Musings on music, old, new, popular and obscure. Post punk, metal, hip-hop, funk, and rock in general. A music fan with a desire to lose boundaries on what should and should not be listened to writes about experience in music from a listener's perspective, hopefully unhindered by prior expectation.
Sometimes, connections are just strange. I last wrote of Jaguar Love, who I found because, well, I liked the bands its members came from--simple enough. The Jayhawks, however, are something entirely different. I'm not sure if I heard their name before I looked into them, and I'm not completely certain I didn't hear their two bigger, earlier singles on the radio when I was younger. I did live in Missouri growing up, though, so it's entirely possible dim memories of "Jayhawks" relate only to one of my then-neighboring state's mascots.
When I finally looked into this band, though, it was because of an offhand reference to the song "Six Pack" by Black Flag, which was met with a reference to "6 Pack on the Dashboard" from The Bunkhouse Tapes, the semi-official title (a la The White Album/The Beatles) for the Jayhawks eponymous debut on Bunkhouse Records. I didn't know that, and simply used Google to find out where this reference came from.I found it was the Jayhawks and looked for an example of their music, as this was made by Gerald, who I've mentioned on many other occasions. I stumbled into a video of "Save It for a Rainy Day":
I ran into a copy of their post-reformation latest album, Mockingbird Time, and was pretty well taken. I referenced the album in one of my endless lyrical entry titles not too long ago, but also picked up the recent deluxe edition of Tomorrow the Green Grass. I saw this anthology, Music from the North Country, a few times before I picked it up. My disineterest in best-of collections, however, collided with my love of music videos--as well as the fact that, in this 3-disc deluxe edition, there was also a disc of bonus material, as well as the only location for their relatively small videography. I was finally pushed over the edge by the presence of "Save It for a Rainy Day," being my immediate introduction to the band and coming from an album old enough that it wasn't going to show anywhere new, but unpopular enough--and released recently enough--that it was not going to appear used very often.
While I can have a packrat attitude in general, it is often supplemented by a tendency toward organization, even if the rules for this organization are known only to me. As such, I've quietly added a small handful of "resource" pages to this blog for various purposes, such as identifying the places from which I derive my entry titles, which are generally from the artist I'm discussing when I am discussing a single artist, but are sometimes lyrics that come into my head as thematically relevant to the issue or work at hand. I separate them out by month of web-publication for an entry to keep them somewhat easier to digest, though I plan to archive them by year when it gets to that point, in order to keep the volume of links reasonable. So far, this means I've written these basic charts for March, April, May, and June.
I also feed my excessive attention to detail with a selection of the resources I regularly consult for my personal usage in carefully sculpting the flow of my digital music collection. These can be absolutely mind-boggling for people, as they are so utterly devoted to the minutiae of music release that one wonders what on earth possesses people to do it. I've learned to only appreciate this, as so long as someone is always going further than I am, they will include the information I want, and I can just marvel in abject, slack-jawed wonder at who would take the time to scan or photograph a thousand 7"s just for the purposes of simple variations in the printing of 45" record labels. Indeed, though, I was just spending time cataloguing the bonus tracks on my nearly-complete collection of the Byrds' '60s albums, and am currently listening to chronologically arranged tracks included on the original and reissue of Blue Öyster Cult's Tyranny and Mutation.
For the purposes of clarifying my extremely subpar photography skills, I've also compiled a list of the CDs that appear from my own personal collection in the banner that heads the blog. It's subject to change over time as my collection expands, and sometimes unusually shaped or sized releases are pushed out of place to my "Box Sets" shelf. Which I wish I didn't need to separate, but making room for boxes that can hold full-sized 12" LPs is not very spatially efficient.
You can also find a few less focused links, like my last.fm profile page where you can see what artists I've been listening to most on my computer (naturally, vinyl and in-car CD listening is not tracked), as well as what tracks I've last listened to as of the time you visit. The movie reviews I wrote for a few years are also available over on the right, and a link to a gallery of my more unusual vinyl records, and the Facebook page for this blog, which I politely request you "Like" if you get the chance and use the site.
Just to make things easier this once: this title comes from a song by the Jayhawks, and it's actually the title of the song as well as the opening line of its chorus. Here they are performing the song at Ocean Way Studios (I don't know which one, though I'd hazard at guess that it's the Nashville one), and you might be able to see that this is only appropriate as a song to follow a brief mention of the Byrds:
