This week: Tracy Chapman, The Vessels, Julien Baker, and classical music
I'm pretty sure I'd be a terrible revolutionary freedom fighter. I'm old, out of shape, with a pretty healthy set of anxieties without living with the constant paranoia being a tool against state oppression requires, but as I spend some of Star Wars Day catching up with Andor's ongoing portrayal of both the cost of fighting oppression, and the imperative need to do so, and I contrast that against local election results here in the UK which sees a resurgent rise of the far right apparatus across the country, I think about where the line is before that kind of action is necessary here. People tell me it won't come to that; I have my doubts.
There, that's my tenuous link to Star Wars on this May the 4th established, and my chance to vent a little of my anxieties on the internet because Catherine doesn't like it when I talk 'doom and gloom' around her, so we can move swiftly away from the crumbling of our social fabric and on to music. Once again, by virtue of a combination of long holiday weekends and the continuing Snooker coverage which Catherine and I have been glued to, and the return of Taskmaster and the start of ITV's Genius Game, an adaptation of a Korean game show I really love which has been excellent so far through two episodes, my listening time this week has been curtailed. I've started listening to some of the albums I am planning on covering next week already, so today I only have four albums to sweep up which is convenient because we have snooker/cinema/pub plans for this afternoon and evening which means there's a reasonable chance this article gets published on Monday this week instead. Rather than rush or warp my entire plans for the weekend just to carve out some time to write this (I did have some time booked in this morning but our dishwasher leaked and I had to spend an hour resolving that to prevent our utility room getting flooded), I'm just going to be comfortable letting it slip 24 hours and not get neurotic about it. Honestly, I know how many clicks these articles get, so if that seems unreasonable to you, feel free to shout your frustrations impotently at the screen right now, and psychically I will feel your dissatisfaction and will work to do better in the future.
It seems wrong somehow to have listened to
Tracy Chapman almost incidentally while I was cooking one night. My first experience of this album was during long, eight hour car journeys from West Berlin (as it was then) to Soviet controlled Warsaw, Poland at the tail end of the cold war. My Dad had been posted to the British Embassy in Warsaw, and the closest bastion of western decadence was the divided Berlin, where we would zip over to every six months or so to visit the Post Exchange on the various western military bases and buy music and films and games and toys for my sister and me. One of those trips resulted in the purchase of a new car, a yellow Ford Escort Cosworth that my father, frustrated Rally driver that he was, had ordered. This was the first car our family owned with a CD player, and so the trip to collect the car also included a trip to the CD racks at the PX to get some road music.
I never asked my Dad why he picked the Tracy Chapman album as part of this round of CD purchases. There's no doubt he cares as much about music as I do, and perhaps some music magazine or word of mouth had switched him on to her music. In my darker moments I wonder if he bought it at the time because it has a song on it called Fast Car. Regardless, with blue diplomatic plates affixed to the car, my sister and mother drove the white embassy van back from Berlin that we had all driven down in, loaded with supplies for the embassy video library; My Dad and I drove back in the Cosworth, doing 120mph along the relatively deserted East German and Polish motorways; occasionally a police car would pull out behind us, catching up just close enough to see the diplomatic plates on the car before peeling away in disappointment. About an hour from Warsaw, we stopped at the side of the road to wait for my Mum and sister to catch up, who had left at the same time as us. It took them fifty minutes to reach the point where we had stopped.
Somehow, from that point, Tracy Chapman became the soundtrack to these long road trips, up at 5am to make it to West Berlin at 4pm. I had probably heard this album all the way through 20 times before I was 14. It's a staggeringly good album; never has the mournful reality of being trapped in a system designed to exploit and discard you been more poignantly brought to life. It's a must-listen for anyone trying to build a comprehensive library of musical experience, and like a lot of stuff I've listened to recently, it seems only more relevant now.
While we are talking about comprehensive musical experiences, this week saw one of my returns to Sheffield City Hall to see a classical music performance. I think sometimes people consider classical music elitist, hard to access, something just for old people who don't realise that Spotify exists, and it can be some of those things. Please believe me when I say that the power of seeing classical music performed live is something unique in itself, and is an experience that is worth seeking out, especially as orchestras work to be more accessible - performing classical music samplers, music from films, easing people into comfortably appreciating the skill on display of a full orchestra performing in total synchronicity.
