My Records: An Autobiography

[autobiographicrecords]

Albums of 2016, number 9: “Eden” by Ivy Sole

On “The Vow,” Ivy Sole says her “homies say my flow got a ring to it.” Placed in the middle of a track about her peers settling down, getting married, and starting families while she hustles to start her career as an emcee, that line is the kind of wordplay that makes “Eden” stand out as a tremendous debut from a young poet.

The song is a declaration of her commitment to her craft. She’s put a ring on it. But, sonically, her flow does have one hell of a ring.

Coupled with a laid back, soulful production, Sole’s delivery is clear, emotionally evocative, and versatile. In “All Mine,” Sole’s voice has a command through the verse’s confident boasts (“A catalyst with hella aptitude for visual aesthetic // Captivating audiences, rhyme schemes chock full of message...”) to a softer, singing delivery like in “The Glow.”

The success of “Eden” is that it operates on two levels: Superficially, this is a great album to put on with a couple of friends. On another level, you could sit down and pick apart Sole’s verses like literature, pulling at the puns and images she’s left like a trail of breadcrumbs leading you to a deeper understand of the ideas with which she’s operating.

To put it shortly: This album is all kinds of beautiful. Hear it for yourself here.

[autobiographicrecords]

Albums of 2016, number 10: “Solace,” A Day Without Love

It’s December, which means it’s time to start paging through the old music collection and reflect on the new sounds and discoveries of another year. Given the subjective nature of this page, I thought it’d be best to focus on albums that might have gotten overlooked in the far-flung galaxy of media that is the internet; albums that I’ve stumbled upon by meeting people at DIY shows or other happenstance.  The first record I want to discuss this year is A Day Without Love’s “Solace” which did my favorite thing that any record could do: It surprised me.I’d met singer/songwriter Brian Walker at a basement in Philadelphia earlier this summer and we’d kept in touch. So, I was sitting in an airport terminal waiting on for a flight to Austin, TX when he sent me a link to his newest album and asked me to give a listen. Admittedly, a sleepy airport terminal is not the ideal place for a first, critical listen of an album and my takeaways were its clear emo influence and a sense of isolation that pervades the entire work. What wound up engaging me on the album was the root of this isolation and how Walker takes a broad emotion at the root of emo music and elevates it through his unique perspective. You see: Brian Walker is a black man playing indie/DIY music. It’s not my place to get into the totality of his experience (read one of his blogs on that here), but I can tell you it took him seven years of playing shows before he found himself on show with another black artist in his home city of Philadelphia.

Throughout Solace, Walker chronicles the various instances of isolation he perceives in his life in the DIY scene (“Joseph”), as a black man in America (“They Don’t Want Us to Live”), and from his own community (for not being “dark enough” in “Constantly Ignored”).

Echoing these themes are moments of discordance in the music; there’s bit of Pixies meshing with the Sunny Day Real Estate in the bass line of “Capacity” or the vocal harmonies of “They Don’t Want Us to Live.”

There’s a conversation occurring on Solace and it’s one that Brian Walker is uniquely poised to begin, which alone makes this an album worth investigating.

What’s more, today (December 5, 2016) is the last day to get this record on bandcamp by naming your own price. Check out the album here.

[autobiographicrecords]

June 20, 2016: Sigur Rós, “Route One,” or: “There Will Be Growth in the Spring”

The summer solstice has always carried with it a great deal of meaning for me. At least since I was nine-years-old. 

I never grew up with much of a heritage, or at least a deep understanding of where I came from. My maternal and paternal grandparents settled in Hackettstown, New Jersey; both my parents graduated from its high school; my dad’s father was on the recreation committee and the town’s post master; my mom grew up as one of eight and the daughter of Hackettstown’s Episcopalian minister.

That’s about as far back as it went. For all intents and purposes, my sense of life throughout my childhood might as well have been a Norman Rockwell painting. 

But my next-door neighbors growing up, they had a culture. They weren’t from around there. The only child was my age and so we spent a lot of time migrating across the yard and spending time and each other’s homes. His parents had both grown up out of the area and the family would constantly take trips for weeks at a time. His father was from California, which I grasped. I’d seen it in movies, knew what Disney Land was, and could generally grasp on to a sunny place where they grew oranges.

