Music That Meant Something to Me (well, at least it did seven years ago)

A Letter from 2015

Hey!

November’s been a bit of a downer this year, but I recently remembered this letter I wrote to my supervisor seven years ago after 1) reading Brian Hodge’ excellent short story, Insanity among the Penguins - where he references NIN’ bootlegged pretend snuff film which soundtracked my second kiss and deserve its own more detailed post in the future and 2) talking with my buddy David, I learned he didn’t seem to remember the hidden meaning I remembered him telling me about one my favorite songs of his! And the song of his I chose for this playlist has higher stakes than I realized, Martha Ann being his grandmother’s name and not some random girl he was talking to at a bar (which had been my prior mistaken assumption!)

Anyhow, these aren’t the songs I would choose today (perhaps a task for another future post!), I currently doubt I would include the George MacDonald quote today (because I’m not quite sure I completely understand it now and also am not quite sure it’s saying what I thought it did then), but the songs still rock and I think the commentary still (mostly) stands. 

Enjoy.

A Listen Into the Heart of Wil (2015)

1. Maybellene – Chuck Berry

2. Get Me – Dinosaur Jr.

4. The World at Large – Modest Mouse

5. John Wayne Gacy, Jr. – Sufjan Stevens

6. The Start of Something - Voxtrot

7. We Used to Vacation – Cold War Kids

8. Video – Aimee Mann

9. Lives – Modest Mouse

10. Martha Ann – David Karsten Daniels

11. Rise Up With Fists!! – Jenny Lewis

12. My List – The Killers

13. 1 2 3 4 – Feist

14. Brand New Colony – The Postal Service

15. Everlasting Arms – Vampire Weekend

16. Exitlude – The Killers

17. Last – Nine Inch Nails

18. Life’s a Happy Song – The Muppets (and more)

Preface of Sorts

A couple weeks ago you asked how I found the music that means so much to me. In response, I have made this Mix CD and memoirish track commentary out of a desire to share good music and a little something about myself. In my younger years, I dreamed of writing an autobiography structured as short biographies on people I knew throughout my life. The idea was that you learn more about someone through how they describe others than how they describe themselves. What traits do they praise? What characteristics do they criticize? Wouldn’t learning about what someone loved in others tell you more about that person than any anecdotes from a personal “I” perspective? I hope my commentary on these tracks serves a similar identity unveiling. To that end, I plan to be both honest and backspace-free. I hope the resulting descriptions end up more illuminating than unbearable.

Wil Dalton, May 7th, 2015

Maybellene – Chuck Berry

The first album I ever owned was Chuck Berry’s Golden Hits. Given as a Christmas gift when I was in 5th or 6th grade with the inscription “Wil B. Good” on the inner paper sleeve. My dad played music all the time – on family drives, when grilling, polishing his shoes, while reading one of his short story magazines (either Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction or Ellery Queen’s Mystery Stories). In 7th grade, around the time when my armpits began to sting and itch and it mattered what brand of shoes you wore, the Speech teacher assigned a lip-synch performance. Each of us had to select and perform two songs of our choice – an oldies tune and a modern tune. I remember easily knowing which oldie song I’d use (Johnny B. Goode). But I had no idea which contemporary tune to use. So as not to be embarrassed, I started listening to the Top 40 radio. In the end, it didn’t matter, I never got a chance to lip-sync in front of the class.  On the day the performances were scheduled, someone had unplugged the classroom clock and snapped one of the pins that goes into the outlet, but then bent it back so it didn’t look broke, and when an unsuspecting student (or maybe the student that had sabotaged the cord), plugged it back in, there was a giant spark and black smoke, we were all rushed into the hall, and anyhow, pretty much disrupted that class. Then that summer, a friend gave me my first cassette for my birthday, Metallica’s Black Album. (And so began my audio collection).

