2017's Albums to Look Forward To

Here's what's on my radar so far:

2017

1/13
Colony House - Only the Lonely

1/27
Cuddle Magic - Ashes/Axis

2/3
Elbow - Little Fictions
Big Wreck - Grace Street
Shannon Wright - Division

2/10
Mother Mother - No Culture

2/17
Son Volt - Notes of Blue
Eisley - I'm Only Dreaming
Ryan Adams - Prisoner
The Verve Pipe - Parachutes
Soft Sleep - Infinite Circles

2/24
Acceptance - Colliding By Design (Pledgemusic)
Jeff Lang - Alone in Bad Company

3/3
Minus the Bear - Voids
Beth Bombara - Map & No Direction (Pledgemusic)
Junius - Eternal Rituals for the Accretion of Light

3/10
David Bazan - Care

3/17
KXM - Scatterbrain
Ari Hest - Natural (bandcamp)
Depeche Mode - Spirit

3/24
Will Johnson - Hatteras Night, A Good Luck Charm
Bridget Kearney - Won't Let You Down
Aaron Sprinkle - Real Life

3/31
Aimee Mann - Mental Illness
Richard Edwards (Margot & the Nuclear So and Sos) - Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset

4/7

4/14
Anders Parker - The Man Who Fell From Earth (Pledgemusic)
John Mayer - The Search for Everything

4/21
Incububs - 8

4/28
Mark Lanegan Band - Gargoyle
Juliana Hatfield - Pussycat
R. Ring - Ignite the Rest
The Classic Crime - How To Be Human (Kickstarter)
Feist - Pleasure
Violents - Awake and Pretty Much Sober

5/12
Paul Weller - A Kind of Revolution

5/19
Land Of Talk - Life After Youth

5/26
Ben Ottewell - A Man Apart
Sarah Jaffe - Bad Baby

6/2
Dan Auerbach - Waiting On A Song

6/9
Phoenix - Ti Amo
Rise Against - Wolves
Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie

6/16
Steve Earle - So You Wanna Be An Outlaw
Ours - Spectacular Sight

6/23
Jeff Tweedy - Together At Last
UNKLE - The Road Part 1

7/7
Broken Social Scene - Hug of Thunder

7/14
The Dears - Times Infinity: Volume Two

7/28
Manchester Orchestra - A Black Mile to the Surface

8/11
Paul Draper (Mansun) - Spooky Action

8/18
Grizzly Bear - Painted Ruins

8/25
Queens of the Stone Age - Villains
Filthy Friends - Invitation

9/1
Starsailor - All This Life


9/8
Tori Amos - Native Invader
Alex Cameron - Forced Witness
Victor Wooten - Trypnotyx
Ted Leo - The Hanged Man (Kickstarter)

9/15
Foo Fighters - Concrete and Gold
Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton - Choir of the Mind

9/22
Circa Survive - The Amulet

Moses Sumney - Aromanticism
Phoebe Bridgers - Stranger In the Alps
Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun

9/29
Wolf Alice - Visions of A Life

10/?
Craig Wedren - Adult Desire

10/6
Liam Gallagher - As You Were
Dhani Harrison - IN///PARALLEL

10/13
The Barr Brothers - Queen of the Breakers
St. Vincent - Masseducation
Matt Cameron - Cavedweller
stars - There Is No Love In Fluorescent ight
Billy Corgan - Ogilala
Robert Plant - Carry Fire

10/20
Kele Okereke - Fatherland
Brand New - Science Fiction

10/27
Julien Baker - Turn Out The Lights
Weezer - Pacific Daydream
Joe Henry - Thrum

11/3
Lalah Hathaway - Honestly

11/10
Quicksand - Interiors

11/17
Sharon Jones - Soul of a Woman
Charlotte Gainsbourg - Rest
Mavis Staples - If All I Was Was Black

11/24
Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds - Who Built The Moon
Bjork - Utopia

12/1
The Dear Hunter - All Is As All Should Be
Gord Downey - Introduce Yourself
U2 - Songs of Experience
Miguel - War & Leisure
Neil Young and the Promise of the Real - The Visitor

