Patrick Hosken

To everything, there is a playlist.

[trickhosken]

Lee Morgan: The Sidewinder (1964)

Here’s one I’ve had in the drafts for years. I used to listen to jazz records the way a strange person would rent a movie at Blockbuster—by picking one at random, often based on cover art, and going all in. That, along with some friend recommendations, led a lot of my jazz listening in the 2010s. It guided me toward the good shit: “Moanin’” and Money Jungle and plenty of other Mingus. It also pointed me to The Sidewinder and its perfect title track, a complete firecracker that I now reserve, like a fine whiskey, as get-shit-done music (or for a likewise narcotic effect). Lee Morgan blows a goddamn hurricane here on the trumpet, and Billy Higgins’ drum work is an adrenaline rush, enough to steady you for a marathon. That’s where my ears go, anyway, horns and percussion. I know the bass and piano are foundational, and my ears register them, but I haven’t fallen in love yet. I will. I can’t wait to.

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Stephen Malkmus: Groove Denied (2019)

Golden-hour 8 p.m. lighting lent my parents’ living room an eerie purple hue. My father had just gone to bed (yes with the sun still half-up) and my mom sat near the front window scribbling in her crossword book. Seemed like as good a time as any to let Groove Denied—the spooky, infamously delayed and uncharacteristic album from Stephen Malkmus—drip through my tinny laptop speakers. Sounds here don’t comfort. They poke and prod like surgical tools, the only salve being Malkmus’ trademark detached-yet-emotionally accessible vocals. “Belziger Faceplant” sounds just like the foreign, violent injury its title suggests. My mother heard it all but didn’t speak on it. And yet I was comforted. The open home, languishing hallways evaporating sun, the pillows in the back bedroom—and now a beloved voice. The first time I listened, the week prior, I sent a dumb text message: “It might be bad.” Now, “Viktor Borgia,” the New Order clone with a creepy, skinking melody, has quickly become one of my favorite songs of the year. It follows its own logic, like a dream. Could be that I heard the master himself talk about its origin a few days prior. Then he played “Spit on a Stranger” and followed it up with some of these deranged glitchy new cuts and, well, you don’t forget a moment like that. It would’ve been right around 8:30 or so. No windows in that room though. A shame.

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“#41″ Is The Best DMB Song, Period

I’ve already made it clear that Before These Crowded Streets is my favorite (and personal pick for best) DMB album. But my favorite (and personal pick for best) DMB song is, in fact, not on that album. It’s on Crash, and it’s called “#41,” apparently because it was the forty-first song the band ever wrote together. It’s also perfect.

When every member of a band is playing in sync with each other, they’re all lifting each other as well as lifting the entirety of their joined musical body. That’s what happens on (nearly) every performance of “#41,” but certainly most prominently on the 2005 live version from the album Weekend on the Rocks.

Dave Matthews Band, “#41” (Weekend on the Rocks, 9.9 - 9.12.05)

“#41” is special to me not because of any particular life experience or favorite concert memory. It’s just the moment I realized I truly loved this band and what they were capable of. (Shout out to Rashawn Ross on trumpet and Butch Taylor on keyboards on that live version above.) I also love that the tune has its roots in an early jam they called “41 Police,” named as such because they thought it sounded like The Police’s “Bring on the Night,” which, sure — same chord structure and hi-hat-propelled intro. But “#41” undeniably reaches the stratosphere early on and doesn’t come back down. That makes it singular in my book.

The first time DMB played “#41” was at Duke in April 1995, though it was hardly a “song” at that point and more of a fuck-around, as Dave introduced it. The fundamental pieces are there, and Dave’s playing is more of what the electric guitar eventually did when they recorded it for the studio album. He’s working out the parts right there. It’s cool to hear. The intro is not as defined yet, but the billowing five-note horn and violin interplay between the verses — the best and most memorable part of the song! — is there though. And that’s what matters most.

Dave Matthews Band, “41 Police” (live at Duke University, 4.7.95)

I could easily spend 6,000 more words talking about why “#41” is the best, but I think brevity is key here. I implore you: Go listen to it! But one thing I do want to mention quickly is that as the years have worn on, DMB have endured several personnel change-ups. Guitarist Tim Reynolds has officially been a member of the band for some time now, and he’s been with the touring crew steadily for a decade now. I’m not crazy about him shredding on nearly every song as it can lend a kind of greasy blues-band feel to the whole operation, and it especially detracts from “#41” as they play it these days.

That one minor quibble aside, let’s celebrate “#41” and sing “#41.” The band certainly does: It’s among their most-played tracks, currently sitting at 761 over 23 years. The most recent time? Three days ago in Del Valle, Texas.

