And we’re done!

Unbest 2k12 has come to an end. Huge thank-yous to everyone who contributed and everyone who followed along at home. We’re going into hiding for a little while, but we’ll be back for the end of 2013 and better than ever (hopefully). <3!

Lindsay Zoladz on Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” (1984)(Rdio, Spotify, iTunes)In my 2012, there wasn&#8217;t an Independence Day. You lose a day when you fly over the Atlantic, and early on the morning of July 4, at an hour when nobody barbecues and the sky is too bright for fireworks, I got on a plane to Denmark. On long international flights, at a distance of 30,000 feet, the concepts that usually order our lives—clocks, mealtimes, holidays—have a way of first becoming abstract, and then seeming downright absurd. So I cannot even pinpoint exactly where I was (above Iceland seems as good a guess as any) the precise moment that the most quintessentially American holiday turned to a metaphysical speck and then quietly disappeared.I almost did not get on a plane to Denmark, because up until two days before my flight, I didn&#8217;t have a passport. Only about three weeks before, I had been assigned to cover the Roskilde Festival, which is in a town about 20 miles outside of Copenhagen. The fact that I didn&#8217;t have a passport when I got this assignment was something I conveniently kept from my editor and that he probably still did not know until now (hi Mark!). But when you are a freelance writer and it’s the dead of summer so you&#8217;re kind of bored and the worst month in the swampland city you live in is fast approaching and you&#8217;ve never been to Europe and someone asks you if you&#8217;d like to go to a festival where Bjork and Bruce Springsteen are headlining, you say yes. Knowing full well how difficult it will be to get a passport in three weeks because you have lived in our nation&#8217;s capital of red tape and long lines and bureaucracy for seven years now, you say yes, you will find a way to make it work.The people at the passport agency did not believe I was who I said I was. Not at first. They flagged my paperwork and made me come back on three different, excruciating, nails-bitten-to-the-nubs occasions. Later I found out why: although I’d been living in DC for seven years, I’d only very recently gotten rid of my New Jersey drivers license. This is suspicious, in the eyes of the National Passport Agency. It was actually just lazy, I tried to explain to the man behind the fogged up plastic window. But what I couldn&#8217;t quite explain to him was it also might have also been something else. I think that part of me felt like hanging onto my New Jersey license kept me grounded, connected to the place I&#8217;d spent the first 18 years of my life, proof that I was not entirely what I feared people from my hometown thought I’d turned out to be: that girl who flees to the big city first chance she gets (and to be a writer, of all things), globs a coating of faux sophistication over her past and forgets all about where she came from. But I wasn’t that girl, you see. Because last year I’d also changed my phone number, and my provider asked if I&#8217;d like a 202 area code. &#8220;Actually,&#8221; I asked, &#8220;Is it possible for me to keep the 856?&#8221;I had been out of the country once before: Canada, when I was 18, on a trip that whose main cultural objective was to go to travel to a mystical land where 18 year-olds can drink and gamble publicly. I won about 30 American dollars on a slot machine, and I spent 100% of my winnings on strawberry daiquiris. When we were driving back through customs, we played that &#8220;America, Fuck Yeah!&#8221; song from Team America: World Police and giggled conspiratorially. That was my idea.You can take the girl out of Jersey, etc. All my life when I’ve done something that a kind person would call gauche or provincial (see: never having “seen the world,” making it to 25 without a passport, etc.) or an asshole would call trashy, the easy thing has always been to chalk it up to being from New Jersey. And then I spent the early part of my adulthood trying, and maybe failing, to get away from all of that. An asshole did actually call me trashy to my face once, at a party when I was 19 or 20, a little while after I’d moved. My best friend from New Jersey and I were there together, feeling very cool, at this party full of older people. A drunk guy who’d been talking to her found out where we were from, and then he and his friend lead a rousing chant of “Jersey trash, Jersey trash.” (Assholes, naturally, will recognize this concept as “negging.”) We had a plan, though. We played nice enough to get his number (more specifically, his business card; older people!) and then stayed up half the night leaving vulgar, mean and—thanks to details we’d astutely picked up while playing nice—pointedly personal messages on his voicemail. That’s what happens when you mess with Jersey.*My senior year of high school, I got into two colleges. One was in New Jersey and the other wasn’t, so I picked the one that wasn’t in New Jersey. I met some people who liked music as much as I did and they lovingly teased me for saying wuter instead of water. Some of them asked if I liked Bruce Springsteen, and I said that honestly I didn’t very much, no. That was my parents’ music—Born to Run, Born in the U.S.A. That was New Jersey in the flesh, or by this time, so widely revered that it was more like New Jersey in statue form. Too hallowed, too close to home. “You would at least like Nebraska, I know you would,” somebody told me many different times, and somehow that put me off even more: The One Bruce Springsteen Album It’s Acceptable To Like In College. OK sure, I told them maybe I’d try it sometime, but I never did.I was thinking of all this in June—your entire life tends to flash before your eyes somewhere around the fifth time a passport agent puts you on hold—after having just read David Brooks’ column about Bruce. The gist was, “You’ve never seen Bruce until you’ve seen him in Europe.” OK, sure.By the grace of some obviously very high up saint (Clarence?), I got a passport and made it to Roskilde. And as soon as I got there, it was easy to gauge whose set was the most anticipated. American flags dotted the crowds all weekend. People in handmade Bruce t-shirts and hats. Fervent drunks in the bathroom line singing “Born in the USA” like it was last call at a karaoke bar the night before the apocalypse.David Brooks is not right about everything, but he is right about Bruce. People in Europe go batshit for him. And alone for the first time in a country where I didn’t speak the language, Max Weinberg’s most iconic beat rattling my bones, I went a little crazy too.I stood beneath one of the monitors and handed my camera to a Danish woman who I thought I’d overheard speaking English. “Take my picture!” I beamed, “I’m from New Jersey, like Bruce!” She snapped it, handed it back to me and said warmly, “Happy birthday!”It occurred to me overseas that America is just America. From 30,000 feet, without the regional texture. Everyone knows that Bruce represents something American, but not everyone knows what it means to be from New Jersey as opposed to California or Maine. They didn’t know that Bruce represents something specific and hard-won and triumphant. And that if any asshole even tried to call it “trashy,” I’d be regionally obligated to seek a very personal sort of revenge upon their soul, and possibly their extended family.“Born in the U.S.A&#8221; was the moment I was struck with this urge to tell everybody everything. I never thought I would have taken such strange, giddy pride in a sentence I’d spent my teens and half my twenties trying to stealthily inch away from: “I’m from New Jersey, like Bruce.” But I was. Born down in a dead man’s town / The first kick I took was when I hit the ground. How many times had I heard this song before and tuned it out? I listened now, I felt the communicative texture of every word like Braille. End up like a dog that’s been beat too much / Til you spend half your life tryin’ to cover it up. Bruce is a writer so he had to learn this too, that you’ll spend half your life trying to pass as generic, the written equivalent of the newscaster’s non-regional dialect, and then quite suddenly you’ll spend the other half peeling off the varnish and getting down to the business of telling your story in your own cracked accent. You can’t mark this down on a calendar ahead of time: you cannot predict when this change will happen or where you’ll be when it does. But trust me when I say it will come. Independence Day.Lindsay Zoladz is a writer now living in Brooklyn.
View Separately

