World within a Song: November 9-16, 2023
Yes, yes, I know. I’ve related several of these assignments to Jeff Tweedy, and I’m sorry. But tonight I’m going to see him in conversation about his new book, World within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music. I have not read the book yet (getting a copy tonight), but the concept behind it inspired this week’s assignment. I also noticed this snippet from a review of the book, which felt like the entire purpose of Artpocalypse Thursdays:
“…an inspiring reminder of the role art can play in keeping a person alert to life and moving forward.”
So there you go. For this week…
Tell us about a song (or more than one if you want) that changed your life. What is the song? Why and how did it resonate? What was going on with you at the time, and what impact did the song have on you then? How does the song affect you now? Etc. Write about it in any format you wish. Create artwork to go along with your writing, or let the writing be the art. Share a link where we can listen to the song, if possible.
The Submissions:
by The Kisigliere
When I was newly 21, I moved to Prague during my junior year of college. I don’t remember doing an enormous amount of research before choosing a program, or a location. France would have made more sense, having studied French for most of the previous seven years. I’d been to Prague when I was 16 for a short visit, but it never loomed in my memory the way Paris or Rome did.
In any case, it was January, 2005, and I found myself living in an eight story Soviet-era cinderblock apartment with other twenty-somethings from across the U.S, some Canadians, and one guy from Finland.
I lucked out in terms of suitemates, Cree and Ari shaped my experience as much as anything else that year. We fell into a small group of people navigating this city that was new to all of us. Our ringleader of sorts, or maybe our jester, at least when it came to what music we listened to, was Asher.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Asher came to Prague with a steel resonator guitar and several cartons of Marlboro Reds.
We were all half in love with him. We’d pile into one of our rooms on any given night with a dozen bottles of incredibly delicious and incredibly cheap Czech beers and Asher would play for us.
As importantly, that first month, was finding U Maleho Glena, a blues and jazz club down the hill from where we lived. Like most bars in Prague, it was underground. Every Monday night, for decades, Stan the Man and the Bohemian Blues Band would play. Most Mondays, especially in those early cold months, we would all go.
There were three or four seats at the basement bar, a small stage and a couple of tables. It felt like the band was playing directly in our laps. We ordered shots of Becherovka and more beers and Stan would play lots of old blues standards, and some original stuff too.
What is remarkable to me is not so much the music itself, though it was very good. It was the fact that for the first time in my life, I knew what it felt like to center music, particularly live music, in a way that felt meaningful at the time ( and incredibly meaningful in hindsight).
I credit Asher, in large part, who growing in up in New Orleans and playing music himself, was accustomed to the casual daily-ness of music that exists there. It’s the same feeling I get around Appalachian families, or any community where music feels like a birthright.
At the time, for me…it felt like a pretty radical idea that I could just go, with some regularity, to hear music anytime I wanted.
Sure, before Prague, I went to lots of concerts, waited in line to meet bands, sat on lawns, saved up to afford tickets to big shows. But I never truly centered music in my life in this way before. As something special, and something ordinary. As something to enjoy in its regularity, rather than something saved for special occasions.
Stan the Man on Monday nights opened up whole decades of live music for me. Without him, I don’t know if I would have found Gilly’s and Canal Street Tavern, and Trolley Stop in quite the same way. I would have missed a lot, always buying tickets in advance, and only venturing out on weekends.
It’s harder now, I’m twenty years older and staying awake past 10 pm is rarer and rarer. But I still get that feeling, when I’m in New Orleans, or when I’m with a group of people that start playing instruments in their living rooms-that feeling of the incredible expansiveness of ordinary music.
by Anonymous Frau Redux
Had to consider several pieces of music for this assignment.
Foo Fighters: These Days
2011 was crazy with a cancer diagnosis, multiple surgeries, chemo and some rough days. “These Days” was released that spring.
When facing the possibility of your time ending a bit sooner than expected, hearing “it’s alright” might piss you off, especially coming from someone who hasn’t lived the same experience.
The Foo Fighters detail the possible events that end a life, but also wanting to explode and throat punch someone who (verbally, perhaps unintentionally) kicks you when you’re down.