12/8
The New Trust - Upset the Tides

12/22
Lovedrug - Relive

Complete -Uncertain release date that I am aware of:

Will Johnson - Little Raider 2, two 7"s, The 901 LP
Kimbra - Primal Heart Jan 19th 2018
David Kitt - Yous

Ongoing Scheduled releases

Sleeping At Last - Astronomy

Definitely in Production:

Ty Tabor
Now Now
Raphael Saadiq

P.O.D.
Breeders
My Brightest Diamond
Tancred



Rumored to be in Production

The Cure - 4:14 Scream

Poetic License or... In Other Words: #2

Once upon a time there was a song, a song featured in many live performances upon the release of an album by a band that had managed to ascend the charts and critical consciousness of the music industry in the early 2000s. Up to the moment of this song, their lyricism of their material wasn't put under much scrutiny, but in retrospect, "Yellow" is worthy of a little scorn.  That said, when the most prominent couplet in the song is the most offensive to poetic sensibilities, it's a lightning rod for further scrutiny. That being said, Coldplay's "Fix You", initially my favorite song on X & Y before it got incredibly overplayed and lost the power of sentiment it held, is up to bat.

The offending line goes:

"Lights will guide you home
and ignite your bones..."

*sigh*

I honestly have mulled over a number of improvements to this line. It's not at all difficult since it already employs a slant rhyme.  I opted to use a true rhyme and a phrase that fit the context and added significance and come up with:


Deepening the relationship between the light and the journey
"Lights will guide you home, fading as you roam"

Focusing on the journey specifically retaining the slant rhyme
"Lights will guide you home, when you're lose and alone"

but initially when I first heard the song back then I thought the easiest fix was changing one simple word:

Lights will guide you home, and ignite your soul

In reality, for my writing still the first line works better as the closing line, and opens up the flow of the lyric as a declaration of devotion.

"If you're lost and alone lights will guide you home "

or more poetically

"When your hope is is all but gone lights will guide you home... and I will try to fix you"

Poetic License or... In Other Words: A new series.

For a while now I've wanted to rework lines from songs that I enjoy that have left me a wishing they were put another way, so I figured, that's a good theme for my blog. So here goes:

The first line I want to tackle comes from Eisley's "Marvelous Things", in the second verse they sing, "I followed a rabbit, through mermaid entwined shrubbery." It's a mouthful, the meter and melody force the words to be sung faster than any others in the song, and the word play has been the subject of a little embarrassment from the band, as depicted in this fan shot video.


Now, I love this song, but I won't deny that I always take a breath (mentally and physically) before I sing that lyric. They have a couple of doosies like that.  Needless to say, that's part of the charm of the band, the whimsy they had early on.  But being a lyricist, I was always curious if I could find a way to augment the line to flow rhythmically and poetically. I thought of a few versions, but here's what I came up with:

"I followed a rabbit, through sirens entwined, arranged in lines..."

That said, enjoy the "Marvelous Things" as I first experienced it.

Advice for the Young at Heart

I remember when I was in my early 20s and I had befriended some teenage patrons of the record store I was working at when I was away at college. I kept up contact with them via email and written correspondence after I'd come home. One of the teens wrote me about the trials and tribulations of their romantic life and made mention of someone wanting to be "Friends with Benefits".  It was the first time I'd heard of the concept. I recoiled because to me it sounded like the kind of hustle you run on someone who is obviously into you, but you're not into them enough to commit to. My response was to say, "You can't have your cake and eat it too". That made no sense to the teen, and I don't think I had the wherewithal to use the phrase, "You can't have it both ways." though I might have invoked, "You can't serve two masters." without explaining that in such as case the masters would be the varying desires of the "Friends" when one wants companionship without commitment and the other consents because it's as close as they can get with the person offering, though they want more.

Now lets circle back in time to me in 5th or 6th grade watching the show Wiseguy with my Mom. A A scene took place in the 1st season where at a wedding reception a protagonist questioned another about his relationship status and why he wasn't hitched. Someone responded "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free???" That quip drew laughter from the wiseguys so I thought it was a pretty clever saying, not recognizing the misogyny and disrespect inherent in it.

