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.

We Take the Road Less Traveled On

The band We Are The Union recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund their forthcoming album Self Care. I was incredibly invested in this band's music when I was a little younger, so I though I would take the opportunity to promote their efforts in putting out some new music.

We Are The Union was my entire world for a couple of years during my undergrad degree. I discovered the band through MySpace just as I started school and immediately took to them, specifically their album Who We Are (available as a free download at the time), which dominated my listening that year and was my "Album of the Year" in a time before IMU existed. The music was a synthesis of things that were new and exciting to me at the time, like Mutiny!-era Set Your Goals and Self-Titled-era Lifetime, with the ska-punk I was already familiar with and will love for the rest of my life. It took me many babysteps to get into hardcore and those examples of SYG and Lifetime were the first of those. Finding a band that happened to be combining the things I was just getting into with what I was already comfortable with seemed too good to be true.

The lyrics on that record were also a huge part of why it resonated so much. There were angsty breakup songs that I loved because I was just starting to wade into the dating world and was extremely confused about that process, but what really stuck with me was the album's overall themes of self-reliance and anti-conformity. At a time of transition and self-discovery, that being 1st year university, those ideas felt empowering.

A quick sidenote: Being a good ska-punk band is a delicate balance. Every member needs to be:

• A good and capable musician. Moreso than most punk or rock band members.
• A true appreciator of ska music in all its forms. Even if you mostly like newer stuff and want to play 3rd wave, your band will mostly likely suck if you don't have an understanding of 1st and 2nd wave.
• A fuckin' punk. That level of energy and aggression and defiance needs to be there or everything will fall flat.

It's a hard thing to maintain. Even bands who absolutely nail it for an album or two don't maintain it for a whole career. We Are The Union nailed all of these.

Following the release of Who We Are, the band quickly became "my guys" and I hyped them up at every opportunity (here's a real bad post from the archives doing just that). I followed all of the members on Twitter and eagerly watched updates from their tours. In particular, I remember watching a livestream of one of their shows from Memphis, I think? Some small punk market. When they announced a follow-up record in 2009, my excitement was at a fever pitch. I was all over their studio updates and was trying to piece together what the album would sound like from brief unmixed clips playing in the background. In my mind, they were the best band working and the album would be the best thing put out that year.

Ultimately, I remember being a little disappointed by Great Leaps Forward. Not that it was bad, but that it didn't live up to the monumental expectations I had for it. In the years after that, my listening to the band gradually slowed. I still loved them and eagerly checked out new releases, but my investment wasn't nearly what it was when I was in 1st and 2nd year university. In the last couple of years especially, I haven't paid much attention at all.

When they started promoting the new Kickstarter campaign, I went back and dug out my vinyl copies of Who We Are and Great Leaps Forward, as my record player was serendipitously repaired for this listening. WWA still has a special place in my heart for how much it meant at one time, but I found that it didn't quite resonate as much as it used to. To my surprise though, I found Great Leaps Forward much more palatable now. It's fast and it doesn't let up for the whole play through. Maybe I've relaxed a bit about getting dumped. I'd like to think that I still care just as much about being who I am though. I don't think that will ever leave me, even if I've found different ways to say it now.

While I was re-listening to the records, I dug through my t-shirts to see if I still had my old "I'm Like John Cusack"-themed one. I still do, sort of, in that I cut the front out of it to include in a quilt of old band t-shirts I'm going to make. I guess that symbolizes a lot of the music I was into at that time: Maybe I've moved on a little bit from some of it and maybe I like some different things now, but I'll never let go of what this stuff meant at one time and the fire it lit inside of me.

Blink

I've been neglecting IMU here and only giving you short Liberties posts. For this, I apologize. It's because I've been working on a couple of other writing projects, one of which I just finished. Over on the "serious" site, I just posted an essay about blink-182 and masculinity. Give 'er a go.

I Wanted Everything, I've Got and Now I'm Gonna Throw It Away

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.

Make It Up as We Go Along

A funny thing happened at work today: David Byrne came in to see our exhibitions.

I didn't actually recognize him in the moment and just registered him in my head as "cool looking old guy with loafers". I realized after the fact that I hadn't ever seen an older version of him than the one in Stop Making Sense, so I guess it made sense that I didn't start waving my arms up and down when he walked past me. I was a little sad that I didn't capitalize on the opportunity to meet him, though I don't know what I would have said anyways. It's fine!

It was a little serendipitous, as the Talking Heads have become a fixture in my life over the last year and a bit. Last year, Rebecca and I went to go see a screening of Stop Making Sense at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema near our apartment. I had listened to a couple of the band's albums and seen most of the film already, so I knew the general vibe of it and Rebecca had been meaning to listen to the band for ages. I figured it would be a fun date and a good way to introduce us to the band.

The theatre was way more packed than either of us anticipated and we had to take our seats in the balcony. There was a solid buzz of noise in the theatre and everyone seemed to be buzzing with anticipation for what was about to happen. "Psycho Killer" elicited passionate singalongs in seats and everyone around us seemed to be bopping up and down, but it was the beginning of "Burning Down the House" where half the theatre jumped up and started dancing in the aisles. The sound was cranked, we were tipsy, and everything was wonderful. "Life During Wartime" had the audience running in circles around the theatre's seating while Byrne did his laps of the stage on screen. The energy of our crowd never stopped for the entire film and it seemed like the closest you could come to seeing prime Talking Heads play live now. We became instant fans and it was the most fun I've ever had in a theatre.

After that, I made sure to get their entire discography to listen to immediately. They became our go-to music around the house and many of their songs slotted into my life seamlessly. I learned 4 or 5 songs on bass and couldn't believe I hadn't been learning them for my whole life.

One song in particular really stuck with me, and has since become one of "my songs". It immediately calms me down and I feel like I'm floating in still water as soon as it starts. It reminds of being in love and living with Rebecca. I would listen to it on hard days at work and when I got nervous before leaving the apartment to go a party with new people.

I guess I would have talked to David about that song.