Lindsay Zoladz on Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” (1984)
(Rdio, Spotify, iTunes)

In my 2012, there wasn’t an Independence Day. You lose a day when you fly over the Atlantic, and early on the morning of July 4, at an hour when nobody barbecues and the sky is too bright for fireworks, I got on a plane to Denmark. On long international flights, at a distance of 30,000 feet, the concepts that usually order our lives—clocks, mealtimes, holidays—have a way of first becoming abstract, and then seeming downright absurd. So I cannot even pinpoint exactly where I was (above Iceland seems as good a guess as any) the precise moment that the most quintessentially American holiday turned to a metaphysical speck and then quietly disappeared.

I almost did not get on a plane to Denmark, because up until two days before my flight, I didn’t have a passport. Only about three weeks before, I had been assigned to cover the Roskilde Festival, which is in a town about 20 miles outside of Copenhagen. The fact that I didn’t have a passport when I got this assignment was something I conveniently kept from my editor and that he probably still did not know until now (hi Mark!). But when you are a freelance writer and it’s the dead of summer so you’re kind of bored and the worst month in the swampland city you live in is fast approaching and you’ve never been to Europe and someone asks you if you’d like to go to a festival where Bjork and Bruce Springsteen are headlining, you say yes. Knowing full well how difficult it will be to get a passport in three weeks because you have lived in our nation’s capital of red tape and long lines and bureaucracy for seven years now, you say yes, you will find a way to make it work.

The people at the passport agency did not believe I was who I said I was. Not at first. They flagged my paperwork and made me come back on three different, excruciating, nails-bitten-to-the-nubs occasions. Later I found out why: although I’d been living in DC for seven years, I’d only very recently gotten rid of my New Jersey drivers license. This is suspicious, in the eyes of the National Passport Agency. It was actually just lazy, I tried to explain to the man behind the fogged up plastic window. But what I couldn’t quite explain to him was it also might have also been something else. I think that part of me felt like hanging onto my New Jersey license kept me grounded, connected to the place I’d spent the first 18 years of my life, proof that I was not entirely what I feared people from my hometown thought I’d turned out to be: that girl who flees to the big city first chance she gets (and to be a writer, of all things), globs a coating of faux sophistication over her past and forgets all about where she came from. But I wasn’t that girl, you see. Because last year I’d also changed my phone number, and my provider asked if I’d like a 202 area code. “Actually,” I asked, “Is it possible for me to keep the 856?”