Sometimes people respond to tough situations with trite statements. They’re thrown a bit off course- maybe nervous, trying to be supportive but also reacting to facing their own mortality.
A close relationship with someone who has cancer makes one realize that cancer is an equal opportunity destroyer.
Something else to consider:
Indigo Girls: Galileo
I am one creature on this one sphere racing around a huge ball of fire, or am I more than that? Am I the product of previous lives, are we attempting to improve upon past efforts but continuously falling short (in comparison to some of the great minds persecuted for their brilliance)?
Dunno.
Deep thought provoking lyrics, great harmony and intricate guitar licks evoke fond memories of sing-alongs with my besties over the years.
“From somewhere in the midwest, this is Anonymous Frau Redux for Artpocalypse Thursdays.”
by Captain Quillard
As excited as I was (and still am) to read Jeff Tweedy’s new book, upon which this assignment was based, I’m only about twenty pages into it so far, thanks to a busy week with early bedtimes caused by illness. But so far, I’ve been somewhat surprised by the songs he’s chosen. They’re not all great songs—in fact, several are bad and he admits they are. But they made an impact on his life and that’s why they’re included. Jeff says:
“I could’ve easily chosen a thousand other songs to write about. And having finished that book, I would regret the omission of a thousand other songs. These are just the ones that came to me first. Besides, the specifics of the songs themselves aren’t really the point. What’s important to me to convey is how miraculous songs are.”
I feel the same way here. The songs below aren’t the ones I expected to write about when I started this. They’re not even necessarily the ones that changed my life in the most meaningful ways. I could’ve easily chosen a thousand other songs. These are just the ones that came to me first. But they were miraculous in their own ways, so here they are.
Teach Your Children Well
I have no doubt that my parents sang many songs to me when I was a baby and through my toddler years—songs they made up, songs they heard on the radio, your standard nursery rhymes—the kind of musical fare that most parents use to show affection for their first-born child or—let’s be honest—get him to calm down and shut the hell up before the crying sends their sleep deprived brains over the edge. Most of those songs are now lost to my aging memory or perhaps never stuck at all in a still-developing infant brain; but there are a few—one from my mom and two from my dad—that I still remember nearly 50 years later as some of my first introductions to song.
My guess is that when The Jamies recorded “Summertime, Summertime” in 1958, they weren’t expecting a suburban Ohio mother to co-opt it into a recurring bedtime anthem nearly 20 years later. But I can still hear my mother’s voice singing “It’s jammie time, jammie time, jam- jam- jammie time” as she helped me change into my pajamas at 7:00 p.m. or whatever time 2-year-olds went to bed in the mid ‘70s (more likely midnight). It probably worked like a charm, making bedtime fun and distracting me from a bad case of toddler FOMO.
Dad, on the other hand, didn’t feel the need to alter the original lyrics, most likely because he knew the songs he’d chosen already had a certain ridiculousness and irreverence that was a surefire hook to a young child. Ask any three-year-old if they’d like to be a pig or a mule, and they’ll have you pegged as some kind of comedic genius. Thus, I assume, my father’s frequent tendency to do his best Bing Crosby impression while singing “Swinging on a Star” to me. When the effectiveness of that fun but somewhat preachy ditty wore off, he upped the ante with warnings about spitting into the wind and stepping on Superman’s cape. Jim Croce’s “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim” was a regular part of the repertoire, and a song I still love to this day—be forewarned: if you’re ever unlucky enough to be in a car with me when it comes on the radio, everything stops, and we sing every word.
I sometimes lament that I’m not as close to my parents as others are to theirs, but I love them, and memories like this remind me that they love me. They were fun and funny when I was growing up, and went out of their way to entertain me. I like to think this inspired me to be fun and funny and entertaining, and maybe the early exposure to these songs helped establish my love of music. If nothing else, once I was old enough to realize that Jammie Time was really Summertime, I was likely awakened to the concept of parody. I think we all know that one stuck. Music is powerful, and has made me feel a lot of things throughout my life. But I can’t imagine anything more powerful than making someone feel loved and safe and cared for and welcomed with smiles and laughter, and that’s exactly what these first songs I was exposed to did for me.