Chuck Berry continues to fascinate me and I hope I can see him play live in St. Louis before he dies. I saw him and his famous duck walk once at a music festival hosted by the local oldies FM station. Little Richard and the Righteous Brothers played as well. Later, in a Rolling Stone article, I read how his fingers are unnaturally large, which is why he played the guitar the way he did. I love the concept of something beautiful arising out of a setback, which is sort of a theme of rock and roll to me, or of life in general, I guess. In the article, Chuck Berry describes how he combined country and western guitar licks with rhythm and blues to appeal to both a white and black audience, and in doing so, created rock and roll. I read it while in graduate school, and thought it would make a great diversityesque bulletin board, except later in his life, Berry also had a scandal concerning cameras in the ladies’ restroom of his restaurant. Which ties into another theme of life, and that is… sheesh, this is too long an explanation, it could easily turn into a never ending meditation as long as the song is on repeat, so repeat off, but now at least, you have an idea of what you’re getting into with these track notes, consider this my PARENTAL ADVISORY sticker, proceed with caution, challenge by choice, nonetheless I hope you enjoy.

(P.S. I’m listening to this mix as I type up these notes, if you hadn’t suspected already), now on to the next track!

Get Me – Dinosaur Jr.

On our way to camping trips, my Boy Scout patrol would pass around cassettes in the van. You wanted to be the revealer of a cool band, that the others hadn’t heard of yet. Nirvana had changed the landscape of rock music and there was this sense that there was a whole world of these amazing unheard of bands out there. The Scoutmaster’s son lived in a neighborhood with older kids, so he typically had his ears into the best stuff none of us had yet heard. Which is how I discovered Dinosaur, Jr. – Oh, those guitar solos! I read once that J. Mascis, the vocalist/guitarist/drummer/bassist for this album hardly talked, that he could only express himself through his guitar. I don’t really believe it, my skeptical heart assumes that story is a self-made myth to elevate his music, nonetheless, it’d make a funny SNL-type sketch skit, of a kid with all these stressful events occurring and unable to respond unless he had a guitar, and maybe a string breaks, maybe a loud train passes, he gets more bad news, and so on - the humor would be in the execution of the concept and then in the introduction of an increasing variety of thwarting elements.

A sad post note, at a nearby junior high, this kid ran away from home and while skipping that day of school, he was hit by a car. His favorite band had been Dinosaur, Jr., so I heard the school he attended played the band over the announcement speakers in between classes in memoriam for him, which seemed to me at the time a pretty cool thing for the principal to do.

(P.S.S. You see what I’m doing here, detailing joy and sorrow, personal and cosmic, trying to capture the tension of opposing forces to mirror and illuminate the themes of this music, the themes of life?)

The World at Large – Modest Mouse

Jump ahead several years and I’m out of college, thinking that the music I’m going to like for the rest of my life will be the music I listened to in college because I didn’t like to listen to the radio (especially when I owned so many amazing CDs!) I’m working at a camp for kids with life-threatening illnesses, trying to convince Jess we should be more than friends, and another camp counselor plays this song and the kindergarten kids we were teaching how to make bead necklaces danced and swayed and the counselor said, “I can’t believe these kids love Modest Mouse so much,” and I said, “Modest who?” and “Play the next song,” and she looked at me like I was crazy, because as I learned later, they got curse words, and a dour outlook, but they became one of my favorite bands. I discovered their other albums through my AmeriCorps NCCC team and remembered someone had once compared my music to theirs, but I never saw it. Anyhow, this song was my entry point for them.

John Wayne Gacy, Jr. – Sufjan Stevens

In Peace Corps, a fellow friend gave me an mp3 CD of music he thought I would like and Sufjan Stevens was on it. This is absolutely one of my favorite songs; it’s macabre and moving and super-Christian, in my opinion. But to explain why, it might be easier to quote from two of my mental mentors, C.S. Lewis and Fyodor Dostoevsky. From Lewis, from the first page of the A Mind Awake anthology, a copy of which sits on my office shelf, for easy perusing if I am overwhelmed and need to refocus, this passage which moves me, which haunts me:

“Of each creature we can say, ‘This also is Thou: neither is this Thou.’

Simple faith leaps to this with astonishing ease. I once talked to a continental pastor who had seen Hitler, and had, by all human standards, good cause to hate him. ‘What did he look like?’ I asked. ‘Like all men,’ he replied. ‘That is, like Christ.’

And a repeated idea throughout Dosteoskvy’s The Brothers Karamazov:

“Guilty for everything by everyone to everybody.”

