Liberties, Vol. 19

Listen folks, Liberties may not be a weekly endeavour anymore, but I think it's nice that it can still be a fun thing to put up here some times. Never say Timmy doesn't love you baby.

Focused Vision, a Life of Your Own and It's Worth Living

I promised a playlist on Monday last week and am posting it today. Never say Timmy doesn't love you.

Some real homesickness is starting to set in over here. It was easy to not miss Toronto when it was bright and sunny in the summer, and we were regularly going back. Now that some of my yearly traditions that were tied to Toronto, like my annual baseball game with my mom or Thanksgiving, are starting to come around, I'm feeling a lot more aware of the distance between my friends and family and I.

Boo school.

Boo rain.

Boo watching former Blue Jays succeed on playoff teams.

School is starting to ramp up, and while I'm doing a decent job of balancing my work (and do need to remind myself of that), it feels like I'm running through a restaurant with a tray of filled water glasses. One of them has to spill soon, right?

To do a very "me" thing and use a horribly over-used cliche, this is all a marathon and not a sprint. I can't rush through work hoping that there won't be more waiting for me next week, because that will never happen. What's more important to diligently wade through things, trying somehow to pick out ideas and books that relate to my research when they come up, and hope somehow that I'm still standing in December.

Liberties, Vol 17

I started making this one with the goal of included upbeat riffy songs from 2019. It's raining today, so listening to Sheer Mag was a funny juxtaposition with the wet grey outside. Maybe that's why we turn morose near the end. Either way, these ones all make me throw up a thumbs up like my boy Drago on the over for one reason or another.

Liberties, Vol 14

A new Liberties? Bud, I'm feelin' crazy and had to build one around the new Fury record, which is wonderful.

Liberties, Vol 12

A true deep cut has to have the following qualities:

• It must be from a well-known artist. If it's obscure, then every song is a deep cut.
• It must not be a single. Singles can only be deep cuts if they are by an old one-hit wonder who are no longer popular.
• It must not be a song that is commonly played live (full album sets exempted).

Here's a volume of Liberties dedicated to some of my favourite deep cuts:

Liberties? Who knows?

I've had an edition of Liberties sitting and waiting to be finished for about two months or so, but every time I go to add tracks to it, my mind draws a blank on other songs that fit the theme. Rather than continuing to open it and hit a wall, I thought I would instead share this playlist, which is a collection of my favourite songs of 2018. It has something from all of my 2018 album list entries, as well as some others which stood out to me along the way:

Liberties, Vol 7

I just got a new phone, my first smartphone since the days of Blackberries being popular, and something that immediately excited me was the ability to use music as my alarm in the morning again. No more shrill flipphone tones! I chose four songs to upload to my phone for use as an alarm in the next couple of weeks. The thought process behind picking a song you won't be annoyed to hear every day for the near future was interesting to me and the four I chose made up the basis of this playlist, while the rest was filled out by songs I've used to wake up in the past. Behold, 10 songs that make me excited to take on the day.

Liberties, Vol 6

To go along with the essay about blink-182 that I wrote this week, I've also devoted this week's edition of Liberties to what I feel are the band's best deep cuts, though Spotify doesn't have They Came to Conquer... Uranus, so I couldn't include "Wrecked Him". Also, why does that release have an ellipsis in it? It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

It may seem silly to include "Carousel" as a deep cut, as it's one of the band's most beloved songs, but am I to assume that you all are blasting Cheshire Cat on the regular? Also, I make the rules around here, so too bad. Blink are a band that deals in hits and most of the singles bang, to be sure, but I think what sets them apart is how great most of their output is, so here you go.

A whole lot of blink-182 content this week. If you aren't into that, all I can say is that you have absolutely come to the wrong place.

Liberties, Vol 5

This week's edition of Liberties follows a pretty simple premise: I was listening to Deafheaven's new album Ordinary Corrupt Human Love recently and decided that the opening track would make a great score to a skate part. What followed was the full soundtrack for the skate movie that I will never make.

Liberties, Vol 4

I decided to use my dad as inspiration for this edition of Liberties. I got some surprising news about him last week and since then he's been on my mind a lot.

