An Unversion

I've been on leave this term, but in so many ways this has been an incredibly confusing and disorienting time. My father died over the summer. My girlfriend got a job where I teach. I taught a graduate class for the first time, on a topic I'm not formally trained in. I am moving back to the suburbs with said gf. There are more things, some private, some not especially so. Some people, I assume, wake up under the pressure of such an onslaught (and many people wouldn't even consider this an onslaught!)

Of course, much of this is good news, and substantially helps me with my grief over my father. But I've still been feeling in a daze lately. By "lately" I mean for the past four or so months. I've edited a journal issue, but that's about it. I never seem to want to write anymore.

Last night I was reading some entries in Lauren Berlant's blog, http://supervalentthought.com/. I've admired her as a scholar in American Studies for a long time. I've never met her, though we have so many Facebook friends in common that we friended each other. But the deep level of attention to the affective dimensions of the intellectual life resonated with me really strongly. It's something I miss from graduate school, from being around people like Eve Sedgwick. I worry that the undergrad institution where I teach is a place that doesn't cultivate, honor, nurture that particular aspect of the mind's life. I miss this level of engagement that I see still fueling the work and lives of other friends from graduate school. At the same time as I miss it, I also remember shying away from it. And I know it's scary to think so much. The scariest part is when you think and nothing happens, either on screen or inside your head. In such moments, the disconnect between your hereness and where you think you should be is a chasm of immense proportions.

I've been reading Jack Spicer. His manifesto for unverts is hilarious. "Vert" means turn, so the neologism literally means "un-turn." I'm not using the term in the same way he does, but it seems to fit what I am thinking will be a turn in this blog away from a purely musical focus, and toward, well, something more general yet more internal--and hence not a turn, or a movement, of any sort. Just staying there/here.

Remaking Rumours

About a month ago, the artist Jennifer Delos Reyes put together a piece at Haverford (where I teach) in which she arranged for members of the community to remake the Fleetwood Mac album Rumours in its entirety. The album is legendary because, among other reasons, four of the band's members were involved in break-ups with each other while the recording was taking place. So it stands as a kind of monument to the difficulties and possibilities of collaboration.

Participants were all assigned a song to work on, mine was "I Don't Want to Know," on which I was paired with a Haverford junior named Jacob Waters, whom I'd never met before. We were the first people to record (lo and behold, my college has a recording studio in the basement of the dining hall--first I'd heard of this). The day of our assigned session, Jacob and I met in my office from 3:15 to 4 to talk about an idea I had for an arrangement of the song, then I ran off to faculty meeting, then to the studio for our session scheduled from 6 to 9. And despite all the difficulties we faced--the uncertainty of not knowing each other or each other's musical taste/approach, the age and student/prof differences, the general harried quality of the day, and so on--it came out pretty well as a Pavement-like slack sound. I'm playing drums and bass; Jacob sang and played guitars, and Julia Ryan, the Bryn Mawr student who was assisting Jen Delos Reyes, got thrown into the mix after she was caught singing harmony in the control room.

Jacob, Julia, and Me, "I Don't Want to Know"

Eight Minutes of Sun Ra Bliss

This is a beautiful song recorded in 1960 by Sun Ra and His Arkestra. It goes well with the weather we're having in the Northeast: days and days of non-committal rainstorms. It's the title track of his album Interstellar Low Ways, which I believe is still in print on CD along with the album Sun Ra Visits Planet Earth. If you were to own just one Sun Ra CD. . .

Sun Ra, "Interstellar Low Ways"

Always on the Sunny Side

This is a mini playlist, perhaps to be expanded, of songs that are so happy that they are actually sad. This could mean that they are masking some kind of desperation. It could also mean that they are rally songs sung from a place of pain or trial.

June Carter Cash, "Keep on the Sunny Side"

I’ve been obsessed with this song since it came out last year, on June’s final album. I love how it sounds like an old person, unabashedly. You can hear her struggling with the unavoidable limitations of her voice, missing notes. But, of course, she persists. Her voice has a quality I don’t recall hearing anywhere, except maybe on some old folk records—but this is crystal clear. I just love that it doesn’t mask the reality of being really old. I also love when Johnny comes in for the harmonies on the choruses; they seem like two elderly soldiers to me.


Darlene Love, "Chapel of Love"

“And we’ll never be lonely anymore.” Good luck with that.

This version has a slower tempo than the more famous one by the Dixie Cups, which enriches the sad undertone. I like this one better.


Barbara Harris, "It Don't Worry Me"

The climactic song in one of my favorite films, Robert Altman’s Nashville, and it was written by actor Keith Carradine. It’s a song that comes from a place of political trauma, very much of the Watergate era. But it could have applied equally well or better in the GWB era. “You may say that I ain’t free, but it don't worry me. . . "

Here are the songs.

Singing lesson from Bob Dylan

I'm fascinated by the art of vocal intepretation. I love imagining what a singer is hearing as s/he re-casts a melody familiar to her audience. It's often said of Bob Dylan that what makes his singing interesting, in lieu of a voice that is innately pleasing tonally, is his phrasing, his interpretation of his own lyrics. I've seen Dylan live twice, both in the last three years. I've liked both shows, mostly because he seems so into it, and is aging gracefully. But interpretation for him now means the rhythm at which he spits out the lyrics, pretty much.

This version of I Want You is from a rather reknown bootleg, from a show in New Orleans in October, 1980. He was just coming out of his Christian period, just starting to sing his old songs again. And in this version, he is intepreting by really singing. He has an alternate melody in his head, one that nonetheless fits the song perfectly, and it undergirds a beautiful, rather desperate sounding performance. I think desperation is a good affective tone for this song.

There are some other gems from this show--particularly an awesome version of "Simple Twist of Fate"--that I may post at a later date.

Oh!

I realized right after the posting the last post that the best song to re-start with would be the song that inspired the name of this blog. It's "Major to Minor" by the Settlers, a mid-sixties English pop band. The song is from the volume two of the excellent "Ripples" series of obscure Brit sixties pop singles, I think drawn from the Pye Records catalog. This is the best volume of seven--they're out of print but worth seeking out.

But also, from Cole Porter:

There's no love song finer;
but how strange the change
from major to minor

Back

I'm back. In a stripped down, very minimal form. I'm actually just planning on posting individual songs every day or two or seven, with a little blurb about the song. I guess I've entered the Twitter age. And I'm not even on Twitter!

So my first post is "Things You'll Keep" by the Apartments. They are an Australian band from the 80s. I had never heard of them until I read an interview with Dan Bejar, in which he referred to them as an influence. I really like the atmosphere of this song, especially the way it "kicks in" by going from melancholia to a slightly less lethargic melancholia. I also like the lyrical hook of "Some things you were never meant to lose."

Test

passover

I'm Coming Back

Soon.