Later that year our family was down in Kentucky for a reunion and we all got to meet my great aunt's significant other. Someone asked that older gentleman she was seeing about his relationship status and guess who was primed to jump in with a Screenwriter's Guild certified zinger? The men in the room laughed, the women, not so much...  I was in trouble and I didn't really understand why.  I was raised to "not hit girls" but I was used to verbal and physical abuse as the vocabulary of socialization. It would take years to figure out how degrading the joke was in regards to the values of my elders, and how attitudes that invested in that sort of mentality, which renders a person's vulnerability a commodity to exploit, distorted and corrupted the relationships of people in my life.

So, flash forward to me reading this letter from a friend after years and years of seeing people used, abused, bemused, and confused in the pursuit of romance. The clarity of the ills of games of the heart were crystal clear. Friends with benefits threw up all sorts of red flags as a clever way to re-branding of compromising someone to get something you wanted without giving them proper consideration and compensation.

Whenever the subject of these sorts of relationships are broached, I made it a matter of principle to implore people not to settle for that hustle. Don't compromise your desire and nature to pursue something you don't really want, or devalue something you have to offer of worth by exchanging it for less. Don't let anyone call that a friendship. Friends don't use each other or welcome seeing their friends being used. The benefits that should come from a friend should include empathy and integrity. Anything exchanged absent both of those things isn't a product of Friendship. It's a con to fleece you.

Hotter than July

So far this summer I've been very fortunate. My good fortune has been determined by the run of cool temperature days that have been accompanied with rain. It has spared me from enduring extremely hot temperatures in a home without air conditioning. Thankfully I have an attic fan, so on these hottest days I can use nights to cool my house a few degrees and make it tolerable.

Now the temperatures have decided to take an uptick & I'm sweating guilty party an interrogation room. It's fitting that the worst of it didn't hit until the middle weeks of this month. By my recollection, since 1997 in particular, the middle of July has been an ominous season for me. The summer heat usually presages vivid dreams containing elements that hint at precognition. Take that for what you will but from my experience it's unwise to ignore omens and disregard patterns of behavior and circumstance.

For me, looking at life cyclically is essential to prevent me from making the same emotional and pragmatic decisions that have led to upset and tumultuous times in my life which I would prefer to not repeat. These are hard lessons, but important ones to heed. When you've paid sweat equity and bear the scars of Love's Labour's Lost it's better to acknowledge all that's come before and be wiser for it, than to look forward constantly with no sense of perspective and someday find you've been going in warped ellipses.

To be stuck in the middle of July perpetually, sweating bullets trying to figure out how to carry on, without autumn or winter, without the spring, without the cold of the night to relieve the heat of the day, is nothing short of condemnation.

Might As Well Face Facts...

As an occasional journalist, I take an interest in listening to or reading interviews with artist I'd otherwise deem enigmatic.  My own experiences meeting artists and performers, and my own experiences as an artist and performer have taught me that people are people, their variances in personality having little to do with how we categorize or laud them.  But still, there's the mystique, the artifice or creating an aesthetic, a persona for people to be intrigued by or identify with, which engages us.  Actively undermining or reinforcing that is something of a gamble, because, as I said, people are people, and not all people are decent.

All that said, I heard an interview from someone who is very good at conjuring mystique, possibly in part because it's projected onto them to begin with?  Regardless, in what can be considered a very "down to earth" and humanizing interview the artist acknowledged having a rough childhood.  There was no specification on just what that entails, but from what's known about the artist, and what our standards are in this day and age, as far as dysfunction and trauma, I'm sure it was nothing to scoff at.
In the past, a part of me actively identified with the notion of having a "rough childhood" because, regardless of how I choose to orient my attitude towards it, my childhood was far from ideal.  There was violence, cruelty, dejection, perversion, and confusion from the onset of my capacity to remember.  My understanding or rationalization of the idea of being "born into sin" is a direct reflection on my experiences as a child. I thought myself innocent, but I was not surrounded by innocence. At best I was too young, and thus naive and ignorant of just how damaging and potentially corrupting the things I was exposed to were. When it's common place for people who ought to love each other to be cruel and sadistic towards each other, behavior you learn to model before you can recite the alphabet that doesn't bode well for future developments.

