A gorgeous recording of “Near Death Experience Experience”
The French website La Blogotheque just finished putting together an absolutely gorgeous recording of “Near Death Experience Experience”. The “Traditional” version works a lot better than the “Interactive” one on my computer.
200 years ago, not everyone was depressed. This is interesting because by today’s standards the people of the past actually had very little. They had no cellphones, no computers, no movies, no fancy cars with leather seating, no MP3 players and no Internet, where they could access the summation of all human knowledge with the click of a mouse. Food wasn’t as good and they spent much more time working.
Similarly, today, there are lots of famous, wealthy and often extremely successfully people–the envy of society–who struggle with strong, persistent negative feelings. A recent example that comes to mind is Mike Wallace, who despite having an extremely successful career (even at the time), attempted suicide in 1986. So many CEOs of major companies have issues with depression that there’s a secret organization devoted to dealing with it (“depression is rampant among people who have achieved their goals–and even worse among those who have not”).
If people who had nothing by today’s standards weren’t actually that much less happy and people who have everything by today’s standards aren’t always happier–then what we, as a society, implicitly believe makes people happy must be incorrect.
I’ve been reading a lot of work lately by economist Robert Frank and psychologist Jon Haidt. Both academics have basically accepted that what most people want and what actually makes people happy are two very different things. One idea is that people often only enjoy things relative to others or relative to themselves in the past. If everyone had awesome BMWs for their entire lives, we would take high speeds and fancy leather seating for granted and no one would get pleasure from having them. This would happen for the same reasons that having a color TV (a once highly prized luxury) is now completely taken for granted by just about everyone.
When you start thinking about the implications of this line of thought the results can be overwhelming. Instead of that, I like to concentrate on two things: 1) There must be a whole lot of great things in our lives that we are not fully appreciating and 2) by just focusing on getting we want we are putting ourselves in an endless cycle of work/reward that doesn’t lead anywhere.
Being aware of these quarks in our psychology, I actively try to remember to appreciate things. Things like family and the beauty of nature shouldn’t be taken for granted. I try not to be obsessed by where I want to be and enjoy right now. At the end of the day, that’s really all there is.
Time and attention is a lot to ask for these days. I think that’s why the most popular music tends to be really straight forward. We are bombarded with so much information and noise from every direction, that if something isn’t immediately appealing, we tend to ignore it. I think this explains why Andrew Bird’s popularity is confined to a relatively small niche.
Break It Yourself, Andrew Bird’s latest studio album, reveals itself slowly over time–requiring repeated listens and careful attention. In exchange for your effort, Bird serves up a banquet of beautiful, unique sounds and ideas. It’s a little overwhelming; there’s no way I could do justice to this album with just one short blog post. But then again, maybe it’s better not to sit down and try to explain too much. A lot of the beauty from Andrew Bird’s songs comes from their mystery–finding your own meaning in their bizarre and unexplainable passages.
There are some pretty objective observations that can be made about Break It Yourself as an album. It has a more acoustic, earthy sound than The Mysterious Production of Eggs, Armchair Apocrypha and even Noble Beast. Analogue recording techniques were used and it sounds much less “produced” than previous entries. For a change, the studio versions of these songs aren’t that far removed from what could be performed on stage. Despite the minimalist style of the album, the raw quality of the recorded sound (particularly the drums) is exceptional.
Bird’s trademark emotional, philosophically-charged caricatures of science and history are still present, but are more subtle in Break It Yourself. There’s a noticeable shift to a more folksy/Americana/traditional style in this album. You can hear the shift at every level: including the lyrics, instrumentation, production and, sometimes, even in the musical structure of the songs themselves. The juxtaposition of Bird’s experimental, overly cerebral style with this earthy traditional American folk sound creates a interesting tension throughout the album.
Here are a few ideas from songs the album that really resonated with me:
Near Death Experience
“Dare the plane to crash,
redeem the miles for cash
we’ll dance like cancer survivors -
like we’re grateful simply to be alive.” (1:48-2:18)
In “Near Death Experience” Bird explores ideas about expectations and happiness in life. He uses this image of cancer survivors being happy just to be alive.
But Bird doesn’t stop there; from the idea that “those who survive death are happy just to be alive” he derives this idea of having a death-wish as a path to happiness. If you “dare the plane to crash” you walk away from a flight with a sense of gratitude for life after. I read as a twisted way of lowering one’s expectations.