Not bad for a song Dave wrote about a malicious, friendship-ending lawsuit he was subjected to in the early ‘90s — not that you’d ever glean that from the lyrics. It’s also credited to all five members of the band, songwriting-wise, which is telling. For me, it’s DMB at their absolute peak. And it’s cool to know they feel the same.

[trickhosken]

I will always ride hardest for DMB’s “#41.” This is why.

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The Lillywhite Sessions

Dave Matthews Band, “JTR” (The Lillywhite Sessions, unreleased album)

If you go chronologically through DMB’s studio albums, you’ll get a good sense of their come-up as a loose, party-centric jazz hybrid from their first two major-label releases, Under the Table and Dreaming and Crash. Before These Crowded Streets is where they apply a wider lens to both their sound and their themes. And then, there’s 2001’s Everyday, which — well, let’s talk about Everyday for a moment.

It’s got a song with Carlos Santana (“Mother Father”). It leads off with an incredibly silly and nonsensical song, even by Dave standards (“I Did It”). And most notably, it’s a lot less reliant on the multi-instrumental jams that made their previous three albums so expressive. Everyday is polished and radio-ready, with no song exceeding five minutes in length. It spawned two very sweet singles (“The Space Between” and “Everyday”) and one of my favorites, the rippin’ hot “So Right,” that really comes alive onstage.

But it wasn’t originally supposed to be like this.

As Before These Crowded Streets led Dave into darker songwriting territory, he followed the path during sessions as far back as 1999. He lingered at the bar past last call on “Grace Is Gone,” nursing a broken heart, also present from afar on “Grey Street,” then got a little too heady for his own good, spinning parables “Big Eyed Fish” and “Bartender.” There was a sweetness, though, on “Digging a Ditch,” no matter how futile the title activity, and even some playfully morose Steely Dan influence on “Captain.”

The band sounded great, too. On the eventually cut “Build You a House,” Stefan has fun ambling through frantic bass lines. Boyd’s violin gives “Grey Street” the mournfulness it needs and trades off barbs with LeRoi to close out the highlight “Sweet Up and Down.” And Carter completely owns the minimalist “Busted Stuff” with a groove that keeps shapeshifting.

But as the story goes (laid out in exquisite detail by antsmarching.org’s Jake Vigliotti here), the label wasn’t hearing it with such positivity. Dave’s “sad bastard” songs had taken over — where were the carpe diem odes? The band, too, was reportedly frustrated with the overall sound and the strength of the individual songs. Producer Steve Lillywhite had been with them since their 1994 debut, and he’d helmed these sessions as well; perhaps it was time to go in a new direction.

Keep reading

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Today, I wrote a long (but still too short) entryway into The Lillywhite Sessions, DMB’s great “lost” album. Check it out.

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Long Before These Crowded Streets

Dave Matthews Band: “The Dreaming Tree” (Before These Crowded Streets, 1998)

You walk into a comfortable room. Your friend hands you a beer, or maybe a joint. “Come and relax now,” your pal says, and you do. Then, maybe later on you start talking to someone you think is cool and cute, and then you make out for a bit. And then the next day, you’ve got a hangover, so you try to watch some mindless Netflix sitcom but fall asleep on the couch, allowing the algorithm to take over. Soon, you awake to a documentary about war, or maybe it’s about genocide? Either way, it’s horrifying. So you get up, wash your face, crack open a Polar seltzer and throw on a record that makes you dance around the room. You’re feeling good again.

Later on, the music gets weird and avant-garde and makes you think about death too much. So you retreat to a bar and maybe have a cigarette outside and text the person you’ve been trying really hard not to text. When they don’t hit you back, you go home and try going to sleep, but you’re haunted by that weird Netflix stuff from earlier. You sleep terribly. A friend you left at the bar, maybe the same one you gave you that joint the night before, texts you in the morning: “Don’t burn the day away.” You take this to heart and go to church for the first time in a while, and though you don’t really feel anything you’re supposed to feel, the sense of community is warming. You decide that’s enough. The rest of the day, and your life really, is still to come. And that’s exciting.

The above is not precisely what it’s like to listen to Dave Matthews Band’s third (and in my view, best) studio album, 1998’s Before These Crowded Streets, but it’s close. It’s a bit reductive, sure, but it captures the right atmosphere. I wrote it after giving the album a proper full spin one night not long ago and still agree with its overall narrative. The album itself doesn’t quite have one, but it certainly has an ambiance. It’s the band’s darkest album, moody and contemplative as its evocative cover art suggests. This is an album of nightlife, of falling in love in crowded cosmopolitan cocktail bars — like the ones in New York, where the band recorded it, at Electric Lady Studios — because it’s all you can do to stave off the knowledge of your own death.

