0.36.0 - August slipped away into a moment in time

 Dashboard!

I wrote these words in February of this year and when I wrote them, I was half convinced that we would never make it there.

When I say we'd never make it there, it's a line that covers a multitude of outcomes.  I might have given up, abandoned this project as too time consuming, too self indulgent even for my own wildly inflated sense of the value of my own thoughts, simply been too lazy to pick it up and let it slowly wither away and die a quiet, peaceful death.  I, personally, might not have made it.  I look at the date of birth on my driving license and I think of all the people who never made it as far as I did in life;  death is cruel and it cares nothing about the dreams or goals or stupid internet projects of who it claims.  But what I really feared was that none of us would make it to August, that our self-inflicted social apocalypse would have claimed us all already, that the madness that rages throughout the geopolitical spectrum would have reached a flashpoint.

Now, in the middle of September, my doubts are of a different sort.  Instead, I watch the slow, inexorable decay of a society of peace, but understand that the gears turn slowly, that we give up our safety and freedom and comforts by degrees;  the violence, the clashes, the danger and sorrow, that comes only when we try and win them back.  So we pass through August, and I look at my progress, examine my mental state, redouble my efforts to push on, move forward, finish, create this one thing with its ridiculous and arbitrary rules intended for and desired by no-one except myself.  

I knew the summer holiday would disrupt my rhythm, but I underestimated what the combination of post-holiday blues directly into ongoing chaotic changes at work, moments in history being warped into a narrative for violence and exclusion around me, and the resurgence of a broken tooth which I have just booked an appointment to have expensively and painfully removed next week would do to my resolve.  I have fallen back into old habits.  I watch the same rotating cast of Youtube videos to numb my brain to sleep, to find comfort in the familiar.  I listen to the same podcasts I have heard six, eight, ten times before;  when I listen to music its in snippets, or I return again to albums I've already listened to.  I tell myself I'm trying to familiarise myself with some new albums before seeing the bands on tour, but that's only half the story.  In truth, I'm looking at new albums for the record and wondering when I'll have the time, the energy, the enthusiasm to give them the attention they deserve, to commit to writing about them here, to do the work I set out to do.

Time makes fools of us all.

There was a time when I was a comfortable 20% ahead in progress than the ticking clock counting down towards December 31st.  Now I am less than five;  slowed to a crawl by an unwillingness to drive myself, to take the time, to call on the piles of recommendations and new music and old music I have been saving to get me over the line.  That stops now.

August And Everything After by Counting Crows was the 700th album I listened to this year.  

When it became apparent that I'd get to album 700 some time in August, the serendipity was just too perfect not to lean into it.  With the exception of Quality Control by Jurassic 5, this album is the only one across the now 130 or more albums I have had recommended by friends and colleagues that received more than one nomination;  in fact, three different people suggested I listen to this album.  More than Graceland, more than Born to Run, more than Tapestry, people I knew across a variety of age groups and social groups and walks of life looked at me and said "You?  You should listen to the Counting Crows album from 1993", because they didn't realise that every note and every word has been hardcoded into my DNA since I was seventeen years old.

I don't have a coherent origin story for how I discovered this album;  there came a point at some time in 1993 when Mr Jones was just being played everywhere, and somewhere buried deep in an energetic but otherwise straightforward indie pop song lay an vibration, a hook, something so compelling that suddenly and without warning everyone between the ages of sixteen and thirty five years old in 1993 went out and bought a copy of this album.  I talked about other albums which felt ubiquitous at the height of their power, but no other record in my lifetime exemplifies this phenomenon better than this.  The cost of this power, this hypnotic suggestion buried deep in a song about struggling musicians, was that it would come to represent the worst song on an album I love.  Overexposure is a slow poison, and in many ways Mr Jones feels slightly at odds with the tone of the rest of the album.  I'm a purist and I try not to skip songs on albums (curation is intention, albums flow from song to song, skipping any of it breaks that flow*) but I certainly approach track three with a certain weary dread;  the song which got me through the door on Counting Crows has now become the grim price to pay to instead enjoy the poetic melancholy of Round Here, the lovestruck confusion of Anna Begins, the weary despair of Raining In Baltimore.

Mr Jones has nearly a billion streams on Spotify.  Ghost Train, track nine, has the least, just 5.8m.  I don't understand those people;  or maybe the magic spell woven into Mr Jones just wore off on me faster than others.  

No matter the reason, and accepting Mr Jones as the cost of doing business, I fell in love with this album because emotionally it makes me feel lost, unconfused, unsure of my place in the world, whether any decisions I am making are the right ones;  put simply, it reminds me of being young.  It's an album of shambolic potential, a kind of chaos which exists as a prelude to something better.  When I was young, it related to it like Adam Duritz's was summoning up my own emotional state;  as a middle aged neurotic, it takes me back to a time when every decision seemed critical, but responsibilities were something that happened to other people, where consequences were emotional, personal, and rarely significant.  

There's a number of bands from this era of music that I never got to see play live;  bands who were responsible for some of my most formative musical experiences broke up for one reason or another before I had an opportunity to be in their presence.  Counting Crows remain an active band, with a core of performers dating all the way back to their debut.  I listened to their most recent album only a month ago.  I've had several opportunities to see them live; and yet, each time I have chosen not to, and it's for a simple reason.

By all accounts, lead singer and key creative force for the band Adam Duritz, refuses to sing the lyrics as written on the album, and that would infuriate me in a way that I can't describe.  My foundational experience of August And Everything After and This Desert Life and Recovering The Satellites (yes, this album may be their magnum opus, but I stuck with them after the buzz wore off for everyone else and listened to their other albums also) is resonating with the lyrics, and the emotion he brings to those songs.  It makes me twitch when Catherine sings the wrong lyrics to songs we are singing along to;  having the voice that I fundamentally associate with that song, that performance go off piste and just make up some other lyrics on the spot would give me a stroke.

I don't think he's wrong to do what he does;  there's a different kind of art to it, a kind of free-flowing style which intellectually I can understand.  I know people who love their live performances for that reason, but I know my limitations, I have a better knowledge of my own inner workings than I ever have, and I know that I am better having memories only of the perfect, fossilised, idealised versions of those performances that I love so dearly.  

So, there we have it, a month-late review of an album that, if I could only listen to twenty albums ever again for the rest of my life, would probably make the list, featuring a song on it that I kinda hate and which I'd never want to see performed live by the band.  

I'm back, pushing forward, staying one step ahead of the deadline.  Radiohead next.

* Yes, I am one of those people.