But his mother was from Sweden, which meant eggy, oven-baked pastries with bacon inside called “Swedish Pancakes,” meatballs, and chocolate eggs with toys in the center. There were photos around the house of Sweden, one of a small cottage with a hay roof and other pictures of family members, and when you excused yourself from the dinner table you said, “Takk for maten.”

It also meant there was a giant summer solstice party to start the summer of 1997. 

Quick, stream-of-conscious memories of the night include badminton, lighting off fireworks and cherry bombs, and riding around our block with my friend Talia. There was a panic at one point when one of the adult guests had wondered off and was nowhere to be found. We kids found him asleep on one of the neighbors’ front lawn, passed out on the grass under a street light. They told the nine-year-olds he was tired. I now understand it was just a really good party. The cops eventually came, obviously, and told everyone to keep it down and the night ended not long after that. At one point, and the timeline here is fuzzy, I found myself curious enough to ask why that particular party was thrown and it was explained to me by my neighbor’s mother what the summer solstice represented for northern European countries and, conversely, the immense darkness the people face during the winter months.

None of that really registered to me, though. That might as well have been another planet from their Star Wars tapes. Still, the memories of that party are as vivid as any from my childhood and are fueled with the excitement and energy you can only experience at nine-years-old.

Ultimately, that’s what the solstice means to me. Symbolically, its the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere and, of course, you can point to centuries for fire and light representing life and truth.

But, for me, there are very tangible memories from childhood that represent those ideas, too.

After all this time, I’ve still never traveled to northern Europe but, through my fandom of Sigur Rós’ music and other artists out of Iceland in particular, I’ve become slightly more familiar with life in those countries. But it’s still been a real joy to watch the live feed that is Route One and consider what it means that the band decided to stream this project on the solstice.

While taking the time with this project to reminisce about a night from nearly 20 years ago, as I often do on June 20, I’ve continually come back to the idea of the solstice while I watched the phantom ride camera make its way down the remote roads of Iceland. 

It was 9:30 EST when I realized the sky in Iceland looked similar to the fading dusk I was experiencing. So, I decided to look up exactly what the time difference was between the eastern coast of the United States and Iceland and found that it was 1:30 in the morning and still light.

Watching this, it’s hard not to think of the cyclical nature of things. It’s such a simple thought, but one that is also profound. Light and dark. Like Chance in Being There, who -- after living his entire life working in the confines of a garden with no social interaction -- can only understand and express his experiences using the language of gardening. The other characters, politicians discussing the economy, don’t know of his past and resulting limitations and take his words as profound insight.

There’s a particular zen in its simplicity:

President Bobby: Mr. Gardner, do you agree with Ben, or do you think that we can stimulate growth through temporary incentives? Chance the Gardener: As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden. President Bobby: In the garden. Chance the Gardener: Yes. In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again. President Bobby: Spring and summer. Chance the Gardener: Yes. President Bobby: Then fall and winter. Chance the Gardener: Yes. Benjamin Rand: I think what our insightful young friend is saying is that we welcome the inevitable seasons of nature, but we're upset by the seasons of our economy. Chance the Gardener: Yes! There will be growth in the spring!

It’s nearly 4am in Iceland as I get ready to post this thing, and the sun is already up.

“There will be growth in the spring.” I can drink to that. Thank you, Sigur Rós.

[andrewjsheldon]

One of 500 copies pressed, rare live performance by @fatherjohnmisty at Rough Trade, UK pressing only #vinylcollection #vinyl #music

[autobiographicrecords]

Just added this to my collection today. I’m so thrilled.

[autobiographicrecords]

February 3, 2016: The Alan Parsons Project, “I Robot”

Full disclosure: There was an unpublished post regarding this album that I just couldn’t jive with. It followed the same structure as my post about Akron/Family and just didn’t feel right. So, I decided to regroup and start from scratch.  The reason is that I don’t have much of a connection to this record. Friends and I spun side A of “I Robot” at a party my senior year of college and enjoyed it enough, but I never felt the need to go back and examine it. If I had an immediate reaction to the music, it’s that it would fit right at home on the Boogie Nights soundtrack, a film that has been my stock answer to “What’s your favorite movie?” since I was about twenty (for better and worse).   Of the various categories I could create from my collection, this would fall into a group of records I inherited from my Uncle Rick and Aunt Linda. For Christmas 2007, they shipped their record collection from their home in Tahoe City to give their nephew, who they heard was interested in vinyl, a jump on their collection.

Rick and Linda, Virginia City, Nevada; August 2001.

Sitting on the floor of my parent’s basement, I began to unpack the numerous cardboard boxes filled with their 12-inch records and began to get a picture of my aunt and uncle I hadn’t had before. Some of my aunt’s records had “Linda” written in the upper right corner: Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones were all from her collection. Eventually, I started to feel as though I could make educated guesses as to who had owned each record. Cat Steven’s Tea for the Tillerman? Undoubtedly Aunt Linda. Then there was Out of the Blue by the Electric Light Orchestra and that was clearly a Rick record. It was that thought that I carried with me as I worked over the various ways I could approach this post. I was determined to engage with a record I hadn’t found initially engaging, apart from being a great album to put on at a party. I kept coming back to this quote in the gatefold, though: "I Robot... The story of the rise of the machine and the decline of man, which paradoxically coincided with his discovery of the wheel... and a warning that his brief dominance of this planet will probably end, because man tried to create robot in his own image."

It’s probably unknowable, but I’m going to assume this was a Rick record. It may not be, but let me tell you something about my Uncle Rick: The inside of his old pickup truck had and odor that was so strong I would swear it emanated form the cushions. It was overwhelming and distinct, but it was natural. It was the smell of someone who was constantly active. It was quintessentially Rick. The guy was just a natural. “True blue,” you might say and, as someone who might occasionally fall to a crippling sense of anxious self-doubt, it’s a trait I’ve come to very much admire about the guy. He seemed to simply enjoy just being there. During a visit I made in August of 2001, the man seemed to make it his mission to force my AOL Instant Messager-obsessed, narrow-minded self to confront anything I professed an ignorant proclamation of distaste for. He took me, who had subsisted entirely on chicken fingers and french fries up to that point, for my first meal at a Chinese restaurant; when my cousin and I went to see Jurassic Park 3, he slipped us some extra money and insisted we also get nachos at the Mexican place around the corner. At that age, I couldn’t have been less interested in a hike. Still, one morning, Rick informed me to put on my board shorts and prepare for myself for a walk around the California scenery. I figured it was punishment for not offering to do the dishes the night before. There’s this thing, though, about being a natural. It’s that it seems nearly impossible for anyone to have a bad time in their company. They’re locked in to a wavelength most of us only flirt with, if we’re lucky. That hike, complete with scaling steep hills filled with brush that made its business scratching the shit out of your shins and swimming in a lake sitting somewhere on top of the dry hills, has become one of my fondest memories of my time in Tahoe that summer.

Me, in my “Enema of the State” phase, Tahoe City, California; August 2001. Photo by Rick Sheldon. The needle just lifted off side B, so let me just share one last anecdote before I sign off. Listen: Rick was a morning person and I was on East Coast time, which made us the first two people in the kitchen my first morning there. As I sat down and began rubbing my eyes, Rick started heating up a frying pan and added butter. “You like breakfast burritos?” he said. A burrito? What is that? It sounds Spanish. Just be polite. “Not especially,” I said. Oh, god. Is he getting out the eggs? You’ve never had eggs before, Champ. Something really gross and off-putting about them, right? He’s going back into that fridge. Okay, there’s salsa. That confirms the Mexican suspicions. This can’t be good, whatever it is. “Have you ever had one before?” He was scrambling the eggs now and cutting up something I’d never seen before. It was pear-shaped, with a big brow pit in the center, and the inside looked like a green sunburst guitar. What is he feeding me? “No, I haven’t,” I said. He poured the contents of the frying pan on top of a tortilla, wrapped it up, and put the plate in front of me. “Do me a favor,” he said. “As long as you’re staying here, don’t say you don’t like something until you try it.” There’s a humility to that. It’s what kept me coming back to that quote inside the record’s gatefold. 

It’s also, quite easily, some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten. Thanks for that, Uncle Rick.

[autobiographicrecords]

December 21, 2015: Akron/Family, “Love is Simple”

Let me start by being completely frank: there was some serious apprehension to write about today’s (the first) record in this project. That’s because Akron/Family’s Love is Simple is an old favorite from a relatively “blue” part of my life, which was the winter from 2009 into 2010. Characterized by a lot of time within the four Blue Album blue walls that constituted my bedroom and college, I spent most of my time indulging my agoraphobic tendencies with copious amounts of records, DVDs and the prototypical collegiate inebriation.