The Halle Orchestra in full flight
However, a trip to the Halle this week presented me with a unique issue. I wanted to listen to a classical album featuring the pieces we were going to listen to, but some part of my rules included a prohibition against live albums, and nearly all classical recordings as "as live" by their very nature. In the end, I decided it was my blog and my rules and I can bend them to suit my whims, so listening to the Minnesota Orchestra perform Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, Four Dances From Rodeo, and El Salon Mexico was fine and counted. As a classical music fan, I have an appreciation for modern classical, especially modern American classic, which I have inherited through Catherine. This album, and the subsequent live performance acted as a highly enjoyable reminder of why that is true. As the final notes died away into deafening applause, I had goosebumps on my arms, and Catherine had tears in her eyes. The power of music, especially live music, in its most concentrated form.
As part of rearranging the room in our house which is my office/board games library/PC room, I've had occasion to look once again at the stacked CD racks which were the
original inspiration for me to register this domain name back in 2017; and when I have a window to listen to an album but no real idea of what I am going to listen to, I take a moment to glance over at the CD pile and see if something jumps out at me. This week, something did, and made me feel like I had lost my mind.
I saw this album, and immediately the song leapt to mind, summoned from the depths of my memories where it had been lurking for 20 years. This is one of the few EP-esque CD singles that exist in my CD rack, and I remember specifically buying this after hearing it get some radio play from one of the several UK Radio One DJs who influenced my musical tastes back then. As an EP, this couldn't qualify for this project, and the song,
Look For Me First In Any Crowded Room, just isn't on a streaming service; there's no video for it on Youtube. Things were complicated further by the fact that there is a currently seemingly popular band called Vessels (rather than The Vessels) which are eating all the search traffic. After thirty minutes of searching, I did
find the song on Vimeo because the visual artist who had done the video animation for it had uploaded it, but no sign of it on Spotify.
More detailed searching revealed a single self-titled album by The Vessels lurking on the service with next to no streams. After a quick background check to make sure they were the same The Vessels who had put out the single I had enjoyed, I committed to listening to The Vessels for the first time to allow me the context to talk about the single EP I owned. I was slightly disturbed to realise, about half way through the second song, that I somehow knew every song on this album.
Now I don't own it, because for the sake of my sanity - once it became apparent that I had at some point, listened to this exact album enough to know the track order and many of the lyrics from every song - I checked every CD on my rack to make sure it was not there. I don't remember the album art, I don't think I know anyone else who knows this band or this album. I have no memory at all of listening to this album, but I must have done, often enough for the songs to carve their own little space in my brain. Even now I am slightly spooked by it, an entire period of my life, which is more often than not defined in my memory by the music I was listening to at the time, where the music itself disappeared from my consciousness. It was like experiencing self-inflicted hypnotic regression, except I still don't remember anything apart from the album now. In the interest of making this paragraph not just me having a slight panic attack about the state of my memory, the album is a very pleasant kind of gentle indie rock which doesn't quite sound like the EP's kind of Americana Blues sound, and more like what you'd expect from an early 2000's British indie band. I kind of want to listen to it again to see if I can pin down any associated memories, but I don't have time for that kind of exercise right now. Another one for the future listening list.
Finally for this week, I got around to listening to the new Julien Baker album. I've already written about how much I love
Turn Out The Lights, so I was always going to listen to anything else she put out; once again, the streaming services let me down, only having half of the tracks on the album available to stream, but fortunately for me the album is available on their
bandcamp and it's on my list of upcoming vinyl purchases now I've listened to the album and enjoyed it. It's very Julien Baker - confessional and country-sad - and I feel like I need more time with it to truly appreciate it, though I have listened to it twice this week and a couple of tracks a few more times than that.
And with that, another week wraps up. This got published on a Monday in the end, and I'm off for lunch and then to watch the Snooker final this afternoon, but with that in the rear view next week, I should be able to spend more time sweeping up some albums as I careen recklessly towards 500.
Have a good week!
*Which is, of course, the opening lyric of 'The Saga Begins' by Weird Al, just in case you thought I was cheating and not using a song title for my lyrics.
