Tag: music

We got a record player

April 10th, 2016

For his birthday, my husband wanted a turntable. He’s been digitizing all of our CDs so we can listen to them easily from our living room stereo, but while it’s convenient once it is all digitized and we can control the music from our phones, it is a soulless process. He and I both feel the lack of anything physical to work with when we play music — nothing to touch, hold, or place in a player; no artwork to enjoy while we listen. No object we feel we own.

On his birthday last week, the kids and I presented him with a record player from U-turn Audio. Though I knew it might be risky, we really really wanted to not get the black one. So we bought the white one instead. It has made him ridiculously happy.

This turntable has been almost as exciting in our household as when we brought the kittens home. Our kids are really into it. The problem is, we spent the whole birthday budget on the turntable, and we didn’t have any money left to buy any records.

I know, lame.

But the lack of music to play actually intensified the experience for Brian. The next day, he went to a record store and flipped through vinyl albums. He was moved by the act of being in a brick and mortar store, touching the albums, and looking at the large format artwork that was once an important part of the listening experience.

STYX vinyl: one of the first albums of my husband’s new collecton
On Friday, he brought home two records: Miles Davis Kind of Blue and a favorite from his childhood, one that as soon as he saw the album cover washed him with nostalgia: STYX Paradise Theater. He came home during his lunch break, placed Kind of Blue on the platter, started it spinning, and set the needle in the smooth outer ring of the disk. The sound from the record was rich and warm. He sat on the couch, put his feet on the living room table, and sipped coffee while he read the album cover and listened.

When the kids came home, they wanted to know all about the music he bought. They wanted to look at the records. They had a dozen questions. “How does it work? How does the music come out?” My husband showed how to put a record on, how to place the needle. They watched it spin and wanted to know about the grooves — how they’re made, how the needle in the groove makes music. They had never asked questions before about the mechanics of music-listening or the physics of sound. This object — a vinyl jazz record — sparked a curiosity that had previously not existed.

We’ve already listened to our two records multiple times. The kids want to listen to more, and so do we. “Maybe we could listen to the clock,” our son said.

Our living room clock
This morning over coffee, my husband and I reminisced about how significant music was in our childhood lives. We remember our first albums, we remember the cover art, we remember a scarcity about collecting music. Music wasn’t easily accessible then — you had to save up your allowance to buy a record or a tape or a CD. Now our kids can just hook up to Spotify on their tablets, pull up songs on the Internet, or we can share digital music from our own collection.

This turntable is special to them in the way that music was special to us when we were their age. We want them to have the experience of their own first album, like we had when we were young — maybe the Empire Strikes Back score for our son and Rubber Soul for our daughter, who has learned at least a half dozen Beatles songs on her guitar.

For now we’ll just keep playing these two records, enjoy them with our feet up on the table and a drink in our hand, and start saving our allowances again.
Driving music

April 8th, 2016

I felt so good like anything was possible.

— Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Running Down a Dream”

I am the only person in my family who likes car rides. I love to go for a drive through the mountains on the weekend, or toodle around to nearby little towns. And unlike my husband and our kids, I like road trips. Our children get bored, of course, just like I did when I was their age. They just want to get to where we’re going.

But I like the going. I like looking out the window, watching the landscape roll by: a sign of being on the move, of seeing someplace different from our everyday ordinary life. The highway and the passing scenery are a reminder that the world is big and interesting and beautiful.

What makes a road trip even better is good driving music. One of my favorite musicians for driving, especially in spring, is Tom Petty. There’s something free about his music. It makes me feel alive, and it pairs well with watching the landscape roll by through a car window.

It was a beautiful day, the sun beat down
I had the radio on, I was drivin’

On our way to Baltimore, we drove through forests edged with redbud trees that bloomed magenta, farmlands filled with white-blossomed pear trees, passed red barns on green hills in sunlight, saw the first signs of spring green leaves on mountainsides. In the background was Tom Petty, the soundtrack to our drive through the flowering Appalachians.

I had my feet on the dashboard and my eyes on the moving American landscape, and I was happy.