I was lucky to grow up with a father who encouraged me to check out music from an early age and more importantly to not be afraid to love it. This has probably affected me more than anything else. Once you realize you how truly important it is to see the value and beauty in art of any kind, it becomes shocking that not everyone lives that way. When I started to listen to rock music in 6th and 7th grade, my dad was eager to show me lots of things that he liked. Some stuck (like Elvis Costello, who he thought I would like because I was interested in punk), others not as much (Cream never did it for me). Below is a playlist of things that my dad loves and has shown me. The last song is the one time I tried to get him into music I was listening to, but that didn't work at all.

Liberties, Vol 3

The idea for this edition of Liberties started when Rebecca and I were listening to an all-80's radio station earlier this week. They played Blondie's cover of "The Tide is High" and it made me think about how so many people associate that song and "Hanging on the Telephone" with them despite the fact that both are covers. I figured I would put both of those in the playlist and the rest grew from there.

Liberties, Vol 2

Behold: I have kept up with this series for at least one week!

For the second edition of Liberties I decided to do no punk songs. Becks and I just our speakers fixed by their older brother and we put on Reach Out  by the Four Tops. For whatever reason, "I'll Turn to Stone" really hit me and I was surprised that I hadn't heard it more. The rest of the playlist fell into place from there with things we listened to at the cottage and with friends. Enjoy!

Liberties

Since its first episode, I have been a devoted listener of the Blink 155 podcast (yes, I am Original Nation, baby). I was already familiar with Sam through his time in Junior Battles, and vaguely knew Josiah through reading the excellent magazine Exclaim!, so coupling that with my lifelong obsession with blink-182, it was an easy sell.

Let's take this opportunity to segue into some related listening:



My weird, intense obsession with the podcast will be a topic for another time, but it did lead to me checking the episodes of the Myage podcast that both hosts guested on. I think that Myage is a very cool idea for a podcast: The guest goes through a sort of musical autobiography, explaining why certain interests started and how they impacted later listening while giving sonic examples along the way. It's a lot like that scene in High Fidelity. It's perfect for dumb, lame music nerds like me. An example of the format would be the guest playing a song their parents played in the house, then one from the first thing they bought, one from their teenage years, etc.

In the episode above, Sam mentions how grateful he was to grow up in a time when there was so much good music programming, like The Punk Show on MuchMusic (also a favourite of mine) or the glory days of 102.1 The Edge in Toronto. I completely agreed! Before the giant chasm of the internet truly opened up, finding stuff you could relate to through media like TV and FM radio was so exciting. It was private, but also made you feel like you were part of something bigger.

This also made me think. I'm starting to realize that though we are familiar with one iteration of this feeling, it comes in different ways to each generation. I'm sure that my parents got a similar feeling from listening to a particularly talents DJ in the 70's who played new and niche music amidst a landscape otherwise dominated by the products of major labels. Kids younger than me got the same feeling through frequently checking and reading music blogs to find obscure music, which I also participated in, but feel like I missed the glory days of.

I started to wonder if today's equivalent would be someone who puts a lot of effort into curating Spotify (or any other streaming platform) playlists. I'm sure someone out there can't wait for a new playlist from a particular user to come out to discover new things. The entire world of music is truly open to us now and collections are becoming obsolete. Streaming is a raw deal for artists, but if this is the future, let's at least make sure we keep our sense of adventure as music fans.

Through all this, I've decided to start a weekly playlist series called Liberties (I was having trouble thinking of a name, so I scanned iTunes, first checking Bomb the Music Industry!, then Big Star, then !ATTENTION!, before settling on an Attack in Black reference). I'm going to make short playlists, with the cap at 10 songs, and try to release them weekly. Maybe there will be a theme, maybe it will be new stuff I'm into, who knows? I'm just going to place the focus on doing one each week. First though, best thought.

This is the first one, based loosely on the idea for Myage. Starting with a song my mom always played, one from the first CD I bought, a song from my ska phase, from when Bomb the Music Industry! took over my life, from when I started listening to hardcore, from when I only listened to shiny pop-punk for 3 years, from when I moved into emo. I probably could have put many different songs in, but like I said, first thought, best thought.