Which, if you haven’t read the novel, its plot and characters both embrace and reject the concept. As I understand it, it’s the idea of pay it forward, but carried out to its logical conclusion. If I’m nice to you, then maybe you’ll be nice to someone else, who will be nice to somebody else, etc. So your one kind action exponentially grows. Yet… if we are all connected, what evil might have been prevented, if only I had shown more kindness, more love to others? But who could live under that burden? Is the weight of the world really resting upon each and every individual in it? I wonder if I have ever properly considered the question, but it’s always there in my undistracted moments (of which there are not many lately, thank you Netflix!)

Anyhow, knowing how influenced I am by those two ideas, hopefully my love for the Sufjan Stevens song about a serial killer that ends with the lines, "And in my best behavior / I am really just like him / Look beneath the floor boards / For the secrets I have hid,”  is more understandable.

The Start of Something - Voxtrot

When I lived in Austin, Texas the first time, I was listening to a CD of my friend David Karsten Daniels (represented later on this mix) and a colleague listened and said, hey you might also like these guys, and she loaned me a Voxtrot CD. They were local Austin musicians, though I never saw them perform. A trick in writing memorable lines in literature, or clever lyrics is to say a common phrase wrong. You hear it here before the bridge when he sings, “I’m still under you,” instead of the more common, “I’m not over you.” This song ends up on a lot of my mix-tapes, since it’s fun and very probably unknown by most people outside of Austin.

We Used to Vacation – Cold War Kids

This track was given me by my friend Sophia, who was on my AmeriCorps NCCC team and said she expected me to act like a dad, even though I was just a year older than her, in that I helped her and other teammates resolve their conflicts and exhorted them to be better. We stayed friends after AmeriCorps, she values my opinion of her much more than I value my opinion of anyone. She is my connection to New York City and the church there I would go to if I lived there and to which I introduced her. Anyhow, I love this line -“This will all blow over in time…” - Sigh, this is a beautiful song about addiction. He sings about alcohol. I resonate regarding my tendency to procrastinate, easily and frequently, and how easy it is to say, ‘in time, I’ll be who I want, in time, I’ll quit doing this,’ but you end up saying that you’ll quit for longer than you’d lived before you started what you now want to stop.

Video – Aimee Mann

Back in high school, we would stop at a couple different Used CD Stores to browse the racks for albums we didn’t have, or singles or imports of our favorite bands. I liked to buy cheap soundtrack or label samplers, always in search of a new sound that I could share with my friends; we were each of us explorers on the continent of rock. On a Geffen music sampler, I discovered Aimee Mann but didn’t seek out her albums until the Paul Thomas Anderson movie, Magnolia. Have you seen it? I remember seeing it the same weekend that I read The Great Gatsby for the first time. Both deal with the idea that the past isn’t past and I think I was struggling with some stuff in my own past at the time – at any rate – her music plays a huge role in the film, Magnolia. Not this song. Another one, about 'it not stopping until you give up.' But this song I like better because of the way she sings, “baby, baby…”

Lives – Modest Mouse

Another of my absolute favorite songs and the heart of this playlist. I love its stark observations, how downer it starts, then abruptly fights the sad thoughts with declarations of life affirmations, and then returns to resigned sadness. The line “No one really knows the ones they love, if you knew everything they thought about you’d wish that they’d just shut up,” reminds me of another C.S. Lewis quote, from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Lucy looks into a mirror and magically sees one of her good friends mocking her to an older girl. Aslan shows up and corrects her, he says:

"Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way. And you have misjudged your friend. She is weak, but she loves you. She was afraid of the older girl and said what she does not mean."

Anyhow, I like this song a lot. And it is hard to remember we just get one life.

Martha Ann – David Karsten Daniels

David was in my freshman orientation camp cabin group. He introduced himself by saying his band had just released an album and I remember thinking, ‘who is this loser who claims he's in a band?’ And then we became friends. And then I heard him play with his band at some University events. Then at local bars (which to hear music, was the only time I’d go to a bar back then). And he became one of my favorite artists. But he was also a good friend. So he’s got a song about Jesus and the Devil, which sounds like it’s about knowing good from evil, and it is, but I know it was inspired by his struggle regarding whether he should propose (or not!) to his girlfriend at the time (his wife now!) I think knowing the person who wrote the music makes the music better, makes me enjoy it more. Another theme/truth of life, no doubt!

