Category Archives: music is my boyfriend

Damien Jurado and the Greatness of Growing Up

Filed under i used to be so cool, living in new york is neat, music is my boyfriend, no i really do love ohio
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It’s funny, growing up. When I was a wee lass of 18 at college in Columbus, freshly released from my dad’s worries about my venturing into strange neighborhoods in the big city, I’d buy show tickets months in advance. I’d skip classes to be one of the first in line. I’d be happy leaning against the stage for hours waiting for my band to appear. I didn’t mind suffering through three or four terrible local openers, and I didn’t mind waiting around in the rain and the stink of a back alley to talk to the band afterward. If I couldn’t find someone who wanted to do these things with me, I’d go alone. I saw my favourite band more than 50 times between 2000 and 2005, but that number doesn’t even begin to elucidate the sheer amount of shows I saw as a whole.

I know that I’m old because none of that interests me anymore. I don’t want to sit in a car for fourteen hours straight just to see one of my bands open for someone else in places like Georgia and South Carolina. I don’t want to stand around and listen to a band for three hours anymore, let alone the three hours before the show starts when everyone’s pushing to get to the front and I can’t drink anything lest I have to pee and the club’s playing some unknown crap over the speaker system that’s not even in the same genre of the band I’m there to see.

So last night was perfect. I went home after work, watched my “Criminal Minds”, and then took the bus down to the Mercury Lounge in the Lower East Side to see one of my long-time favourites, Damien Jurado.

Kamran met me there at 9:15, and we pushed ourselves against the wall the best we could for the 15 minutes until the doors opened. The bar area is basically just a long hallway, so everyone was touching everyone else, and there was nowhere to escape and nothing to do, and all I could think about was how miserable I would’ve been had I been there alone. The show started soon after, and we were right in front, and we hadn’t been waiting around for three hours, and we were happy.

Damien Jurado, Mercury Lounge, NYC

Damien is just sort of an amazing guy. He sings these incredibly sad songs, and he comes off as so thoughtful, but there are these moments where he’ll say something so bashfully joyful that it kind of makes you wonder if his whole songwriter persona is a put-on. Last night, he told us about sitting next to a girl on a plane who was listening to music; at first, it was David Bowie, but then suddenly something even more familiar came on, and he realized it was his own song. She sat there listening to his entire album and had no idea she was sitting beside him. I just love thinking about how that must have felt.

He was wearing his Seattle uniform of flannel shirt, lumberjack jeans, and moccasins. The woman doing his backing vocals, Melodie Knight from Campfire OK, was wearing black leggings, a black tunic, a black shawl, black strappy wedges, and a black bowler hat. I said, “I think she’s dressed the way she thought New Yorkers would be dressed.” Kamran said, “I think that’s how they dress in Seattle.” I said, “That’s how they dressed in New York in the 80s.” Kamran said, “That’s how they dressed in Seattle in the 90s.” So then it made sense.

I know I won’t be able to explain how good Damien is with dynamics, the way he can have an audience straining to hear him one moment and how he can fill an entire room with just an acoustic guitar the next, and how something as simple as a foot tap can change an entire song, so I’ll just link you to some songs instead.

Here’s my favourite recent song of his:

Here’s my favourite song of his of all time:

And here’s the song that made me cry last night, because it’s so clearly written about me:

I would wonder why a man from Seattle has multiple songs about Ohio, but it just seems so obvious why.

This iPod Nano is Kind of Depressing Me, Actually

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The other night, Kamran came home with a package for me that included an iPod Nano and all the fixin’s. I’ve been walking part of the way to his apartment from work every night and have been trying to listen to my Pandora stations on my phone but keep finding myself with a dead battery after one or two songs because I’m too irresponsible to be trusted with charging the thing. So now I get to be one of those people with my iPod snuggled into an armband, pumping my arms as I march down the street in time to whatever mid-90s alt-rock I happen to be craving at the moment.

What really struck me is how tiny the new Nano is. When I first starting dating Kamran, he was using the 1st generation iPod Shuffle, which you’ll recall looks like this:

A big stick with absolutely no screen whatsoever. Fun if you like always being surprised by how much terrible music you have in your collection. Not fun if you like actually being able to choose what you’re listening to.

But the 6th generation Nano? Tiny! A one-point-five-inch square with a touchscreen! And radio! And photos! And a pedometer! Can you believe how far we’ve come?

So far, I have it loaded with every album from 2010 that I downloaded but never listened to. We’re talking bands I totally love–Sufjan Stevens, Tokyo Police Club, Crystal Castles–and didn’t even care enough to check out their new albums because I was too busy wallowing in 2007. This is what it’s like to get old, huh?