For the month of April, I will publish a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Trying to get back into the writing habit.
Muzak

April 24th, 2015

Our daughter’s music — Katy Perry, Run-D.M.C. — and our music, especially when we play hard hip hop, make our son cringe. He has specific and limited music tastes. He will tolerate classical, and jazz without singing, but rarely has he said he likes a type of music, and never would he seek any music out.

One day we went to the mall, and as I power walked to whatever store we were destined for, in my hurry to get the shopping over with, our son strolled behind me and said, “I like this music.”

I stopped to listen. It was some horrible generic Muzak whose blandness offended me. I scrunched up my face, one nostril raised, and said, “You do?”

“Yeah,” he said, with his contented Buddha smile. “It’s quiet. And sad.”

He was 10 at the time. And he liked quiet and sad music.

He didn’t seek out or buy Muzak after that, thankfully, but the moment was enlightening to me. A little window into our son’s sensibilities: he did not care about music, as evidenced by his appreciation for Muzak. It just wasn’t his thing.

So when he started requesting a song in the car recently – “Can you play the whale song, Mom? – I was happy to play it for him. Over. And over. Again.

“What is it you like about this song, buddy?” I asked him after the fifth or sixth request.

“I like that it tells a story,” he said. And he shrugged. “I don’t know. I just like it.”

“Oh, well maybe you’ll like the rest of this band’s songs then. Most of their songs tell stories.”

“What’s the name of the band?”

“The Decemberists,” I said. “You want to listen to another of their songs?”

Since then, we have put 39 Decemberists songs on his tablet for him. I’ll be folding laundry in the living room and hear, drifting down the stairs,

We are two mariners
Our ship’s sole survivors
In this belly of a whale*

He listens while he does his homework. He listens while he curls up and reads. He listens while he lays in bed and stares at the ceiling, doing nothing at all besides absorbing the stories, and the music.

*From “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” by The Decemberists.

Artwork from University of Toronto Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection.

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page.
¿Come se dice “kickass” en español?

October 7th, 2013

I was planning to run my first bike/run combo today, which is called a “brick” in triathlon lingo, because your legs feel like bricks when you try to run after riding a bike. But when I checked the forecast yesterday, it called for thunderstorms all day today, with an extra special treat of severe weather this afternoon, which here in Minnesota usually means tornadoes.

In the middle of the night, I woke to crashing thunder several times, with lightning flashing through the openings in the curtains, and every time I thought, “Go on weather. Get it out of your system now so I can wake up to clear skies.” I really didn’t want to ride and run in a lightning storm.

And when I woke this morning at 7 AM, this is what I saw through the slats in the blinds:

Blue Sky

You’d better believe I jumped out of bed to take advantage of it. Because what I couldn’t see from my bed was the ring of black sky all around the small patch of blue.

My bike ride was awesome, as bike rides always are, and I was tempted to take it even longer than my training schedule suggested (only 30 minutes – what’s the point in that?). But the sky was darkening back up, and I figured I should get back home and run before my luck ran out.

I dropped my bike off, changed shoes, grabbed my headphones, and took off running. At first I thought, “Bricks? What bricks? My legs feel totally normal. Like I didn’t even ride my bike!” By the end of the block it felt like someone had opened me up and poured lead into my waist. The heaviness seeped down my hamstrings, into my calves, all the way down to my heels and toes. Picking up my feet was like uprooting trees. And I thought, “This sucks.”

I looked at my watch and 4 minutes had gone by. Only 4 minutes? I’ve got to do this for 26 more minutes? What the hell was I thinking of signing up for a triathlon?!

The sky was grey and gloomy. No more blue skies and happy clouds. All I could think of was my friend Liv’s blog post, Three Ways to Make Blogging Suck Less, and how I wanted someone to inform me of three ways to make running suck less. Besides doing more running.

