It’s 2014, my band Here Comes Everybody
has booked an album release party
at a ballroom downtown, the name of which
I can no longer remember.
It’s a big deal, our first ever release
on vinyl, which at this time, has made a
kind of hot wax comeback.
We are excited beyond imagination to
bring our keyboard oriented pop rock
to a big stage for what will surely be
a pivotal and peak performance experience.
The club double-books the date, which they
quickly and easily remedy by inviting
The Appleseed Collective, on tour to
support their new album, “Young Love,”
to simply share the bill with us.
They will play and then we will play
and all will be well. If you’re expecting
some kind of left turn in the story
replete with drama and discord and strife,
you’d be sorely mistaken. All was well, indeed.
But it was an odd pairing, to be sure, as the
Appleseed Collective plays a kind of
Americana folk music, some strange hybrid
between blue-grass, New Orleans swing, jazz,
and psychedelic pop, but somehow the
blend of their thing with our kind of art rock
thing made perfect sense. I enjoyed
them a great deal, enough to buy their
album–unless I remember incorrectly
and we traded. It’s been 12 years, after all.
And 12 years later, I put their record
back on for a new listen. Normally, it’d be
completely outside of my wheelhouse,
but the banjo, the fiddle, the mandolin,
the upright bass, and yes, the washboard,
are transportive and fun and essentially
good because these cats can really play
and sing. Taste be damned; when in the
presence of top-knotch musicianship and
creative vision, it’s very difficult not
to love the music.
Notes on the vinyl edition: Young Love, Earthwork Music, 2014, translucent multi-color swirl.
Postscript in Bullets:
- This is the 10th poem in a series of poems written while attempting to listen to every record in the collection, A to Z. I’m writing one poem for each artist in the collection, no matter how many records of said artist I have listened to. I use the word “poem” loosely. Perhaps the only poetic convention here is that these pieces are composed in lines as opposed to paragraphs.
- This is another project that will take a long-ass time to complete, if it is ever completed. I wouldn’t hold your breath. I’ve been at it for a week and I’ve not yet finished with the A’s.
- All the poems in this series will have dumb titles to make these pieces easy to distinguish from other kinds of poems: the letter of the alphabet and the name of the artist.
- The poems may or may not be a direct response to the listening, might be tangential, discursive, journal-like, biographical. I’m finding I am less satisfied with the output when I end up writing purely descriptive pieces about the music. I prefer the associative approach, even though it is less obvious that I have actually listened and not just remembered. But that’s not really the point, I think, is it? The listening is just for me. The writing, however, hopes to find an audience. So I want to try to do what’s best on the page, what’s most engaging or artful. I will try to do better. However, it is the nature of blogging, and/or publishing our shitty rough drafts as soon as they are completed, that the work is not quite as perfect as it could be. Hasn’t stopped me.
michael jarmer 