I had been out of the country once before: Canada, when I was 18, on a trip that whose main cultural objective was to go to travel to a mystical land where 18 year-olds can drink and gamble publicly. I won about 30 American dollars on a slot machine, and I spent 100% of my winnings on strawberry daiquiris. When we were driving back through customs, we played that “America, Fuck Yeah!” song from Team America: World Police and giggled conspiratorially. That was my idea.

You can take the girl out of Jersey, etc. All my life when I’ve done something that a kind person would call gauche or provincial (see: never having “seen the world,” making it to 25 without a passport, etc.) or an asshole would call trashy, the easy thing has always been to chalk it up to being from New Jersey. And then I spent the early part of my adulthood trying, and maybe failing, to get away from all of that. An asshole did actually call me trashy to my face once, at a party when I was 19 or 20, a little while after I’d moved. My best friend from New Jersey and I were there together, feeling very cool, at this party full of older people. A drunk guy who’d been talking to her found out where we were from, and then he and his friend lead a rousing chant of “Jersey trash, Jersey trash.” (Assholes, naturally, will recognize this concept as “negging.”) We had a plan, though. We played nice enough to get his number (more specifically, his business card; older people!) and then stayed up half the night leaving vulgar, mean and—thanks to details we’d astutely picked up while playing nice—pointedly personal messages on his voicemail. That’s what happens when you mess with Jersey.

*

My senior year of high school, I got into two colleges. One was in New Jersey and the other wasn’t, so I picked the one that wasn’t in New Jersey. I met some people who liked music as much as I did and they lovingly teased me for saying wuter instead of water. Some of them asked if I liked Bruce Springsteen, and I said that honestly I didn’t very much, no. That was my parents’ music—Born to Run, Born in the U.S.A. That was New Jersey in the flesh, or by this time, so widely revered that it was more like New Jersey in statue form. Too hallowed, too close to home. “You would at least like Nebraska, I know you would,” somebody told me many different times, and somehow that put me off even more: The One Bruce Springsteen Album It’s Acceptable To Like In College. OK sure, I told them maybe I’d try it sometime, but I never did.

I was thinking of all this in June—your entire life tends to flash before your eyes somewhere around the fifth time a passport agent puts you on hold—after having just read David Brooks’ column about Bruce. The gist was, “You’ve never seen Bruce until you’ve seen him in Europe.” OK, sure.

By the grace of some obviously very high up saint (Clarence?), I got a passport and made it to Roskilde. And as soon as I got there, it was easy to gauge whose set was the most anticipated. American flags dotted the crowds all weekend. People in handmade Bruce t-shirts and hats. Fervent drunks in the bathroom line singing “Born in the USA” like it was last call at a karaoke bar the night before the apocalypse.

David Brooks is not right about everything, but he is right about Bruce. People in Europe go batshit for him. And alone for the first time in a country where I didn’t speak the language, Max Weinberg’s most iconic beat rattling my bones, I went a little crazy too.

I stood beneath one of the monitors and handed my camera to a Danish woman who I thought I’d overheard speaking English. “Take my picture!” I beamed, “I’m from New Jersey, like Bruce!” She snapped it, handed it back to me and said warmly, “Happy birthday!”

It occurred to me overseas that America is just America. From 30,000 feet, without the regional texture. Everyone knows that Bruce represents something American, but not everyone knows what it means to be from New Jersey as opposed to California or Maine. They didn’t know that Bruce represents something specific and hard-won and triumphant. And that if any asshole even tried to call it “trashy,” I’d be regionally obligated to seek a very personal sort of revenge upon their soul, and possibly their extended family.

“Born in the U.S.A” was the moment I was struck with this urge to tell everybody everything. I never thought I would have taken such strange, giddy pride in a sentence I’d spent my teens and half my twenties trying to stealthily inch away from: “I’m from New Jersey, like Bruce.” But I was. Born down in a dead man’s town / The first kick I took was when I hit the ground. How many times had I heard this song before and tuned it out? I listened now, I felt the communicative texture of every word like Braille. End up like a dog that’s been beat too much / Til you spend half your life tryin’ to cover it up. Bruce is a writer so he had to learn this too, that you’ll spend half your life trying to pass as generic, the written equivalent of the newscaster’s non-regional dialect, and then quite suddenly you’ll spend the other half peeling off the varnish and getting down to the business of telling your story in your own cracked accent. You can’t mark this down on a calendar ahead of time: you cannot predict when this change will happen or where you’ll be when it does. But trust me when I say it will come. Independence Day.

Lindsay Zoladz is a writer now living in Brooklyn.

