Some people are weekend warriors, getting up and out early on Saturdays, taking the kids to soccer or swim lessons or karate, getting their grocery shopping out of the way, etc. That’s not us. When Saturday rolls around we all like to have slow, leisurely breakfasts at whatever time it is when we come down stairs, catch up on some reading, just take it easy. What’s the rush? To me Saturdays are like summer vacations; you have to appreciate them while you have them because they’re gone before you’re ready. Slow it down. The dishes can wait.
In a couple of days I’ll be seeing Johnny Marr. That’s right, Johnny Fuckin’ Marr. With each passing day I get more excited. I need this. I’ve been listening to his two solo albums while I’m working to prep for it and hoping that we don’t get sidelined by some freak November snow storm.
I’ve seen videos of him playing How Soon is Now and Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before from earlier stops on the tour. I’m just going to admit it. If he plays How Soon is Now, or Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want, or There is a Light That Never Goes Out, or Ask, or probably just about any of the Smiths songs it’s likely he might pull out, I will be a teary mess. To see the man himself playing those songs that have been ringing in my ears for more than 25 years…
I’ve written about Johnny Marr before and I can’t remember now why I didn’t go see him when he toured the US last year but when I learned he’d be touring for his new album Playland, I didn’t want to miss it again. Luckily I live in the northeast and he’s playing several venues within a reasonable distance* of where I live. Just remind me to buy some new tires over the weekend.
I know it won’t be a Smiths concert. I don’t want it to be. But I do want my head to be filled with that undeniable Johnny Marr sound. I want to hear these new songs and have that swirling feeling when the music is all around you, palpable, moving your hair and giving you goosebumps.
* A reasonable distance in my book is anything not requiring a flight.
I scored closet hipster on one of those online quizzes that a friend posted on Facebook (she got anti-hipster). If I wander into hipster territory would you all tell me? Am I getting close here?
You know what I miss? I miss going to shows where the whole crowd is moving in unison. Where you’re all packed in tight and have your arms up, bent at the elbow for protection. It’s a mosh pit but in the fun, not-harmful way. Urban Dictionary would have me believe this is called a closed pit. Pogoing in a closed pit? Maybe? I’m afraid mosh pit has taken on a meaning associated with the worst (or best, if you’re into that) kind of violent pit. I’m not talking about the steel-toed combat boot to the ear* kind of pit.
What I’m talking about is when you hear a song like this, you just want to be packed into a small, hot, black room jumping up and down with 300 of your closest strangers. No one’s holding a beer, no one’s holding a phone up filming. Why would you when it would only get knocked out of your hands?
It’s been forever since I was at a show like that. When I went to see the Joy Formidable, the conditions were ripe but the crowd was still green. It’s something that requires everyone buy into it, or at least a large enough cluster of people to sustain the momentum. It works better when there’s not a lot of room. There are fewer chances of getting hurt, in my experience, when it’s tight and there’s a collective will to do this one thing. I’m not a fan of stage diving and crowd surfing. I just want to be carried away in the figurative sense. It doesn’t seem to be a tradition that got passed down to the next group of concert-goers though.
* That was my worst pit experience. Full force whack in the ear from someone who took a dive at a Carter USM show (I know, right?) at the old 930 Club. It felt like in those old Bugs Bunny cartoons where the stars circle your head.
Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy – Satanic Reverses
Holding my daughter on her first Election Day, 2001.
I hope you all got out and voted today. I tried to vote this morning but I had to drive my daughter to school again today and when we pulled into the parking lot of the school where I vote, it was clear that I wouldn’t be able to get in and out quickly enough to get her to school on time. I’m glad to see everyone getting out and doing their civic duty but I wished we could have gone in together. I’ve been taking her to vote with me since she was two months old but in recent years I end up swinging by after work so it’s been a while. They’re studying forms of government in school and I thought it might make it all seem a little less abstract.
There were still people coming and going when I stopped to vote this evening but it was quiet. It’s not an especially upbeat election season. My state doesn’t have a senate race this year, my representative will be handily re-elected, it’s just the local seats and the race for the governor’s seat. Fingers crossed for that one. Nationally, I’m much less optimistic and down years make me nervous. Jittery even.
This song fit my mood today. It’s from 1992. Let’s repeat that. 1992. What the fuck, America.
Normally I am not around at 3pm on a Monday afternoon but there was no bus transportation for my daughter’s school today and my husband couldn’t pick her up so I took the day off and took care of some local things as well. I turned on the radio and hit the button for the local college station. The DJ said he was going to be down in New York on Friday for Peter Hook’s show at which he and his band are playing Low-Life and Brotherhood back to back. The DJ decided to play both albums in their entirety as a kind of tribute.
As “Love Vigilantes” started up I said, “Oh, I love this song!” and turned it up and started singing along. A surefire way to embarrass your young teenager.
I then launched into an unasked-for explanation about why I was not also going to this show. Lots of the usual logistical reasons but also I’m not sure how I feel about the whole Peter Hook playing New Order and Joy Division songs with the Light and New Order playing without Peter Hook thing. Bands break up all the time or kick someone out, get a new drummer, but this is weird and uncomfortable, like when a couple you know breaks up and you still want to be friends with both of them but they want you to choose sides. I can’t do it!
To say my daughter didn’t care in the least is an understatement. She was further perplexed by my insistence that the voice singing these songs should be Bernard Sumner, even though I acknowledged that he isn’t a “good singer” which is really all my daughter seems to notice at this point in her musical development. Then “The Perfect Kiss” came on and I said, “Oh, I love this song!” Eye-rolling in the passenger seat.
