marathonpacks' Year-(Fri)end Bonanza, Volume VIII: Jennifer Jones
Happy New Year. The following is the last in the series of my friends' year-end posts. It's also the best one. In case you missed it, my year-end mixes are buried in here somewhere, and my year-end lengthy write-up is forthcoming, as well.
Jennifer Lynn Jones is a second-year doctoral student in the Communication and Culture program at Indiana University, Bloomington, focusing on Film and Media Studies. Her 2007 short "in/sight" premiered this fall on The Documentary Channel. But regarding the really important stuff, she used to play viola, and one of her most cherished childhood musical memories involves a lengthy interrogation of Neil Diamond’s “I Am I Said” with her father.
My year in music has been marked by developments in both technology and content, so I decided to combine elements of the two categories within my top ten list. Here’s the down and dirty.
10. My new iMac.
I’m kind of a Luddite. I don’t believe in hopping on the new gadget bandwagon, and I really like to wait to buy new technology until I feel like a) it’s reached a low-price plateau and b) all its kinks have been worked out. As such, until this year, my computer was a 2001 Dell laptop, heavy as a bag of bricks and commonly called a dinosaur by the lab techs I phoned for monthly help. However, I work in media production, and it’s pretty near impossible to professionally edit a video on anything but a Mac. So I broke down and bought a beast, a brand-new, top-of-the-line iMac with all the attendant bells and whistles, and it has completely revolutionized the way that I interact with music. I realize that this may not seem so amazing to most people reading this blog, but it was a huge paradigm shift for me. I’d been pretty good at keeping up with reading about developments in music, but with the dinosaur, I had no way to actually experience them. Now I can, and it’s completely altered and improved my life as a result. The Luddite is still there—I only just bought my first iPod, a 2GB shuffle—but she’s melting, bit by bit.
9. Singles/Tracks.
Don’t get me wrong; a good album is great. But one of the joys of my new iMac has been rediscovering the beauty of the single. Less like a chapter to a book than a cupcake to a cake, I forgot how these little gems can be so satisfying and profound on their own, beyond the confines of the album. Surprising, I know, especially since singles were how I first uncovered the pleasures of music as a child, but procuring a single alone was a challenge during the time between the decline of vinyl production and the rise of computer downloading. Otherwise, music outside of the Top 40 charts seems to favor the album to the single, so that was where I tended to focus my attentions. But now that I have more and better access to them, I’m really savoring the specificity of singles, and decided to focus the rest of my list on the ones I’ve enjoyed the most this year.
8. Vampire Weekend “Campus”
Criticize them as you will—and Eric has—it’s hard to deny that Vampire Weekend’s eponymous album came out at the perfect time. Their Caribbean-inflected sounds added a much-needed shot of warmth to my cold Indiana winter. Although several tracks struck my fancy, “Campus” is the one that has stuck with me the most, in large part due to two key aspects of setting, the college campus generally and New York’s Columbia campus specifically. In general terms, I assume most of my attraction stems from my association with academia. As a Ph.D. student, the college campus is my chosen habitat, so making it the focus of a song about a soured student-professor romance is sure to lure me in. In specific terms, I lived in Manhattan before coming to Bloomington, so I love imagining the narrative action occurring across the Columbia campus. Aside from these aspects, I like the open-ended nature of the story and the cheekiness of the wordplay. After all, we don’t really know exactly what’s going on with the couple, but we know it’s bad enough to cause some passive-aggressive stalking on the part of the protagonist. Kefir on keffiyah, anyone?
7. Detachment Kit "NYC"
Interestingly enough, in terms of setting, this song serves as a sort of bridge in the list between New York and the South, as the band’s two founders now live in Brooklyn, but hail from Tennessee, my home state. However, I have to admit that this is about all I definitively know about the band, aside from the fact that I love this song and think it’s worthy of sharing here. I first heard “NYC” when a friend donated it to my iPod during a trip to New York this fall. Upon my initial listen, I thought it was a song from some long-lost late seventies New York punk band, but was impressed when I realized that it came from this independent, hardscrabble ensemble still at work in the city instead.
The song tells the familiar story of a New York transplant seeking fortune but finding only misfortune. However, this version seems to be framed within the independent music scene, in which success is often seen as coming from self-sacrifice to muse and vice versus simple sales. Therefore, to “come to New York City to die,” as the chorus repeats, may be part of the plan. The band beguiles the listener by beginning with that chorus in cadenced acoustic tones, then yanks them into a plunging abyss of screeching vocals, searing guitars, and smashing drums. If the musicians must go to New York to die for their art, you as a listener will also be dragged along on the ride.