Andrew William Smith on Edward Sharpe &amp; the Magnetic Zeroes’ “I Don’t Wanna Pray” (from Here, 2012)(Rdio, Spotify, iTunes)Pop music has always fancied the sublime and fascinated itself with the divine. Songs want to return us to Eden or rapture us to heaven or reduce us to a sloppy but womb-like wonder with the help of whisky and weed. Ever since Joni Mitchell lured us “back to the garden” in her timeless trippy folk hymn “Woodstock,” artists imbue sonic experiments with religious images to recreate revivals in sound. I’ve always had a soft spot for music that invokes either Jesus or the Age of Aquarius, but the latest one-among-many band-as-caravan to lure me into some limitless and liminal region of the spirit with a gospel-tainted album of mystic crystal revelations is Edward Sharpe &amp; the Magnetic Zeros.“I Don’t Wanna Pray,” from the band’s most recent record, Here, is a strange kind of folk-gospel song. Refrains of the chanted mantra “I love my God” are coupled with not just love but hate, not just good but bad. When the lyric suggests we might “become not the prayer but the prayer,” it’s no longer the person that prays that’s important. It’s no longer the act of asking. It’s the prayer itself, embodied and empowered. It’s not the asker, but the question itself. It’s vision quest and visionary action collapsed into pop epiphany. It’s getting behind the symbol and into the beautiful bowels and glorious guts of reality.  If prayer and meditation require mediation, this song says let’s get past that, through that, beyond that, over that, by becoming one with all. People who pray set prayers, recite regular devotions:  they are the disciplined neo-monastics. But some people are undisciplined and seek shortcuts; rock songcraft when it achieves its purpose can bypass the therapeutic and the theological for a revolutionary awakening into the now and the wow.Rock’s shamans have always shown us the reckless chemically-enhanced-and-tranced versions of the vision quest: Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin messed up magical on booze, many more with harder habits and a sense of nothing-left-to-lose. Despite the negative consequences and pharmacological boundaries of that lifestyle, songs still come along that could make the magical mystery tour more magical but also sober and sanctified. “I Don’t Wanna Pray” is one track among many in the tribal revival that informs mystical consciousness and transforms into the collective called Edward Sharpe &amp; the Magnetic Zeros.The kind of direct contact with or immersion into God suggested by the song: these are not usually possible or easily available in modes of mundane, everyday living. So prayer and meditation or yoga and exercise remain fruitful for many. But this song reminds that there’s still something more, more vast, more loving, more amazing. I don’t wanna pray, but I don’t want to try the psychedelic shortcut either, so I am going to pray anyway, hopefully without ceasing, even while singing “I Don’t Wanna Pray.”Andrew William Smith is a professor by day, DJ by night; poet, preacher, insatiable creature.
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Andrew William Smith on Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes’ “I Don’t Wanna Pray” (from Here, 2012)
(Rdio, Spotify, iTunes)

Pop music has always fancied the sublime and fascinated itself with the divine. Songs want to return us to Eden or rapture us to heaven or reduce us to a sloppy but womb-like wonder with the help of whisky and weed. Ever since Joni Mitchell lured us “back to the garden” in her timeless trippy folk hymn “Woodstock,” artists imbue sonic experiments with religious images to recreate revivals in sound. I’ve always had a soft spot for music that invokes either Jesus or the Age of Aquarius, but the latest one-among-many band-as-caravan to lure me into some limitless and liminal region of the spirit with a gospel-tainted album of mystic crystal revelations is Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros.

“I Don’t Wanna Pray,” from the band’s most recent record, Here, is a strange kind of folk-gospel song. Refrains of the chanted mantra “I love my God” are coupled with not just love but hate, not just good but bad. When the lyric suggests we might “become not the prayer but the prayer,” it’s no longer the person that prays that’s important. It’s no longer the act of asking. It’s the prayer itself, embodied and empowered. It’s not the asker, but the question itself. It’s vision quest and visionary action collapsed into pop epiphany. It’s getting behind the symbol and into the beautiful bowels and glorious guts of reality.  

If prayer and meditation require mediation, this song says let’s get past that, through that, beyond that, over that, by becoming one with all. People who pray set prayers, recite regular devotions:  they are the disciplined neo-monastics. But some people are undisciplined and seek shortcuts; rock songcraft when it achieves its purpose can bypass the therapeutic and the theological for a revolutionary awakening into the now and the wow.

Rock’s shamans have always shown us the reckless chemically-enhanced-and-tranced versions of the vision quest: Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin messed up magical on booze, many more with harder habits and a sense of nothing-left-to-lose. Despite the negative consequences and pharmacological boundaries of that lifestyle, songs still come along that could make the magical mystery tour more magical but also sober and sanctified. “I Don’t Wanna Pray” is one track among many in the tribal revival that informs mystical consciousness and transforms into the collective called Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros.

The kind of direct contact with or immersion into God suggested by the song: these are not usually possible or easily available in modes of mundane, everyday living. So prayer and meditation or yoga and exercise remain fruitful for many. But this song reminds that there’s still something more, more vast, more loving, more amazing. I don’t wanna pray, but I don’t want to try the psychedelic shortcut either, so I am going to pray anyway, hopefully without ceasing, even while singing “I Don’t Wanna Pray.”

Andrew William Smith is a professor by day, DJ by night; poet, preacher, insatiable creature.

