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The Song of Your Life IV

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In the movie, Before Sunset, Ethan Hawke is on a book tour where he is talking about his next project: this idea of a song transporting you back in time. How it grabs you and can make you remember things you’d forgotten – all of it locked within a song.

I feel the same way, where the music moment can transport you back to those memories you might not always have right at your fingertips. Things you thought had been lost are now crystal clear once again.

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Far – Water and Solutions Album

When you have a group of friends your musical tastes can certainly merge over time. It only makes sense since once you discover a cool band, you’d want to share it with everyone else. Other times you break off into smaller groups within the circle where you celebrate a particular album with everyone else merely tolerating it.

When I first heard Far’s Water and Solutions a group of us had headed up to North Carolina/Tennessee mountains to go skiing. We arrived that first night, and Egg put on the album and when it finished, someone else started it again. This continued throughout the weekend when we were in the cabin. And it was always someone different who restarted it.

I don’t know if I’ve ever quite seen that before or since. Whatever magic contained on that CD was exactly the right sound for the weekend.

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Helmet – Impressionable

Back in the dark ages of the internet (the 90s), it was suddenly possible to find out about rare songs from your favorite band without needing to scour random record stores throughout the city (now, we still did that too, but this helped narrow down exactly what it was we were looking for). For some bands, the list was extremely long (Pearl Jam, I’m looking at you), but for some others they became these names without any knowledge about what they may or may not have sounded like. And there was one song we did manage to hear: “Impressionable”.

At the same time I started working at the Georgia Tech Radio Station, which meant I could sign up for Will Call tickets for various shows in the Atlanta and Athens areas. Now, I was low man on the totem pole, so most of the bigger acts’ tickets were gobbled up, but a band like Helmet was just the right size for me to snag one for myself and one for Egg.

We make it to the show and decide that any time there was a lull between songs, we’d shout “Play Impressionable”. Aside from being a crazy plan, we certainly didn’t really think about the fact that most of these bands had a pretty standard setlist night in and night out. So unless Impressionable happened to already be on the agenda for the night, there was no way they would have practiced it enough to even play it. Maybe if we’d chosen a one of the rarer album songs… maybe, but not some b-side which had never made it on much of anything.

So, this isn’t the story of victory where the band suddenly heard us, decided we were hardcore fans, and played the track. No, but the song always brings that concert back to my memory.

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LIVE – Throwing Copper Album Tour

This is effectively an anti-memory. Don’t get me wrong, I love LIVE, but when Throwing Copper came out I was in my Freshman year of college and my tv viewing had gone to near nothing, and my radio listening had done much the same. I still listening and buying new music, but LIVE was not the type of act which would have fallen into my lap without some radio play (which I wasn’t hearing anyway).

Except, it should have been right in my wheel house. My roommate bought a six disc changer that he loaded his music in to play on my stero. He was listening to LIVE, but somehow, I never really heard of them. Maybe it was just one of those things where it didn’t make it into the changer or maybe it was on a different disc when I was in the room, but regardless, I had no idea who the band was.

Flash forward to November of that year, and LIVE was going to play on GA Tech campus. It was literally the largest show they’d done up to that point. My roommate and his girlfriend got tickets, but I don’t remember any talk about the concert prior to them heading out that night. I saw plenty of people heading down to the arena as I walked around campus.

Maybe I was just in my own little world. Just me in blissful ignorance.

Over the next couple of months, I discovered LIVE and only then did I realize I’d missed out on something special. It’s no one’s fault (I do blame Chris a little for not forcing me to listen to them), so it becomes this weird not memory of the time I didn’t get to see a favorite play.

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John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

Top Eleven Albums – Part 1

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Image by annca from Pixabay

I was talking with my in-laws over the weekend about memory. They volunteer at Grace Arbor, a place where older folks with various memory/dementia issues can go for the day and have activities and listen to music (among other things). They mentioned that they heard the portion of the brain which remembers music never truly goes away.

Which reminded me of a scene in Before Sunset where Ethan Hawke is talking about how misuc can be a form of time travel for a person. That when you hear a particular song it returns you to the place where it means the most to you and instantly you are 8 or 18 or 28 again.

I love that idea.

And then on my Facebook feed various people have all been doing the FB challenge of posting your favorite albums (or ones that had the greatest effect upon your life) but without any comment.