So I suffered and complained in my head, thinking about how much running sucks, until this song came through my headphones:

The clouds parted (for real!), I found my stride, and the Runner’s High commenced. My right foot fell on every down beat, in perfect rhythm with the music. I was swift, I was light, I was running, and it didn’t suck! I ran like a track star, like I’d been running all my life, like my legs were feathers. My stride lengthened. My shoulders loosened. My lungs opened. I grinned a stupid grin while I ran.

In short, I kicked ass.

I have no idea what the song is about, because my Spanish is no good, but I do know that that song lifted my feet and lightened my load, and it put me on cruise control for the remaining 20 minutes. The next thing I knew, the run was almost over, and James Brown’s Make it Funky came through to take me home. I feasted on homemade crepes and a perfect cup of coffee with my family as the sky opened up and poured its deluge onto the roads I had just ridden and run.

Originally written May 22, 2011 in Minnesota, when I was training for my first (and only) post-children triathlon, I thought this would be a good fit for this week’s Daily Post photo challenge: Good Morning! Also, Calle 13’s “Pa’l Norte” has this effect on me every time it comes on my iPod when I run. I’m kind of sick of my other workout music though. Do you have any favorite running tunes?
I like to Boogie Woogie

August 26th, 2013

One of the things I miss most about living in a big city (besides the libraries) is access to night clubs. I love to dance. When I’m in a dark club with lights flashing and music thumping, and I become immersed in dancing and everything else goes out of focus, I move into an ecstatic state akin to what snake handlers feel when they catch the spirit. I don’t need alcohol, I just need the music to be loud and the club to be crowded enough that I can become anonymous. If I get into a good groove, and the music moves through me as if I am a part of it, as if my body is the instrument that completes it, I feel like I’m communing with the Universe. There’s a mystery in music that moves me, and for once, I don’t care to analyze it. When I dance, I just want to submit to it. I don’t crave the experience often, especially now that I’m a parent and go to bed at 10 o’clock, but in DC, and Tampa, and Minneapolis, I had access to those clubs for the once or twice a year I felt the urge to slip into that altered state.

Here in small town Virginia, not so much. I don’t think those clubs exist around here. And even if they do, nobody will invite me to one now because they’ll be scared I’ll start speaking in tongues (I won’t!). BUT. Thanks to my good friend, Dee, who invited my daughter and me to free skating lessons on Saturday mornings, I may have found an alternative.

When we skate at the free skate, from 10 AM to noon on Saturdays, they keep the music low and the lights high. Rolling around and around that rink, when the music is just loud enough to sing along and skate in rhythm, and my hair lifts off my neck a tiny bit from gliding across the smooth floor, I want to really get into it. I want them to turn the lights down, and the music up, and I want it dark and fast, with strobe lights flashing. I want the rink to be a moving mass of roller skaters, discoed out and dancing, like a night club, but on wheels. I roll around the rink, holding our daughter’s hand, and think, why did that never catch on?

I mean, who wouldn’t want to get in on that?! I totally would.

Adventure World, the rink in our town that offers free skate on Saturdays, hosts a roller derby team (Dee, we’re going to go watch them race, right?), and even better, my friend said they sometimes have an 80s night. Who needs night clubs when you can have 80s night at the skating rink? Now all I have to do is keep practicing, so I can dance and roll at the same time. Then I’ll start rounding up adults who are willing to strap on roller skates and go disco with me. It might take some time in a small town, but that’s all right. We’ll be here a while.

For readers in the New River Valley (Blacksburg, Christiansburg, southwest Virginia), Adventure World Skate & Fun Center offers free skate lessons from 10AM to noon on Saturdays. The lessons are very free form – our daughter and I mostly just skate around and around by ourselves – but there are very helpful and fun instructors available if we have questions or would like to learn any basic skills.
Indoor Appalachian entertainment at the Floyd Country Store

May 20th, 2013

Flatfoot dancers escaping into music at Floyd Country Store Old Time Music jam

As soon as the caller put his bow to the fiddle strings, and the first notes of mountain music sang out in the warm, dry country store, I was a goner. My eyes teared up as feet tapped, and teeth shined, and white-haired heads bobbed in time with Old Time Appalachian music.

