing or a bad thing entirely to the listener.

Brandishing cultural references to strike for a connection with the listener can be a risky gambit. It all depends on your audience. For instance, when Vampire Weekend sings “Walk to class / In front of ya / Spilled kefir / On your keffiyeh,” the listener gets to have a personal moment as they inevitably remember having a crush on a girl who wore a keffiyeh everywhere, which probably every man I know has at some point, seeing as how keffiyehs became standard-issue hot chick garb somewhere along the line. Or maybe they never did. Maybe they like chicks who wear wicker cowboy hats and automatically assume that broads who wear those ay-rab scarves are probably stuck up bitches. Maybe you’re like me and hear a song like “Country Boy” and feel like throwing up in your own lap. “Country Boy” is an example of what made it impossible for me to care about anything that was happening to my ears while this album was playing. It, like half the album, consists of rattlin’ off aww-shucks references like:

Bucket seats, soft as baby’s new butt,
Lockin’ hubs, that’ll take you through a deep rut

and later, on “1976”:

Eight track tapes were still in style and Elvis was still alive,
Wonder Woman sure looked fine, Bionic Man was still Prime Time,
And that girl I liked, we kept on tryin till we got it right

A lot of the album continues this way, scattering references to things that people who would like this album would probably appreciate quite a bit. The end result though was that while I was at least able to connect with the things Josh Turner was pining for — as he painted a picture with broader strokes, the kind of pastoral joys (family, love) that all reasonable men want to remember on their deathbeds, I think — Alan Jackson instead dips his pen into such specific wells that it strikes me as someone trying to either prove that they are in touch with the curve (as in “I Still Like Bologna”‘s aww-shucks bemusement with 50 inch plasmas that “seem to reach out and grab ya”) or to easily remind the listener of a time he’d been through, that maybe the listener has been through or maybe the listener wishes he was.

The album, as I said, ends up being pretty mixed. Half of the tracks are nice, straightforward songs about things any red-blooded man ends up thinking about: falling in love; remembering falling in love; trying to not be bored with fucking the girl he fell in love with and married all those years ago, even though he sure does still love her. I think he mentioned his kids in there somewhere, and I’m pretty positive that one of the songs is lamenting the death of a loved one.

The music on this album is actually quite good, but it suffers by association with the lyrics. Jackson has had the same backup band for quite a few years now, and they demonstrate a comfort together. The band is strong on everything from the album’s plenitude of ballads to its chin-jutting bluegrass tunes, and the music manages to apologize for the lyrics quite well most of the time. The album ends up being at its strongest when it lets feeling through, and stops trying to use objects and names as placeholders.

There are plenty such moments where Jackson is universal and relatable, even a complex, likeable man. When he stops trying feebly to paint a word picture, and settles for just telling you about feelings, the album takes off — if only for moments at a time. The album’s high point, for me, ends up being “If You Want to Make Me Happy“: “If you wanna make me happy / Pour me some bourbon on the rocks / And play every sad song on the jukebox.” He actually convinced me that we could sit down to a drink together and have an alright time.

Day 8: Josh Turner – Long Black Train

One of the things that keeps occurring to me in my listening so far is how much I construct my idea of identity — both others’ and my own — around music. It’s actually pretty stupid.

So often in my life I’ve felt like people were separated by what kind of music they listened to. Like, people who listened to rap could not coexist with people who listened to rock and roll. It’s one of those divisions that lives on a totally surface level and makes life more complicated than it needs to be. Luckily, in the capital-i Internet era, musical taste has come to have a lot less to do with geography. People can find things they like in rap, in rock, in jazz, in indie. Indie music itself is like a multicultural gang-bang: people crowding into a room bringing their influences from every corner of the world and cramming them all into one song.

And yet, some genres remain divisive. Country music is a very good example of this. In the hundreds of albums I’ve voraciously absorbed in the last couple of years, I’ve noticed little or no country crossover. Now, depending on what your definition of country is, that statement could be totally wrong. Plenty of modern indie music has called heavily on country’s roots. But rather than synthesize any of the elements to come out of the last couple of decades of country, they skip to the source — the early-1900s recordings, folk music inspired by southern blues.

I’ve met tons of musically-minded people who were eager to proclaim that they appreciate “old country,” arbitrarily naming a few classics like Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn — even though most of them would never just sit down and listen to either of their own volition — in the interest of not seeming close-minded. Most of the people I’ve known who were careful to make this distinction were definitely people that you could imagine being called yankees — younger people obsessed with multiculturalism and New Yorker trend-setting, uncomfortable and insecure about their place in America, eager to cast off anything proudly patriotic as the detritus of an intellectually desiccated culture, still trapped in a bygone civil war dichotomy.

Old country had a real rawness, all battered people mining the depths of their humanity: compare Tammy Wynette to Carrie Underwood and the notion that they’re in the same genre is ludicrous at best. Same for, say, Townes Van Zandt and today’s Josh Turner. Country music took a turn at some point in the last century and stopped being for people in roadhouses who were drinking themselves into a stupor to escape the bleakness of their lives. It became music for the half of the country who doesn’t give a fuck about what people in New York think and suspects California would do our country a lot more good if it did get chipped off the continental shelf. But this whole elitist eye with which people, myself included, look at modern country music is totally and completely wrong, and it’s prejudiced.

Over this last summer in Idaho I spent a lot of time getting in touch with my inner good ol’ boy. Let me tell you, driving through the desertous plains to the east of Boise in a big pickup truck, on our way out to go shootin’, and cranking Tom Petty — well, that was one of those moments for me when all of the affectations and pretensions I seemed to find myself accumulating, all those haughty ideas about art, sloughed off as I found myself perfectly in tune with the redneck mien. Even if it was only trading one affected packaged personality for another one, it was still a relief to be transported to the ‘other side’, to forget for an afternoon about all the existential shit I obsess over on a daily basis. And it was on that afternoon, and on many late nights at dive bars with pop-country filled jukeboxes, where I didn’t care about anything but being with my friends and drinking and having some laughs while we shot pool, that pop country made perfect sense.

Listening to this Josh Turner album a dozen times, I found myself being won over. He has a knack for really beautiful, simple Hallmark songs. Seriously, In My Dreams is one of the most perfectly crafted pop ballads I’ve ever heard. The song is a paean to the beauty of the little things in the artist’s life: settling down with his love, raising a child in a modest house, bringing his wife a glass of water while she pulls weeds in their garden. Taylor’s voice is a rich, sonorous baritone that is passionate and genuine enough to imbue even a song that is, on paper, catastrophically schmaltzy with so much soul that it’s hard not to like. And harder still to ridicule, because to insult it for its blatant artlessness and lack of depth feels petty, and more than that, totally misses the point

This is why I’ll always, if begrudgingly, respect country, even pop country. It is not something alien that was constructed in a laboratory. Oh sure, it may be conniving and manipulative in its ways, as any pop music is, but it is the sound of most of America right now, probably more so than any other extant musical form. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of.