Keep reading

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Here’s me diving into my favorite DMB album, over at One Week One Band.

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Dave Matthews Band: Playing Time Against My Troubles

Dave Matthews Band, “Intro” (Listener Supported, 9.11.99)

Hi there! Welcome to Dave Matthews Band week. If you’re worried that I’ve come to try to change your long-held opinions about this particular group, I guess I kind of have, a little bit. But only because I like them and because and I grew up with their music. Starting when I was 14, I went to seven of their live shows in five years because I liked them so much, and that’s kind of what you did when you were a teenager in Western New York. And you, personally, might not have, and that’s cool too! Maybe you think “Crash Into Me” is a lame song. I get it.

Or maybe, like Lady Bird McPherson, you love “Crash Into Me” and aren’t afraid to admit it, even amid “cool” people who don’t feel the same way. For a long time, I couldn’t do that. (Well, I’m actually not that crazy about “Crash Into Me,” honestly, so let’s replace it in this example with “Ants Marching,” a song I do love.) When I got to college, I slowly left my DMB fandom behind for the greener hipper pastures of indie rock. And yeah, I fell for The National and Pavement and R.E.M., who eventually became my favorite band ever, and dozens of others who’ve had great OWOB entries dedicated to them.

But as I got older, I realized that perceived coolness only has as much power over your tastes as you let it — and also that you can like two things that seem to be at odds with each other because that’s what makes you uniquely you. So I began listening back to the DMB albums I used to love, like Before These Crowded Streets and The Central Park Concert, and guess what I found? They’re still good! I still get a lot of very genuine joy from them, and that rules.

If you find this to be a weird introduction to Dave Matthews Band, it definitely is. But not a lot of other groups are saddled with the baggage that DMB are. Sometimes they’re treated as a punchline because of their South African-born leader reputation as a bro-rock maestro complete with inscrutable lyrics, a hyperbolic stage persona, and a penchant for writing drunken little ditties about lovemaking. During March Madness, someone bracketed DMB, separating their songs into four regions: “Lil’ Baby,” “Tim Reynolds,” “Guttural Yells,” and “Creepily Romantic.” Of course, I retweeted it. It’s funny! Caricaturization this precise has to come from a place of being wise to the joke. And so, this will be the last mention of DMB’s “coolness” this week (probably). There’s simply no time! Plus, Lady Bird would want us to spend time talking about the things we love.

Instead, this week, I want to examine DMB through the only lens I have: one of revisiting my fandom from nearly a decade removed. To do that, I’ll discuss the songs I feel best represent them as a whole (this concerns roughly 1993 until about 2002) and trace how they’ve continued to evolve over the group’s 27-year history. I’ll trek back to the culture I grew up in, where their shows are annual Dionysian traditions, and where Dave in particular is celebrated as a playful Pan-type god of bourbon and dance music and sex. Yeah, this guy. It’s wild, I know! (Though as Dave himself said in a revealing recent interview, “We’re a party band. That’s not all the music is — it’s often something much darker — but we are about a party.”)

And most importantly, I’ll touch on the things that keep DMB fans connected — the little moments.

Dave Matthews Band: “Ants Marching” (Under the Table and Dreaming, 1994)

Firstly, a quick note: Just last week, disturbing allegations of sexual misconduct against the band’s longtime violinist Boyd Tinsley came to light. Boyd hasn’t been in the band since February, when he parted ways seemingly amicably; these new charges cast a new light on his entire tenure in the band. Most of this week’s content was written before these allegations came about, but I’ve made some changes where appropriate.

And now another quick note, this time about me: I’m Patrick, I’m 27, and my first DMB show was on July 13, 2004 at the Darien Lake Amphitheater rural Western New York. They opened with “Don’t Drink the Water” and I spilled ketchup on my cargo shorts eating french fries before the show. Since then, I’ve been writing about music for a few places, including MTV News, where I currently work. Please get in touch if there’s a specific DMB topic, song, album, or urban legend you want to talk about. (If you’re thinking Lillywhite Sessions right now, it’s coming!)

But before I dive fully in, thanks are in order to Hendrik, of course, as well as past OWOB contributors Scott Interrante (twice over) and Nathan Mattise for their advice and guidance.

With all that in mind, let’s talk about some essential DMB songs by way of introducing the four other guys in the classic lineup of the band.

[trickhosken]

Spending the week over at One Week One Band. Follow along every day for DMB updates! I’ll be reblogging select posts here.

[trickhosken]

Hop Along: Bark Your Head Off, Dog (2018)

Philly rock quintet Hop Along made what in retrospect was easily my favorite album of 2015, Painted Shut. It’s an album I’ve listened to dozens of times in tons of different moods, and I always close it out feeling elated to have found it. It’s that good. So I’ll admit I held very high expectations for the follow-up, Bark Your Head Off, Dog — and here’s where it gets interesting.

