My Life In Records

Growing up with devoutly religious parents meant there wasn’t much rock music around the house. JCS was the closest we got (well, plus some old Beatles records). My brother and I know this double LP note for note. Later on, when we first started making bands together, we used to drop acid and watch the film/relive our youth. This served to further etch it into my mind. I keep trying to recreate it but always fail miserably. 

I had a pretty mythical experience to this record when I was in high school. It cemented the idea that an album could be the same as a film or a book, something to be experienced from beginning to end – not just a collection of 10 or 12 individual pieces. It also drove the point home that music could defy recognition as "music" in the conventional sense. It could be whatever the hell popped into your mind as long as you executed it with purpose and conviction. 

I arrived at a (young) point of my life where I was totally consumed by Warhol’s mythology, Popism, fantasies about the “Factory.” This record was the soundtrack to my attempts to recreate such a scene in the most unlikely place on earth: Poughkeepsie, New York. 

Feast Of The Sunfish started me on the notion of having my own band. Agitop were from my culturally desolate, Upstate NY neighborhood, but they had a video on MTV’s 120 minutes?! They were arty abstract lo-fi proto-slackers. I thought to myself “I can do this...?”

British songwriting always sounds so damn clever. I was obsessed with this album from teenage hood on. The epic closer 'Looking Glass' just crushed me as a kid. England seemed like a place where everybody was smart, refined and had cool haircuts.

I was in bands for years by the time I heard this – punk-ish bands – and I was just beginning to wrap my brain around the idea of shoegaze music. Albums like Mercury Rev’s Boces, MBV Loveless, Slowdive, etc. were blowing my mind, and Shoulder Voices really got me somehow. I could tell there were songs underneath all the layers of fuzz. I need melody in my avant noise, apparently. 

I was extremely fortunate enough to have been on a tour with the Dirty Three many years ago, and I got to watch them (all pre-beards) play “Everything’s Fucked” night after night. I was all of 21 years old and had never left home before. I would secretly cry while watching them. 

Everything that goes up must come down. This record is essentially a self-help book veiled in 70’s close mic’d blues rock and abstract Yoko-isms. John's primal scream really worked for me.

This record played along behind some gory scenes in my personal history. There was a period where it was a safe bet I was either listening to this or or Lou Reed's “Berlin.” The less said about this period, the better. 
 

The late '90s were a good time for songwriters. It’s the last time in our communication-obsessed history that you could have actual mythical-style songwriters that you couldn’t just email or myspace. Elliott, along with Belle and Sebastian, Wilco, Sparklehorse, et. al. made catchy music that didn’t let me down intellectually. They were the soundtrack for the last era that could have soundtracks. 

 Vic Chesnutt's The Salesman & Bernadette somehow has reached a place where it exists alongside some of my favorite contemporary novels – Infinite Jest, Already Dead, Underworld and The Salesman & Bernadette occupy the same place in my mind. It’s not a narrative per say, but you can feel the general thrust of the story via the open-ended lyrics. It’s as if you are the person in the story and Vic is singing your thoughts somehow, and since you don’t ask yourself what your own story is, you don’t ask what this album is about. You just know. He will be missed, I suspect he hadn’t yet delivered his masterpiece to us.