Brady Hall on Smog’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love (2005)(iTunes)I used to be obsessed with new music. Every year I listened to dozens upon dozens of freshly printed albums as soon as I could get my hands on them. I would discuss and debate the merits of these albums with my friends and coworkers until they banished me to the world of online discussion boards. A pen and pad of paper was always kept next to the radio when I worked to record the names of new songs played by my local radio station and my weekly All Songs Considered podcasts. Attending live shows of touring bands was almost always where any spare cash I happened to have went towards. Then when December rolled around I would spend an unseemly amount of time reading every best-music-of-the-year list I could find and compare it to my own. There were very few albums on those lists that I hadn’t listened to.The last two years I haven’t made my own best-music-of-the-year lists. I’ve skimmed over some of the lists from a few trusted sources, but I’ve listened to almost none of the albums that they thought I should. In 2012 I picked up exactly two new releases, my radio stayed complacently tuned to NPR, and I only attended live shows when my favorite artists came to town. I don’t know to where my passion for music had fled or precisely when it had deserted me, but it was undoubtedly gone. Was the quality of recent music declining? Probably not. Were musicians starting to lose their innovation causing most new music to sound too similar? Probably not. Was the reason for my dissatisfaction internal? Probably. Whatever the reason, it was gone. However, after smoldering for the last two years my fire for music has been rekindled by the one and only Bill Callahan.    I had first discovered him when his 2009 album Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle came out. Despite loving the album I didn’t delve into his back catalog (much of it released under the name Smog) until last year, and when I finally did it was with 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love. At first I thought it very similar to his 2009 album, which means I loved it, but despite the beauty of the songwriting and complimentary minimalist musical arrangement on the later album River revealed itself to be a far superior beast. Callahan’s songwriting is pure poetry. “Palimpsest,” the 2005 album’s opening song, is an excellent example. Callahan half speaks and half sings his poem in a deep but smooth voice of a gruff angel:Winter weather is not my soulBut the biding for spring…Why’s everybody looking at meLike there’s something fundamentally wrongLike I’m a southern birdThat stayed north too longWinter exposes the nestsAnd I’m goneEvery song on A River Ain’t Too Much to Love is a gold mine of achingly beautiful verse. The production on this album is its own kind of poetry that compliments Callahan’s personal songwriting perfectly. Mostly the thoughtful picking of an acoustic guitar sparsely supplemented with a piercing violin here, an echoing whistle there, it’s by turns mesmerizing and haunting. Near the end of “Say Valley Maker,” a heart-wrenching song about lost love, Callahan mutters the line “Oh, I cantered out here / now I’m galloping back,” and with that the music picks up its pace and gallops to the end of the song. This album moved me in a way that others haven’t done for a very long time. With every additional listen the once dormant fire inside me blazed stronger. I have high hopes for the this year’s coming musical releases, but even if they fails to move me like the last two years of music have failed to move me, I know that personally 2013 will be a great year for music because there are still plenty of Smog/Bill Callahan albums for me to experience.Brady Hall is a student in Portland, Ore.
View Separately

Brady Hall on Smog’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love (2005)
(iTunes)

I used to be obsessed with new music. Every year I listened to dozens upon dozens of freshly printed albums as soon as I could get my hands on them. I would discuss and debate the merits of these albums with my friends and coworkers until they banished me to the world of online discussion boards. A pen and pad of paper was always kept next to the radio when I worked to record the names of new songs played by my local radio station and my weekly All Songs Considered podcasts. Attending live shows of touring bands was almost always where any spare cash I happened to have went towards. Then when December rolled around I would spend an unseemly amount of time reading every best-music-of-the-year list I could find and compare it to my own. There were very few albums on those lists that I hadn’t listened to.

The last two years I haven’t made my own best-music-of-the-year lists. I’ve skimmed over some of the lists from a few trusted sources, but I’ve listened to almost none of the albums that they thought I should. In 2012 I picked up exactly two new releases, my radio stayed complacently tuned to NPR, and I only attended live shows when my favorite artists came to town. I don’t know to where my passion for music had fled or precisely when it had deserted me, but it was undoubtedly gone. Was the quality of recent music declining? Probably not. Were musicians starting to lose their innovation causing most new music to sound too similar? Probably not. Was the reason for my dissatisfaction internal? Probably. Whatever the reason, it was gone. 

However, after smoldering for the last two years my fire for music has been rekindled by the one and only Bill Callahan. 
   
I had first discovered him when his 2009 album Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle came out. Despite loving the album I didn’t delve into his back catalog (much of it released under the name Smog) until last year, and when I finally did it was with 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love. At first I thought it very similar to his 2009 album, which means I loved it, but despite the beauty of the songwriting and complimentary minimalist musical arrangement on the later album River revealed itself to be a far superior beast. 

