My Life In Records

I celebrate Randy's entire catalog, but this record, if you're going to try any, is the place to start. It's just some of the most lucid songwriting on the planet. Mr. Newman deserves a lot more recognition than he's gotten in the last decade. The man can write.

I moved to NYC to work on some writing with a good friend of mine. He had found an apartment in Brooklyn in a basement of a friend he'd made since moving there the year before. This was no ordinary apartment. Our room was the back half of a large, long, full basement -- the front half was the Museum of Disembodied Folk Art -- a collection of found ephemera, record sleeves, handmade musical instruments, and the paintings, sculptures, drawings and notebooks of artist A. Bogs. Bogs lived upstairs but came down to the museum daily to listen to records and work on his own recordings. Bogs, real name Alex Telavera, had an encyclopedic mind for folk music and folk art and the museum was his way of evangelising his gospel message: "art is for folks." He was horrified one day when I asked who he was listening to. Bob Dylan, he said. I mean, I knew about Bob Dylan, but I guess I didn't know this Bob Dylan. The color in Bogs' face left him and from that moment I became a new vessel for his knowledge of the folk movement, the soul movement, Bob Dylan, the Guthrie's, Dock Boggs, Harry Smith and the rest of them. Not much of the music stuck with me, but I remember my first listen through Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood by Nina Simone. I was at first put off by the muscle in her mannish voice, but I couldn't stop listening. I brought that cd with me on every subway ride for the rest of the summer.

This album was announced and some clips of it were released months before the record came out as a sort of tease for the record. I listened to these clips on repeat for weeks and when the record finally came out it didn't leave my cd player for a month. The production, the inky blacky richness of it, was my favorite part about it. Everything else sounded too dry in comparison. I just recently bought this album again on vinyl this time and have reasserted my love for it.

I found this record in the music library at my college and me and my friends listened to it with the lights out like we were tripping to floyd. For a long time it was the only music necessary.

A roommate in college came back to the dormroom one afternoon with a stack of LPs he'd bought at Salvation Army. This was on the top of the stack, and his most treasured find. I'd never heard any Eno except some of the ambient stuff, which I never really got into, but this record wouldn't let go of me. The second half of the record is a perfect little suite.

I brought this cd with me on a family trip to Williamsburg, Virginia. Everytime I hear it now I think of an evening spent walking through parkinglots at sunset in the most perfect suburban landscape I'd ever witnessed. And I think of the Civil war reenactors I saw getting into a tiny Plymouth Horizon just like the one I drove back home, and how their backdoor handles had snapped off just like mine. I really got into the production on this record -- it sounded to me like a perfect little music factory.

I played trumpet in Wind Ensemble all through middle school and high school. Mostly I was sort of disappointed by the music we worked on -- lots of marches and Williams' soundtracks and then some token weird pieces that were never much more than excuses to run rehearsal a little differently. I think it was my second year in high school that we learned Lincolnshire Posy -- it's a sort of collage of themes collected from the English countryside by the composer on wax cylinders which he hauled with him where he went. I was initially hooked by the melodies and the textures -- I had never been very proud of the way we trumpets sounded, always a little comically heraldic, but Grainger had a way of making the brass lines sound wounded first and then only strong after you'd been made to feel sorry for them -- and then, after working with the pieces for a while, I fell in love with the economy of their structures. There's not a moment of superfluous gesture -- every millisecond is claimed.

A friend of mine, a devlish, impish character who tried over and over to get me to try cigarettes, alcohol and marijuana (a kid who was in high school when I was in middle school and who had a bigger brother who was off-the-charts cool by all standards and tried by all necessary means to climb to the top of his brother's monumental coolness and used me as a measure by absurd perspective of his progress -- I was, by his eye, scandalously pure of heart)... this friend of mine would have me over to his house every once in a while and would play me whatever new music his older brother had introduced to him: Jane's Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, Messiah, Pixies. I remember listening wide eyed to all these things. Then one time I went wandering through his house -- his parents' house really though I don't remember ever seeing his parents there -- and found on the coffee table Tori Amos' Under The Pink. Found out after listening all the way through it, completely rapt, confounded by the lyrics, the piano, the through-composed structures, that this cd belonged to my friend's mom. It was as dark as anything else I'd heard in that house. My friend confided in me later that it had been out sitting on the coffee table because he had been listening to it earlier that same day.

I had a dark industrial phase at 11 years old which was spearheaded by this Christian band Mortal. I didn't have access to music outside of what was sold at the Christian book store my family shopped at, but this record didn't strike me as overtly christish or culty or cutesy like the rest of the tapes there did. Not that I wanted out of the bubble, but I wanted something different. Anyway, this one song, cryptic, really got to me and I'd listen to it, rewind it on my tape player, and listen again and again. I eventually wore the tape out and haven't found any way of buying it since. Their next record, Fathom, was really good too, but after that they started to suck pretty bad. I actually cried after hearing their fourth album -- it was just ridiculously bad. Ugh. That was a tough night. Really big drops of really angry tears on a little boy's face. Mortal, if you're out there, think on that.

 -- I had a copy of this tape that my parents would play in the car on road trips. The memory of it is of glistening harps and great arching strings, some miss piggy hilarity, and the aching lonely voice of Gonzo. We would listen through the record without stopping. Wore out the tape, which I still have, but the lettering on the outside of the cassette is all worn off. I recently found a copy of the LP at a Salvation Army and brought it home with me. Rainbows all over the double gatefold, just like I imagined.