The Strange Places Your Favourite 1998 Rockstar Shows Up

Filed under a taste for tv, i used to be so cool, music is my boyfriend
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Kamran’s DVR has been 97% full for weeks now thanks to all of the “Criminal Minds” I’ve been recording from multiple channels, so I try to knock an episode or two or five out whenever I can. This morning while I was getting ready, I pulled up one with an intriguing synopsis about murders coinciding with a rock star’s tour schedule.

It started out with a band covering Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, one of the best songs ever, and I thought, “Hey, this is actually pretty good.” The lead singer’s Robert-Smith-esque white face and red lips were a bit copycat-ish for my taste, but his performance was so confident and real-rock-star-like that I couldn’t help but want to see more.

I thought, “How great must it be for this local band to get a break like this?” I thought, “This must be the greatest moment of their lives.”

And then I thought, “Wait, is that Gavin Rossdale?”

Now that I watch it again, it’s so obviously his voice. His perfect, perfect voice. So instead of it being some local band trying to catch a break, it’s actually a completely washed-out former rockstar now relegated to a TV crime drama.

And I couldn’t be happier! Now if only Daniel Johns from silverchair and Matthew Caws from Nada Surf would do episodes of “Law & Order” and “Burn Notice”, my high school lead singer crush trifecta would be complete.

“American Idol” is the Only Drama Left in My Life

Filed under a taste for tv, living in new york is neat, music is my boyfriend
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I kinda don’t have anything to say right now. Kamran’s finished with law school and the bar exam, so we’ve been doing crazy things like

1) going to the 3-Michelin-starred restaurant Kamran swore he wouldn’t take me to until I agreed to eat their signature oysters-and-caviar dish (and I did! (and liked it!!)),

2) driving to see our friend Anthony’s in Long Island with a bunch of other friends so he could make us a real home-cooked Italian meal in a house with a kitchen that’s its own separate room and not just a counter on one side of the living room, and

3) going for weekend walks in secret parts of the city and finding a 100-square-foot (i.e. normal-sized for Manhattan) wine store that happened to carry our favourite wine, the J.J. Prüm Riesling Kabinett Graacher Himmelreich 2008. We’re totally drinking with our preservative-free, microwaveable FreshDirect vegetarian meals now. One of us is drinking out of an actual wine glass that came with Kamran’s apartment (I was under the impression he had purchased wine glasses himself when I first met him and was impressed with how grown up it seemed, despite not actually liking wine), but the other glass broke at some point, so one of us is drinking out of a mug. Classy.

Anyway, life is good, and about the only thing stressing me out right now is deciding if I’m going to watch this season of “American Idol” or not. Obviously I watched all of the auditions, because that’s the only time you actually get to see people with singing talent. By the time you get around to the live show, the judges have weeded out anyone who doesn’t add Christina-Aguilera-ish runs to the end of every song.

I think the only reason I’m even remotely interested in watching this season is to see all the hacks and jerks get kicked off. A handful of the contestants are actually bad: Thia Megia, Tatynisa Wilson, Rachel Zevita, Kendra Chantelle, and Julie Zorrilla. A couple of the contestants are just unlikeable: Clint Jun Gamboa and Jordan Dorsey. There’s the one guy who’s an Adam Lambert ripoff: James Durbin. And most everyone else is just generic.

Here are the only four I care about:

American Idol Season 10

• Brett because he’s a total freak with a voice to match.

• Casey because he scats in a not-annoying way and because he’s what Kamran calls a slobthrob, which is of course a slob who also happens to be a heartthrob.

• Paul because he may legitimately be Rod Stewart.

• Scotty because his voice suits him so little it’s almost cartoonish. He could put out a country album tomorrow and have it sound better than anything out there right now.

I don’t think any of them can actually win, of course, because they’re all too good. Kamran promises me we’ll make it through the season with the help of the trusty fast-forward option on the DVR, but maybe I should make a pact with myself to stop watching once the four of them get kicked off to avoid the pain of having to watch someone like Lee DeWyze win again.

HOW DID WE SURVIVE BEFORE COMPUTERS?

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Here is proof that the Internet is awesome.

On the night Kamran finished the two-day New York state bar exam, he played me this video by The Pastels:

It’s a seriously great song, and I’ve been playing it over and over again for the past two days, so I decided I should just up and download the whole album this morning. So I go to my favourite BitTorrent site, and I find a copy of the 1987 single for that very song, “Crawl Babies”.

I also find this:

Isn’t that SO FUNNY? It reminds of one of the early Chuck Klosterman books and the way he talked about how sad it is that music videos aren’t being preserved. At the time I read it, YouTube was already in existence, and I kind of wanted to write to him and be like, “Did you ever think life would be this great in the 2000s, Chuck?” But then I remembered that I don’t have his e-mail address, because he never wrote to me to thank me for the completely awesome movie I bought for him.

And now this music video that was being called “very rare” has been viewed 168,000+ times on YouTube, 1,000 of them by me. The Internet is so great.