I’ll Sit and Listen to ‘em by Myself
One year for Christmas, I got a record player. It was plastic and white, and came in a white plastic carrying case which, since I was obsessed with Mickey Mouse at the time, had Mickey’s big, mousey face emblazoned on it. There was also a carrying case for 45 rpm records—also white, also plastic, also featuring Mickey smiling at you from the top of this cylindrical container that looked like something you’d use to transport a small cake. The records inside were all hand-me-downs—children’s records from my parents’ childhood or even earlier—except for the odd “Adventures of Burger Chef & Jeff” storybook record we received with a fast-food meal. But one day my parents gave me a new record. They’d caught me enjoying a song on the radio a few times, and decided I should have my very own copy to play at home whenever I wanted.
“Whenever I wanted” turned out to mean “over and over and over again, ad nauseum, until my parents wanted to beg me to stop.” I shudder to think what could’ve possibly been the B-side of this shiny, brand new, vinyl 45, given that the A-side, and the reason they’d gotten it for me, was “Elvira” by The Oak Ridge Boys. “Elvira” featured an incredibly simplistic beat and a sort of tinny, plunky aesthetic that sounded like it was performed on children’s toy instruments. The lyrics were not only impressively dumb, but also plodded along at a pace that made you wonder if maybe you’d played your 45 at 33 rpm by mistake. But my six-year-old ears didn’t care about any of that. I was hooked by the song’s only redeeming quality: an unbelievably gimmicky part of the chorus where the Boys sang “Giddy-up” followed by the deep bass voice of Richard Sterban half-singing, half-chanting “a-oom-boppa-oom-boppa-mow-mow.” Brilliance. Or at least I thought it was. Mickey’s turntable played that record a million times, with me singing along, leaning into every “mow-mow” and reveling in the too-slow “High-ho, Silver. A-way!” part each time it came around.
A few years later, my parents—probably thinking an entire album would at least have more than one song for me to play into the ground—gave me what I believe was my first album on cassette. Michael Jackson’s Thriller had several hits—“Beat It,” “Billie Jean,” the eponymous title track—and I loved all those, but the one I probably played the most was “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” Maybe “Mama-say-mama-sah-meh-mak-hoo-sah” was just the next evolution from “oom-boppa-mow-mow,” or maybe I was intrigued by a song that tells someone “you’re a vegetable” and “if you can’t feed a baby, then don’t have a baby.” Either way, I played that song and the rest of the album repeatedly in my bedroom for the better part of a year.
My first new record and first new cassette (let’s not even get into my first CD, which may or may not have been a Paula Abdul album obtained through Columbia House’s 11 CDs for a penny scam) were fairly silly choices, but I think they changed something in me by making me realize that if I heard a song I liked, I could make it mine, own a copy, sequester myself alone in my bedroom, and play it over and over again until I’d memorized every lyric, guitar solo, crescendo, and nuance. Those are habits I have continued my entire life with countless new artists, albums, and songs, and it remains one of the pure joys of life for me.