Lazy Projector
Now if memory serves us, then who owns the master
How do we know who’s projecting this reel (2:10-2:30)
Tell me who’s the best boy and the casting director
And the editor splicing your face from the scene
It’s all in the hands of a lazy projector
That forgetting, embellishing, lying machine
That forgetting, embellishing, lying machine (3:40-4:30)
In “Lazy Projector” Bird sings about the unreliability and subjectivity of human memory. A huge amount of psychology actually backs up the theme of this song (see Daniel Schacter’s The Seven Sins of Memory). Our memory really does degenerate over time and our recollections are extremely subjective (subject to moods and bias).
But the point Bird really drives home here is how dependent we our on memory. Everything we are comes down to our memory–and yet it’s this completely unreliable, inaccurate thing.
Sifters
What if we hadn’t been born at the same time
What if you were 75 and I were 9
Would I come visit you
Bring you cookies in an old folks home
Would you be there alone (1:05-1:35)
What if we hadn’t been each other at the same time
Would you tell me all the stories from when you were young and in your prime
Would I rock you to sleep
Would you tell all the secrets you don’t need to keep
Would I still miss you
Or would you then have been mine (2:35-3:15)
Here Bird plays with ideas of true love and age. I like it because when he puts romantic love in the context of a relationship between a 9 year old and a 75 year old, it makes it about pure love — not something necessarily sexual in nature. In a sense, he is providing us with a vision of what pure love looks like.
Also in “Sifters” is the gorgeous refrain “Sound is a wave like a wave on the ocean; Moon plays the ocean like a violin. Pushing and pulling from shore to shore; Biggest melody you never heard before” (0:18-1:00).
…
My cursory look in to the meaning of a few of songs is just small taste of what this album has to offer. Break It Yourself is overflowing with ideas and beauty, so much so that it might be considered “dense”. I’d imagine this density is off-putting to a lot of people who are used to songs that make sense (lyrically and otherwise) on the first listen.
But it’s this same density that makes Andrew Bird so great for people who do have the time and attention to invest in his albums. Like in many areas of life, real depth is there for people who will work to find it.
A few days ago I was involved with something that had me turning through pages of ancient poetry. I think of these poems as a window into the minds of people living hundreds, sometimes thousands of years ago, in completely foreign cultures. What’s amazing to me is that, a lot of the time, they write about the same kinds of ideas that occupy our minds today. Love, friendship, family, loneliness, social status, aging and art are all common topics in ancient poetry.
One discrepancy that stands out to me is the topic of “nature”. A lot of ancient poetry focuses on the beauty of nature and on our connection to it–yet that’s rarely on an average modern person’s mind.
One poem on this topic, from my 1941 edition of Arthur Waley’s Translation’s From The Chinese, stood out to me:
The Valley Wind — Lu Yun (~250 A.D.)
Living in retirement beyond the world,
Silently enjoying isolation,
I pull the rope of my door tighter
And stuff my window with roots and ferns.
My spirit is tuned to the Spring-season:
At the fall of the year there is autumn in my heart,
Thus imitating cosmic changes
My cottage becomes a Universe.
In “The Valley Wind” Lu Yun claims his heart imitates the “cosmic” changing of the seasons; his spirit is “tuned” to the seasons. This poem makes me want to appreciate the seasons more. It also makes me think about how the seasons influence everyone’s life (seasonal affective disorder is a very well documented phenomenon). I think the ancient poets were on to something when it comes to our connection with nature, and perhaps its worth spending some extra time outside to try to understand what moved all these people.
This brings me to the intended subject of this post: Spring is nearly here.
Leafless trees over a stream at Devil’s Den in Weston, CT. I took this on my hike earlier today.
I went for a hike in Devil’s Den today and it was barren. There were miles and miles of leafless trees and rocky soil with the occasional stream. Winter is all about hardship–with short days and taxing weather–and that’s reflected in the landscape. But spring is on the way, and last night I started my first seeds indoors to grow lettuce and tomatoes.
Watching the winter fade and planting my seeds for spring, I can’t help but to feel like I’m metaphorically doing something similar in my own life. For me, late winter seems like a perfect time to be putting time and energy into things that have no immediate payoff, but–with proper time and attention–will make the future brighter. Maybe in this way, like Lu Yun, I can be in-tune with the seasons.
The thing not to forget, in life and gardening, is that taking care of these little plants/projects is something to be enjoyed for its own sake. Although having fresh tomatoes in late summer is great, that reward is no match for the experience of working to help something grow.
It’s amazing to me how well music can capture specific emotions and states of mind. On the 60 Minutes episode before Valentines day, there was a story on Adele and how fans are often affected so strongly by her love songs that they literally cry when they hear them–a phenomenon well known enough to be the punchline to a skit on Saturday Night Live. The story stuck with me over the past few weeks, and has made me think about how some of my favorite musicians approach love. Specifically: Andrew bird.