I have a good memory, as most of my friends can attest.  I don't think this is some biological endowment. It's a check on my character.  My moral compass isn't oriented on some arbitrary good like true north, it's shattered into bits, and rests on one side of a scale with stones that ought to have been cast at me for my indiscretions from my childhood onward. By process of elimination the correct moral path was made apparent, no longer obscured by those who undermined their own authority with behavior that was contrary to it.  I don't think anyone should be forced to discover their conscience by broaching what they later find to be unconscionable. A lifetime spent tip-toeing around the line that ought not be crossed increases the likelihood that it is.  It's better to put as much distance between yourself and that line as possible. For that to be possible it has to be made clear.  For that to happen most people need to have it pointed out to them by someone they trust, who has gotten close enough to the line to say definitively, "This is the point of no return, do not go beyond this point."  It's a little paradoxical, because would that person have to exercise judgement contrary to conventional wisdom, as I defined it, to get close enough to make out that moral line clearly?

I like to think our lives are the summations of the choices we make, but they are also the summation of choices that were made for us when we lacked the power or knowledge to make them. It's up to us how we reconcile the consequences of those choices.  Nevertheless, there's a weight that comes with that grounds us.

Sans Prompts

Dropping the musical prompts pretty much derailed this blog.  That and eliminating a number of stressful thought processes from my life.  There are plenty of other things that could prompt me to write, but without having a song to veil my emotions and disclosures I'm inclined to keep those matters to myself.  It's strange how easy it is for me to document the stability in my life by my compulsion to write about it.  Some of that may be the impact of ambivalence.

I remember telling someone close to me that life doesn't have to be complicated.  Things are simple and straight forward, and it's our own behaviors and rationalizations that complicate things.  An inability to be honest, with our selves and others is one of those key sources of frustration.  The desire to change the will of others to satisfy our own is another.  The lack of respect and appreciation for life creates so much turmoil.  A lack of respect and appreciation for innocence is just as damaging.

I try to be pragmatic and think about what causes so much complexity in life.  Asking the question, "Why?" seems like scapegoat.  I don't think that's the issue.  If you've ever been around a 3-4 year old kid, the question "Why?" comes up a lot.  Rather than view it as a sign of just how perceptive and curious a child is, a lot of people respond with exasperation. They respond in a way that makes it seems like explaining is a burden, or being questioned is a challenge.  I just think it's a manifestation of intelligence.  We are made to wonder.  This is what sparks the imagination.

There is no crime in not having all the answers, and there should be no shame in it.  We have our limits, and given the complications we make for ourselves, they encroach on us further with every new thread we spin. The acceptance of these limits is an acknowledgement of the horizon. We have a depth of field, and that's okay.  Our limitations aren't set by what one person can do, or one generation. The potency of humanity comes from the power of the collective becoming more efficient and productive over generations.  We approach life like a 100 meter dash, when it's a relay race to infinity.  We run the risk of falling out of the running if we don't take care of ourselves, and the baton we're meant to hand off to our successors.  The goal isn't to win the race, it's to never stop running.  Our only competition is our attitude towards the value of living as a whole.

If life is worth perpetuating, shouldn't our focus be on taking every measure available to ensure that it is?  Our aspirations within our epochs should be balanced between improving the quality of life for the whole of humanity, and all life on Earth during our time, while advancing our capacity to preserve life when this epoch ends.  As it stands, we are locked in a mental trap such that the value of living, and life is mutable.  Relativism in regards to the value of life undermines our progress and threatens the existence of life as we know it. It has become the fundamental complication in our existence, from which most others descend.  Our hierarchies and inequality are first and foremost justified by the idea that some lives are more worthy than others.  That is an unsustainable orientation for humanity.

Alone, a rising tide will sweep you away never to be seen again, lost to the sea. Together, we have changed the course of those very seas. Now if only we could harness that collective energy towards productive means.