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
I’m what you might call “a late bloomer.” (I turn 49 next week. Maybe this will be the year the buds turn to blooms.) Unlike a lot of my classmates, I didn’t date in middle school or high school. But by senior year of high school, my considerable and undeniable charm had made me at least mildly attractive to one young woman who was in a few of my classes and eventually my friend group. We never acted on anything then (waiting until college to long distance date, then marry, then divorce), but we were flirty with each other, spent a lot of time together, and would sit by each other at high school football games that we attended as social events, mostly ignoring the actual game. As most school bands do, ours had a handful of songs they played at every event. One of those was Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” and for some reason it became a connection for us. We’d get excited whenever it was played, sing it together, joke about it, and bond in the weird way that nerdy high school kids do. It’s hard to explain what it was about it that drew us together, but it quickly became “our song,” even though we weren’t dating. I think at that age (maybe at any age), when you feel something for someone else, you look for things that make you feel connected to them and look forward to or get excited about those things because they remind you of that connection. That’s a weird way to describe a crush, I realize, but it’s been my experience that once I identify something with someone I like (a song, a smell, a sound, a TV show—whatever), that something will always make me excited because it’s a stand-in for that someone. Until, of course, that someone breaks your heart, and then the pain associated with that song, smell, sound, etc., is excruciating. Not that I’m saying that’s what happened with this particular person. We later dated, married, discovered we shouldn’t be married, divorced, maintained a great friendship, and are close friends to this day. I can still listen to the song—it’s by no means excruciating, just kind of played out and soured by Clapton’s inane response to Covid—but there’s no doubt that “Sunshine of Your Love” played a major role in changing the trajectory of my life. In this case, music influenced my love life. But there have also been times when my love life influenced my music life…
Many years later, I met a woman who lived in New York while she was in Ohio to curate an exhibit at our local art museum. We hit it off and started a brief long-distance relationship that was never going to last for several reasons, not the least of which being the 600 miles between us. It was fun while it lasted, though, and punctuated by us creating mix CDs that we mailed to each other, each one starting with a song about New York and ending with a song about Ohio. She had good taste in music, and several of the songs she included were new to me and opened up new musical doors for me. Somewhere in the middle of the first CD she sent me was a song called “I’m Always in Love” by Wilco. At the time, I had heard of Wilco, but was only loosely familiar with them. She introduced me to them by saying, “The lead singer is ugly, but they make great music,” which in hindsight I feel is unfair to Jeff Tweedy, who is not ugly at all, thank you very much (should’ve been my first indication we wouldn’t last). The song actually doesn’t sound all that much like most of Wilco’s music, but it got my attention enough to check them out, and I liked them. I started listening to them more, and when they toured a few years later I went to see them live and was blown away. Now I’ve seen them live many, many times—even traveling to Iceland to see them play three consecutive nights in Reykjavik—and they’re in heavy rotation among the music I listen to on the regular. Hell, even this very series of essays was inspired by going to see that “ugly” frontman talk about his new book about songs that changed his life and life that changed his songs. So, thank you, New York art lady, for the fun few months of dating, but mostly for influencing my taste in music.
Everything’s Gonna’ Be Alright
Like a lot of people, I have struggled with anxiety and depression throughout my life. I’d wager that some of you have, as well, given that you are all creative, thoughtful, perceptive people who feel things deeply—a combination of characteristics which, in my non-expert opinion—sets one up for this particular burden. Most of the time, mine is a low-grade, background noise, ever-present but not debilitating type of affliction. Manageable, only minorly-intrusive, and honestly probably the normal response to living open-eyed (“woke”?) in a world that can often be unspeakably awful (despite occasionally also being unspeakably wonderful). There have been a small handful of times, however, when some unwelcome-at-the-time life event served as a catalyst to trigger a much deeper, darker, less manageable version of depression that sent me spiraling to a place I couldn’t see my way out of. I’m not talking suicidal tendencies here—though I wouldn’t judge anyone who’s been there—but maybe the next rung or two up on the ladder, where you definitely don’t feel like living even if you’re not prepared to do anything about it. It’s a horrific experience that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but I’m not special—many, many people feel or have felt that way at some point, and those who have can tell you that it’s an incredibly hard thing to pull out of once you’re in it.
Probably my first such experience came with my divorce. As I mentioned above, she and I are still great friends who now both know with absolute certainty that friends is all we should be. But it’s rare that two people come to that realization at the same time—usually one is still in denial when the other is ready to move on, and there was definitely a period of hurt and shock and confusion and depression for me before I eventually came around to be on the same page.
Literally the same month that the divorce conversation first came up, U2 released a new album. In the months that followed, I listened to it a lot. One song in particular started to speak to me and feel like a soothing balm that somehow made things feel a bit better when I listened to it. The song, called “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” is not one of U2’s best songs by any stretch, and its message is not necessarily all that deep. But, it’s amazing how (for me at least) the same advice you can’t stand to hear from friends when you’re depressed doesn’t sound nearly as much like empty platitudes when you hear it in a song. It should be the other way around, of course—the message should mean more from people you know and care about—but that’s not how it works when you’re in the shit. I desperately wanted to punch in the face anyone who told me “this too shall pass” and dismiss it as coming from people who didn’t understand. But the same message could be delivered via the Trojan horse of a song, and eventually I would start to let it in. I read somewhere that Bono wrote the song as a conversation he would’ve had with Michael Hutchence if he’d gotten the chance before Hutchence killed himself. I don’t know if that’s true, but I imagine Michael would’ve wanted to punch Bono, too. Still, listening to the song over and over somehow allowed the idea that I was only “stuck in a moment that would eventually pass” to seep into my consciousness until I believed it.
