Eckhart Notes

Just to make it official, Eckhart Notes is on an indefinite hiatus.

A record which was overlooked because it wasn't in the binder yet (now it is) is the Apples in Stereo's "New Magnetic Wonder", a terrific poppy, melodic record that makes me sing along every damn time. I get happy listening to this. Simple, some might say childish, lyrics complete the picture. Check out the song "Energy" (one of my three favorites, with "Can you feel it" and "Joannie don't you worry")



They were part of the Elephant 6 collective, along with Neutral Milk Hotel (great essay on Jeff Mangum in Slate the other day), which is a band I would like to get to know sometime...

The next few discs have been various Beach Boys compilations... I cleaned the house to one of them, it was a bright sunny day and songs about surfing, girls, surfing, cars, and also surfing, made the time go by fast. Those guys can really harmonize. Oddly enough, the song that's been sticking in my head has been a cover of the traditional "Cotton Fields"... not a song you'd associate with California boys.

Apparently, all my A's and early B's are classic rock radio. Oh well.

I love the Band. I know I should own more albums, but I only have a greatest hits disc and a King Biscuit Flower Hour show. I also have the Last Waltz on DVD, and I really enjoy rewatching it, especially Van Morrison's hilariously inebriated performance. The greatest hits CD is wonderful, because every single song is fantastic. I think the Band purchase was probably the first sign that I would eventually start diving into country-rock and roots music. Interesting how much good country-flavored rock comes from Canada, though: The Band (at least part of it), Neil Young, the Cowboy Junkies, just to name a couple.

Pet Sounds is of course by general consensus one of the greatest albums ever recorded. There's really not much I can add to the "Wow, Brian Wilson was a crazy genius" narrative. But yes, I love it, and for a while, anytime a new album would be described as having "Beach boys-like harmonies" or as sounding "Pet Sounds-esque" I would run out and buy it. Sometimes (most of the time) I couldn't hear the resemblance, but I still picked up some very nice albums, like The Thrills "So Much for the City".

The next two albums from the first big black CD folder are two greatest hits compilations: the first by Aerosmith, but it's one released prior to their Run-D.M.C. collaboration, and thankfully, before that abomination of a song "Dude looks like a lady", which has all of the boneheadedness and none of the fun of the first record I talked about, AC/DC's Back in Black... I remember some idiot once telling me a story about how "cool and hilarious" it was when the PA system at the Philadelphia Flyers arena would play that song to greet Jaromir Jagr when he played with the Penguins would come to town... first of all, Jagr at 6'3", 245, does not look like a lady, long hair notwithstanding. It was teamed perfectly with the moronic ethos of the film Mrs. Doubtfire, however. Better song about being confused by gender: Lola, by the Kinks. Better movie: Tootsie, starring Dusting Hoffman. Awesome music video: Sing Me Spanish Techno, by the New Pornographers:


Wow, ok. Bit of a run-on sentence there. Not Joycean, or Faulkner-esque, or even Coe-esque, but still...

Back to the music... the other greatest hits compilation was by Badfinger. Who are one of my favorite bands... the made beautiful Beatles-esque pop gems, so much so that for a while people were convinced that Paul McCartney was actually in Badfinger. I love listening to this CD, it did actually make the transition on to my laptop, and I often cue it up on planes when I want to just escape and be happy, sad, and moved. "Come and Get It" (actually written by McCartney), "Baby Blue", "Maybe Tomorrow", mmm... I think I bought this CD when I was 18. I loved it then, I love it now.

OK, I should probably say more about the Aerosmith. I felt tempted to take the stand espoused in this Onion article. Listening to the CD, however, made me realize that these guys, before they became a joke, were pretty awesome. "Dream On", while cheesy, is undeniably great, and other songs (which I want to call deep cuts (that's the classic rock DJ in me coming out) but aren't, really, given that they're on a greatest hits album) like "Kings and Queens" are surprisingly cool twisted seventies blues-rock. The less said about their cover of "Come Together", though, the better.

Also, I'm very uncool. You can see that from the CD's I've been writing about so far. To read about cool music, go to Colin's blog, the Attentive-Octopus.

Inspired by Noel Murray's Popless series in the A.V. Club, I've decided to start listening to my music collection from A to Z as well...

That's the short version at least... the long version is that with my laptop as my only stereo system, and with the podcasts I listen to, and the fact that the ipod is so portable, I listen to a much smaller subset of my music than I used to before- and a lot of the time it's background music, in the car, on a plane, while working. Also, if I'm at home, and I open up my laptop to listen to music, I often get distracted by something else, usually the internet (ooh, have any of my favorite Google Reader feeds updated?).

I do love (most of) the music on my ipod- however, since it's the Nano, and it's only 4 gigs, I do have to choose- and in fact, most of my CD's are not even in my itunes. What's happened is that my ipod/itunes music is extremely biased towards more recent stuff- the White Stripes, New Pornographers, Apples in Stereo, Flaming Lips, Common, the Roots, Wilco, and mostly newer indie rock, garage rock, power-pop, and hippie-hop (I'm probably not the first to coin this term, but I think it describes a lot of the hip-hop I listen to pretty well). The older stuff that's on there is mostly my classic country-rock albums: The Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram Parsons, the Byrds.

Other motivations: Nicole and I need to find driving music to agree on- while we both love old school funk, soul, and r&b, I don't have a lot of that stuff on my ipod, or even in the CD's that are in my car. But I do have a lot of it in my collection, and it'll be good to start listening to it again.

Also: the other day at Wegmans, while buying groceries, I picked up a couple of Hank Williams Best of CD's on impulse. First CD's I've bought in a couple of months...

With that as the prologue, on to the project. The first (alphabetically) CD in my collection is AC/DC, Back in Black. AC/DC are without question the finest band ever to come out of Australia, and this, their first post-Bon Scott album, is an unbelievably hard-charging blues-rock album, with unapologetically boneheaded lyrics... for example, in the song "Let me put my love into you" (already showing their trademark restraint and tastefulness), we have the immortal, almost Spinal Tap-esque chorus:


Let me put my love into you, babe
Let me put my love on the line
Let me put my love into you, babe
Let me cut your cake with my knife

So stupid it's smart? Or just so stupid? Well, whatever it is, the riffs of the Young brothers, and the wailing vocals of Brian Johnson still make this a go-to album if you ever have to explain to somebody what it means to rock out.

Oh, and a fun note: one of the podcasts that keeps me from my CD collection is Brian Ibbott's hugely enjoyable Coverville, which collects interesting cover songs. One of the bands that's often on there is Hayseed Dixie, a countrified (banjo-based) hard rock cover band. Also totally awesome.

It's really pretty silly: the biggest thing that's happened to me, well, ever, and I didn't blog about it... most of the readers of this probably already know, but let me go ahead and say it:


NICOLE AND I ARE ENGAGED!

Here's pictorial proof:



I'm the luckiest guy in the world!