Speed On

As a person, I am very bad at evaluating the worth of what I'm currently doing. I tend to think all the things I've done in the past are miles better than what I'm currently working on and I immediately start to wonder why I've gotten so lazy and less motivated to produce writing and do cool stuff. I know that a lot of this is nonsense and is mostly just me idealizing the past, but I also rely on it to keep me working on things. If I don't beat myself a little bit, then I won't keep writing. It's just how it is!

Something I've done in the past is talk about the space that specific songs have carved out in my mind. I did one on "Motown Never Sounded So Good" by Less Than Jake and one on "Chicago" by Big D and the Kids Table.* Maybe there's more! I'm not going to check! I wouldn't say that either of those songs is an absolute tattoo-the-lyrics-on-my-arm favourite of mine, but they are tied to specific memories and do stir something inside me each time I listen to them. Maybe that does make them an all-time favourite. I don't know. When you've been consuming music for 20 years it gets harder to delineate your favourites like you did when you were a teenager and discovering the Arrogant Sons of Bitches.

*Most of IMU's titles are lyrics from songs. Oddly enough, neither of those two posts use lyrics from the song they're talking about it. Seems like a layup, no?

While remembering that series, I was listening to "Motor Away" by Guided by Voices, another song which will live in my brain forever, and bam, the next IMU post was born.



I had seen Guided by Voices name-checked in online music journalism many times in my youth, but assumed they sounded much different from their name. Since I was so deeply in love with punk music in my late teens and early twenties, I thought that indie rock was death and strictly for poseurs. Spacey, grandiose, and esoteric bands like the Arcade Fire (whose first record I now like) convinced me that any musician who deigned to think themselves an artist was clearly way too pretentious and not worth my time. This changed a little bit when I started to listen to Pavement and Superchunk, whose riffing and quasi-punkness showed my that there is good in the genre, but it's really something that stuck with me a while, and still kind of does (Animal Collective fucking blows ass bro).

The way that I discovered Guided by Voices was through a collection of covers by Sean Bonette of AJJ. I've for sure written about this release before, so I won't go deep into it, but it's a collection of lo-fi versions of his favourite songs from skate videos. It's great stuff and has stayed in constant rotation for me since its release.

http://quoteunquoterecords.com/qur076.htm

Among the songs he does is "Motor Away". Even though I knew a couple of the other songs, "Motor Away" had an immediate impact and I got that lightness in your chest and slight shiver when a song shoots right to your chest. I looked up the original right away and was shocked to find a trebly and fuzzy song that was in the middle of a 28-track album of 90-second songs. This was not what I expected Guided by Voices to be at all. I thought they were a, like, 6-part band from Scotland who used glockenspiel and shit, not a rough rock band from Ohio who ferociously put out songs.

I tend to really love bands who focus on output rather than meticulously crafting records. I think it stems from Bomb the Music Industry!'s early output, when Jeff Rosenstock was making everything himself on a laptop and putting out an album per year, having a deep impact on me as a teenager and that informing the way I look at all music now. When somebody has each song be just the execution of one idea and not fussing over it, it screams DIY to me in the most encouraging way. Rather than reading it as "the song isn't finished", which I guess some (I'm looking at you Duffer) could, I see it as valuing the process over the product. The art lies in all of us trying to do it and putting it out there. It's why I'm head over heels for Tony Molina right now.

What I find great about bands like GBV and BtMI! is that when the songs hit they really hit. The idea behind the song is so simple and complete that it doesn't need anything else, and that is beautiful. "Motor Away" is basically just two chords for most of the song, with simple guitar leads over that. The lyrics are just poetic enough to stir up images and ideas in you, without getting up their ass. A perfect song.

When I discovered Guided by Voices and "Motor Away", I was living in Kitchener. I had just started writing my thesis and Beat Noir was starting to work on Sovereignties. Rebecca and I were just past the one-year mark in our relationship and that was becoming more obviously one of the most important things to ever happen to me. I was living with Mark, Colin, Duff, Erik, and Jeff still, but commuting to school where I was on my own. I was becoming more independent and still doing some important thinking about who I was.

When I listen to "Motor Away", I see myself sitting on my bed in Kitchener with the door open and the song playing. Everyone else is home, but I'm doing my own thing in my room for the moment because I have school tomorrow. Maybe the seeds of me moving to Guelph and then back to Toronto, moving in with Rebecca, finishing my thesis and starting at the gallery are there and that's why "Come on, speed on" hit me so hard.