Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Year 12

#MusicMonday: “Gravel” – Ani DiFranco

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Ani DiFranco’s “Gravel” burst from my iPod headphones as I left the house this morning and transported me back to another place and time in my life.

It was 1997, and I was a new Ani DiFranco fan. After borrowing her tapes from my friends Andrea and Nava (yes: TAPES) I snapped up two of her remarkable trio of perfect LPs, Out of Range and Dilate, and waited with bated breath for April 22nd. That was when her new, live, double-CD Living in Clip would be released.

Living in Clip contained a bevy of older songs that were new to me, but one that no one had ever heard before outside of concerts: “Gravel.” It was the third track.


(This live performance is from slightly after the LiC version, but still pretty close in feel.)

While I loved the entire double-CD, it was “Gravel” that I played again and again in wonder. This was long before YouTube and prior to Ani’s major media breakthrough with Little Plastic Castle, so I had never seen a video of her playing guitar. I was already fascinated by the sound of her songs like “Out of Range” and “Shameless.”

How did she make those sounds? I had plenty of friends who played guitar, but none of them made the sounds that came out of “Gravel.” The guitar hopped and skipped, and sometimes barked. How did she do it?

(I would learn her rapid guitar attack emerged from five Nailene brand nails duct-taped to her fingers.)

I played that record into the ground in 1997 – played it so much that both my mother and I had it memorized from front to back. We saw Ani together for the first time that summer, sitting in the rafters of The Mann Music Center, watching her open for Bob Dylan.

“Gravel” also had a more immediate effect. Less than six weeks after I first heard it I begged my mother to buy me an acoustic guitar. I think she was surprised by my sudden vehemence – while I certainly asked for things, they were usually music or books. I didn’t frequently beg for anything, aside from the ability to get online – and I quickly became a whiz at that.

She relented and bought me a guitar. Who knows what she thought I would do with it, but the night we brought it home I learned to play “Dilate” from a guitar tab (a what?), and started to slowly decipher the tab for “Gravel.” By the end of the summer I could play the song all the way through.

That’s where “Gravel” took my brain this morning – fifteen years ago, almost to the week. Half my life – a half completely changed because of my fascination with this single, amazing song.

Thank you, Mr. DiFranco.

luck in my blood

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It seems that the entire USA portion of the internet has Mega Millions on the brain today, which seems like a good excuse to take a break before I file my last two Madonna posts.

My grandmother had incredible luck. She won the lottery so many times I truly lost count. Not Mega Millions, clearly, or else I would be typing this to you on a laptop made of responsibly-mined diamonds. Daily pick three? Pick four? Scratch-off tickets? Slot machines? Yes, she could win at all of those games of absolute zero-strategy.

Pure luck. It was her sole income, other than Social Security. I think at one point it may have paid for a year of my private grade-school, but I could be remembering it wrong. Many comic books, at least.

I think a little of her luck was passed down to me. I have won or been picked for many things I’ve desired, against highly improbably odds. Notably, I won a guitar signed by my favorite band, Garbage, but that’s just one of many odds-defying wins I’ve had.

Whenever jackpots get very high, I always consider buying a few tickets. When people are surprised (given my typical anti-gambling stance), I explain to them that I stand a much better chance of winning than they do, because I have luck in my blood.

12 Awesome Madonna Songs You’ve Never Heard

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Welcome to Day 2 of my personal celebration of Madonna’s twelfth studio album, MDNA! I’ve been listening to it non-stop since yesterday morning, and some early favorites are beginning to emerge … but I’ll get to that later.

For all of her indelible hit singles, it’s easy to forget that Madonna knows how to deliver a stellar deep cut. Forget the hits. Forget the late-released low-charting singles. These are twelve Madonna songs you could only know if you play her albums front to back, and they’re all good.

12. Sooner or Later from I’m Breathless

Okay, this one is cheating a little bit – because it won a freaking Oscar. Now, that’s not an Oscar for Madonna – the Best Original Song award is for the songwriter, not the performer. Thus, Stephen Sondheim took home that naked golden idol in 1991. Yet, Madonna wound up with the song – a truly award-worthy torch song that she sings the hell out of. She delivers such a credible cabaret imitation that it stops being an imitation and starts being reality. (However, when it comes to Oscar, the beautiful “What Can You Loose” duet with Mandy Patinkin might have got my vote instead.)

11. Spanish Eyes from Like a Prayer

So, you like “La Isla Bonita,” huh? Did you know Madonna has another pseudo-Latin tune played on even more organic instruments, with a super-raw, almost screamed vocal performance? Sounds like something from American Life, you say? Nay – it’s the closer from “Like a Prayer.” It’s not one of her best songs ever, but it’s a wonderful glimpse at Madonna’s version of writing a follow-up single, which is disappearing entirely into the genre she previously imitated.

10. Nobody Knows Me from American Life

Madonna disappears inside of the machine on this American Life album cut that buries her deep beneath throbbing synthesizers and enough auto-tune to make Cher’s “Believe” blush. It comes off like an over-processed remix of itself, which cleverly distracts you from the brutal lyrics, like “But why should I care what the world thinks of me? Won’t let a stranger give me a social disease.” Madonna dressed this up with more beats and stunner choreography on the Reinvention Tour, but I still prefer the sucker punch of the stark album version.

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Sunday Night Writers’ Club

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I am now a member of a highly-exclusive, secret society with strict qualifications for its members.

It’s a Writers’ Club. You know, like a Book Club, only we’re reading each others’ books (and short stories, and poems, etc).

