Nine songs for a new season:
1. Springenfall
— Died Pretty
A thousand years ago, I spent a summer living in a welfare motel on Cape Cod. It was great fun. I spent my mornings working at a local bookstore, stocking the shelves and trying not to disturb the well-heeled vacationers who prowled the aisles. Afternoons and evenings – most of them, at least – were spent a few miles away, churning out pizza and subs. D'you know how enjoyable it is to spend an impossibly humid summer in a place with no air conditioning? Imaging that joy redoubled by a job that requires you to repeatedly thrust half your body into an enormous 400+ degree oven dozens of times each hour. That's a feel-good experience, guaranteed.
Every couple of weeks, I'd find myself with a day off — a complete stretch of daylight where I wasn't trading my hours for minimum wage. Given that spending this time in my swinging bachelor pad wasn't really an option… I'd get in my car and drive. Explore. Sometimes my ambitions would take me to the Lower Cape — to soak up the colors and energy of P-town, or the more gentle and genteel ambiance of Wellfleet. Other days, I'd head over to Woods Hole. Watch the ferries roll out of the harbor, bellies stretched with families on their way to Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard. Imagining myself standing on the deck, my arm draped over the shoulder of someone who might love me.
Or I would jump onto Route 28 and see where it took me — creeping along the road, my tiny import hidden among the minivans and SUVs, the air thick with the cadence of cicadas and sounds of a world at play. Occasionally I'd find myself at a ballpark, and take in a Cape Cod League game (go Kettleers!). Other times, I'd meander into Chatham or Hyannis and find someplace to park. Get out and walk around. Pretend that I was like everyone else. Like I was free.
Hyannis – and the village of Hyannisport – is best known as the playground of the Kennedy clan. It's where their famed compound is located; where Jack and the boys played football on the lawn, learned to sail off the shore, grew up and entered the world and too often died young. That was the other Hyannis; mine was a crowded downtown filled with t-shirt shops and restaurants, motels and ice cream parlors.
And a record store. Where I found – for $2.99 – a used cassette of Died Pretty's Lost. I didn't know anything about them, other than the fact that the band name and album title described my state of mind more perfectly than anything I might have imagined possible.
I remember sliding the cassette into my tapedeck when I got back to my car. Unsure but excited by this new discovery, eager to experience how it sounded, how it felt, to be lost and to die pretty.
The answer: it felt right. There was one line from Springenfall – I’m wrapping up this empty world and I will wallow in it all – that might as well have been tattooed across my chest. This music knew me.
I remember it. I remember it all.
2. The Colour of Spring
— Mark Hollis
Once upon a time, Mark Hollis' reedy, expressive voice was the sole component that linked Talk Talk's early days as a post-Duran Duran synthpop band to mid-period successes in reinventing the sound of Roxy Music's Avalon – the time when I first discovered them – to their late period of experimentation, where their groundbreaking Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock transcended attempts at categorization while simultaneously laying the groundwork for what would, eventually, become the post-rock movement.
A few years later, Hollis released his one and only solo album. It features this song, which shares a name with Talk Talk's third album (although, to add to the confusion, that album does not feature a song by this name).
It is perhaps the quietest album ever recorded. It's more than that; it's fragile. It's the slender veil of mist ghosting over grass, in the moments just before the rising tide of sunlight. It is music that is easily overlooked and requires attention to be appreciated — and that rewards that effort with a rare and ethereal kind of beauty.
3. Spring
— Rites of Spring
Rites of Spring was Guy Piciotto's band before he joined Ian Mackaye in Fugazi, and while I enjoy Fugazi as much as anyone… I honestly don't know that they ever put together an album that, as a whole, is as powerful and cathartic as End on End. This is music that was emo before emo became a dirty word: combining the muscular chaos and breakneck speed of American hardcore with thoughtful, intensely personal lyrics and passionate vocals to create something immediate, and emotional, and truly and honestly goddamn moving.
4. Rite Of Spring
— Angels & Airwaves
And now I'll completely subvert any illusions that I might be cool by admitting that I really enjoy this band. Although I'll also admit that I'd enjoy them a lot more if Tom DeLonge's lyrics didn't suck.
To be clear: they really suck.
5. Rite Of Spring
— Bill Morrissey
First off, allow me to clarify: beyond the title, this song has nothing in common with Angels & Airwaves. It's 1:51 of Bill Morrissey sounding as spritely and chipper as Bill Morrissey ever sounds — his broken croak of a voice chugging through a sweet little love song about a girl who loves the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five. Which is something of a departure for Morrissey (no, not that Morrissey), whose songs generally come off like something akin to Russell Banks or Raymond Carver set to music… but no less charming a song for that departure.
6. Love Goes Home To Paris In The Spring
— The Magnetic Fields
Count me among those who loved, loved, loved the Magnetic Fields back in the days before Stephin Merrit decided he was a genius, recorded 69 Love Songs and stopped being any fun. Remember those days? When listening to the Magnetic Fields meant wonderfully hyperliterate, irony-drenched lyrics delivered in a deadpan, near-monotone voice laid over kinda cheesy-sounding synths and drum tracks, creating something strange and remarkable and great? I do. I still remember sitting in my tiny attic bedroom in the first apartment I ever rented (not counting welfare motels), listening to The Charm of the Highway Strip over and over again, wondering "who is this guy?" even as I found new reasons for delight with each new listen.
It feels like a long time ago. (Probably because it was.)
7. Spring Rain
— The Go-Betweens
Music nerds always point to The Go-Betweens as one of the great coulda-woulda-shoulda-been-huge bands of the 80s… an Australian band that released a series of albums that sent reviewers into great heaving paroxysms of rapture, none of which ever made even the faintest dent in the Americas. Songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan went on to release several acclaimed solo albums (including McLennan's Horsebreaker Star, one of the great lost treasures of the 90s) before reuniting for pair of new Go-Betweens albums in 2000 and 2005. Unfortunately, just as they were (finally) starting to gain a little mainstream traction… Grant McLennan died of a sudden heart attack in May of 2006.
Spring Rain is one of their best-loved songs, and rightfully so: it captures their blend of edgy melodicism and sunny jangle in a charming and memorable 3:06. In another world, this is what I would've been listening to as I drove around Cape Cod that summer — sun on my face, wind in my hair, fingers bouncing on the steering wheel.
Young and happy.
8. Spring Provides
— Matt Pond PA
I'm baffled by the fact that Matt Pond PA isn't tremendously successful. Why? What's not to like? Great melodies? Thoughtful lyrics? What? Tell me you can't imagine hearing this song on the radio and liking it. Somebody explain this to me.
9. April
– Chapterhouse
You knew that sooner or later I was going to slip some shoegaze in here.
I'm not going to apologize for it, either. Just crank up the volume, close your eyes, and let the waves of sound wash over you. Consider it a musical colonic, only without the invasive properties.