My parents are in town, stopping through Virginia to see us as they embark on the great adventure of their lives: an RV journey from their home in Georgia, across the US and Canada, to the wilderness of Alaska. Another rainy day in Blacksburg derailed our plans to take them hiking, to show them the spring green of our Appalachian forests. Rather than stare at each other in the confines of our living room while the rain came down, we decided to escape to a different kind of Appalachia before they drive out of these hills: an open jam session at the Floyd Country Store.

Sunday Old Time music jam at Floyd Country Store

Sitting in a circle in folding chairs on the warm wooden planks were eleven musicians, some newcomers, some old timers, all hunched over their strings, their left hands moving up and down fret boards as they played Turkey in the Straw. Their shoulders shrugged in time as they picked banjos and mandolins, twitched bows across fiddles, strummed guitars (pronounced GIH-tahrs), and as one burly, bearded mountain man thumped an upright bass with a meaty hand. All of the instruments were stringed, but the leather sole of a mandolin player’s shoe slapped time on the floor, an unofficial drum. Throughout the four rows of folding chairs behind the bluegrass circle, feet tapped, heads nodded, and shoulders bumped as the audience seat-danced.

The leader of the jam called out, with his chin clamped to the instrument on his shoulder, and his bow racing across fiddle strings, “The floor is open here in the middle.” He tipped his head to the center of the circle. “If anyone wants to dance, it sure helps us out.” I looked at our daughter and raised my eyebrows, “Do you want to dance?” Her eyes got wide as she licked her ice cream cone and she shook her head. No way.

Happy fiddler at Sunday Old Time Music Jam, Floyd Country Store

The group moved into their next song, which was even more irresistible than the first, and as fiddle bows fluttered, the man from behind the counter, who had served me my coffee, stepped into the circle and began dancing. (It turns out he is local flatfooting champion Rick Sutphin). My mom leaned over and said in my ear, “You’re going to have to learn how to buck dance, Andrea!” A silver haired man with pressed, stiff, indigo jeans stepped in after him and began flat foot dancing as well. My eyes teared up again to see the joy on their faces, to see bliss in the smile of the fiddler in front of me. Wrapped up in this music and this Riverdance type jig is the rich Appalachian history of Celtic immigrants climbing into the mountains to find affordable farming land. The banjos and mandolins and slapping feet tell a story of isolation beat back by coming together for country dances, for fiddling, for celebrating the harvest. The twangy sounds, and the rhythm that moves men to buck dance, preserve a rich history, the pulse of which still beats in this mountain music of Virginia. A history that depended on creating community, on participation, for mountain folk to escape the remoteness of their homes in the hills, and that brought a sense of giddiness and joy on the occasions they came together to put their lives into song. How can you not be moved by that?

Apparently it was easy for our nine year old, who was ready to leave just as the silver haired man collapsed into his seat, panting and grinning, and the group moved into a waltz. Our daughter was captivated, though, as was I. I wanted more.

We left reluctantly, and on our way home we asked our daughter, “Do you think you’d like to play an instrument?” She wanders around the house, the campsite, bopping in her booster seat, singing, clapping, dancing little jigs. I crossed my fingers, begging in my heart for a musician in the family.

She thought a minute as she watched at the wet green mountainsides pass by her window. And then she said, “Yes.” She picked at her jeans. “I want to learn the guitar.”

Floyd Country Store in Floyd County, Virginia

The Floyd Country Store broadcasts The Floyd Radio Show from their Friday Night Jamboree, which features gospel music, skits, and dance bands (previous shows available on podcast). Tickets go on sale no earlier than 4:30 on Fridays. On Saturdays they host a free Americana Afternoon starting at noon, followed by an open mic session at 1:30, and on Sundays from 2 to 4 pm, the Floyd Country Store hosts a jam with a local Old Time or Bluegrass band who leads the jam session. The jam session is free. More information on the On Stage page of their website.

If you are interested in Appalachian Music, I highly recommend the movie (and soundtrack) Songcatcher.