Andrew Bird’s musical interpretation of love is a lot my own internal understanding of it: It’s messy and bizarre–full of strong feelings, symbols, non sequiturs and half-formed thoughts. It’s not rational, but it’s not completely random. You can look at the pieces and try to make sense of them and you’ll find something meaningful, but not fully coherent or logical.
But that’s the beauty of it. Because it doesn’t fully make sense, you can spend all the time you want thinking about it, and never have to worry about solving it. At the same time, there are enough interesting patterns and powerful emotions that can be picked out from the noise to make it worth thinking about.
“The Naming of Things” is a perfect example of some of Bird’s love-themed, meaningful nonsense. The song is intonated in a way that implies slightly downbeat, dazed wonder. He opens speaking to a third party (possibly a love interest) about how “impressed” he was that they “shot through” his “window glass” and left a “mess”. Although part of the reason Andrew chose these words was clearly for how they sounded (he uses repetition, rhyme, and rhythm in this song in a novel way), they also can have an interesting meaning if you give them some thought.
“You, remind me of you, the way you shot right through and how… you broke my window glass, fast–it happened so fast–that I have to confess that I… I was impressed that I… I was impressed that I… despite all the mess and all the broken glass, I was impressed…” 2:05 – 2:40
I imagine the “window glass” as a person’s defenses around the heart. The scene of someone violently shooting through window glass can be construed as another person effortlessly crashing through those defenses. When someone breaks through–when you really fall for someone–it’s not a clean thing. You become an emotional wreak. There’s a “mess” and “broken glass”.
He goes on to explain what exactly happened to him:
“Here’s where I disappear, where I fall of the pier (or two)… and too be rescued I did wait–watched water-bugs skate as they draw figure-8s as they draw… From the bottom of the lake–as they draw–I watched water bugs skate as they draw… From the bottom of the lake I watched the water-bugs skate…” 2:40-3:15
He disappears–falling off a pier to the bottom of a lake, watching waterbugs skate as he waits to be rescued. To be at the bottom of a lake is to be without air, with a distorted view of the world, while being in peril. I may be projecting here, but that sounds an awful lot like how a certain type of love can feel.
A final segment of the song I found interesting is as follows:
“Oh, but you, you can’t be found when the bell rings! You weren’t there that day for the naming of things… it’s the naming of things, it’s the naming of things… and the homeroom bell rings and the homeroom bell rings…” 3:50-4:40
This nebulous passage makes some unusual ideas come to mind. The concept of “naming things” is quite deep–because when things are named they are placed in categories and put in social context. For example, when a guy is called a “husband”, a “partner” or a “boyfriend”, an individual in a unique relationship is placed in a social category that assigns them norms and roles to conform to. The process of giving something a name ends up changing it in a really profound way.
When I hear this passage, I imagine someone who refuses to accept society’s definitions of things–someone who thinks outside of the confines of norms. Not being found when the “homeroom bell” rings, could be an illustration of someone living outside of society. In an organized school, where students hear the bell move from classroom to classroom like clockwork–one person (I imagine a girl) doesn’t know what the bell means–and so she operates outside of the confines of this factory-like school environment. She goes wherever she pleases.
***
I’ll happily admit that my interpretation of Andrew Bird’s lyrics may not have much to do with what he was thinking when he wrote them. I think Bird’s songs often function as a kind of musical Rorschach test–what you see in them is often just a reflection of what’s going on in your mind. And that’s really cool–because what could possibly make a song more personal?
Andrew Bird may not make people cry like Adele, but he takes people to places they rarely see. Whether it’s from hissurrealistic visions or the shadowy unexplored corners of our own minds, Bird gives us something to feel and something worth thinking about. To me, that’s worth writing about.
Today, I’m officially a year older–but I don’t need a number to know I’m aging. When I look in the mirror these days, the first thing I notice are these rapidly multiplying, shining streaks of gray hair. Our bodies change as we age. More importantly, so does the way we think.
When I was younger I was terrified of aging. I looked at older people and saw folks I didn’t have much in common with; people that I didn’t really understand and had no desire to become. Now that I’m older, I’ve realized we are all different and getting older doesn’t change that. I know I’ll still change as I age–everyone does–but I won’t turn into someone I’m not. I’ll never follow football, lose interest in music or passively watch Good Morning America at dawn. I’ll change, but I’ll still be me.
I once read:
“You can’t be depressed about getting older unless you’re stubbornly clinging to your youth”
I think this is true. All the really important things in life, to me anyway, aren’t things that go away when you get older. There will always be sunrises, books, parks, good food, different cultures, love, friendship and good music. Debauchery may go out of season as time moves on, but that sort of thing is distinct from (and is in some ways an obstacle to) the real good life. I think a lot of people who have trouble letting go of their youth don’t understand that.