First off, that voice. Frances Quinlan heads up the band with a seemingly endless spool of narratives, melodic machinations, and otherworldly vocals that can somehow sound both like a screw stuck in a garbage disposal and a sweet lullaby. And here on the opener “How Simple,” it redoubles near the end to underscore the imminent loss built into the track: “Don’t worry, we will both find out, just not together.” But there’s a 15-second span just before that, where she’s not singing, and “How Simple” sounds like an ‘04 Killers cut. It rules. So, that voice, yes, but also the instrumentation behind it.

And then — and then! — there’s an unbeatable groove on “Somewhere a Judge” that comes courtesy of her brother Mark on drums. In a recent interview with Stereogum, the pair discussed digging ICP and Slipknot as kids, and it sounds fucking crazy, but I get it! I hear it in this rhythm, one that’s fidgety but also descended from something much heavier, though used here to evoke uncertainty instead of rage. Two tracks in now and we’re already flying high. You can see where this is going.

But just to underscore the band’s talents even further, there’s “Not Abel,” which reminds me so much of Counting Crows’ “I’m Not Sleeping” that it’s actually eerie. Both spend time mapping out stark situations with baroque flourishes wedged into more traditional rock songs, the strings mingling with the vocal runs that bounce off the written page well into the margins. And of course, Hop Along eventually brings it all home in a perfect minute and a half of indie rock that could be a more foolish band’s stadium-scraping masterpiece. For them, though, it’s just the right way to end the song and get out while the getting’s good.

The coolest part of all this is that the record only dropped yesterday, and these are some very basic first impressions. My relationship with Bark Your Head Off, Dog will continue to grow and, yes, slope backward sometimes, nevertheless always pushing ahead in understanding. Three months from now, I’ll probably be able to tell you why “Look of Love” is a masterpiece. I just haven’t figured it out yet. But I’m having a blast trying.

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Pearl Jam: Yield (1998)

We moved when I was 7. I think I rode in the U-Haul from Buffalo to Rochester, but I honestly don’t remember. My first memories of the new place, a two-level townhouse with a basement across from a Blockbuster plaza, involve Michael Keaton’s Batman on VHS and falling asleep in the car as my dad played Yield on cassette. Not much about the physical space. But so much about how we spent our time in it.

Yield was the first Pearl Jam album I ever heard, and it’s still the one I know best, even over Ten and Vs. Part of its lasting imprint on my brain comes from that fog of hearing “Wishlist” half asleep and loving its gentle push and pull. Part is me turning 16, after we’d moved into a proper house two miles down the road, plugging in and playing “Given to Fly” loudly when my parents would leave for errands. I think of Yield as a gentle, open album, the way its cover art suggests it is. And then I’ll revisit it to find it opens chaotically amid assassination, hits biological panic at its midpoint, and detours into flaming art-punk before it sunsets.

But also, Yield is gentle. It’s the album where Eddie Vedder loosened his autocratic grasp on the band’s creativity, allowing Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament to pen some moody, exploratory songs, while his own focused on the simple and the ordinary. At 12, I went to see Pearl Jam with my father (my third-ever concert), and the 10-minute “Wishlist” I saw that night successfully lodged it in my soul as one of my favorites ever. (Eddie’s wailing calls for peace and love at the end did teenage me in.) Years later, I found this version from a ‘98 Letterman spot that I can’t help but hear as definitive now. Not easy to make a tender ballad feel like a barnburner, and yet.

I came to “In Hiding” much later, but god, what a guitar line. What an early-morning, first-one-up-after-the-party rush.

One grey morning a few years ago, as I walked along Houston Street to work after exiting the 6 train, I saw a bus-stop PSA encouraging drivers to slow down as they approached crosswalks. It featured a stark yield sign that took up most of the frame. I saw my in, so I took it. Funny how a simple street sign can bring up such a specific feeling — safe in a parent’s car, nodding off as a man rhapsodizes things equally unremarkable: “I wish I was the souvenir you kept your house key on” — and keep you warm for years.

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System Of A Down: Steal This Album! (2002)

Experiment time: Enlist me, as a 12-year-old with a glow-in-the-dark Hot Topic Toxicity hoodie and a SOAD poster on my bedroom door, to rewrite the top 5 slots in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Now check out the updated ranking:

05. Korn: Life Is Peachy (1994) 04. Linkin Park: Hybrid Theory (2000) 03. System Of A Down: System Of A Down (1998) 02. System Of A Down: Steal This Album! (2002) 01. System Of A Down: Toxicity (2001)

Yes, my preteen taste skewed firmly nü-metal, the result of having an older brother in high school whose Slipknot, Limp Bizkit, and Korn CDs got passed down to me when he fled for the chiller, greener pastures of collegiate acronym jam bands (DMB, O.A.R., et al). Bizarrely enough, I lingered in this hyper-aggro, seven-string guitar, proto-Post Malone style icon terrain long enough to actually be excited for Staind’s Unplugged show (which, ugh, I later purchased on DVD) and, most damningly, to essentially miss the whole “emo” thing. Don’t worry — I came back to it in my 20s to experience what wonderful mopey shit had passed me by.