But she wasn’t asking me to change the station and any chance I can get to expose her to music that isn’t on the top 40 station is a good thing. I tried to explain how just because someone may not be a great singer doesn’t mean that the way they sing isn’t great. I don’t think I convinced her but I like to introduce the idea to her. I am not immune to the power of a beautiful voice, far from it, but I love a lot of bands with singers that would never make it in an a cappella group. And I love them, in many cases, not in spite of but because of that imperfect voice.
We made it home and I went in and turned on the stereo so I could pick up where we left off in the car. “Sunrise” came on and I heard her laugh as I said, “Oh man, I LOVE this song!” and she wandered into another room. Just wait, I thought to myself. Just wait.
Lately I’ve been on a Scottish bands kick and last week I bought myself a ticket for We Were Promised Jetpacks with The Twilight Sad opening up. I am hoping there will be a bit of banter in between songs so I can hear those incredible accents and barely understand a word of it.
I don’t know why there seem to be so many shows I’d like to see in the coming weeks, and I missed a bunch back in October that I would have gone to if other commitments hadn’t gotten in the way. In the same week that I am going to the show above, there are at least two others on my radar. There are a couple in December too. None of these are actually near me either. Why is it always like that? Feast or famine.
I had high hopes for today’s NaBloPoMo efforts but it’s nearly midnight and my WiFi keeps crapping out, leaving me with just my phone. I wanted to start out strong but I guess there will just be some times when you actually do have to phone it in.
Perhaps against my better judgement, I have decided to try and do NaBloPoMo this year. I know a number of people who used to do it but it has fallen out of fashion with most of my online friends. So why am I bothering? My posting has been spotty lately, to say the least, and I am hoping it might get me back in the groove.
It seems appropriate though since what inspired me to start this blog in the first place was the 30-day Song Challenge. A friend of mine posted it on Facebook and I thought I’d play along. It was fun, even if some of the daily themes must have been thought up by someone who doesn’t really listen to music the way my friends and I do. Frequently I really wanted to post some explanation for why I picked a particular song for that day’s theme and Facebook, at the time, limited your post length so it wasn’t like you could really get into it. Having a blog where I could do that, but not be required to do it every day or follow some set guidelines, sounded like a great idea.
So 3 1/2 years ago, I took a Tumblr site I had used as a Couch25K tracker, deleted all those entries and started my music blog. A little less than a year later I bought noisycats.com and started a version on WordPress that contained the entries I was posting to Tumblr, but not all the stuff I reblogged. Reblogging and all the other people who are sharing stuff are the great things about Tumblr. The commenting and messaging features, not so much. I had a guest post coming up on a friend’s site and I was hoping to get a bunch of new readers who may not have had Tumblr accounts and who probably wouldn’t have been familiar with the whole Tumblr culture.
Today the two versions of Noisy Cats exist together just fine, I feel, and since I’m the one doing them, that’s all that matters. I like the clean WordPress version and the categories and easy commenting that it allows. I also like reblogging cool, fun, and interesting things that my Tumblr friends post mixed in with my own longer entries that are less common on Tumblr. Lately though, I’ve been doing more reblogging and less writing of my own and that’s the easy way out (for me, and what I’ve been trying to do content-wise anyway).
So National Blog Posting Month, here I am. We’ll see if by month’s end November spawned a monster or if it forces me to try harder and write entries that are worth reading every day. Be patient, guys, ok?
* My daughter looked over my shoulder while I was watching the video and said, “Is that guy a belly dancer or something?” I haven’t laughed that hard in days.
I went to see Matt Pond a couple of weeks ago. Though I’m not all that familiar with his stuff, I knew a few songs and it felt like it had been a long time since I’d been to a show. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be just him or the whole band but it turned out to be the whole band, including a cellist.
The line up was a bit confusing because the show was originally billed as being just two acts, both singer-songwriters performing solo, then Matt Pond was added, and listed just as Matt Pond. I wasn’t really sure who would be on first or who the headliner was supposed to be, and if Matt Pond was performing solo or with the band.
First turned out to be Rose Cousins from Nova Scotia. The crowd was thin, but polite, as I guess you might expect for the first slot on a triple bill.
Second was Anais Mitchell. Let me just say that I’m not well-versed in women singer-songwriters. It’s just not what I’m usually drawn to. There are a few exceptions here and there but overall I prefer a band to a solo performer. So I was very surprised to discover that by the time Anais Mitchell got on stage, the room had filled in considerably and the majority of people seemed to be there for her. Even more amazing to me was that the people who were the most enthusiastic, singing along to every song and enthralled by her presence, were nearly all big, burly, bearded guys. Not your skinny little bearded hipsters but, can easily pull off a lumberjack for Halloween kind of guys. Plus one tall skinny guy just off of a work in a suit and tie and pointy shoes. Nearly all of those big guys left before, or shortly after, Matt Pond PA came on. It didn’t take long between each act because the stage was already set for Matt Pond PA (honestly, I don’t know if adding the PA is what determines it’s the band instead of just the man but I’m going with that assumption) and both women just played a guitar that they carried up there with them. There were outdoor lights strung up inside and they never dimmed those so it made it feel like they never turned down the house lights. Between the thinning crowd and the weird lighting I felt bad for the band but they didn’t act like they minded and made it seem like they enjoyed being in a more intimate setting. He tweeted something to that effect the day after so I decided to stop feeling guilty on behalf of the weak turnout and weird lighting.
Speaking of a weak turnout, we had only five kids trick-or-treating tonight. I think that might be a new low. Always buy candy you’ll be happy to be stuck with, that’s my rule of thumb.
Noisy Cats 