Thriller was the first album I actually owned. Beginning at age three, I listened to and became familiar with my parents’ Beatles albums, but I couldn’t claim them as my own.

When I was seven and Thriller was released, I begged my mother for it, and she was all like, “Why don’t you just have Uncle Henry make a tape of it for you?”

“That’s not the point!” I whined. With all due respect to my uncle Henry—definitely one of my hipper, more musically aware uncles— I wanted the official album on tape, the complete package: that shimmery white suit reproduced in a tiny 3×4″ format, and the ugly beige cassette itself, with the song titles and everything stamped on the plastic. That was my holy grail.

So I wore my mother down and eventually got it, and played the hell out of it, and eventually lost it, and a couple years later moved onto the second album I ever owned, Songs From the Big Chair. But that album, the video for “Shout,” and the ensuing 25 years of pop music couldn’t have existed without Thriller, or the man who created it.

As soon as I heard the news yesterday, my brain performed that curious elision that allows adults to reckon with nuance, controversy, and cognitive dissonance: I immediately forgot the past 20 years of Michael Jackson’s narrative—the weirdness and the plastic surgery and the baby-dangling and the allegations of impropriety—and thought only about Thriller and Bad, about being a single-digit age in the 1980s—an era I consider more frequently even as it continues to recede.

The bells at Minneapolis’ City Hall are playing Michael Jackson songs. You can hear them all over downtown. I recorded them playing “I’ll Be There.”

Posted: June 26th, 2009 under Music.
Comments: 1

Oh hi. I was just sitting around, you know, listening to some great music.

Maybe it’s the weather—thunderstormy, on the cusp of June. Maybe it’s because it’s a Sunday night, or because some fuckwad killed an abortion doctor this morning in the lobby of his own church. Maybe it’s because I just watched a sad movie, or because this is the time of year when we are all going through transitions, even if we don’t know it. But this song hits me right square where it hurts.

Halloween, Alaska - “The Ends”

I try not to use the M word anymore when discussing music, but this is good old-fashioned melancholy pop. Halloween, Alaska is a Minneapolis band but they recorded their new album with Tchad Blake at Real World Studios. So I think it’s safe to say they’ve Arrived, if they hadn’t already, and they deserve every bit of it. These guys are geniuses with the vocal melodies and especially bridges—and a knife-twist of a lyric like “Don’t talk to your ex / There, I said it.” And while most bands would milk every last drop out of melodies as brilliant as the ones in “The Ends” (I know I would), they fade it out before you can really get a good grip on it.

I’m focusing on “The Ends” because it sounds a little bit like the 80s, and that’s always going to get my attention. And the Current’s been playing it a lot lately. But I could have picked just about any song from Champagne Downtown and it would match this one for sheer beauty and hooks. And then the bridge sounds like Steely Dan. So there you go.

I feel like lately my music listening habits have been stagnating a little, or that I’ve hit a dry spell interrupted only by halfhearted listens to P4K’s Best New Musics. I’ve been waiting to discover my First True Summer Album. It’s a new month, and it feels pretty much like summer, and I just belatedly acquired Champagne Downtown, and I love it, so it might as well be the one.

Posted: May 31st, 2009 under Minneapolis, Music.
Comments: 4

Our last shows of the tour were excellent: First there was the impromptu open-mic in Adams Morgan, DC, where a crowd member, upon finding out we were from Minnesota, shouted “Al Franken!” and “60!” between every song.

After that we drove to Philadelphia, where we were warmly welcomed by the women who run Girls Rock Camp there and several of their friends, including members of the delightfully insane ensemble Oh! Pears. The next day we even walked around the historical parts of the city.

That evening we joined Oh! Pears onstage at Johnny Brenda’s, along with An American Chinese and The Mean.

The drive from Philadelphia to Minneapolis was twenty hours long and punctuated only by a midnight meal at Denny’s and the unfortunate news of Jay Bennett’s death.

Now that I’m back, I’ve done that neat trick I performed after my tour with Nolan, which is to immediately and efficiently ablate from memory all the tedious or frustrating parts of touring with a band, leaving only memories of the fun, and the desire to do it all again as soon as possible.

More here.

Posted: May 27th, 2009 under Chicago, Music.
Comments: 1

We’re in Washington DC, trying to plan the next 48 hours until our next show, in Philadelphia. Right now our tentative plan is to try and hit an open mic and blow the minds of these District of Columbians.

(Marshall got a haircut. He has two mohawks now.)

