Andy Chase

Tom Waits' Take it With Me is simultaneously the prettiest and most haunting love song I think I've ever heard, and it only gets moreso every time I listen to it. Specifically, the recording on Mule Variations.

I don't know how it was accomplished, but the piano in that recording sounds dusty. There's no other way I can think of to describe it. You can hear the dust motes, and I think it's a big part of why the track has such a grip on me.

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• tomwaits

The iLife applications have to be some of the most underused ones on my computer… Once I can figure out a way to easily get my photos out of iPhoto and into Movable Type I’ll be using iPhoto a lot more, but the thing that’s going to get me to drop $49 on the new iLife suite next week is GarageBand.I’ve been drinking the Apple kool-aid pretty much since I heard what OS X was all about a few years ago.

it’s a good thing that about 99% of the stuff coming out nowadays is utter crap, because otherwise I could never hope to keep on top of new music worth buying.I’ve been trying to break myself out of my musical heavy rotation rut over the last few days; rather than grabbing a stack of my more recently purchased CDs to bring to work (from, say, the last year or two) I’ve grabbed lots of my older ones, going all the way back to when I started buying compact discs around 1990.

Not surprisingly, I listened to a lot of the stuff and thought to myself,

“Damn, I forgot what a good album this is!”

On the heels of which I think

“Damn, I have to get the rest of their recordings!”

Then, in a lot of cases, I realize just how old some of my most recent recordings of an artist are.

Case in point, Primus. Right now I’m listening to my most recent Primus CD, Pork Soda. It was released nearly NINE YEARS AGO. Holy crap! And yet I still think of it as “the new Primus album”. How did I get so far behind? I think what happened was my being a starving college student combined with a shift in taste away from some of the stranger stuff I took such pride in listening in high school and my freshman year of college.

Actually, now that I think about it I know exactly what that shift was: I discovered Sugar, who to this day remains just about my favorite band of all time. (And finally, after a looooong three and a half-year wait, there are two Bob Mould albums on the way!)

At the time Tales From the Punchbowl came out, what I heard of the album didn’t grab me, for whatever reason. A few years later when I heard Tim Alexander had left the band, I sort of wrote them off, much to my own discredit. More recently I’ve heard some of the newer stuff with Brain on drums, and it left me wanting more… more, dammit!

Going back even further, there are so many other artists whose back catalogs I need to get; Deep Purple, Kiss (I’m doing fairly well there, although I would like to have all of the recently remastered versions), Zappa, The Beatles, Dave Brubeck Quartet, etc, etc… it’s a good thing that about 99% of the stuff coming out nowadays is utter crap, because otherwise I could never hope to keep on top of new music worth buying. It’s all I can do to keep on top of old music worth buying.

Music does this to me all the time.Time for a rambling non sequitur before bed.

Sometime around 1989 or 1990 (I suspect it was the summer of '89, between ninth and tenth grade), I picked up an LP - (a Vinyl LP, can you believe record stores still sold vinyl as late as 1989?) Jazz From Hell, by Frank Zappa.

My brother, who became a Zappa fanatic at Berklee, quickly made a convert out of me. He made me quite a few tapes of Zappa's stuff from the 70's through the early 80's, and they've received so much play over the years that I suspect the magnetic particles are getting worn away from the base.

I had rented Video From Hell, and found the Synclavier tidbits interesting, especially the pseudo-video for G-Spot Tornado.

By the end of the 80's I wanted to vomit from the overuse of shitty synthesizers in much of the music of that decade, and had developed a general aversion to all things synthesized, especially percussion. (Hey, my brother's a drummer... what do you expect?)

But a synthesizer like the Synclavier in the hands of Frank Zappa... my God. G-Spot Tornado fairly rocked! There was also concert footage of St. Etienne, the only track on the album performed by humans. When I ran across a copy of Jazz From Hell at the Greendale Mall Record Town, I decided to buy it.

I wasn't quite prepared for the rest of the album, which gets into some extremely complex and abstract territory, and I never listened to it a whole lot... but the first track, Night School is probably the most accessible tune. It's an instrumental (like the rest of the tracks on the album), and it's a great example of what a great composer Zappa was. I've always found it to be a little bit sad, and in the years since Frank Zappa's death it's gotten that much more poignant.

Not too long ago I hunted down an MP3 of Night School (Hey, I own the LP - I count that as fair use) and I've been listening to it fairly often. Tonight, staying up too late, my wife and all the critters already asleep, it really got to me.

When we were working in a special effects shop after moving out here in 1996, there was hardly a day that went by that I wouldn't think to myself or say out loud, "If you had told the miserable sixth grader I was 10 years ago that I'd be working on costumes for Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5, I would never have believed you!" As the novelty of working in effects wore off and my dislike of L.A. grew, I fell out of that pattern of thought. As I seem to keep saying lately, I've been trying to stop dwelling on the past and get on with things.

But listening to that song tonight, I thought to myself "If you had told me Frank Zappa would be dead, and I'd be married and living on the other side of the continent away from my family and old friends when I start listening to this album again, I wouldn't have believed you!" Bittersweet. Being married certainly doesn't make me sad, but I hate feeling so disconnected from the past sometimes. Music does this to me all the time.

I think I need to go to bed.

Driven to the brink of madness by the muzak filtering through my closed office door at work, it occurred to me for the first time to see if the Muzak company has a web site.

They do, and (not surprisingly) it’s at Muzak.com. I don’t know why I find this amusing… probably because for all the talk they have on their site about “the power of music” and their providing music for millions of people everyday, they don’t mention the part about stripping it of its heart and soul and making it as plastic as the products on the shelves of the stores it’s playing in.

Seriously, I don’t know if they use Muzak™ brand muzak where I work, but one day I actually heard a flutey instrumental of the Foo Fighters’ song ‘Big Me’. Now, this isn’t one of the Foo Fighters’ heavier songs by a long shot, but it doesn’t deserve to be lobotomized like that. Nothing does, really.