It’s scary, because if you want to gain something, you have to be willing to lose something else. And people don’t like to lose. Including me.
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We just watched a clip of McConaughey on Lex Friedman’s podcast talking about True Detective and something he talked about struck me. What he said was that he reached inside himself to connect to Rust’s character. Now, I’m not an actor, but this is a lot different than what I normally here about someone preparing for a role.
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Letters to Cleo are an interesting study in what music in the 90’s were like. I don’t want to over-simplify it, but you didn’t have to have a ton of chart success to have a major label career or a lasting cultural impression.
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Ryan’s story has always been incredibly personal to me. I grew up 100 miles from Ryan in Indiana. He was a little older than me, but he was just another kid from Indiana like I was. I had just turned ten when he died and I couldn’t for the life of me understand how a disease, no matter how dangerous it appeared, or how scary people made it out to be, could make people be so evil to other people. Especially a kid.
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I was making music with synths long before I listened to any synth-based music on a regular basis and it was for that exact reason: I was on my own. However, making music with synths opened my world up to entire genres of music I’d either ignored or overlooked.
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Getting better keeps you motivated and you don’t get better alone.
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Everything about them was uplifting compared to Seattle. Gone was staying at home and dying from heroin. Back was cocaine, fighting and supermodels. I’m not suggesting going out, doing blow, getting in fights and going home with supermodels, but I at least understand why one would want to do that, as opposed to withering away on the needle at home.
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It’s incredible how they’ve been one of the biggest bands in the world for twenty-five years and, even to this day, I rarely meet anyone who has heard of them. I love all of their records (and Kelly’s solo work) but this one still gets me down deep.
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You cannot create out of chaos, only out of order.
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Pete Yorn has pretty good taste in the ladies. I say that because two of my exes back in the day told me, separately, he tried to pick them up. That having been said, I could have told him he was better off getting shot down by those two.
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Buddy’s career really only lasted nineteen months. From the ages of twenty to twenty-two. From the hot, dry days of Lubbock, Texas to the frigid, snowy nights of Clear Lake, Iowa, he packed a lifetime into those nineteen months. In his music, and in his life, it was a busy nineteen months.
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I simply approached him, said hello and he gave me a friendly “what’s up?” in response. So, I had seen on VH1 that they were working on a new album, and this was after Wes Borland had left and Durst was doing all the guitars. I asked him, “Hey I saw you’re doing all the guitars on the new album, how’s that going?”
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But perhaps what Hughes was best at was marrying the right song to the right scene. Think of the end of The Breakfast Club and “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” or the end of Pretty in Pink and OMD’s “If You Leave”. We grew up with this as an example, but Hughes knew… he knew that humans inherently tie memory to sensory stimulus. It’s a movie, he can’t make us smell or taste, but he can make us see and hear. I challenge you to listen to one of those songs and not think about Molly RIngwald.
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The same can be said about music. The Vandals are not as good as Franz Liszt, but I like them both for different reasons. That’s okay. And it’s okay if you find out your favorite artist “borrowed” something from a song they liked. It doesn’t make them less-than. In fact, it might make them greater-than, because if you were obsessed with making music that no one had ever made before, you’d probably never get out of your bedroom. The key is finding a slightly different way of doing it, by combining these influences. Purity is a myth.
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We talked for about an hour about Chicano music and how a white kid from Indiana fell in love with it. He just couldn’t believe I loved all this Chicano rock and mariachi. I told him I didn’t know why I responded to it the way I did, but I just loved it. I never saw the guy again, but that moment has stuck with me ever since.
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I’m not going to tell you that there isn’t such a thing as authenticity, but I am going to ask, at least in regard to art, “who is to say what is authentic?”
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Nothing great was ever accomplished by playing it safe.
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He would have been ninety next month. That’s a fair amount of years for a life by any definition. But, the world has lost a great artist. A literary legend has passed on to wherever he is now. Hopefully his work, which by no means caters to the utopian dreams of certain gatekeepers, will stick around to remind generations to come just how depraved we really are.
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A list of 101 music films I recommend. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some good ones, but these are not all that I’ve seen, just all that I’d recommend.
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I will tell you this, it feels fantastic to create something that I love and that I’m proud of. After that, the opinions will come.
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