6. Tammy Wynette “Good”
I grew up surrounded by country music, and though I was familiar with it, I didn’t really appreciate it until I was in my mid-twenties and getting ready to leave the South. Although I found it easy to get into most country classics and felt a particularly close connection to Loretta Lynn, I was always a little more ambivalent about Tammy Wynette. While both Loretta and Tammy might sing about rocky romances, there’s a big difference between Loretta’s assertive “Your Squaw Is on the Warpath” and Tammy’s submissive “Stand By Your Man.” Pair that with her frosted façade and famously messy marriage to George Jones, Tammy seemed to me to be the kind of woman whose music and life I might do best to avoid.
Then one day this fall I ran across “Good,” and I had to reconsider my prejudices. Wynette wrote the song with her sixties super-producer Billy Sherill, and it was produced around the time of her breakthrough singles “I Don’t Want to Play House” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” though there’s not a lot of other information I could find about the single’s release or chart record. “Good” follows the form of a classic country story song, about a waitress saved from her errant ways by a customer who asks her to dance. However, her amazing grace is more lost than found as she succumbs to temptation and squanders the love of her savior. The lyrics are deceptively, cleverly simple, with two main verses that mirror each other through redemption and ruin, bridged by a chorus professing the flawed protagonist’s plaintive desire to be “good.” The music is likewise straightforward, starting with four rhythmic strums in two measures of 4/4 time, then building up in instruments and volume to crescendos at the chorus. However, in my mind, the song still remains somehow elegant, spare, lacking the full country flourishes that would have been easy to include at the time. To me, the song’s lack of adornment points not only to its accessibility, but also to the pain of its protagonist, who remains scorned, raw, and despite her capacity for conquest, painfully alone.
5. Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet “A Fuller Wine”
Washburn was already known for her work as part of bluegrass outfits Cleary Brothers and Uncle Earl, but took a new direction after a US-government-sponsored goodwill tour of China in 2005. There, Washburn found herself not only performing, but also producing, as she was inspired by her long-standing love of Asian traditions to create music that melded elements of both American and Chinese folk cultures. She then teamed with fellow banjoist Bela Fleck and his counterparts in the Sparrow Quartet to record their eponymous album released in May. The result is a true gem, a unique and inspired opus that demonstrates the individuality of a specific artist while simultaneously blazing new trails for everyone in the field.
The first track release is “A Fuller Wine,” which has fewer of the more obvious Asian embellishments present on other parts of the album but still contains some connections in the flourish of its fiddle and also—in my interpretation—its austerity. The song tracks the journeys of a woman following an unrequited love around the world. In the chorus, our protagonist pines, “Everywhere I go I look for you/Do you look for me where you go to?,” while the lyrics later explain the title, referring to the promise of a dream deferred (and we know what happens to those). The song starts with the rhythm section, solely string instruments. The banjo begins, then the cello jumps in, both chugging smoothly and subtly but relentlessly like a train crossing continents, reflecting the search as well as its endless and irresolvable pursuit, what the lyrics call “this losing revelation,” that somehow persists despite—or perhaps because—of the elusiveness of its target.
4. Love is All “Wishing Well”
I’m a sucker for big beats and lush walls of sound, and this song definitely delivers on both counts. Beginning with a flood of drums, the percussion is soon accompanied by a waterfall from the keyboards that eventually plunge into the song’s sweet, plinking melody. The lyrics are silly but fun, following the protagonist’s inauspicious attempts at auguries, and the half-spoken, half sing-song delivery of lead singer Josephine Olausson’s voice contributes to the song’s overall charm.
3. Vivian Girls “Where Do You Run To?”
Ever find yourself humming along with the vacuum cleaner? Here, I think that’s a good thing. A song that so harmonically blends voices and instruments into such a hypnotic blend may not be for everyone, but I like the way that it mixes so atmospherically into the environment. And I think that it fits for the song’s searching story. The music pulsates like a heartbeat or pounding feet, seeps into your skin, and throbs repetitively yet subtly like the obsessive and unrequited desires that we all have, roiling regularly but almost imperceptibly through our passing thoughts and into our daily lives.
2. M83 “Kim and Jessie”
This is the song that’s playing when Jake Ryan walks into the school cafeteria, catches my eye, and realizes that I’m the one he’s been waiting for all along.
1. Muxtape
It was brilliant, and I’ll miss it forever.
