Month: April 2015

Writing about music is very difficult. That’s a plain, vague, throw-away kind of sentence, hardly very evocative, and truly representative of most writing about music. Liking, which is to say, judging music is just too subjective. Asking people what kind of music they like is a fairly intimate question: asking them to name their favorite band or song is downright invasive. At least it can seem to be. Responses usually give no real insight into the person being asked. At best, they’ll tell you, “I like all kinds of music.”

Sitting here and writing about three songs that are important to me is going to be tough. Especially since my tastes run to songs without words, so there’s no interpreting what a song “says,” to me. Nor do I attach any kind of significance to life events and the music that accompanied them. (Why not? See above: subjectivity.) Seriously, you’re getting more about me from the fact that I’m writing this at all than you are from what it is I’m actually saying.

Three songs that are important to me, then: Mozart’s ‘Piano Concerto no. 20,’ Tool’s ‘Right in Two,’ and ‘Zombie Harem’ by Daikaiju. I really don’t think I can tell you why they’re important. I just now that I need them to be available to me and they’ve become like old friends, songs I can count on if I need to count on anything at all.

The Mozart Piano Concerto no. 20 is in D minor, a key for brooding, but an active brooding, a stomping through darkened streets kind of brooding, heavy coat and fog and a frown turned sneer turned snarl. It starts off with the orchestra setting the main tone and theme, and then the piano comes in gentle and quiet, building to a fury and then backing off again. The second movement is like the coming of a storm, building and building and finally crashing down around you, only to calm down at the end and leaving you in sunlight. Sunlight, you see, the third movement, playing in D major, all of the D minor demons exorcised and the world bright once again.

Tool is a band from Los Angeles, and have been around for 20+ years. This is a band that defies description: call them “prog rock,” and the hard-rock fans shake their head, call them “hard rock”; and the math boys curl their upper lips. ‘Right in Two’ starts with just guitars and bass playing stunted arpeggios, in 3/4 time. 3/4 develop into 11/4, and as the song progresses, as the drums come in, the time signature continues to evolve. The song gets more complex, layers instrumentation on top of more time changes, until a final rush of tightly controlled fury. This is one of my favorite songs to listen to when I’m running.

Daikaiju is a surf-guitar band out of Huntsville Alabama. This is the new generation of surf-guitar, the hard-rock kind that takes the old reverb, cranks it way up, and runs around the stage, getting fans tangled up in the guitar cords. (That’s both an aural metaphor and literal description: their stage antics are as wild and crazy as their guitar licks). For all its craziness, ‘Zombie Harem’ more or less follows a kind of minuet format. Riff A, development, Riff B, repeat; middle section; repeat Riff A and B. As simple as it is, it nevertheless fills you up. It’s all energy. It’s sweat and thirst; you can’t help but play air guitar along with it. Which I do, pretty much everytime, even if I’m out running and it comes on my iPod, even if I’m three miles overdo for a stop—I have to run even faster when it comes on.

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As writing exercises go, let me say this: I wrote way more than I thought I would, here. And I feel like I wrote hardly anything at all. Ah well. At least I’m writing. Maybe that’s a take-away here: if music is just good because it simply is, then writing can just be as well.

You stop the car and the Hawaii heat comes back because there’s no more driving breeze. You can feel it in your bones. Even if you’re only in your (early!) forties, you can see why old people move to places like Miami and Arizona. Why not Hawaii? The long flight? The disappointingly drab view from the airplane window when the plane is landing? Waiting in line for what seems like hours at the car rental place? The really bad radio stations, driving around the edge of Kuia, from airport to vacation rental?

Everything is bright, so bright you don’t notice the out-door shower. Later in the week you’ll take Instagram photos from inside that shower, of the nearby flowers and distant mountains. But for now you just want to haul your bags inside and have a beer. The house is green. Not a real-estate, easy-to-sell green, but an almost garish green. Three years later, writing down a description of the place for a writing-course blog entry, you’ll think: monopoly house green.

It’s not a big house, but it’s big enough. A back door leading into the kitchen. A rickety table, something from the seventies. Well trod linoleum. A squat fridge; your fridge at home is an enormous, brushed-stainless-steel behemoth, but this one’s short enough to see the top, where you can set your bag of groceries. Some sweet onion potato chips, a few cans of spam, more than one six-pack. 11 of 12 bottles go into the fridge; the other goes in your hand.

The kitchen window with the view of the beach a few blocks away. The next room, a sitting area, large, overstuffed couches that would be miserable in this heat. Because it’s stifling in here. You glance at one bedroom with its tiny bed. Pass the cramped bathroom. Step outside onto the porch, two rocking chairs, a card table, more view of beach.

And then the breeze arrives, gentle, like it wants to ask you a question. You sit down in one of the rocking chairs, open the beer, and drain half of it. You ask yourself, where else would you want to be right now? You’re not even sure if any other place on earth exists right now.

The breeze moves around, makes the grass in front of the green house wave, plays in the distant palm trees. The sun’s getting ready to think about setting, but content for the moment to loll in the sky. Deep blue, probably goes on forever.

You notice your beer is empty, so you stand up. Notice how the screen door creeks when you open it. The floorboards, too, as you walk into the kitchen. Grab another beer. This house is starting to feel like your threadbare Hawaiian shirt (had it for 10 years) and your easy-fit cargo shorts. Where did your shoes go? Nevermind. Grab a book from the shelf of vacation-left-behinds next to the door. Something with guns and intrigue and romance. Stuff you don’t really have in your life.

But you’ve got that beer, that breeze, that rocking chair. That’s really all you need. All you want, too. So turn to page one. You’re going to be here for a while.