The song itself wasn’t solely responsible for me feeling better, of course. It’s a slow process made up of a lot of incremental steps. But another one of those steps came later when U2 toured on the album. A friend and I went to see them in Columbus, and I loved the experience so much that I came home and bought myself a ticket to see them again a few days later in Indianapolis. That high wasn’t enough, so a while later I drove myself to Detroit without even having a ticket in hand, and managed to buy one from a scalper to catch the show again. I still had the bug after Detroit, and ended up seeing them again on that tour in South Bend. I’d seen live music before, but this was probably the beginning of my obsession with going to concerts, traveling to see bands, and seeing the same show multiple times in multiple cities per tour. 23 years later, I saw U2 for the 25th and 26th time last month in Las Vegas. My ex enjoyed music too, but she wasn’t as in to seeing bands live, and I had sort of altered my personality to suit hers in that regard when we were together. There was a huge feeling of liberation and a newfound happiness for independence and being on my own when I realized that I LOVE going to concerts, it’s a huge part of who I am, and I don’t have to conform to someone else’s personality—I can go see as many shows as I want all by myself! Who knew?
Years later, during another depressive spiral, I came across the Heartless Bastards song, “Hold Your Head High.” Where the U2 song had come to me near the beginning of my troubles, this time the song arrived near the tail end, when I had done the long, hard work of pulling myself out of the darkness bit by bit and was finally starting to feel like myself again. It felt like a celebratory, “Fuck, yeah, I did it!” kind of song, while still acknowledging how rough things had been and how hard it was to get to that moment. The “I may not be fully out of the woods yet, but I can see the light and I know that I’m almost back” sentiment really resonated with me and gave me the feeling of personal strength I needed at the time to put myself back out into the world as the person I’d forgotten I was. This is not a song they often play live, but I’ve heard them do it a few times, and each time it makes me immediately stand up and belt the lyrics out with a smile on my face. Even listening to it now gives me goosebumps and makes me feel like myself.
Depression is awful, and I don’t want to sound trite or offer the same kind of platitudes I hate to hear when I’m in it. No one wants to hear “Have you tried listening to this song?” and different songs hit people differently at different times. Music isn’t even everyone’s “thing,” and even for people like me it’s only a small part of the formula for raising yourself out of the depths. But at times when I was at my worst, I at least started to see the way back to being my best when I didn’t think it was possible, thanks to a song. And that is every bit as important and serious as it is ridiculous and silly.
How Blue Can You Get?
For someone who doesn’t do much writing, I have an odd writer’s habit of keeping a note on my phone where I type words, turns of phrase, and other ideas for possible future writing projects that rarely actually materialize. Once, in the middle of a Jason Isbell concert, I was moved by his guitar solo enough to type and save the words “Because there are just some emotions that can only be expressed with a slide guitar.”
Not an amazing thought, necessarily, but one I think I believe in, nonetheless. For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to blues music. The rhythm, the lyrical style, the way it expresses feelings through sound, the at times uplifting but often sorrowful subject matter and emotion—all of it speaks to me on an elemental level. Rock music, among many other things, grew out of the blues, which is why I always used to tell people I preferred the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, because the Stones were rooted in the blues sound.
The Stones, it turns out, are a good example of what has been happening for hundreds of years: white people stealing from black people. Whether done with malicious intent or even as an attempt to honor them, white folks have been taking something black people invented or otherwise possessed and making it their own for generations. I’m even somewhat ashamed to admit that my earliest exposure to the blues came in the form of white artists—Clapton, for one, captivated me for a time in my teens, and I wore out the double CD album “24 Nights” with him playing at the Royal Albert Hall. But even Clapton felt a bit like a sanitized and overly-white version of blues, so the first (also white) artist I can remember really capturing the grit and emotion of the blues for me was Stevie Ray Vaughan. I saw Stevie on Austin City Limits, slinging his guitar behind his back in the middle of a solo without missing a note, and I was captivated. I liked everything he played, but was really into the guitar-heavy, slow driving “Texas Flood,” where Stevie would effortlessly speed through a series of notes only to land on one that he’d let linger, creating a cathartic release and stopping time. This felt like real blues to me, and led me to go through later phases of interest in Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Johnny Lang, and even Jimi Hendrix, who somehow sounded like these artists—or, more accurately, they sounded like him.
Thankfully, with no disrespect to the white blues artists, I traced the rabbit hole back to where it came from: the Mississippi Delta, and discovered a whole new appreciation for the blues, especially when its subject matter was about a more dire life experience than not being able to call your baby because it’s flooding and the phone lines are down. There are far too many of these blues artists and songs to pick just one that affected me, and most of them came into my life decades before the one I’ll list here. But when I discovered Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” it instantly became one of my favorites. I’m not a religious person, and this song is almost certainly a Gospel song and likely about the crucifixion, but his ability to evoke emotion with no words—only a sort of moaning and sparse but heavy guitar playing—is unbelievable and made an impact on me.
Many of those Delta blues songs chronicled life for black people in America, and while I was by no means unaware of or unsympathetic to that history, listening to blues music really allowed me tap into how people in that community felt (as much as I can ever understand it), and enhance my belief in the need for social justice. There are many, many examples of protest songs and songs about the black experience that have impacted me, but one that stands out is Nina Simone singing “Backlash Blues.” The version I first heard, and probably still my favorite, is actually listed as a remix, though you might not know it if you hadn’t heard other versions—I didn’t. Nina’s strength in this song floored me. The things she was saying and the way she said them were powerful and would be powerful if they’d taken place now. But when you factor in the era in which she was saying them, her bravery and power felt off the charts. I remember thinking that if she could take the stand she was taking during that time as a black woman, I could certainly take a stand now as a privileged white man, and be an ally for those who needed one. I don’t know if this is where my propensity to attend protests and marches grew out of, but it certainly helped.
It's maybe an awkward segue to shift from protest songs and songs about Antebellum life to celebratory songs from a celebratory city, just because the common denominator here is black folks, but there’s a bit of a through-line here that can’t be denied. Several years back, I discovered New Orleans. Not in the way the French did, of course, and not to suggest that I’d been previously unaware the city existed. But, if you’ve been to New Orleans and you get what makes it special, it feels right to say that you “discovered” it. I love New Orleans and could go on and on about it and its music, and there are of course so many songs and artists to delve into from a wide range of genre that all seem to somehow belong to that city. But for the purpose of this story, I’ll focus on Kermit Ruffin’s rendition of “Drop Me Off in New Orleans.” My first trip to New Orleans was with five friends, but four of them were on a flight that arrived in the evening, many hours after the fifth friend and I landed there in the late morning and immediately caught a cab to the middle of the Treme neighborhood, luggage in tow, to start our trip with the world’s best friend chicken and red beans and rice from Willie Mae’s Scotch House. This friend was a seasoned traveler and eater who had been to New Orleans before, and had a good plan for showing me as much as she could. Over the next eight or nine hours, we covered an impressive amount of the city’s acreage, and consumed about seven meals with a dozen drinks before making our way to see some live music. My friend knew that Kermit Ruffins and his band were playing at Vaughan’s. Having returned to New Orleans many times since, I now know exactly where Vaughan’s is, but at the time, disoriented, pleasantly drunk, and in the dark, it felt like our cab driver was taking us to the middle of the swamp to kill us. We arrived to find people dancing in the middle of the street outside a rusty, weathered, Bywater shack. We found seats inside, near the band and with a good view of the chaotic dance floor, but not out of reach of the free jambalaya and barbecue Kermit was offering anyone who wanted it. This was heaven, and the true start of my love affair with the city. When our friends arrived and met us in the middle of a raucous jazz set, they said they’d never seen such a wide grin and look of pure joy on my face. Because there are just some emotions that can only be expressed with a trumpet and a slide trombone.
Next Week’s Assignment:
Design a new balloon or float that you think should be added to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.