Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence - ROBERT FRIPP.
Information is not knowledge;
knowledge is not wisdom;
wisdom is not truth;
truth is not beauty;
beauty is not love;
love is not music;
MUSIC IS THE BEST - FRANK ZAPPA.
I think we're a little happier when we have a little music in our lives - STEVE JOBS.
Music in the soul can be heard by the universe - LAO TZU.
Rock and Roll is fire, man. FIRE. - DAVID BRIGGS.
Music grips you, gets into your soul -
GEORGE MARTIN
Active compensatory factors: For Emma, Forever Ago was a real revelation back in 2008.
I loved the romantic Walden style back story (heading to a remote cabin and recording an album) and when the music matched the idyllic circumstances, it all felt and sounded magical.
The album appeals to a wide range of people too - my youngest daughter's generation loved it as much as mine did. Even Jacky likes it!
Follow-up difficult second album was as successful commercially as For Emma, but it's taken me a while to warm to it. There are echoes of the For Emma style but it's, quite rightly, it's own album.
Where do they all belong? Justin Vernon has got a little too wacky for me on subsequent releases so I'll stick with these two.
Bon Iver Blood Bank/ Beach Baby/ Babys/ Woods (Jagjaguwar, Jag 134, 2009) The Blood Bank EP was Justin Vernon's follow up to the amazingly brilliant debut ForEmma, Forever Ago. Pretty cunning that. The expectation after Emma was immense so, go with an EP. Blood Bank itself is a haunting song but it was left off the album and that was a good decision. It's slightly at odds with the vibe of For Emma. It just lacks the gravitas of that album at its best. Hidden gems: Beach Baby is amazingly good - would have fitted the vibe of For Emma without any problem. Has that same wonky guitar sound and vocals that linger in the air and drift off in sadness. The other two are more sound experiments and an acquired taste. They do show him thirsting after new soundscapes which is great but one listen of this kind of thing lasts me a long time.
This one's for my friend Mark who asked me yesterday for some recommendations. Always tricky that - what if they don't like them?
I thought for a minute and blurted out - BON IVER. It's such an amazing experience listening to his music. Bon Iver isn't his real name, by the way. It's Justin Vernon. The mystery associated with the choice of Bon Iver to perform under is also there in the haunting music on the album For Emma, Forever ago.
I've written a lot about Flume on the 49er list below so I thought I'd add a few clips to this post instead. There's a guerrilla style a cappella version of For Emma; Lump Sum; I have to include Flume and a raw version of Skinny Love from the Jools Holland show Later. It's spectacular. Enjoy!!
I mentioned in my last posting on Jethro Tull that I love acoustic guitar and so I do. I won’t try to trace where this love came from. Oh, okay, I will. It may have been Lennon’s You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away which I heard way before I heard Dylan.
It may be the first Crosby Stills Nash album and Suite: Judy Blue Eyes. Steve Stills is a guitar god. I watched Déjà vu (the DVD) in great sadness recently. Steve looks bad and sounds bad, in contrast to Neil who looked and acted spry, and even, God forbid, in contrast to David Crosby. The Cros consumed industrial sized quantities of bad shit for decades and now…he looks better than Stills, and still sings harmony with Nash like an angel. But poor Stills is massively overweight and is slurry of speech. Sad. What happened to him?
It may be James Taylor that got me started, but I doubt it because I didn’t get into him until after I found his first album on Apple Records. Or it could be the Paul Kantner solo (haha) album Blows Against The Empire with it’s undercurrent of acoustic guitars on songs like Have You Seen The Stars Tonite played by every freaky guitarist in San Francisco?
Actually, now that I come to think of it, I think it was Paul McCartney of all people who got me started. Specifically some songs on The Beatles (aka The White Album) – Blackbird and Mother Nature’s Son and the ballad of Rocky Raccoon. Thanks Macca!
Ever since - I’ve stopped off at all of those destinations listed above and much more. It’s amazing how differently guitars sound in expert hands. Jorma Kaukonen, for instance, has a tone and style that is vastly different to Earl klugh, to Neil Young, to Bruce Cockburn, to Kurt Cobain, to…Bon Iver.
Bon Iver’s album For Emma, Forever Ago is a real treat. On one level, because all of the hype I read about it in Mojo is actually spot on. On another, it’s the kind of album that reminds me of why I love music in the first place – acoustic guitar, meaningful lyrics, great vocals, and inspiration to go with the craft.
The first track, Flume, is the most beautiful song I’ve heard in ages. It also makes my heart ache, and it sounds so effortless and simple but I bet it was a bastard to write and get right. Or maybe it was as natural as it sounds.
The elliptical style he writes in means the lyrics are open to a lot of interpretation but they sound absolutely right for the song. That's got to be a kind of genius. The music and lyrics match perfectly and this must have taken an age. The gaps in meaning within the lyric also point to careful thought and revision.
The opening line, ‘I am my mother’s only one, it’s enough’ is wide open to interpretation and that wide open space, once set up in this line, pervades the rest of the song and album. There is a depth here that is unusual in a pop song. As he says in the final song re:stacks, ‘it’s the sound of the unlocking and the liftaway’. The unlocking began with Flume but it doesn’t end there. Via this unlocking, in the end he provides a depth that allows me to listen to the song, and album, multiple times and will still allow new thoughts, new revelations, new feelings for years to come. It’s a great song.
I was told today, as I made tracks to the stereo system, to not put on "any boom boom crash stuff, your horrible hillbilly music or jazz". This means she wanted 'nice music'. Boom boom crash = noise (Jimi Hendrix, Led Zep, Mastodon, Beatles et al), Hillbilly is reserved for the worst insult = twangy or nasal (Dylan, all blues, folk, Patti Smith et al) and Jazz includes everything else pretty much. Which doesn't leave a lot - soothing classical or a fringe act that somehow combines things into a new genre - Jacky music.
As you can probably tell I don't live with a music lover. In this instance I came up with David Crosby's 'Thousand Roads' album, The Thorns, Jackson Browne, and James Taylor - long since proven safe bets. I wasn't asked to take any off so I must have succeeded.
It got me thinking though as I was searching - what are the albums that stack up as quality but still qualify as 'nice music'. Clearly Captain Beefheart's 'Trout Mask Replica' is a non starter.
The following five albums are the ones that bear repeat showings and (through bitter experience) are 'nice music': 5) Joni Mitchell's 'Hejira' is absolutely there, so is 4) Bon Iver's brilliant 'For Emily, Forever Ago'. There is an other-worldly aspect to this music - they all sit outside established genres. So does 3) Aimee Mann 'Bachelor No.2'. She doesn't conform to female singer/songwriter norms, releases her work in the margins and has a maverick persona.
There are elements of pop and jazz and folk and it all makes a perfect sense. Plus she sounds superb. 2) Mike Oldfield's 'Ommadawn' stitches together prog and celtic music over two seamless sides and 1) Van Morrison's 'Moondance' combines jazz, the spiritual, the sexual, the lyricism of 'Astral Weeks' to make a sublime album that is the epitome of 'nice music' and sheer quality.
Active compensatory factors: For Emma, Forever Ago was a real revelation back in 2008. 