But in my nü-metal prime, no band could hold a motherfucking candle to System Of A Down. And artistically speaking, no nü-metal band can, even now. Though there’s been a dearth of SOAD material since 2005′s one-two punch of Mezmerize and Hypnotize, the radio silence may have worked in their favor. They’re one of the few groups (along with Deftones) that survived the nü-metal label and are fondly held up as oddball Frank Zappa descendants whose undeniable groove and incidental 9/11 relevance prolonged their shelf life well into the tumultuous Bush years (when conspicuous war became an immovable facet of American life).

While Deftones continued to make music long past their 2000 magnum opus, White Pony, SOAD have been quiet — and as such, the 15th anniversary of Steal This Album! is an occasion to commemorate. It’s decidedly not their masterpiece, but it might be the Amnesiac to Toxicity’s Kid A (or hell, even the Emotion: Side B to Toxicity’s Emotion). That’s to say, viewed from afar, it could seem like leftovers, but with a runtime nearly identical to its predecessor and arguably even beefier thematic unity (read: militarization in every form is BAD), Steal This Album! is its own clawing, messy, and wonderfully surprising beast.

And now, the ultimate question: Is Steal This Album! somehow greater than Toxicity? The swift answer is no, but all the proof you need for the affirmative case comes via the skyscraping gusto of tracks six through eight: “A.D.D. (American Dream Denial)” into “Mr. Jack” into “I-E-A-I-A-I-O.” A superior mid-album guitar triad I cannot conjure, with the possible exception of what Billy Corgan does on Siamese Dream (“Soma” into “Geek U.S.A.” into “Mayonaise”). Still, SOAD built an album around this immobile bedrock, coloring it with hard-worn folk (“Ego Brain”), hitchhiking gypsy New Wave (“Highway Song”), surrealist television fever dreams (“Pictures”), and the only good ballad they ever put on an album (“Roulette”).

There’s also “Chic ‘N’ Stu,” the weirdo’s perfect choice for 1:30 a.m. karaoke duet (I’ve never done this but want to) and “Boom!,” a top-10 signature SOAD song and, well, shit. There’s a lot here. Just go listen to it, then get on your knees and pray for at least a little more new System Of A Down music in our lives before the end of Dr. Strangelove becomes a reality. Yes, Toxicity is still better. But even Toxicity doesn’t have “Fuck the System.” And in 2017, no SOAD song makes more sense.

[trickhosken]

Bleachers: Gone Now (2017)

The first time I ever heard a Bleachers song was, appropriately, in a car during the summer: “I Wanna Get Better” in June 2014 on a Los Angeles radio station. I was in town visiting my brother and his wife; he was driving us all around downtown and eventually out to a red rock hike on the outskirts. I knew Jack Antonoff then — Steel Train played at my college in 2009, during the drunken haze of our Spring Weekend celebration, and not long after, fun. was everywhere — and I immediately took note of how he’d upgraded his pop sound. No more glockenspiel-heavy Scarlett Johansson breakup odes, no more intimate bedroom pop, but also no more golden-throated grandeur. Bleachers, on the first record, was a noisy, brash ordeal, slick pop for the radio with a sheen of manic energy and obsessive sonic details — all a logical continuation of Steel Train’s 2010 self-titled album, which proved Antonoff was thinking bigger.

It might seem strange now, but it took me a bit to loosen up to that sound. “Out of the Woods” wasn’t a favorite during my first 1989 listen. But then, Grimes! St. Vincent! Lorde’s Melodrama! And a new Bleachers album, in 2017, called Gone Now that ties together the stadium Springsteen worship and the neuroses and the mad carnival pop playground that lives inside Antonoff’s head for a pocket symphony of something potent.

Fitting, then, that one of the seminal musical performances I witnessed in all of 2017 was Bleachers doing “Don’t Take the Money” — one of the best pop songs of the year, no contest — in Los Angeles of all places. The crowd pushed its glow sticks up toward heaven as Antonoff delivered the surging chorus, and I found myself overcome with joy and, oddly, pride. Antonoff has been in touring bands since he was a teenager, playing punk gigs for no one, eventually working his way up to a songwriting deity who’s changed the way pop radio sounds. No small feat.