(And BONUS, a resolution: next year, I’ll be searching for songs that have nothing to do with unrequited love. Wish me luck.)
Jennifer Lynn Jones is a second-year doctoral student in the Communication and Culture program at Indiana University, Bloomington, focusing on Film and Media Studies. Her 2007 short "in/sight" premiered this fall on The Documentary Channel. But regarding the really important stuff, she used to play viola, and one of her most cherished childhood musical memories involves a lengthy interrogation of Neil Diamond’s “I Am I Said” with her father.
My year in music has been marked by developments in both technology and content, so I decided to combine elements of the two categories within my top ten list. Here’s the down and dirty.
10. My new iMac.
I’m kind of a Luddite. I don’t believe in hopping on the new gadget bandwagon, and I really like to wait to buy new technology until I feel like a) it’s reached a low-price plateau and b) all its kinks have been worked out. As such, until this year, my computer was a 2001 Dell laptop, heavy as a bag of bricks and commonly called a dinosaur by the lab techs I phoned for monthly help. However, I work in media production, and it’s pretty near impossible to professionally edit a video on anything but a Mac. So I broke down and bought a beast, a brand-new, top-of-the-line iMac with all the attendant bells and whistles, and it has completely revolutionized the way that I interact with music. I realize that this may not seem so amazing to most people reading this blog, but it was a huge paradigm shift for me. I’d been pretty good at keeping up with reading about developments in music, but with the dinosaur, I had no way to actually experience them. Now I can, and it’s completely altered and improved my life as a result. The Luddite is still there—I only just bought my first iPod, a 2GB shuffle—but she’s melting, bit by bit.
9. Singles/Tracks.
Don’t get me wrong; a good album is great. But one of the joys of my new iMac has been rediscovering the beauty of the single. Less like a chapter to a book than a cupcake to a cake, I forgot how these little gems can be so satisfying and profound on their own, beyond the confines of the album. Surprising, I know, especially since singles were how I first uncovered the pleasures of music as a child, but procuring a single alone was a challenge during the time between the decline of vinyl production and the rise of computer downloading. Otherwise, music outside of the Top 40 charts seems to favor the album to the single, so that was where I tended to focus my attentions. But now that I have more and better access to them, I’m really savoring the specificity of singles, and decided to focus the rest of my list on the ones I’ve enjoyed the most this year.
8. Vampire Weekend “Campus”
Criticize them as you will—and Eric has—it’s hard to deny that Vampire Weekend’s eponymous album came out at the perfect time. Their Caribbean-inflected sounds added a much-needed shot of warmth to my cold Indiana winter. Although several tracks struck my fancy, “Campus” is the one that has stuck with me the most, in large part due to two key aspects of setting, the college campus generally and New York’s Columbia campus specifically. In general terms, I assume most of my attraction stems from my association with academia. As a Ph.D. student, the college campus is my chosen habitat, so making it the focus of a song about a soured student-professor romance is sure to lure me in. In specific terms, I lived in Manhattan before coming to Bloomington, so I love imagining the narrative action occurring across the Columbia campus. Aside from these aspects, I like the open-ended nature of the story and the cheekiness of the wordplay. After all, we don’t really know exactly what’s going on with the couple, but we know it’s bad enough to cause some passive-aggressive stalking on the part of the protagonist. Kefir on keffiyah, anyone?
7. Detachment Kit "NYC"
Interestingly enough, in terms of setting, this song serves as a sort of bridge in the list between New York and the South, as the band’s two founders now live in Brooklyn, but hail from Tennessee, my home state. However, I have to admit that this is about all I definitively know about the band, aside from the fact that I love this song and think it’s worthy of sharing here. I first heard “NYC” when a friend donated it to my iPod during a trip to New York this fall. Upon my initial listen, I thought it was a song from some long-lost late seventies New York punk band, but was impressed when I realized that it came from this independent, hardscrabble ensemble still at work in the city instead.
The song tells the familiar story of a New York transplant seeking fortune but finding only misfortune. However, this version seems to be framed within the independent music scene, in which success is often seen as coming from self-sacrifice to muse and vice versus simple sales. Therefore, to “come to New York City to die,” as the chorus repeats, may be part of the plan. The band beguiles the listener by beginning with that chorus in cadenced acoustic tones, then yanks them into a plunging abyss of screeching vocals, searing guitars, and smashing drums. If the musicians must go to New York to die for their art, you as a listener will also be dragged along on the ride.
