Crushing Krisis

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Music Monday: “The Wrong Year” – The Decemberists

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I can fall in love with a song because it means something specific to me.

Other times I fall in love with a song because of something it only implies – because I can find so many different meanings inside of it.

“The Wrong Year” by The Decemberists is one of the latter category. Every time I hear it I want to cry, and I’m not sure if they are tears of joy, of grief, of relief, or some other emotion entirely. There’s some unquenchable ache it creates in my chest that feels like only my tears can fill or expel it (maybe both).

The Decemberists write hyper-literate chamber-pop that’s also hyper-specific – and, often, historical. For a long time I assumed there was something obvious I loved about the lyrics to this song that I simply didn’t recollect between listens.

Diving more deeply into it, there’s very little to the lyrics. Each verse is about some ungraspable fey person – first “Grey Jane,” then an unnamed “he” who is “struck down as a summerchild,” and finally the author themselves – sleeping like a ghost all winter.

Yes, “Grey Jean” could be referring to Lady Jane Grey, the teenaged so-called “Nine Days’ Queen” of England who was swiftly dethroned and not too long after beheaded. And, in fact, “struck down as a summerchild” could even refer to her brief rule in July of 1553.

However, that’s not what has drawn me in all of this time. I didn’t know about any of it until this very moment!

So, what is it that makes “The Wrong Year” make me ache deeply in my soul every time I hear it.

First, the chord progression. It couldn’t be simpler or more common: G D(7sus4) Em Cmaj7. At first when I hear them played with this jaunty rhythm it evokes the verses of Ben Folds’ “Rockin’ The Suburbs.” However, after a few listens just now I realized that these are also the chords to something much more familiar: the first line of “Don’t Stop Believin'” raised a minor third!

In fact, the first line of this song closely echoes the first line of “Don’t Stop Believin'”! [Read more…] about Music Monday: “The Wrong Year” – The Decemberists

sounding off

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This is the first time all month I truly don’t feel like blogging. Between the acts of god and the blogiversary I am tapped out, dudes.

Chez Krisis escaped Irene with only the aforementioned broken screen door as evidence of the storm. Goes to show that all that wackiness E put us through with the several tons of dirt and subsequent weeks of hard physical labor paid off, as there was hardly even a trickle in our previously-damp basement.

I cannot believe that there are people whinging about Irene over-hype in the media. I hate local news just as much (okay: five times more) as the next person, but this was warranted. Overhyping a snow storm is one thing – it’s snow. We’re all gonna live through it and probably have a lot of fun getting bombed and using trash can lids as sleds.

Hurricanes are something else entirely. There is no fun aspect, and as a city used to “fun” apocalyptic weather patterns we needed a bracing dose of reality to make sure we’d be prepared for any eventuality. I know I personally ignore all local weather news, but at the point that the National Weather Service thinks it might be dire I pay attention and prepare.

(Did you know they are the ones largely credited for spurring passive communities into action during Katrina prep? Did you know you can input your zip code into NWS’s site Weather.gov at any time to see all the weather warnings for your area? If you hear any politician say something negative about this service, it is a sign they are a total moron.)

Did it hurt to get extra groceries and gas, clean up the stray stuff around our house, and check various batteries. Totally not, so no complaints here. Well, maybe I could have done without eating an entire loaf of Parmesan Pesto bread in the last 24-hours, but as my friend Sarah pointed out, I was simply carb-loading in preparation for feats of athletic exertion during the storm.

And, well, now I’m ready to hibernate and live off my own body fat, which I guess could have come in handy, too.

Daily Demo: Crashing

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Song #77: Crashing (live demo) [“Save As” to download from that link]
Last recorded for Blogathon 2002.

10 years ago this weekend I went to my first college party, still very much a purposefully-naive, dewy-eyed teen.

I came home having had my first vodka cranberry and my first inklings of adult romance, drifting to sleep wrapped in the blissful denouement of each.

The following Monday morning was a decidedly dreary day, and I found myself locked out my dorm room in my pajamas. Instead of heading to French 103 I sat down in our common room – five stories from the ground with a two-story windowed wall staring out into Center City Philadelphia.

I pulled out a pad and wrote “Crashing.”

Later that day, having been let back into my room, I recorded its first rough demo and transferred the lyrics to the first page of the crisp new book I bought for my collegiate songs. Up until then I wasn’t sure how I would know it was time to start using it, but I suddenly did.