Gone Now is, simply, a deep dive into Antonoff’s psyche and all the restless energy, song fragments, insecurities, and collaborator relationships inside it. Carly Rae Jepsen, Lorde, and Julia Michaels sing backup. He talks endlessly about his New Jersey roots and his parents’ house, where he lived until he was 28. “Goodmorning,” a McCartneyesque ditty built around a recording he made after literally waking up in his Brooklyn apartment and assessing his surroundings, is the perfect example of Antonoff’s obsessions with building a song with fangs that don’t release once they’ve bitten you. And then, two tracks later, it’s “Don’t Take the Money,” showing how he can dress it all up and organize the madness, too. Sometimes. The rest of the album is littered with reprises, songs running into each other, spoken word interludes, and personal ephemera usually reserved for museums and exhibitions of an artist’s work after s/he dies. Antonoff can’t escape loss, and he doesn’t necessarily think it’s a good idea to, anyway. So it’s all here, waiting for the listener to rummage through and take what helps.

From the buzzed blur of shouting out Steel Train songs to seeing him onstage at the Grammys and then eventually in front of a new generation of pop-minded fans in L.A., Antonoff has proven he’s a traveler who can make magic. Sometimes it’s manic, sometimes it’s sweeter than syrup. But it’s all magic.

Jack with Steel Train at St. Bonaventure University, 05.02.2009

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Foo Fighters: The Colour And The Shape (1997)

1997: “I might only be seven years old, but I like this song ‘Everlong.’ It’s good.”

2007: “Man, remember when rock music sounded like this? So good.”

2017: “Man, not a lot really sounded like this, when you think about it. It hit every piece of ‘90s guitar music (grunge, alternative, pop-punk) but also wasn’t any of those. It was a perfect blend of all of them. And it is still perfect.”

And then I tracked down Geoff Turner, the audio engineer at WGNS Studios in D.C., where Dave Grohl recorded the first demo version of “Everlong,” and talked to him for MTV News.

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Savage Garden: Savage Garden (1997)

The two first CDs I ever purchased with my own (allowance) money were Will Smith’s Big Willie Style and Barenaked Ladies’ Stunt, bought together in 1998 presumably at the strip-mall Media Play a few miles from my house. But the first CD that was ever truly mine — not shared with my older brother or passed down from him or my parents — was Savage Garden’s self-titled album, which came out 20 years ago today and is still stacked with sleek, sexy, hooky, and nocturnal jams. A family member gifted it to me for my seventh birthday in 1997 (or maybe for Christmas that year), and whoever it was, I need to thank the shit out of them. I loved this album, man.

I’ve mentioned this before, but as a kid, I was fascinated what being an adult was like, so an aching, mysterious song like “To the Moon & Back” really spoke to me — not because I understood it, but because whatever happened in the adult realm seemed so dramatic and exciting and a tad forbidden. (My parents likely noticed this and wisely barred me from watching MTV as they deemed the popular videos of the day too “adult.” It should surprise no one that I subsequently watched a shitload of MTV when they weren’t around, and also HBO, because obviously.) In the first song on the album, Darren Hayes sings, “Mamma never loved her much and daddy never keeps in touch.” That was wild to my 7-year-old ears. Why was this woman’s home life such a mess? I wanted to know more. My parents loved me dearly, as I think I made clear above, so this wasn’t a feeling of kinship with the song’s protagonist. I was simply a curious kid who didn’t play outside much sitting on my brother’s bed, listening to his Panasonic stereo while he was at hockey practice. And when track two hit, that’s when I’d get up and start dancing.

“I Want You.” What a jam. I spent most of 1997 dancing to this song in various rooms in various homes in various cities (we moved that year), and it’s clear why. I loved Hayes’ rap-inspired verses, the “chicka cherry cola” line — which predates “chickadee China, the Chinese chicken” by more than a year — and the low-stakes electropop I didn’t have to be a certain age to “get.” I knew what hip-hop was, sure, but it was imposing to me at that age. But delivered via a long-haired Aussie named Darren, it felt easy to glom onto. I always pretended I was in the music video when I’d read the verses from the CD lyric booklet and strut around, away from my family’s eyes but having a blast regardless. I did not do the same for “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” which does admittedly have a great chorus, but c’mon. You can’t dance to that, not alone anyway.