6. Tammy Wynette “Good”
I grew up surrounded by country music, and though I was familiar with it, I didn’t really appreciate it until I was in my mid-twenties and getting ready to leave the South. Although I found it easy to get into most country classics and felt a particularly close connection to Loretta Lynn, I was always a little more ambivalent about Tammy Wynette. While both Loretta and Tammy might sing about rocky romances, there’s a big difference between Loretta’s assertive “Your Squaw Is on the Warpath” and Tammy’s submissive “Stand By Your Man.” Pair that with her frosted façade and famously messy marriage to George Jones, Tammy seemed to me to be the kind of woman whose music and life I might do best to avoid.
Then one day this fall I ran across “Good,” and I had to reconsider my prejudices. Wynette wrote the song with her sixties super-producer Billy Sherill, and it was produced around the time of her breakthrough singles “I Don’t Want to Play House” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” though there’s not a lot of other information I could find about the single’s release or chart record. “Good” follows the form of a classic country story song, about a waitress saved from her errant ways by a customer who asks her to dance. However, her amazing grace is more lost than found as she succumbs to temptation and squanders the love of her savior. The lyrics are deceptively, cleverly simple, with two main verses that mirror each other through redemption and ruin, bridged by a chorus professing the flawed protagonist’s plaintive desire to be “good.” The music is likewise straightforward, starting with four rhythmic strums in two measures of 4/4 time, then building up in instruments and volume to crescendos at the chorus. However, in my mind, the song still remains somehow elegant, spare, lacking the full country flourishes that would have been easy to include at the time. To me, the song’s lack of adornment points not only to its accessibility, but also to the pain of its protagonist, who remains scorned, raw, and despite her capacity for conquest, painfully alone.
5. Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet “A Fuller Wine”
Washburn was already known for her work as part of bluegrass outfits Cleary Brothers and Uncle Earl, but took a new direction after a US-government-sponsored goodwill tour of China in 2005. There, Washburn found herself not only performing, but also producing, as she was inspired by her long-standing love of Asian traditions to create music that melded elements of both American and Chinese folk cultures. She then teamed with fellow banjoist Bela Fleck and his counterparts in the Sparrow Quartet to record their eponymous album released in May. The result is a true gem, a unique and inspired opus that demonstrates the individuality of a specific artist while simultaneously blazing new trails for everyone in the field.
The first track release is “A Fuller Wine,” which has fewer of the more obvious Asian embellishments present on other parts of the album but still contains some connections in the flourish of its fiddle and also—in my interpretation—its austerity. The song tracks the journeys of a woman following an unrequited love around the world. In the chorus, our protagonist pines, “Everywhere I go I look for you/Do you look for me where you go to?,” while the lyrics later explain the title, referring to the promise of a dream deferred (and we know what happens to those). The song starts with the rhythm section, solely string instruments. The banjo begins, then the cello jumps in, both chugging smoothly and subtly but relentlessly like a train crossing continents, reflecting the search as well as its endless and irresolvable pursuit, what the lyrics call “this losing revelation,” that somehow persists despite—or perhaps because—of the elusiveness of its target.
4. Love is All “Wishing Well”
I’m a sucker for big beats and lush walls of sound, and this song definitely delivers on both counts. Beginning with a flood of drums, the percussion is soon accompanied by a waterfall from the keyboards that eventually plunge into the song’s sweet, plinking melody. The lyrics are silly but fun, following the protagonist’s inauspicious attempts at auguries, and the half-spoken, half sing-song delivery of lead singer Josephine Olausson’s voice contributes to the song’s overall charm.
3. Vivian Girls “Where Do You Run To?”
Ever find yourself humming along with the vacuum cleaner? Here, I think that’s a good thing. A song that so harmonically blends voices and instruments into such a hypnotic blend may not be for everyone, but I like the way that it mixes so atmospherically into the environment. And I think that it fits for the song’s searching story. The music pulsates like a heartbeat or pounding feet, seeps into your skin, and throbs repetitively yet subtly like the obsessive and unrequited desires that we all have, roiling regularly but almost imperceptibly through our passing thoughts and into our daily lives.
2. M83 “Kim and Jessie”
This is the song that’s playing when Jake Ryan walks into the school cafeteria, catches my eye, and realizes that I’m the one he’s been waiting for all along.
1. Muxtape
It was brilliant, and I’ll miss it forever.
(And BONUS, a resolution: next year, I’ll be searching for songs that have nothing to do with unrequited love. Wish me luck.)
posted by marathonpacks at 5:00 AM
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