Callahan’s songwriting is pure poetry. “Palimpsest,” the 2005 album’s opening song, is an excellent example. Callahan half speaks and half sings his poem in a deep but smooth voice of a gruff angel:

Winter weather is not my soul
But the biding for spring…

Why’s everybody looking at me
Like there’s something fundamentally wrong
Like I’m a southern bird
That stayed north too long

Winter exposes the nests
And I’m gone

Every song on A River Ain’t Too Much to Love is a gold mine of achingly beautiful verse. The production on this album is its own kind of poetry that compliments Callahan’s personal songwriting perfectly. Mostly the thoughtful picking of an acoustic guitar sparsely supplemented with a piercing violin here, an echoing whistle there, it’s by turns mesmerizing and haunting. Near the end of “Say Valley Maker,” a heart-wrenching song about lost love, Callahan mutters the line “Oh, I cantered out here / now I’m galloping back,” and with that the music picks up its pace and gallops to the end of the song. 

This album moved me in a way that others haven’t done for a very long time. With every additional listen the once dormant fire inside me blazed stronger. I have high hopes for the this year’s coming musical releases, but even if they fails to move me like the last two years of music have failed to move me, I know that personally 2013 will be a great year for music because there are still plenty of Smog/Bill Callahan albums for me to experience.

Brady Hall is a student in Portland, Ore.

Katherine St. Asaph on Dirty Epics’ “The Cure” (from Straight In No Kissing, 2008)(YouTube, Spotify, iTunes)Here is the story we all think we have, or had a few long-lost loves ago, or might have in the future with our luckier stars and lither torsos. It has two components: a person and a song. Sparks are sparked, choices are chosen, moves are made, and the radio drops its pathetic EDM mix in its thrall to the pathetic fallacy, and what you hear is perfect and fitting, your immediate soundtrack and your future song. It’s a testament to the romantic imagination, or at least to cinematographers’ romantic imaginations, that this rings as familiar as it does. Things may actually transpire that your loudspeaker serenade wasn’t perfect or fitting at all, but rather a prefab mockery of such songs, delivered by one Ryan Cabrera; and a quarter of your brain will be done for, incapacitated in the wrong way, attending not to the events at hand but to how awful their soundtrack is; and yet your memory will paint this right out. It’s funny how reliably this works. You can kiss someone once then stuff yourself with love songs, and it’s as good as ten more encounters. You can leave someone, or be left, and be fine, then drag yourself down the sluice pipes with just a few minor chords. You can feel nothing, then find the right playlist, then feel everything.“The Cure” was made for playlists. The band, Dirty Epics, certainly thought so, at least. They recorded two follow-up singles which are basically the same song: “Enthralled” (“you-kiss-so-good-I’m-a-little-bit-enthralled!” Cue guitar scintillation, sing-sighing and feeling so! so! psyched! to take it inside) and “Let’s Be Alone” (press release: “a tale where two impetuous young lovers meet by the thrill of a stolen kiss,” alternately shimmery and shuddering). I prefer the original. It’s pop-rock, or pop-punk, however you’d like to parse it, and made of a series of guitar feints, all in your direction. Vocalist SJ Wai’s voice is just as weaponized; you could fire insults with her cadence and they’d land perfectly. The usual adjective deployed for such sounds is “spiky,” but that’s not quite right. It’s the opposite of right. “The Cure” sounds like a woman shedding all her spikes. Those aren’t insults she’s firing, but things like “the room is spinning-twisting-moving-shaking-moves are making” (all those -ing verbs, like singing in the middle of the action) or “my mind is going round the-going round the-going round the bend” (all that repetition, mental and otherwise) or the defiantly spat “before I was un-su-ure” before the chorus unwinds all the tension, quite sure and maybe even smug. “You are the one, you are the cure, you are the one I can’t ignore,” then a triumphant “I pictured! a picture! of us, together, in the future!”—it’s the sort of song you give as a gift to someone.Or so I imagine, at least. I have never used it this way. I’m private by nature (my excursion into the I’s here notwithstanding), and like all my standards, I hold others to this as well. As such, there are certain things that aren’t shared, wouldn’t do. Sex. Pet names. Kissy selfies. Whichever gooey doings transpire within a five-centimeter radius on the couch. And—above all—mixtapes. It is entirely possible, perhaps even acceptable, to indulge in some secondhand romantic reverie over a KC and JoJo ballad. It’s not acceptable to go tell it on the Tumblr. Nobody wants to hear that shit. You need an alibi. You are remembering the ’90s, which in your recollection took place entirely en boudoir. Or perhaps you’re itemizing #deepusheralbumcuts. You are doing almost anything, in fact, besides christening your embryonic crush. You are critical. You are objective.Somewhere on my computer, then, is a playlist of pop-rock love songs, or like songs I suppose (there’s no way to describe them without sounding overly attached or overly stupid, so let’s just pretend we both know what the other means), critically and objectively curated. Visqueen’s “Hand Me Down” was toward the beginning. So was Tanya Donelly’s “Landspeed Song,” and her Muses reunion track “Civil Disobedience” was somewhere afterward unless it was “Start,” and somewhere else was Catlow’s “The Weekend.” It was stupidly rigorous in some ways—I nixed at least three songs on grounds of synths—and lax on others, like this one song called “Stardust” without lyrics anywhere that got through on grounds of sighing. But trust that it was all very undeniable, because I’ve never posted it anywhere. I’m not even sure where it is. “The Cure” was always track one. It couldn’t not be. I knew this because I’d used it before, unsuccessfully, for someone else; singing at strip malls on my way to work, windows down to let in the heat, maybe braking a little to the guitar stabs if no cars were around, or shouting it at 70 miles per hour down the highway, whooshing and exuberant. Never mind that he wasn’t there for any of it, nor ever heard it; never mind that there’s something a little lonely about singing this sort of thing to yourself alone on a commute; never mind that there was, in fact, no picture to picture of us together in the future. For a song’s length, everything was incontrovertibly perfect.That was 2011. 2012 had its incontrovertibly perfect moment as well, though surrounded by several worse. The day we met, we played chess in the Village. He won one game, I won one somehow, and each subsequent meeting was predicated (at first, at least nominally) on breaking that tie, a thing we never got around to. In my more anxious moments I suspected they were only predicated on breaking that tie, making me essentially Scheherazade. Scheherazade dodged murder, nine hundred and ninety-nine times. The parallels were not lost on me. These aren’t ideal conditions to share a song, let alone an entire playlist. Nor are these songs for playing it cool, threading the needle between attraction and disinterest the way women are taught they must. When would you even do it? Not while writing a plausibly deniable text. (“Oops, my nerves tripped over their endings and sent a emoji, and also I thought you were my buddy maybe, and also here’s this song I want you to hear.”) Not while hanging out; I’d always have my speaker volume set just loud enough to be audible but soft enough to smooth out any abrasive or annoying or unfamiliar parts. (Listen to enough music, and you get used to the drill.) Possibly on my blog, but the elaborate hints and subtweets and context-free audio files I dropped into the mix more and more that month were all moot because he didn’t read it. (I think. At this point, I hope.) Certainly not while getting dropped, as was inevitable, during that protracted silence when you haven’t steeled yourself to leave nor has he to kick you out. A playlist wouldn’t do as a parting gift any more than flowers or fuck-yous. Really, there’s no good time to share it. It would be just another thing to regret in the cab home, or weeks later thinking he thought the worst of me. There are certain things you don’t share, remember: mixtapes, worries, crush songs. In theory, this is one of the most beautiful, open things you can do. In practice, it’s been a mistake every time.But that’s not what I remember when listening to “The Cure.” I remember the cab there, a ride over a bridge I’d never seen up close or in the light, so much quicker and brighter with the soundtrack; or going into work and queueing the song up after every little review or news update, like a secret I kept from everyone; then later, walking—strutting, practically—downtown, testing the playlist in my headphones, lip-synching along when I got to traffic lights and wanting to belt, looking up at the buildings like a tourist because that was the only view big enough to match. It didn’t matter how much of a botch I was making of things, or who was or wasn’t hearing it; no song could sound more perfect or fitting. Maybe this spring I’ll even be able to listen to it again. Katherine St. Asaph is a writer living in New York City.
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Katherine St. Asaph on Dirty Epics’ “The Cure” (from Straight In No Kissing, 2008)
(YouTube, Spotify, iTunes)

