Fire Songs - The Watson Twins

I was thinking of writing mini reviews of things I came across in my life - books, music, films, games, those sorts of things - but I'm currently listening to Fire Songs by The Watson Twins and I realised that there are limits to what I can write about when it comes to music.

Music hasn't always been a big part of my life. I remember coming to the experience late. There wasn't a great deal of it around the house growing up, just my parent's feeble vinyl collection and the novelty of taping the top 40 from the radio and listening to it on my walkman over and over again until the following week. The music itself didn't really matter to me. It was something there, but not something that I really connected with in any strong way.

And this is where the story shifts into potentially embarrassing self-revelation.

I remember buying my first album from a band where I really felt some small connection to the songs: A cassette of Automatic for the People by REM, released in (check's wikipedia...) 1992. I was 14 years old and Everybody Hurts was being played to death. As people have been pointing out to me recently, I was kind of a late bloomer, so I was just starting to feel the first hints of adult emotion and thinking, goddammit, everybody does hurt, they're right!

It's not a deep revelation. But 14 year old, socially inept nerd-boys aren't known for their startling insight.

Everybody Hurts is not a great song, nor a song that I would listen to now (Drive and Sweetness Follows are both far more interesting, and have higher ratings on my iTunes), but it is one of those songs that captures some essential part of my youth.

In the years since that first cassette, I've gone from tapes to CDs to mp3s; from a chunky walkman to being able to carry my entire collection around in my pocket; from being a socially inept nerd-boy to a socially inept nerd-man.

One thing I haven't done though, is work out why music works for me.

I write. Short films, short stories, novels, comics, occasionally video games, that sort of thing. I've been doing it for long enough that I have a fairly good understanding of how narrative works, how stories fit together, what words do when you put them next to each other, and how my aesthetic sense gels, or doesn't gel, with certain works. I can articulate those things, and hopefully that's something I'll do more of in this blog as I read and watch and play more.

But how music works, eludes me.

I don't have a context for why something works, or where it fits historically, or how it has been influenced by what's come before, or why certain chords sound good together, or why one song works and one doesn't, and listening to Fire Songs, I want to write a serious response to it, but I can't. I'm brought short by limitations in my knowledge and limitations in my experience as a listener.

And that's fine, because I'd probably spend more time analysing why I liked something, rather than just enjoying what I do like, and there's only so much space and time in life for naval gazing.

And, no doubt, there will be more, much more, of that as this blog quietly ages.

Oh, and Fire Songs is an awesome album too.

Ze purpose of ze blog

This is somewhere to talk about stuff other than your job. Because, apparently, there has to be more out there. Somewhere.

Also, I have blogfright from having to write the first post. And, picturing you all in your underwear is giving me that funny feeling... If you need me, I'll be in my bunk.