(As pictured: Blue Album blue walls, a drunkard’s grin, and my dear friend Sean on New Year’s Eve, 2008). I first discovered Akron/Family during the break following my fall semester of 2008 when I had decided to brave the cold and make a trek to Blockbuster, where I rented World’s Greatest Dad (Having no interest to spoil the surprising film, I’ll just say it’s on Netflix), which featured one of the group’s songs in an incredibly poignant scene. As such, I felt compelled to explore further. Such is my back story with this album, omitting, of course, some of the darker details. This brings things up to speed and, now, we can listen. To begin:

The record opens with “Love, Love, Love,” which bookends the double LP and compels us to go out and “Love, love, love everyone.” At the time, in 2009, I think I might have been embittered by a reluctantly misogynistic “nice-guy” mentality and this song stirred up frustrations with unrequited love. It’s an interesting first reflection to have as I embark on this mission through my collection, wondering if an autobiographic theme is incredibly self-important and in line with the worst traits of Nick Hornby’s Rob. That my current reaction to the refrain is acknowledgement and gratitude is encouragement to go on. The second track is “Ed is a Portal,” and I absolutely love this song. The drum beat is one that, in a Reggaeton context, can be completely unbearable but provides a nice drive to the singular guitar note that carries the first part of this track. What really gives this song is charm, though, is the acoustic interlude. It’s such a wonderful dynamic in contrast with the driving chants of the song’s refrain. The way the instruments build, led by a snare roll, is the kind of crescendo I can really dig my sonic teeth into. Somebody, who’s opinion I truly treasure, once told me this track sounded unabashedly “jam-band-y,” and it made me really self-conscious about it for a minute. He’d probably also call this blog pretentious as fuck, too. Does it matter? No. This song kicks so much ass, however pretentious this blog is.

The first track on side two is also the first Akron/Family song I ever heard, the one from the aforementioned World’s Greatest Dad scene. It’s still hard to not get emotional while listening. There’s a great, simple detail in this song I’ve always loved where, for the first chord in the chorus, the timing changes from 3/4 to 5/4. It’s not important, but I love it. The lyrics are also wonderfully pithy in a way that’s similar to the first track. The album’s artwork, which is simply a human heart set before a plain white backdrop makes sense in a way I’ve never considered before, though my hyper-critical friend might call it heavy handed (and me oblivious): “Don’t be afraid, it’s only love (love is simple).” Indeed. Great moment from track four (”I’ve Got Some Friends”): “Hey, have you noticed everyone is crazy?” I’ve always enjoyed the way this song transitions from chaos to the acoustic guitar that mirror the vocal melody so well. This song also benefits from a dynamic interlude much like “Ed is a Portal” and the instrumentation here is really something else. “Like a white cloud floating free, aimless I wander,” is the kind of lyrical tid-bit 21-year-old me was looking for to validate the shambles of my life. “Lake Song/New Ceremonial Music for Moms” is a track I had to work to appreciate, which is a great example of why I enjoy listening to music on vinyl so much. This may have been a song easy to skip on a digital device, but there’s some real depth to the texture of sound in this track that is really compelling such as the way it mixes synths and distortions with traditional folk instruments. Also: the reverb on those toms is so, as my old philosophy professor Martin Bunzl might put it, sexy.

Can the jury still be out on the chanting after seven years, though? Here we are at side three already. I’d always thought it was a shame there was a loss of continuity by ending side two with “Lake Song...” when it so wonderfully flows into “There’s So Many Colors,” but taking it in now, it provides a nice transition into the second LP and, like a good rug, really ties the room together. I’ve always felt this record loses steam in its second half and we’re about to see how that hypothesis holds up. Okay, well, I’m really appreciating the way these guitars fade in over the song’s introduction to take over the melody. It would be wrong-headed of me to call it Pinkterton-esque, but these blogs are relatively stream of conscious and weak on the Googling, so I’ll have to live with it. I take it back, already. The melodies in this song may not be as “memorable” as “I’ve Got Some Friends,” but there are some very positive attributes to the arrangement of “There’s So Many Colors.” 