But the comment… the context is key. It’s as important as anything else. So… here’s some context.

Far – Water and Solutions

I’m 20 and my friends have rented a ski cabin in North Carolina for the weekend. Egg (who discovered the band in the first place) puts on Water and Solutions and it becomes, for me, the theme of the trip. It’s heavy at times and yet soulful. No one who hears it in the cabin has a bad word to say about it.

Later, I’ll find out the lead singer (Jonah Matranga) has a tape of some of his solo stuff available to send off for through the mail (good lord, that’s like the dark ages). I send away for them, immediately transfer them from the tape which arrives to a digital format, burn it onto a cd, and still wear those songs out.

Even later, I’ll be at a club show for Far and decide to tap him on the shoulder and tower over him with all 6’5″ of my frame in order to tell him how much I love his music. Egg says I gave the guy the scare of a life. I’m not so sure.

!0 Years – The Autumn Effect

Somehow, due to me putting a bunch of music on my wife’s phone over a decade ago, 10 Years became one of her favorite bands. Last year, 10 Years played a anniversary show where they played this album from front to back. It was both of our first times seeing the band (somehow we kept missing them previously). As it was the first night of this anniversary tour, they had only rehearsed the album, so when they went off stage after the last song, we expected an encore song or two. The lead singer came back out, informing us that they had nothing else, but that wouldn’t satisfy us, so, all by himself, he sang one of the more beautiful versions of their song “So Long, Good-bye”. And we all joined in. Just a couple of hundred people and a guy with a microphone singing as loudly as we could.

One of the best moments from any concert I’ve ever been to.

The Misfits – Collection 1

When you are younger, there are so many ways your music tastes can go. Things you hear your parents play can go a long way to shaping you. My parents listened to the Oldies station nearly exclusively. Lots of late 50s and 60s songs. In fact, there was a time where my sister and I didn’t realize there were other stations on the radio. It never changed from the one station, and for some reason, it never occurred to us that those MTV songs we heard had to be on the radio somewhere.

Yet, it is through your friends where I think the key music comes in. So when Lee gave me a copy of the Misfits, I had no idea what I was in for. It destroyed my brain. These 2-minute songs (at the longest) were a blistering, blazing, fireball of in your face music. And they sang about the most outrageous things when they weren’t singing about some weird movies I’d never seen.

I must have been 12 or 13, at the beach in Destin, and listened to these songs over and over on my Walkman. I didn’t dare let my parents listen, but my sister still almost ruined it by sneaking a listen and then telling them about what she’d heard. For some reason, they were unfazed.

But that was really the moment that the heavier side of rock/punk was going to be my wheelhouse.

Taproot – Blue Sky Research

I’m sorry if Nu-Metal left a bad taste in your mouth. I will never understand that. It is the music that I listen to the most even to this day. And I would claim that this particular album might be my favorite of the entire genre. I can listen to it over and over and have never gotten sick of it. It feels like such a complete album where there is no one song I would remove from it. I love it so much, I’m interested in hearing any of the songs that might have been written around the same time.

With this one, I’m at work and needing to really focus on whatever project I’m working on. And this CD will not get removed from my CD Player. When I reach the end, we just loop around to begin again. But it isn’t only work, when I’m writing, it is one of my go-to albums to put on, pushing and pulling me into the correct train of thought.

Shock Lobo – My Wicked Soul

There are a handful of bands that I have seen which were openers for the band I wanted to see and then have gone on to be a favorite of mine. Shock Lobo was not only one of those (they were opening for The Josh Joplin Band and caught our eyes/ears), but since they were local to Atlanta, we saw them a lot. Pretty much every show they did locally Courtney and Chris and I went and saw them. When they needed fans to show up for a special taping, we were there. When they opened for Toad the Wet Sprocket, we were there.

So much so that the three of us are listed in the liner notes under the Thank You section.

With them, it isn’t one particular moment or performance, but all of them. Agnes Scott College. Them playing at a pizza restaurant. Underground Atlanta. The Point.

Mostly, it reminds me of a time, when I was in college, just hanging out with some good friends, listening to musicians play this music that we all loved.

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My last 6 will come next week!

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John McGuire is the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. The Trade paperback collecting the first 4 issues is finally back from the printers! If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Want to read the first issue for free? Click here! Already read it and eager for more?

Click here to join John’s mailing list.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com