“I grew up in the days when vinyl was the only high-fidelity music delivery system. So, I had a few albums with me when I struck out from our family homestead in the suburbs of Minneapolis. I picked up a few more records along the way before a basement flood ruined my album covers and also destroyed my very uncomfortable futon. Sad about the records. Sweet relief regarding that bed. I threw a party where I provided crayons and blank white LP jackets so that guests could help me replace my album art. But my record collection was never the same. The age of digital music set in and I became a CD guy.”
“I was a working musician at that point and from time to time I found myself in record company offices. Those visits always led to an invitation for me to poke my head into a bin of promotional CDs and just grab what I wanted. Pretty soon I had rows of these silvery wonders, and I was living that compact disc lifestyle, trying not to break jewel cases, keeping my discs in wallets, and not really knowing where anything was.
During this period when my music listening was devolving into a data storage issue, I was simultaneously noticing how the process of making music was changing, too. I found myself spending less time touching a guitar, and more time moving a mouse around, pointing at shapes. Everything besides singing and playing was starting to feel complicated.
Our collective fascinations with musical styles seem to follow a cyclical pattern. A simple idea emerges suddenly from some great new DIY-style group. Once we all realize we like it, imitations appear. Expert musicians begin to crowd in and create awesome variations on the original idea. The songs become more shiny and more wonderful. And just as we all start to get sick of the original idea, some new DIY-style band appears with a shocking new sound. The world turns its head in that direction and pattern begins again. In my mind this cycle is like a sawtooth wave. A slow ramping up of awesomeness and complexity and then a sudden catastrophic drop off to the simplicity of some garagey new sound.
Back when all of us were more or less united in our musical tastes by radio, you could really see this pattern unfold. Something startling like The Beatles, the Sex Pistols, or Nirvana would appear. Everybody in the world of music would gather around this fresh, living thing and build on it. The derivative songs that arose would be amazing, but they would begin to ring hollow.
To my ears, heavy metal music had reached this mature state of hollowness when Nirvana came along. For all of its rock posturing, hair metal had become a lot like classical music. Instrumental prodigies executed wonders within a prescribed form. When “Smells Like Teen Spirit” barged into our lives, the heavy metal landscape instantly became like the surface of mars, populated by wraiths.
A long time after I stopped sleeping on basement floors, I decided to get a turntable and I bought an album. I wanted my music listening to become less like information assimilation and more like a magic journey, as it had been for me at first. An album side is a pathway through another world, and you follow it to the end with big album art coloring the periphery as you wander.
The record I picked out for my return to records was an innocent classic, maybe even a corny one. But for some reason, I wanted this to be my doorway back into the garden of vinyl delights. What I wanted to hear first on my turntable was Getz/Gilberto by Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto, the bossa nova-style record that leads off with “The Girl from Ipanema.” And when I set down the needle, heard that familiar crackle, and then that innocent groove, I felt something. The music was full of humanity and emotion.
In his liner notes for the record, Stan talks about how jazz music in the early 1960s had become abstract and difficult. “The desperate craze for innovation had been overextending itself. Jazz literature was becoming increasingly pompous, complex and chauvinistic, theorizing and analyzing itself into a knot.” He compared bossa nova’s impact on jazz to the impact caused by the kid who yelled the truth about the emperor and his new clothes.
I followed the sun of their music past beaches and waves all the way through side one, and on to the end of side two. I was stunned. My scattered mind was swept clear by the sound of just a few players, making just a few notes between the charming pops on that old black slab.” —Matt Wilson
When I Was a Writer, the full-length debut from former Trip Shakespeare leader Matt Wilson arrives in stores March 20 via Pravda Records—on vinyl.
Matt Wilson & his Orchestra Official | Facebook | Twitter
PHOTO: PAUL IRMITER