“Crashing” made frequent appearances at parties and late night hangouts throughout my Freshmen year, resulting in the first complements on my voice I had ever heard. They came as a great shock to me, as they still do. Later that autumn I recorded it for my first full length demo, Other Plans – shakily, in the middle of the night, trying not to wake up my mother in the process.

As a dreary fall turned to winter I moved on to add other songs to my slim gray book – many of which I still play to this day. Yet, it was “Crashing” I would play between classes as I sat at the dinged, old upright piano in the theatre green room. I would hypnotize myself with the rolling two chord verse, learning how to play piano in increments (and maybe a little bit about what the song really meant, as well).

It took the entire intervening decade to learn how to play piano well enough to demo it that way, and it seems apropos that it wound up recorded just as shakily and late as its original demos were, respectively.

holiday tsunami

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Funkin’ Donuts update: Elise has arrived to appreciate a beet donut, as have a charming pair of older women eating the Fourth of July lunch special.

And suddenly it is hurricane-crazy rain outside. The rain is all you can see in any direction – up the road or over the mountains.

Both of us walked here from the farm, but I have the upper hand, as I am wearing swim trunks.

Unfortunately, I don’t drive, so me walking back to the farm in my swim trunks really only helps me, and it doesn’t help me to get back here with my guitar to record a “Live @ Funkin’ Donuts” video-cast.

Meanwhile, I still have a lot more Vermont milkshakes to drink. I need to get started.

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Last night’s start stop rain versus humidity gave way to gray an drizzle today, much to my delight. So much heat all week was just piling more wear and grief onto me and onto the city with every day, and today wiped everything back down to the simple scent of cement and a breeze. With the city so cool and forgiving Hillary entertained my ambitions to get out and wander. We were on second street looking for a restaurant to preface seeing Ghost World, and somehow we wound up in Pagoda.

Pagoda occupies a place in so many simultaneous sentences in my head that i can hardly discern what order i’m supposed to write them in, so please excuse the tangle.

Pagoda is nestled in a restaurant-and-Ritz-theatre district that is Old City, so there are a lot of cobbly streets and things with “independence” in their name. In front of it there is some kind of tiny square about Ben Franklin (though it is not the Ben Franklin House, which is nearby), and in it is a tiny metal model of a historic house on a tiny podium. I saw the house all of the time, because Pagoda has just recently become Pagoda… it’s claustrophic bamboo-strewn space has experienced several incarnations in my lifetime. The restaurant to occupy the building for the longest time was Waldo’s… the same upstairs balcony with a low-flying view out the two-story front face of the building but with a marbly bar extending the entire length of the restaurant from front to back with the swingy doors to the kitchen at the end and a pinball machine tucked into the back corner.

I would sit tiny in those high chairs at the bar with a can of pineapple juice over ice and a bowl of chunky round bar pretzels watching football, because i was nearly always there on a Sunday. The surroundings and everything have melted away now so much that i believe that i really didn’t know anything about the place other than the doors and the balcony and the chair and the top of the bar and the teevee. And my father behind the bar; but, he’s not something i know all that well.

Any story i could tell you about Waldo’s would just be an iteration of “and then the Eagles scored” or “and then we played pinball,” but looking back i think it was the only place i’ve ever been where i have been unequivocally happy; time has wiped away all of the pouty bored pieces of it so they are just smudged pictures around me at the bar trying to teach my dad how to play football on gameboy (“What do you mean there’s not penalties?”) or making my typical assertions (“If the Eagles lose the the Cowboys on my birthday i’m never watching a game here again, okay dad?”) or something. My last memory was from down at the end of the bar at one of those Superbowls that Denver lost, but by then we were me and my dad and his wife and i only remember it was strange being there at night on a Sunday because visitation always was over by 7pm on a Sunday so my life could get orderly again for school the next day.

Splitting time between parents was a funny thing, because weekends with my father never got very much accomplished except for stealing me away from what i was used to, and we never went anywhere because i always was back at home by sundown on a Sunday with a kiss goodbye from his rough stubble. But, i did it nonetheless, from when he lived in a tiny apartment with fish and one of the other bartenders to the wife’s adorable splitlevel house in Andora to their home in BlueBell that is anything but that to me. And, now i don’t even really call him for father’s day, because i don’t have a strong enough association with the world, but i think of him whenever i hear doo-wop on the radio because of his silly high voice that i cannot really match, or when i am distractedly ignoring the Eagles lose. Or when i see where Waldo’s used to be.

So, Hillary entertained my buried sense-associations and we ate at Pagoda and i choked back some tears. It was raining, anyhow.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5038252/