OK, confession time: I only usually listened to those first three tracks because they were the singles, then I’d shut the CD off. Most times. This is not a recommend method of album listening, but remember, I was 7. The few times I dared to skip around, I remember landing on the last track, “Santa Monica,” and letting it play through. Now, it sounds like an escapist anthem with Cure-borrowed guitar waves for the lonely and the unsure, which is cool and which I am into. But all I recall about it at a young age is the line, “In Santa Monica, all the people got modern names like Jake or Mandy,” which I definitely remembered as “Jason or Lisa.” (I’m willing to bet this is not the result of a Berenstain Bears-style time warp but a simple mistake.) But I didn’t recall the line after that: “and modern bodies too,” which deftly suggests fluid sexuality, a concept I surprisingly was not familiar with at age 7. The song is more of an observational poem built under Hayes’ gentle falsetto and Daniel Jones’ minimal piano, calling out the sunny sights of California in a way that sounds snowy and solitary and melancholy. It’s what you’d listen to if you had to spend Christmas Eve alone. And that’s the kind of shit 26-year-old me ended up being very into. Who knew?

That’s the fun of revisiting an album like Savage Garden 20 years later. You might come for the quirky electroclash/rap hybrid, but you’ll stay for the subtle, vaguely melancholy explorations of sexual identity and self. If only I still had my CD copy...

[trickhosken]

Local H: Bound For the Floor (1996)

You’re at work. Phones are ringing around you. You haven’t been outside all day. Idle chatter suddenly buzzsaws into jarring cackles in the next cubicle over. You have hundreds of unread emails, and you fear the next unprovoked sound could send you spiraling into a hot fugue state of seething rage. Instead, you reach for Local H’s As Good As Dead because your hometown modern rock station still played “Bound for the Floor” as late as 2006 when grunge was dead but not revived yet and post-grunge had anthropomorphized into the toxic pollution of Hinder and Three Days Grace. And you loved Nirvana and Alice in Chains and still do but sometimes need something less monolithic in critical appraisal. So Local H, apparently named for two dark as fuck R.E.M. songs, is the precision solution for the 3 p.m. stale office glaze when you want to both scream and hide under your desk and never see sunlight again. Your true grunge love blooms fully in the machine-gun assault of “Back in the Day” and the still-potent fuzz-grime molecules of “Nothing Special,” which has a great refrain of “What’s wrong with me?!” in between noise blasts that are both horrifyingly scarred and totally structured. They appeal to both your primal urges, seeking out the harshest tones you can to bruise your ears, and your need for harmony and order in the rock music you’ve built your entire foundation on. You know it when you feel it. And right now, it feels really fucking good.

[trickhosken]

Whitney: Light Upon the Lake (2016)

Whitney’s debut came into my life right as I was thinking about my top albums of the year so far, and it somehow very quickly ended up as my fifth favorite. I know why. It’s a sugary goddamn bloomin’ onion of an album, for starters, highly melodic and sung in the oddest falsetto by Julien Ehrlich (who also drums). But it also reminds me of ‘70s British folk trio America in the right spots, and that’s special because my parents would wear their America greatest hits CD out on long drives down the East Coast when I was a kid. So I grew up singing along to the Neil Young takeoff “A Horse with No Name” and the really great “Ventura Highway” (which Janet Jackson later sampled) and apparently ingesting what soundalike America bands would actually sound like. And Whitney sounds like America, yeah, but also Jackson Brown (but not in a Dawes way) and peppy Grateful Dead tunes and, intentionally or not, Coldplay (just for one tune though). This is all to say it makes me feel downright cozy, which is important in 2016. When music makes you feel this good, you must not let it go. I have seen the light upon the lake and it is beautiful.

[trickhosken]

Guster: Keep It Together (2003)

One of many working titles for Guster’s 2003 album was Come Downstairs and Say Hello, the name of its ninth and perhaps most affecting song -- and that’s cool, because “Come Downstairs...” is perhaps better kept as an ace in the hole, a late-blooming, heart-exploding five minutes that drags with it a incomparable rush. The song is personally important to me for a number of reasons:

1) The earliest memory I have -- which is not a memory at all, but the memory of a dream -- involves me perched at the top of the stairs in my family’s old South Buffalo house overlooking a poker game my dad had going on. This definitely never happened because my dad never had friends over and certainly didn’t play poker with the friends he did have, but the title is poignant for that reason.

2) In life, I tend to hide. I can be shy, afraid of taking charge especially in social situations. The song title is a beckon, an invitation that more socially adept people take for granted. I sometimes hear it as a stern command.

3) A cool girl named Kelsie burned me a Guster mix CD in 2008, and I’m 95 percent sure this song was on it and that’s how I got exposed to it (and the band at large). The first Guster song I ever heard was “Amsterdam” when I saw the video on MTV(2) around the time of its release. But the CD, Sharpied up with squiggles and the band name in impressive lettering, contained their earlier, more acoustic and intimate stuff. And I ate that shit up at 17. Relatedly, I appreciated this song’s pop culture references, which aren’t obnoxiously literary and stick to same accessible, basement-cluttered-with-board-games-and-knickknacks vibe as the shout-outs in R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon.”