Last night we played the Sidebar Tavern in Baltimore and had a wonderful time. It was a small, divey basement bar, so it seemed crowded even if there were only maybe thirty people there. The other bands, the psychedelic seven-piece King Cloud and the playfully proggy Cat, were the perfect match. We’ve been blessed with some really nice bills that just kind of fall together, where the bands all complement each other really well.

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Posted: May 21st, 2009 under General, Images, Music.
Comments: 2

I’m sitting at the merch table in the Hi-Fi Concert Club in Lakewood OH, just across the Cuyahoga River from Cleveland.

Being here makes me want to listen to the Pretenders.

Run At The Dog began our 10-day Northeastern U.S. Pre-Album-Completion Spring Road Trip/Tour/Carnivale of Sundry Thrilling Feats at about midnight last night, in Jenny’s driveway in St. Louis Park.

We drove through the night, since both Marshall and Maureen are basically nocturnal and insane and like to drive. As for me, I slept most of the way, but not until I’d caused myself permanent eye damage by watching the season finale of Lost on my iPhone. At one point I thought, “It’s two a.m. and I’m watching Lost on my iPhone in the back of a van somewhere in Wisconsin, while most people my age are asleep because they have to get up in the morning for their boring full-time jobs. So what if I’m broke?”

So I’m settling back into the touring lifestyle of an unheard-of band with no budget, something with which I have considerable experience. This means gas-station coffee, several days without a shower, and the dicey parking-lot prospect of piloting a large passenger van through a three-point turn. Unlike last time, I have an iPhone, wi-fi, Naked Juice, MySpace, and Obama. Otherwise, it’s reassuringly familiar, and I’m beginning to feel that curious freedom of being on a road trip, with the added benefit of playing a rock show almost every night.

And Cleveland, based on my extremely limited experience, seems like a pretty cool town. I understand that it is trying really hard to revitalize, in a way that’s fair to everyone, a troubled infrastructure predicated largely on a troubled manufacturing industry. To the extent that that’s even possible, which it probably isn’t, things look promising. And, unlike Minneapolis, Ohio seems to already be in the throes of summer. I should probably change my shirt soon.

Right now there’s an awesome hard rock band playing called Hostile Omish Hot Ham & Cheese. Our original show in Cleveland was cancelled, even though we’re still on the marquee at that venue. (I hope no R@tD fanz show up there hoping to see us cuz theyll be totally bummed LOL!!)

But so then we got on this other bill at the last minute, just up the street, and I think we got a better deal. The whole thing bears echoes of my previous experience with booking snafus in Ohio, except we’re in Cleveland, not Columbus, and I think this one will have a better outcome.

Posted: May 15th, 2009 under Music.
Comments: 1

The month in high school after I bought Popular Favorites 1976-1992: Sand In The Vaseline, the Talking Heads’ new 2-disc great hits collection, was possibly the first and only time in my teenage life when I enjoyed getting up in the morning.

It was May 1993, the weather was finally nice, and my first-period class was B&W photography. There were only four of us in that class and Ms. Yellick-Manley loved us, or so we thought, because we were smartasses and she let us get away with a lot. Phil was in that class with me, and so between that and the fact that we loved taking photos, and were given a lot of room to experiment while shooting and in the darkroom, it was pretty much a glorified, artistically invigorated study hall.

My morning routine that month consisted of waking up and listening to the following songs from SitV: “My Love -> Building on Fire”, “Don’t Worry About the Government”, “Warning Sign”, “I Zimbra”, “Once In A Lifetime”, “Burning Down The House”, and, finally, “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”. If I recall correctly, they were all on the first disc (this was back when we still had discs), and they were a good way to trace the most joyous, buoyant route through the first half of a mostly joyous, buoyant musical career. “Naive Melody”, especially, was the best way to send myself off into the often difficult, occasionally revelatory existence that was 10th grade in a small town in Iowa.

While riding my bike to work along the Mississippi River this morning, “This Must Be the Place” appeared on my iPhone’s shuffle. I keep my phone in my pocket with its tiny speakers emitting my favorite songs, however faintly, so I don’t get something terrible stuck in my head during the long ride. (QV last night, when I inexplicably got “What Would You Say?” by the Fucking Dave Matthews Band lodged in my head during my ride through downtown.)

Anyway, “Naive Melody” made me glad to be awake on a Monday morning, riding my bike, even if I couldn’t hear it all that well, and even if (especially if?) I was no longer 16 years old.