Rise Up With Fists!! – Jenny Lewis

I didn’t get on Facebook until we were in Bulgaria, and it was because we discovered that everyone knew another Peace Corps couple had gotten engaged weeks before we did because they had announced their engagement through a Facebook posting. Up until then, Jess and I viewed Facebook skeptically, not having it while we were in college, and therefore not really seeing the point. But we embraced it to keep in contact with our Bulgarian friends and, you know, be normal, healthy, electronically engaged members of society. Another volunteer had posted a video of this song, and I really liked it and got it and sought out more Jenny Lewis tracks.

My List – The Killers

Another band introduced to me during my AmeriCorps days. Not really “indie” but my favorite is their underrated second album. I love the slow build of this jam and how it really opens up, epic stadium style at the end. I’m not sure if this was the intention, but the line, “Don’t give the ghost up / just clench your fist / You should have known by now / you were on my list,” reads like God calming my storming doubts. A kind of, “I know your real name and don’t worry, someday you will, too,” tune.

This time, the corresponding C.S. Lewis quote is actually C.S. Lewis quoting his mental mentor, George MacDonald. This quote is maybe longer than it needs to be, MacDonald was not the wordsmith Lewis was, but it’s what I hear when I hear this song:

[ 15 ] The White Stone (Revelations 2:17)

The giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication of what God thinks about the man to the man. It is the divine judgment, the solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the "Come, thou blessed," spoken to the individual. . . . The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man's own symbol -his soul's picture, in a word- the sign which belongs to him and to no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is. ... It is only when the man has become his name that God gives him the stone with the name upon it, for then first can he understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection, the completeness, that determines the name: and God foresees that from the first because He made it so: but the tree of the soul, before its blossom comes, cannot understand what blossom it is to bear and could not know what the word meant, which, in representing its own unarrived completeness, named itself. Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name. God's name for a man must be the expression of His own idea of the man, that being whom He had in His thought when he began to make the child, and whom He kept in His thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success-to say "In thee also I am well pleased."

Synthesize this sentiment with Sartre’ “existence precedes essence,” and Renan(?)’s “the “I” is another (or fiction),” and you maybe begin to understand that while pragmatically I see value in all our identity exercises during training, I’m skeptical anyone’s (definitely my own) confidence in who they are is accurate. 

1 2 3 4 – Feist

This song is here to let you know that sometimes I just hear a tune on a commercial and I like it.

Brand New Colony – The Postal Service

Another band introduced to me through my AmeriCorps NCCC team. Also, fun fact – the female back-up vocals are the same Jenny Lewis who sings on Rise Up With Fists!! (from this mixtape).

Everlasting Arms – Vampire Weekend

Vampire Weekend came to Indiana University while I was there, but I didn’t like the few songs of theirs that I had heard from them then. Later, while visiting Sufjan Stevens’ blog, he posted a video for their new (at the time) song, Ya-Hey, and commented, “what vampires sing about when they sing about God.” Their album from which it came, Modern Vampires of the City, is amazing. This is my favorite song off of that album, I think it is adapted from a monk’s prayer.

Exitlude – The Killers

Final song for the playlist. When I hear this, I envision a short story that I’ve yet to write, of a bitter son coming to visit his distant father. He brings along his girlfriend, who supports him, but doesn’t know what it is that makes the son so angry. And they’re waiting in the living area of a giant mansion, and the girlfriend is surprised because the son doesn’t have the wealth she sees at his father’s house, and a servant comes out to say that the father is running late, can he get the son anything? And the son gets mad, and stands and says let’s go to his girlfriend, and the servant nods, understanding, but then begins to sing this song, and then more servants come in, and it’s like something out of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, where the entire estate of the absent father is singing to the angry son, “it was good to have you with us, even if it was just for the day…” and the more people that come to sing him farewell, the angrier the son gets that his father isn’t there…

Why that story? Not quite sure, it’s just what I imagine when listening to this song. Not so long ago, I set about writing stories to songs and this was an idea for this one, but I never got around to writing it.

Hold on a second, I just heard the toilet flush, but I’m the only one here! That’s weird, right? I’ll be right back, going to check it out.

Last – Nine Inch Nails

What is this shit? It’s not chronological. There doesn’t appear to be an ordered theme outside of songs he enjoys. Tension and opposing forces is not a theme. It’s not rock. It’s just confusion. Give me anger! Give me certitude! Give me exacting definity! Here, he appears to have skipped this one, which happens to be the most listened to track in his iTunes library. Let me add it for you. Seems to be a fitting close…zxfcvjmklzesdfxdcv x

Life’s a Happy Song – The Muppets (and more)

I’m back. That was weird.

