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?

Day 6: Serge Gainsbourg – Histoire de Melody Nelson

Wow, so I got thrown a curve ball here. I had previously enjoyed Serge Gainsbourg on the one thing I’d heard, Comic Strip, which was an innocuous yet staggeringly brilliant piece of pop music that inspired me to dig out my French-English dictionary and which took residence in my head for months afterward. I never listened to anything else of his, and simply forgot about him.

Months ago I got Charlotte Gainsbourg’s IRM and was pretty pleased with it, but it didn’t last for me. A few songs seemed brilliant, and I was flabbergasted to find myself digging on something Beck had been involved in, but on a whole the album felt uneven. For months afterwards I did find myself whistling the string part from Le Chat du Café des Artistes, and I particularly loved the way her breathy singing contrasted with the strong, vibrant strings.

Well, so imagine my surprise when I fired up this album this morning and discovered she was pretty much remaking her dad’s music note for note. Of course, Beck supplied the music for all but one of the songs on IRM, and Beck (post-Sea Change) is one of the artists pointed at as being the most distinctly influenced by Histoire de Melody Nelson; the whole thing is kinda creepy and circular.

The album is, in the standard of its year of birth, 1971, a concept album, about a man hitting a girl on a bicycle with his Rolls Royce and seducing her, having a whirlwind affair with her in luxurious hotels shortly after she turned 15. The music is unbearably sexy: the bass throbs, filling out the whole bottom half of every song, drums tip-toeing over it; in the stratosphere strings sing coldly, swooping into dissonance, and providing a glorious backdrop against which Serge can whisper. His delivery is hushed in a literal sense, insistently mumbling snatches of surreal French poetry. Pillow talk in the truest sense of the phrase, he speaks just loudly enough to be heard over the rustle of blankets and the quiet friction of adjusting arms and legs: “At fifty six, seven, eight, it doesn’t matter / X street, if you knock on the door / First one knock, then three others, they let you in / Alone and sometimes even accompanied.”

The music veers from style to style while always sounding unerringly coherent. The first and last track are quite long and serve to bookend the narrative. The tracks in the middle sum up a whirlwind romance in two-minute quips. The highlight, to me, is Ballade de Melody Nelson. The guitar in its swirling figure alone has more character than most full bands can muster in their combined talents. The plaintive bass punctuates the song, growling up from the turmoil just long enough to remind you how anxious the rest of it is.

Overall, what strikes me at the end of every listen is just how modern this sounds. This would be highly lauded if it came out today. The music is utterly sui generis, defying comparison, let alone categorization — lounge rock and roll? A spiritual predecessor to the storytelling of Nick Cave? Tiller of the soil in which Air, Beck, Portishead, and god knows who else would go on to find fruition?  Whatever words I try to weigh it down with, it responds unfailingly with but one: singular.