Talking Heads - “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” (via Hype Machine)

Posted: May 4th, 2009 under General, Grinnell, Minneapolis, Music.
Comments: none

Over the past few months I’ve had the privilege of watching my friend Nathan work on a video installation that opened in Buffalo NY last month, and was honored when he asked me to compose music for it.

The resulting piece, Killing Rolando, is an installation that incorporates elements of documentary footage, autobiography, archival materials, and landscape photography, though it’s immediately apparent that the finished whole amounts to far more than those constituent parts. I was pretty thrilled that I was able to contribute even a scintilla of my own fitful stabs at amateur composition.

The piece is best digested in a large three-dimensional space, so the elegant website Nathan designed for it doesn’t quite do justice. But it’s still pretty fucking cool. You can hear my music by viewing the video in the top right-hand corner of this page, but definitely watch all the videos and read all the text.

Posted: April 26th, 2009 under Film, Images, Minneapolis, Music, Video.
Comments: 1

Over the weekend Amanda and I flew to North Carolina to attend the marriage of my friend Wes to his fiancée, now wife, Theresa.

Even before the wedding, we knew it was going to be a pretty great weekend because our rental car was a silver Mustang, and upon arrival in Raleigh we went straight from the airport to Waffle House.

The wedding was the next day, and I didn’t know many people there beyond Wes’ family, and my other friends Mark and Phil. The four of us have been in the same room only a handful of times since our band ended eight years ago. So reconvening with them is a rare, often emotionally charged prospect, at least for me.

The ceremony was brief, beautiful, and sylvan, and Mark and Phil performed a song they were confident only the four of us would recognize.

The song was “Today You Move,” by Trip Shakespeare, a song and a band Wes helped us all discover seventeen years ago. When it came to music, we took all our cues from him, and were never misled.

I’ve been to a lot of weddings over the last few years, but this one was significant because it was the wedding of my oldest, most consistently dear friend.

While that friendship is now about 25 years old, it wasn’t always close, geographically or otherwise, and it didn’t always come easily. It is probably an axiom of human relationships that your longest, most intense friendship will almost by necessity be not only the most complex, but the most complicated.

But not fragile. While we drifted off each others’ radars a few times, a corollary to the above axiom is that after a certain point it ultimately requires less effort to let the distances between us close rather than to keep drifting.

So, here’s to Theresa and Wes. May you care for him, Theresa, as well as I’ve often wished I could.

More here.

Update: Somehow I forgot to mention that there was karaoke at the wedding (as you can probably tell from the Flickr set) and that Amanda and I performed “Kiss From A Rose.” Don’t know how the hell that eluded my original account, since it was obviously the highlight of the wedding.

Posted: April 20th, 2009 under General, Grinnell, Images, Iowa City, Music.
Comments: 7

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum at the Triple Rock

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Posted: April 14th, 2009 under Images, Minneapolis, Music.
Comments: 3

While in Iowa over the weekend, my brother and I traveled to Iowa City to attend the joint birthday party that Ransom and Angie were throwing. It’s an hour’s drive east from Grinnell, a drive I’ve probably made close to a thousand times.

It was dark. My brother, in the passenger seat, cued up “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” on his iPod. I smiled for the entire duration of the song. I found myself entertaining the admittedly mundane thought I always do in the presence of great art:

How sad that people who died before this song was released cannot hear it.

But maybe they can—and for the rest of the song my only (mundane but worthwhile) wish in the world was this: that all the dead people I’ve known and haven’t known should be able to enjoy “Single Ladies”—and every other creation of equal or greater value.

Driving back, at 3 a.m., my brother put on Lost and Safe by the Books. I’d forgotten all about that album, and the Books, but 3 a.m. on an empty Iowa highway was the perfect time to be reminded.

“Be Good to Them Always” began and I immediately pictured an extremely specific location: the corner of Pierce and Damen, facing east, four years ago. Morning, summer. Taking a left at Penny’s and rounding the corner, hurrying to catch a train. Already sweating in my work clothes. I suppose song was in heavy rotation on my iPod.

The song’s lyrics—if you can call snippets of dialogue and field recordings lyrics layered over beats, cello, and Rhodes, all chopped into carefully reconstituted smithereens—those lyrics were unsettling then, and seem prescient now, on the perpetual cusp of national disaster.

Different music, different context, same mundane but worthwhile wish: that the dead should hear this music. At 3 a.m. on an empty Iowa highway that wish was transformed; it became less mundane, more desperate, both less and more specific—extrapolated out to address whatever amazing song might be playing, but now also invoking a singular departed.

Posted: April 7th, 2009 under Chicago, General, Grinnell, Iowa City, Music.
Comments: 1