As with many of the intriguing developments in my life over the past two years, my recruitment began innocently enough with a series of tweets to Britt and Eric Smith. They had been pulling all-day writing sessions in a local coffee shop and posting photos of their back-to-back laptops accompanied by mucho caffeine. I commented a few times on how that would be an altogether fabulous idea to get me back into gear in editing my 2010 NaNoWriMo novel.

The tattered, marked-up, hard copy of my novel.

That is when the mysterious invitation appeared in my inbox. No location, no details. Just a question – would I be interested in joining the Writer’s Club?

(Luckily, the first rule of Writers’ Club is not that you do not talk about Writers’ Club. Those sorts of clubs are not ones where I particularly flourish as a member.)

I nervously accepted the invitation and then spent about two solid weeks freaking out about other people reading my novel. Not just any other people. Writers. People who take plot and characterization seriously. Some of them have degrees in English.

Luckily, I was at least slightly prepared for their onslaught of literate opinions, but that preparation hadn’t been an easy process.

I spent the early part of 2011 reading and re-reading my novel, not really knowing what to do what to do next. The book had a lot of good bits, but I knew it wasn’t a very good book yet. It was like the skeletal structure of a very handsome person. No one calls a skeleton handsome, but  good bones are a great start.

I just needed muscles and flesh to cover them up with.

I heeded the advice of many authors more experienced than I – I set the book aside for almost a whole year. Then, a year after I penned its first words, I printed the entire thing out on paper and began a serious edit pass.

Why paper? Because, any proofreader worth their salt will tell you they make better edits with a pencil in hand. Also, it encouraged me to read non-sequentially. Taking on each chapter as an individual entity meant I attacked the weak spots much harder than if I had read them in sequence.

Flash forward to two weeks ago. I had a fist-full of tattered pages that have been with me on every commute to work, every visit to the gym – even on the plane to Vegas. Once I was past my authorial nervous breakdown, the time had come to take all those painstakingly scribbled paper edits and convert them into something cohesive and readable.

How did my first top secret meeting go? Just fine (after I first got drunk and confessed to Eric how terrified I was). It turns out, other people do find my book interesting. Even people with English degrees. They also find all the awkward bits I find awkward to be awkward. They also find some fun turns of language and plot that I didn’t even intend, but that make perfect sense.

I am much less nervous about mailing the chapters for my second engagement with the club. Now the problem isn’t fear of sharing – it’s not being sure when I’ve edited enough.

That and the randomly failing keys on my laptop, but that’s a story for another day.

#MusicMonday: “Shores of California” – Dresden Dolls

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Three years ago, Amanda Palmer was one of the first people to engage with me on Twitter – and, I’m not just talking famous people. People in general.

I don’t always love Amanda’s solo ukele-based efforts as much as the songs from her revelatory punk-cabaret two-piece Dresden Dolls, but I continue to follow her becasue she is one of the most honest and open full-time rock stars on the internet. She contends 24/7 with the trials and concerns I encounter only in rehearsal (four days of our seven, last week).

On Friday, Amanda was tweeting about recording a new record with a new band, and in the stream of messages this one stuck out…

… and not just because it involved one of my top five tunes by Amanda…

It stuck out because, as with many things Amanda shares, it expressed something I have felt about music but haven’t ever really articulated.

Historically, Arcati Crisis learns songs at a rate of about four a year. Since Gina and I each write on our own, that means we’re learning just two of my tunes – yet, I write anywhere from six to twenty songs in a year.

As a result, my perspective on song-picking for AC is that every one of my choices must be lead-single quality. I don’t like subtle picks. Every new song of mine that we choose has to be awesome enough to obliterate the memory of all prior songs.

A few years ago, Gina picked “Unengaged” from my available songs. It’s a song I love. It’s complex, but catchy. It’s challenging to play and sing, but not impossible. It seemed like a good pick.

It lasted about two rehearsals. The problem wasn’t the complexity … it was the emotion. “Unengaged” is about the period where I had decided I was going to propose to E but hadn’t yet gone through with it. It’s a hard type of energy to connect with – happy, but uncertain if that’s the right thing to be – and because of the delicacy of the vocal, I need to nail the emotion behind it to get it right.

I realized quickly that it was destined to be a “live unfavorite.” I already loved what Gina was doing with it, but I knew it would fall to the bottom of my list as we chose setlists because I wouldn’t always want to summon the emotions to sing it. And, with only two songs to choose each year, what would be the point of picking something if I didn’t want to play it?

(I did the same thing a year later with “Tattooed,” at which point Gina and I agreed that songs specifically about E are generally not the best choice as Arcati Crisis songs, exactly for the reason that they can become live unfavorites for me as some new emotion between E and I supersedes the older one in the song.)

That’s not to say that I don’t sometimes select emotionally hard-to-deliver songs for AC. “Love Me Not,” “Dumbest Thing I Could Do,” and “End With Me” can all be hard to get emotionally right and incredibly draining when I do. I was ready to fall on the ground after delivering a searing “End With Me” at our holiday revue, and had to spend the next thirty minutes avoiding conversation with other guest. Yet, those songs simply aren’t personal the way songs about E are. I get to play a character.

When they were together, the Dresden Dolls learned songs at a much faster rate than 4 per year, so Amanda could afford to bring a song to the band that might not become a live staple. It was still worth hearing the band version, and worth recording. Fans still love it. It spawned a hilarious music video. It’s just hard for her to play.

This week Gina and I are picking our next pair of songs to learn, having already learned a pair in January. That means we’ll have hit our 4-song quota by April. Will this be the year we learn an entire album’s worth of new music in twelve months? If it is, I wonder if I will eventually tap a live unfavorite as one of my choices.