I had to knock out a doppelganger. He looked just like me, except the blood blister on the top of my left ear was on the top of his right ear. When I was an undergraduate, I used to flex the little muscles I had in front of the mirror and one time my reflection gave me the angriest, meanest, intense I’m-going-to-hurt-you look I’d ever seen! So I covered my mirror, quit combing my hair, and avoided my reflection for a little over a year. I knew it was my imagination all along, but it took me a while to actually behave like I believed – that my reflection was me, not some fantasy story evil version of me looking to cross through the looking glass.

Except, that seems to be what just happened! When I went into the restroom I had no reflection! Then my doppelganger hopped out from behind the shower curtain and hit me over the head with a shampoo bottle. Looks like while I was unconscious he added a Nine Inch Nails song to this playlist. I once wrote a story with this song on repeat, it was a technique I heard (from Chuck Palahniuk) about how to keep the tone of your story consistent. It’s a good song. I wrote a good, loud story listening to it. But it’s more of a ‘good for a jogging playlist,’ not really a ‘clean the house’ or ‘driving’ playlist.

Nine Inch Nails is a band whose albums I buy without having needing to hear the songs, I just know I’ll like them. Same with Modest Mouse. Sufjan Stevens. Dinosaur, Jr. Radiohead (not on this playlist). All the other bands, I’m probably going to want to hear before I buy. But those bands I listed, I’m never disappointed with the purchase. Nine Inch Nails, whose very name is somewhat blasphemous (especially considering the mystical reflections I placed on several of these tracks), has soundtracked a lot of my memories. I once sort-of dated a self-proclaimed punk-rock witch, who invited me over to a party that when I arrived I discovered was just me and her and Nine Inch Nails music videos played too loud on the television of her mom’s house, and the videos were disturbing, and she wanted to kiss me (and I was young enough that I was happy to kiss regardless of the soundtrack), but it was a strange experience, when you’re raised to expect to hear cartoon lobsters singing “kiss the girl,” under romantic moonlight to have one of the first kisses of your life (she was my second kiss, I think) come amidst a cacophony of “GOD IS A LIAR” or “GOD IS DEAD” shouting and images of torture and mud and violence, but still I remember enjoying the kiss, up until her mom came home and pushed her quadriplegic brother into the living room where we were, yelled at my sort-of girlfriend to help her bring in the groceries, went back outside, leaving the brother in his wheelchair in the corner, the music still blaring, and this girl leans over to keep kissing me, and her mom comes back in and starts screaming and cursing some more, and no one turns off the music, and I realize ‘this is ridiculous, no kiss is worth this,” and awkwardly say goodbye and go home. The punk-rock witch found someone else to kiss shortly after that, and my best friend at the time liked to say her name as we walked down the hall, because I believed her magic powers were such that she would show up if her name was spoken, which wasn’t so much superstition, but simple fact, in that every time her name was spoken after we had quit sort-of dating, she did show up beside us, walking down the hall and grinning sort-of sinister.

Trent Reznor (who is Nine Inch Nails) is good friends with David Fincher and soundtracked his movies - Gone Girl, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and The Social Network. David Fincher directed the film adaptation of Fight Club, which led me to the writings of Chuck Palahniuk, of whose influence on my understanding of writing techniques you already know. Rumor has it that David Fincher has been toying with the idea of a Fight Club musical, with Trent Reznor writing the music. Which sounds like just enough of a trainwreck that I can’t wait for it to happen.

At any rate, I can’t end this playlist on the song ‘Last’ by Nine Inch Nails.

So let me close with the song I listen to when I need a pick me up. Something catchy, something uplifting. I heard this song when I saw one of the more recent Muppet movies, with Jason Segel and Amy Adams. The movie was okay, this song is amazing. It’s also on my ‘good for jogging playlist.’

Of all my absolute favorite songs, it may be my absolutely absolute favorite.

Anyhow, hope you enjoyed this! I hope, like life, it got weird, but not too weird.

Hope you found some new favorite artists!

Let me know if you want more of any of this music.

Thanks for all you do and best of luck for now and forever!

5/13/2015