“Tarde em Itapoã” is an old Bossa Nova style Brazilian song about evening on a beach in Brazil. What I love about this song is that even if you don’t speak Portuguese, you can almost feel what it’s about. The song celebrates beauty of the seaside; things like the ocean, the breeze, the sky above, palm trees and the moon. The whole thing sounds like joy to me. Most popular songs pose questions about love, heartbreak and growing up; I feel that songs like this have answers.
For the first time in recent memory, I’ve enjoyed a birthday without harboring subtle feelings of dread about aging. I think that’s because I now know not only what I want, but what actually makes me happy–and none of it depends on being young. I don’t have a reason to “cling to my youth” anymore. I can safely ditch the themes of most popular music as part of my personal philosophy, and stick to those of songs that understand beauty like “Tarde em Itapoã” and “Chicago“. Now that I’m older, I can finally be at peace with aging.
Tony Blankley died a few days ago. I spent years listening to him on Left, Right & Center’s podcast, along side Arianna Huffington, Robert Scheer and Matt Miller.
I’m generally unaffected by celebrity deaths, but when you listen to a person candidly talk and express their opinions for years, you get to know them in a similar way that you get to know a friend in real life. When I heard Tony had died, I almost felt like a friend died.
He was a thoughtful, creative person. He created, he had opinions, he was extremely worldly and he had a ton of insight. When I see that in a person–especially at 63–it gives me hope that I can try to be that way too, even as I age. It’s not a tragedy when a person like that dies, because those people have awesome lives.
I saw this show on TLC called “I Cloned My Pet”. It’s one of those things that’s so lowbrow that it goes full circle and becomes an interesting analysis of human emotion. The program follows three people who were madly in love with their pets; so in love that when the pets died, they couldn’t let go. They are driven to cloning as a way of bringing them back–and invest an unbelievable amount of time and money in the process.
There’s something kind of pure about A) loving a pet so much it becomes your whole world and B) refusing to let go. The show raises a lot of questions without clear answers: Questions about love (“Can you love something too much”), mortality (“What is death?”), being (“Are the cloned pets really the same?”) and ethics (“Is there something wrong about cloning a pet?”). Although most of TLC’s audience probably watches the program as some kind of grotesque freak show, I think it’s actually pretty cool.
Lately, I’m exhausted. Physically and mentally. I’m not just extremely busy, but extremely busy doing psychologically demanding stuff. I get so tired sometimes that I feel like I’m walking around in a daze.
A daze. When things aren’t so clear anymore. I think I notice how interesting everyday things are more when I’m exhausted. Things like how cool it is to have so many books in libraries and how interesting arrangements of dirt on walls can be. I want to experiment in abstract photography to highlight things from this different perspective (like the shots in this post).
Being tired a lot isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially since I expend most of my energy doing stuff I don’t mind. I think that’s probably more than most people can say. Since it seems like my schedule is only getting busier over the next several weeks, I might as well celebrate my complete and utter exhaustion.
15 Predictions for 2012:
* This could be wishful thinking on my part
Reflections of Bare Treetops on a Pond
My New Year’s Resolution: Be more optimistic.
According to Martin Seligman’s work, being optimistic helps us endure setbacks better. By not being incapacitated by bad events (which are pretty common in anyone’s life), optimists tend to accomplish more in the long run. Since there’s a lot I’d like to accomplish in 2012, I’d better be optimistic.
The remains of my garden from 2011
In today’s world of mass production, consumerism and marketing, it’s easy for the humanity to get sucked out of art. What ought to be a soulful communication from one person to another can become a commodity–something that’s value is derived from how much it can sell rather than the substance of its content. I think of the dozens of identical Christmas music CDs sitting next to dozens of identical TVs at Walmart. The commoditization of music isn’t the only thing removing the human element from it; the people who write music are also separated from the listeners by storefronts, marketers and publicists.
The large distance between musicians and listeners isn’t something that people typically notice because that’s the way it’s always been. The only reason I’ve been noticing it lately is because of one my favorite musicians: Redding Hunter (who often plays as Peter and the Wolf or Traffique). He is doing so much to try to eliminate that distance that a lot of other music seems painfully impersonal by comparison.
My copy of The Ivori Palms may look like a bootleg, but the label is actually just hand drawn, supposedly by Hunter himself. It’s a rare thing when musicians even design the covers of their own albums; To have something hand drawn is really special. It gives you a sense of connection with the person who created it and the feeling that your copy is unique and unlike anyone else’s.