There are other very good songs on this album, by the way, including “Careful,” which is notably a perfect pop song, and “Jesus on the Radio,” which the band will often play totally unplugged from mics and amps because they trust their fans and the fans respect their dedication. And there’s a sunny little number called “I Hope Tomorrow is Like Today” that features Ben Kweller on vocals and is as reassuring as the hummingbird in the gorgeous amber field that adorns the album’s cover.

If you’re confused or underwhelmed by this music at all, you really needn’t be. It’s about as uncomplicated as it gets. College rock meets laid-back power pop, wrapped in shimmering melodies and unembellished guitar jangle. Really, if you want to appreciate Guster, read this and listen to “Satellite” again and maybe buy a thermal hat for when it’s cold. You’ll be golden.

[trickhosken]

On Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American, 15 Years Later

“The Middle” is a great song. “Sweetness” is a great song. “Bleed American” is a great song. And those are just the singles.

I’ll always remember Bleed American, released July 24, 2001, as Jimmy Eat World’s accidental moment of 9/11 relevance (it became self-titled after the attacks), but that’s only half of it. I knew the singles that summer and into the impending fall, but I came to the album in full a bit later, in my teens (I was not quite 11 when it dropped), when lyrics like “We once walked out on the beach/And once I almost touched your hand” were very pertinent and when actual memories began to cling to them. I didn’t know Davey von Bohlen then (nor Billy Ocean, nor the ocean floor) and my Weezer scope was limited to “Hash Pipe” and “Island in the Sun,” not odes to Mykel and Carli. Reacquainting myself with Bleed American now is like coming back to an artifact bursting with references and cultural significance, not to mention sugary hooks and gorgeous melodies.

Because of all that, I can’t speak to how old-school fans felt about its saccharine simplicity, which I’ve gleaned was much brighter and peppier than the band’s beloved Clarity before it. Bleed American was my introduction to Jimmy Eat World at large, so I came to enjoy a lot of what they did after it, especially Futures’ title track (which is amazing and was the first song I played once I landed a college radio show). I can speak to how it sounds now in 2016 amid a cresting wave of pop-punk revivalism, and it sounds good. It sounds like a blueprint. It sounds like victory.

[trickhosken]

On Remembering Bell X1′s “The Great Defector” Seven Years Later

Because the internet is the new radio (is the new workplace, is the new movie theater, etc.) and because I monitor what my friends are listening to all day on Spotify like a hawk, today I rediscovered "The Great Defector," a song by Irish band Bell X1 that I loved to pieces in 2009. A bit of background on the band: In the '90s, most of the members were in Juniper, the band Damien Rice fled to try his luck out on his own. They regrouped as Bell X1 and by '09 had released five albums, including Blue Lights on the Runway, which included "The Great Defector." OK, so.

I enjoy "The Great Defector" mostly for two reasons: 1) It sounds like Talking Heads -- specifically David Byrne's vocal performance both melodically and rhythmically on "And She Was," and 2) It sounds like the "Metropolis Zone" level from Sonic the Hedgehog 2. These are important sonic touchtones in my life, so any song that blends both in a non-pandering way will automatically endear itself to me. When I heard "The Great Defector" for the first time, I was a college freshman trying to break into the scene at our student-run radio station to fit in with the hip kids. I favorably reviewed Blue Lights on the Runway for our music department and successfully lobbied "The Great Defector" into medium rotation, though I didn't mention Sonic because I wasn't as adept at YouTube research in '09 as I am now. I couldn't place the reference in my head. So that's the groundwork for this song in my emotional subconscious.

Today, as it popped up on Spotify, I realized I hadn't heard or even thought about the song in years, but it was fitting that it would return to me now. Recently, I spent a solid 45 minutes at work cruising YouTube, watching playthroughs of old Sonic levels to zap myself into some sort of nostalgic high (I needed it). And later that day, I added some extra time to my commute home by walking down to a farther subway station listening to Talking Heads and taking in scenes of evening dinner crowds on Greenwich Street as I pantomimed screaming the end of “(Nothing But) Flowers" -- you know, when David Byrne says, "Don't leave me standing here / I can't get used to this lifestyyyyyle!”

But Bell X1's got a way with words, too, and their song hasn't ever failed to lift me up a bit, not in the seven years it's been in my life: "Getting ready to spill my guts / And I love the color of it all!" Yeah, that one's pretty good too. Just this weekend, I just went to a wedding for one of those hip radio kids where the band played "And She Was" at the reception. It was on a Pennsylvania lake at sunset, so we danced and drank a bit and sang along and reminisced about the station. And goddamn, we loved the color of it all.

originally on Ello