10 Albums of 2014

Here are the albums, in no particular order, I dug the most in 2014.  My album of the year goes to St. Vincent (self-titled). At the very bottom of this post is a playlist of songs from these albums.

Benjamin Booker – Benjamin Booker

Perfect Pussy – Say Yes to Love

Sallie Ford – Slap Back

The New Pornographers – Brill Bruisers

Ex Hex – Rips

St. Vincent – St. Vincent

Clear Plastic Masks – Being There

Shovels & Rope – Swimmin’ Time

Hurray for the Riff Raff – Small Town Heroes

 

Against Me! – Transgender Dysphoria Blues

Papa Was a Rodeo

Father’s Day has always been a source of much angst for me. My parents divorced when I was 2. My mom had full custody. There was always tension between them whenever they were in the same place at the same time and since that wasn’t a common thing, I remember every time it happened. I felt like I was limited in what kind of father/daughter relationship I could have and whether that was due to my father being emotionally absent or due to my mom’s obvious anger towards him is not even the point anymore. It’s all water under the bridge. Today, my father and I have a much better relationship. Now that I am an adult with kids of my own, I feel like our relationship is more of a friendship than a parent/child relationship and that’s fine. I’ve always believed parents and their children should be friends and I have always balked at the idea that parents cannot or should not be friends with their children. Parents or other caregiver/guardian are often a child’s first friend in life and often serves as a model for future friendships. So it is good that I can call my father my friend.

I would like to talk about him today, Father’s Day.

When I was about 14-15, I discovered the music of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I felt an affinity towards their bassist, Flea. I would listen closely to his bass lines. They were poetry to my teenage ears. They were the perfect musical expression of his personality: fun yet deeply complex. I started thinking that maybe I wanted to play the bass. It was the first instrument that I really fell in love with, despite having learned how to play the piano and the trumpet years before. I didn’t chose those instruments.

There was always a piano in the house and my great-aunt gave me lessons every Wednesday. The piano was very accessible for me so I used it, though it did not call to me. I learned how to play the trumpet in my middle school band. I didn’t want to play the trumpet but I saw that mostly boys were playing that instrument so I thought I’d play trumpet just because I felt there needed to be more girls playing it(budding feminist I was), but it didn’t call to me either. The piano and trumpet just a easy means to an end: making music.

It wasn’t until I discovered the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Flea that I felt the call of a instrument. So I mentioned to my dad one day that I might like to learn how to play the bass. He didn’t question it at all and before I knew it, I had a bass! I can’t even remember what kind it was, just that the body was black and the neck was a very pale wood. It wasn’t a full sized bass, but it did the trick. I began teaching myself how to play after my dad showed me a few bass techniques. I felt like it came naturally to me. I started listening to other bass players. I’d always noticed the bass line of songs, often much more than the other instruments or vocals, but when I started learning the bass, I began listening in depth. I studied it. I found the bass players whose styles appealed to me most and I set to work learning their bass lines and that really gave me a foundation of what it meant to play the bass.

A few years later, my dad gave me my second bass. It’s the bass I still play now. A burgundy 5-string Gibson Les Paul. It’s a beauty and a beast of a bass all at the same time. I named it The Ox after my favorite bass player, John Entwistle.

My dad has always supported my musical endeavors. We always could fall back on our mutual love of music and playing music when other aspects of our relationship fell short. He’s the reason I play the bass. He’s the reason I discovered the music of Django Reinhardt after he gave me all his entire record collection one year. I probably wouldn’t have developed my deep and everlasting love of The Who if it weren’t for my dad letting me borrow Quadrophenia which completely turned my world upside down in the best way possible.

I may not have had the kind of relationship with my dad that I wanted most of my life, but I’m very grateful for what he gave me musically. It’s the language I know the best.

If I want to smile you’ll know it.

I heard those words again tonight.
What makes you think it’s alright
To tell me I need to smile
As if I only have a face
to make it worth your while.

That might turn into a song. Because I feel like writing an angry song about how people think it’s ok to tell others they need to smile more. Because I did hear those words tonight after playing music in front of people, “You have a great smile, you should smile more. You just look so serious.” I guess I suffer from Bitchy Resting Face(totally real thing that most women suffer from, except they don’t really suffer from it it’s just that women apparently have to be smiling all the time or people get pissed off at them and start telling them what to do with their faces).

This is the main complaint I get whenever I play music in a live setting. I don’t smile enough. Here is a handy list of things that you need to be able to do to play music for people:

1. If you play an instrument, know how to play it.
2. If you are a singer, be able to sing on key.
3. If you have gear(mics, pedals, etc) know how to work them.
4. Perhaps have some sense of rhythm. It can’t hurt.

“Smile” is not on that list. There are many musicians who don’t smile much, if at all. Many successful musicians. I mean, look at Oasis. All they do is just stand there and play music and not even let the rhythm take hold of any part of their bodies except the ones used to make that music. And yet they were hugely popular and sold tons of albums and made lots of money.