Here is the story we all think we have, or had a few long-lost loves ago, or might have in the future with our luckier stars and lither torsos. It has two components: a person and a song. Sparks are sparked, choices are chosen, moves are made, and the radio drops its pathetic EDM mix in its thrall to the pathetic fallacy, and what you hear is perfect and fitting, your immediate soundtrack and your future song. It’s a testament to the romantic imagination, or at least to cinematographers’ romantic imaginations, that this rings as familiar as it does. Things may actually transpire that your loudspeaker serenade wasn’t perfect or fitting at all, but rather a prefab mockery of such songs, delivered by one Ryan Cabrera; and a quarter of your brain will be done for, incapacitated in the wrong way, attending not to the events at hand but to how awful their soundtrack is; and yet your memory will paint this right out. It’s funny how reliably this works. You can kiss someone once then stuff yourself with love songs, and it’s as good as ten more encounters. You can leave someone, or be left, and be fine, then drag yourself down the sluice pipes with just a few minor chords. You can feel nothing, then find the right playlist, then feel everything.

“The Cure” was made for playlists. The band, Dirty Epics, certainly thought so, at least. They recorded two follow-up singles which are basically the same song: “Enthralled” (“you-kiss-so-good-I’m-a-little-bit-enthralled!” Cue guitar scintillation, sing-sighing and feeling so! so! psyched! to take it inside) and “Let’s Be Alone” (press release: “a tale where two impetuous young lovers meet by the thrill of a stolen kiss,” alternately shimmery and shuddering). I prefer the original. It’s pop-rock, or pop-punk, however you’d like to parse it, and made of a series of guitar feints, all in your direction. Vocalist SJ Wai’s voice is just as weaponized; you could fire insults with her cadence and they’d land perfectly. The usual adjective deployed for such sounds is “spiky,” but that’s not quite right. It’s the opposite of right. “The Cure” sounds like a woman shedding all her spikes. Those aren’t insults she’s firing, but things like “the room is spinning-twisting-moving-shaking-moves are making” (all those -ing verbs, like singing in the middle of the action) or “my mind is going round the-going round the-going round the bend” (all that repetition, mental and otherwise) or the defiantly spat “before I was un-su-ure” before the chorus unwinds all the tension, quite sure and maybe even smug. “You are the one, you are the cure, you are the one I can’t ignore,” then a triumphant “I pictured! a picture! of us, together, in the future!”—it’s the sort of song you give as a gift to someone.