Maybe because my relationship to this song is more detached than the others, this track is causing me to recall driving around New Brunswick in my 1998 Toyota Camry while listening to a cassette I made of this album. There’s a distinct possibility this second disc never made it onto my turntable as frequently as the first disc did, and I only listened to most of the second half of the album on that tape. It would account for two disparate memories. “Crickets” has always been a favorite, though. Growing up, my parents’ house was deep in the wood and I remember laying in bed in the late summer with my large windows open, listening to the crickets outside. This song makes me want to go lay on a blanket with a loved one in the middle of the night during peak “hoodie weather.” I just recently put this song on a mix for someone-in-particular because it’s emblematic of a new genre of music I’m trying to start called “cuddleXcore,” Join me in the fight. (Also, at 27, I’m still making mixtapes for people. Does it ever end, Nick Hornby?) The track “Phenomena” gets a shout out for a hyper-active tremolo pedal and the lyric “Some think Christ is white, others think he is brown.” The militantly budding atheist that was 21-year-old Andrew certainly found the chuckles to be had in that couplet. 

Spoiler alert: He was brown.

“Pony’s OG,” which is the first track on side four, is another gem I’d forgotten about. It might say more about my musical taste than anything else, but I think this album is its strongest when it embraces the minutiae in its delicacies, such as this simple guitar part, with the tremolo reigned in from its “Phenomena” settings, and single vocal.  The interlude here, sort of an inverse of the two that had been noted previously, might not work as well dynamically as the other two tracks, which recede from chaos into calm. Still, the way it calls by the song’s initial melody through a more complex arrangement pulls it out of its own weeds nicely.

“Of All the Things” puts the band back in barn-burner mode. Listening to the lyrics, I bet you these guys really loved the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka in a big way: “By minding your mind, you’ll find timing your time is you’re most likely meaningless search.” The grammatical error in that quote is theirs, from the liner notes, and not mine. I’ll spend the rest of the record wondering what they mean by that. I can’t imagine anything. Maybe they never studied their grammar. Maybe it’s just another meaningless search. Again, the band earns these long, meandering tracks with a great use of dynamics and I’m quite fond of these moments of controlled chaos. As much as I am the points of delicate beauty, even. The end of this track might feel a little like a jam band ending a live set. “We love you, Cleveland! GOOD NIGHT.”

And now here we are at the encore. As promised, the album is book ended by the band’s encouraging refrain that the listener, “go out and love everyone.” Seems like advice that’s as good as any. We love you, Cleveland. Good night.

[autobiographicrecords]

Hi, Internet.

The inaugural post:

Dick ENTERS Rob’s apartment to find piles of records cluttering the floor and stacked vertically in towers. Knowing how the weight of stacked records can damage those on the bottom, he shudders at the sight.

Dick: I guess it looks as if you’re reorganizing your records. What is this, though? Chronological? Rob: No. Dick: It’s not alphabetical. Rob: Nope. Dick: What? Rob: Autobiographical. Dick: No fucking way. I’m Andrew and I’ve been collecting vinyl for the last eight years. Part of me has always been a media enthusiast. I was never able to let go of my VHS cassettes and those tapes remain, to this day, the only copy of some I own of some of my favorite movies. Once, I spent an entire weekend in high school, from Friday night through Sunday, putting my CD collection into an out-dated Dell so I could get my library onto my 30gb iPod.

My initial interest in vinyl was an extension of that collector mentality. Also, I’d watched, and subsequently became obsessed with, High Fidelity. My fifteen-year-old, self-appointed mopey-bastard self had identified with these sad-sack media obsessives who spoke like characters from a Kevin Smith movie to the point of actually purchasing the Nick Hornby book on which the film was based and, believe it or not, reading it from cover to cover. Ultimately, I ended up majoring in English. So, there you go. This blog is constructed in the honor of that spirit. My goal is to sit back, go through my record collection, and react to each of them from an autobiographical perspective. My methodology, as I’ve such decided, is to go through alphabetically. Though full commitment to this concept would have me going through each record in an autobiographical sequence, the alphabetical approach will force me to muse on the records in my collection I often forget to listen to. Still, consider this sub-clause to said methodology: In the case of a slump, I retain the right to visit any record out of order so that I might review a record I’m more prone to connect with. That’s also for the reader’s benefit, I’m sure. Thanks for reading this far. I hope you’ll come back for my first post, which will be on Akron/Family’s Love is Simple.