I have to wonder though, is this request to smile more something male musicians have to put up with? I have seen plenty of men get up on stage, play their songs and leave without smiling much. But they are taken seriously as musicians regardless of how they look or the persona they have on stage. I have yet to hear someone telling a male musician he needs to smile more onstage.

On the other hand, women are expected to look pretty and smile, regardless of their talent or perhaps in spite of their talent.

I’m sorry(I’m really not sorry), but I don’t play music to show off my winning smile. I play music because I love playing music and people compliment me afterward so I’m guessing I have some kind of talent. And, as with the men, that should be enough.

the world was moving, she was floating above it and she was

I made a vow when the year began. A “New Year’s Resolution” if you will. Truth be told, I made three*. Here they are in list form. Just for fun.

-Read at least one book per month.
-Distance myself from toxic people and relationships(relationships with organizations included).
-Do the dumb things I gotta do. Touch the puppet head.

Ok, that last one wasn’t really the way it read, which was more along the lines of, “Go to places I’m interested in, meet new people in them and make new friends.” Because at the end of last year I basically said goodbye to an entire organization for the sake of my mental well-being. An organization that contained most of the people I’ve known my entire life. I knew I would lose most of my feeling of community with such a big upheaval. I needed to find a new community and one that would hopefully be full of people with similar interests.

So, where would I find another sense of community as great as the one I’d known all my life? I started with what I loved most: music. Where could I go to find other people who loved music? Record stores? Concerts? But I also wanted to find people who enjoyed writing/playing/making music. Because even though I am a socially awkward introvert, I have this deep longing to sit around with other people who play music and just, well, play music with them.

That’s when I remembered. There was a coffee shop a few minutes up the road from me that used to have an open mic night! Did it still have those open mic nights? What would I do if I went? Would I just sit there, feeling the whole situation out? Would I eventually play music!? What if people talk to me? Oh jeez, I can feel my social anxiety rising…BUT NO! I WILL GO! But let me make sure this open mic night still exists…

It did. Then I had a little freak out about going alone. I like to have a buffer person in new situations. So I badgered my mom into going with me. I met her up there and we listened to the singers. I thought, “hey, maybe I CAN do this.” This continued for weeks(and months). Going up there. Listening to the singers. Thinking maybe I CAN do this. I set a goal to play before the end of March. I was iffy on whether I’d follow through with my goal or not.

Then one week I had an…well, I don’t know what to call it. That night it was hard to ignore the absence of women onstage. There are a handful who are what I would call regulars but they were all absent that night. From what I hear, this particular open mic is less male dominated than other open mics around the area but it is still male dominated. But actually SEEING it was the impetus I needed to push me up on that stage. The next week I signed up, played the three songs I spent weeks practicing(I drag my feet sometimes) and celebrated the other women who performed that same night.

That night, I felt community again. And it keeps growing. I have met new people. I have made new friends. I keep playing my music and every time I do, I remember that night when no women took the stage. It’s what keeps me from saying, “Maybe I won’t do this.”

*if you were wondering, yes, I have kept them ALLLL. 

the world was moving and she was right there with it

Once upon a time there was a girl. A girl who loved music. She loved music so much, she wanted to turn her life into music.

The first time she turned her life into music, she learned to play “Yankee Doodle” on the piano.

Everyone said, “Listen to this girl. Music lives inside of her.” So they gave her piano lessons. The girl didn’t like the piano lessons, or the piano, all that much but it meant spending time with her really cool great aunt(who gave the lessons) so she obliged.

The second time the girl turned her life into music, she joined her middle school band. Playing the trumpet. She wanted to play the saxophone instead but found she enjoyed playing her trumpet. It was loud, she was quiet. It gave her freedom.

The third time the girl turned her life into music, her father gave her a bass guitar. She taught herself how to play and found even more freedom in the four strings. She soon found, though, she couldn’t actually sing while playing the bass. The girl wanted to sing with her music! So she went looking for another option.

The fourth time the girl turned her life into music, she snuck around and taught herself how to play her mom’s guitar. She learned how to play by looking in Nirvana songbooks. She found she could sing while playing the guitar but still had some sort of coordination problem between strumming and singing. Soon the girl saw that with practice, she could overcome this hand and vocal chords coordination problem.

Years passed. The girl grew into a woman. The woman dreamed of writing her own songs but the words would not come. She could write melodies for days, but no words ever planted themselves. Or, what words appeared were cheesy, trite, amateurish.

The woman put away her dreams of turning her life into music. The woman had a child. Then another. Years passed again. The woman found herself drowning in a sea of motherhood that had no end. The woman knew that for her life to continue, she must dream of turning her life into music again. She remembered a coffee shop with an open mic night. The woman had always been afraid of going, even if she never signed up to play her music(what music? she thought what few songs she had were rubbish).

Then one day she drove to the coffee shop. And listened. And thought, “You know, maybe I can do this.”

The fifth time the woman turned her life into music, she took the stage at that coffee shop. She was nervous, but she remembered the words, to a song, that gave her courage, “decide what to be and go be it.” So she did.