Or so I imagine, at least. I have never used it this way.

I’m private by nature (my excursion into the I’s here notwithstanding), and like all my standards, I hold others to this as well. As such, there are certain things that aren’t shared, wouldn’t do. Sex. Pet names. Kissy selfies. Whichever gooey doings transpire within a five-centimeter radius on the couch. And—above all—mixtapes. It is entirely possible, perhaps even acceptable, to indulge in some secondhand romantic reverie over a KC and JoJo ballad. It’s not acceptable to go tell it on the Tumblr. Nobody wants to hear that shit. You need an alibi. You are remembering the ’90s, which in your recollection took place entirely en boudoir. Or perhaps you’re itemizing #deepusheralbumcuts. You are doing almost anything, in fact, besides christening your embryonic crush. You are critical. You are objective.

Somewhere on my computer, then, is a playlist of pop-rock love songs, or like songs I suppose (there’s no way to describe them without sounding overly attached or overly stupid, so let’s just pretend we both know what the other means), critically and objectively curated. Visqueen’s “Hand Me Down” was toward the beginning. So was Tanya Donelly’s “Landspeed Song,” and her Muses reunion track “Civil Disobedience” was somewhere afterward unless it was “Start,” and somewhere else was Catlow’s “The Weekend.” It was stupidly rigorous in some ways—I nixed at least three songs on grounds of synths—and lax on others, like this one song called “Stardust” without lyrics anywhere that got through on grounds of sighing. But trust that it was all very undeniable, because I’ve never posted it anywhere. I’m not even sure where it is.

“The Cure” was always track one. It couldn’t not be. I knew this because I’d used it before, unsuccessfully, for someone else; singing at strip malls on my way to work, windows down to let in the heat, maybe braking a little to the guitar stabs if no cars were around, or shouting it at 70 miles per hour down the highway, whooshing and exuberant. Never mind that he wasn’t there for any of it, nor ever heard it; never mind that there’s something a little lonely about singing this sort of thing to yourself alone on a commute; never mind that there was, in fact, no picture to picture of us together in the future. For a song’s length, everything was incontrovertibly perfect.
That was 2011. 2012 had its incontrovertibly perfect moment as well, though surrounded by several worse. The day we met, we played chess in the Village. He won one game, I won one somehow, and each subsequent meeting was predicated (at first, at least nominally) on breaking that tie, a thing we never got around to. In my more anxious moments I suspected they were only predicated on breaking that tie, making me essentially Scheherazade. Scheherazade dodged murder, nine hundred and ninety-nine times. The parallels were not lost on me.

These aren’t ideal conditions to share a song, let alone an entire playlist. Nor are these songs for playing it cool, threading the needle between attraction and disinterest the way women are taught they must. When would you even do it? Not while writing a plausibly deniable text. (“Oops, my nerves tripped over their endings and sent a emoji, and also I thought you were my buddy maybe, and also here’s this song I want you to hear.”) Not while hanging out; I’d always have my speaker volume set just loud enough to be audible but soft enough to smooth out any abrasive or annoying or unfamiliar parts. (Listen to enough music, and you get used to the drill.) Possibly on my blog, but the elaborate hints and subtweets and context-free audio files I dropped into the mix more and more that month were all moot because he didn’t read it. (I think. At this point, I hope.) Certainly not while getting dropped, as was inevitable, during that protracted silence when you haven’t steeled yourself to leave nor has he to kick you out. A playlist wouldn’t do as a parting gift any more than flowers or fuck-yous. Really, there’s no good time to share it. It would be just another thing to regret in the cab home, or weeks later thinking he thought the worst of me. There are certain things you don’t share, remember: mixtapes, worries, crush songs. In theory, this is one of the most beautiful, open things you can do. In practice, it’s been a mistake every time.

But that’s not what I remember when listening to “The Cure.” I remember the cab there, a ride over a bridge I’d never seen up close or in the light, so much quicker and brighter with the soundtrack; or going into work and queueing the song up after every little review or news update, like a secret I kept from everyone; then later, walking—strutting, practically—downtown, testing the playlist in my headphones, lip-synching along when I got to traffic lights and wanting to belt, looking up at the buildings like a tourist because that was the only view big enough to match. It didn’t matter how much of a botch I was making of things, or who was or wasn’t hearing it; no song could sound more perfect or fitting. Maybe this spring I’ll even be able to listen to it again.

Katherine St. Asaph is a writer living in New York City.