Hand-making CDs isn’t the only thing that Hunter does to make his work personal; he also writes and, at least, plays a major role in producing his own music. His stuff is really his stuff.
But all these personal touches wouldn’t be worth much if Hunter wasn’t also an extraordinarily talented musician. The stuff he comes up with is extremely creative and beautiful; and has a heavy emphasis on catchy, elegant melodies and harmonies. I’m not the only one who recognizes this guy’s talent: He has been featured on NPR, filmed by Vincent Moon of La Blogtheque (alongside musical heavyweights like Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, Beirut, St. Vincent, Bon Iver and Arcade Fire) and recorded by Daytrotter.
As you might hear in “Better Days”, Redding Hunter’s songs are very human. Analog recording equipment adds hisses and earthy tones. Hunter intentionally leaves in small imperfections that are digitally removed from most mainstream recordings. Much like the album cover, it’s these little imperfections that help make the songs seem authentic and real.
Hunter’s work makes me think about how perfect most music is; and by extension, other things as well. I think of things like T-Mobile ads in malls–with the perfect model in the perfect pink dress against a flawless white background, the minimalist primary red Target logo and even the Apple iPad. Almost everything is mass produced, so it tends to be completely free of visual flaws. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of mass production because I like technology and inexpensive things; but a byproduct of it is a world that can, at times, seem a uncannily perfect and impersonal.
Peter and the Wolf’s New Album: Easy Mountain
I’ve been thinking about Redding Hunter latey because he just released a new album: Easy Mountain. Although it fits in well with Peter and the Wolf’s library of songs, this album is a bit more intricate and focused than previous works. The songs on the album share similar underlying themes and instrumentation, including eerie female vocals he frequently goes back and forth with and some really nice electronic sounds.
“Hazy Lions” is an absolutely beautiful song (notice the ornateness, female vocals and electronics I was talking about). It has a gorgeous lyrical hook that’s characteristic of this album:
“And every morning we transcend the past,
and each evening is like the last,
and in dreams we escape the fields,
It’s so easy out here”
Themes of freedom, escape and loving the present permeate the album. It’s a very insightful work, for lack of a better term. There’s a lot to it, to listen to and consider; if you take the time to think about what’s being said you’ll get a lot out of it.
A reoccurring theme I find particularly interesting is the concept of ”easiness”–being worry free, not having much to do and being able to relax. Americans typically don’t place a high value on having “easy” lives. We are taught to value hard work, challenging ourselves and competition; the opposite of easy. However, listening to this album, and the way it celebrates easiness, makes me wish I could inherent a small house on a beach in Brazil and do nothing for the rest of my life.
Part of the reason this album is so persuasive is Hunter’s remarkable ability to paint landscapes with his songs. Often in this album you’ll find yourself walking along side of rivers with friends, listening to the waves of the ocean by moonlight, staring in awe through clearings on hilltops and the gazing into the bright lights of the city at dusk.
For example, in “Lightfalls” you’re called to imagine a huge tree, swaying in the breeze on a hazy night–a person silhouetted by the moon. And suddenly there’s thought of the joy of being alive in the land that set your “heart ablaze”. It’s just a beautiful landscape within a song.
Stuff like this makes me thankful to be alive. In a world of mass production and manufactured tastes, passionate people are still out there making things. It’s just they don’t have the budget to have posters in malls, TV ads or kiosks in Walmart. Maybe my New Year’s resolution will be to be more proactive in finding stuff like this: Real, authentic, passionate stuff.
During the last few years–and the last few months in particular–I’ve been kind of stressed out. I wasn’t really sure what I was doing with my life; not knowing and trying to find out was psychologically taxing, to put it gently.
But over the last few weeks everything seems to have fallen into place. I like how I’m positioned. I’m basically satisfied with the direction things appear to be headed. For the first time in a long time I can just go with the flow for a while. I don’t have to worry about making any life altering decisions. I can just relax.
The Highway by Peter and the Wolf. I would like to feel as mellow as this song.
But relaxing isn’t easy. There’s a lot of anxiety left over from months gone by; and I still feel like I’m a little too tightly wound. And while being up-tight is unpleasant–there’s more at stake than just my own personal sense of well being: The more wired I am, the less patient I am with other people and less pleasant I am to interact with. Being internally off balance affects how I behave in a way that can lead to negative outcomes.
So I need to relax. This is the plan: I’m going to make a conscious effort not to let some small things bother me, to appreciate other small things, to be more optimistic, to get good sleep and to focus on doing things I enjoy. Those are things that I can really do.
Here are some specific enjoyable things I’ll be doing for the next several weeks: