David Holt
David Holt is the mascot for a Major General at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Someday he’ll reclaim his dignity. Probably not this week, though.
Barreling down John Sevier Highway, absolutely sure that there would be a cop just over every hill, completely unconcerned about this, Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga being shaken from the speakers, dumping out all over me... I had just ended a relationship, complicated like you would believe but wouldn't enjoy, that had consumed the majority of a couple of years of my life, and I needed to get lost. I’d pulled up, blasting “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb,” keeping my mind off of what was about to happen, walked up to the elementary school playground and saw
her, sitting on a swing, eyes covered in ridiculously oversized
sunglasses, presumably to hide the crying we were both pretty sure would occur. It did. And, as I sped home, “Don’t You Evah” played. I sang along, probably the wrong words since I had just gotten the album the day before, but as I yelled at the top of my lungs all of the guilt I felt seemed to pass out of my lungs.
***
I played Gym Class Heroes’ “Faces in the Hall” and “Makeout Club” on repeat for a total of about twenty-one hours of total flight time, crammed in the back of tiny prop planes and one incredibly well-appointed G5 corporate jet, moving from base to base in Afghanistan. I saw the most incredible sights out of the sides of those planes... except the jet: I slept in the jet.
***
After hearing their ep’s, after falling in love with the diversity of their sound, before hearing the full length album, but after its release, I heard an interview on NPR while driving home from work. I don’t remember the show, it might actually have been on streaming radio from someone other than NPR, and I’m only about 85% sure I didn’t just imagine it, but the members of Voxtrot were discussing the songwriting on their self-titled not-really-freshman effort.
Ramesh Srivastava’s lyrics were compared to hip-hop at some point, which I found strange, but I’d forgotten that by the time the band was talking about the song “Ghost.” They spoke of how the song felt ghostly in some strange way, and how they weren’t quite sure what it was about, but that they didn’t mind. I minded, so I listened to the song. I still have no idea what the song is about, but I have a very strong black&white mental image of an old beach house in winter with superimposed, under-saturated memories of childhood that comes up every time I hear the piano playing. Srivastava’s lyrics ramble through his life, not explaining anything, really, just sort of commenting on this and that.
***
This year I met the Mountain Goats. My girlfriend doesn’t like John Darnielle’s voice. I love it. “This Year” is my favorite song this year. This year. This year.
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Last winter, February I think, I saw The Twilight Singers in Chapel Hill. Greg Dulli, heavier than I remembered, less agile, more gruff, more tired, was still the single most charismatic man I’ve ever seen. He could have come out on stage, told us that the opening act had done a good enough job for the both of them, allowed as to how he didn’t feel like performing that night, and I’d have been glad that he at least came out and spoke to us. He is, simply, an over-sexualized celestial body with more gravitational force than his mass can account for. But I suppose that isn’t necessarily “simple.”
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Sometimes, when I think my life is pretty hard, I listen to Josh Rouse’s “Jersey Clowns” and cry about the plight of someone who might well be completely made up.
***
The first time I heard “Plymouth Rock” by John Vanderslice I had no idea what it was about. I was driving, half-listening, picking up pieces of phrases, “street fires,” “Shawnee brave,” others I can’t precisely pin down in my mind right now, but I associated the song with images from Disney’s Adventures of Davey Crockett, traveling down the river with this giant of a riverboat captain, Indians running through the trees, everyone wondering if they’d attack, if the canon hidden on the boat would work to keep them at bay...
Then I heard an interview with Vanderslice on NPR one day. He was asked about his anti-war song, at which point he began to discuss “Plymouth Rock.” I was confused. I listened to about half of the interview before I turned it off, got out the iPod, and played the song. And what do you know, it was an anti-war song. It was about Iraq, not about Indians. For a little while I thought I was going to be disappointed, as I usually am when people talk about things they don’t know anything about, but when I got home I pulled up the lyrics and really took a look at them, then going on to do the same with the whole album, Pixel Revolt. I discovered a man who, though we’re far enough separated politically that we probably couldn’t hear each other yelling if we tried, does a pretty damned good job of explaining (or at least inspiring empathy with) his points of view. He reminds me of how much I wish I could believe that humans could live without war.
***
Rob Crow’s album, Living Well, seems to hint at him being a happy person. This is not usually a good thing, but fatherhood seems to agree with the most prolifically strange songwriter whose various different projects all thrill me in completely different ways. Except Goblin Cock. I prefer Dethklok. I’m that lame.
***
While I’d had Beirut’s The Flying Club Cup for a few weeks beforehand, I didn’t really appreciate it fully until one night, lying in bed next to Krystle, watching the videos that Zach Condon and La Blogothèque had put together for each song on the album. I’d only learned of the band in late 2006, had buried the previous album on three hard drives, two iPods and various recesses of my soul, and to suddenly see the genius behind all of this beautiful cacophony, to see him, thin and wan as he stands, looking limp, but then coming alive as he hears his musicians playing something he especially enjoys, when the whole of the affairs culminates, when everyone is absorbed in their own melody and only he seems to be truly at one with every note being played on every syncopated beat...
The ideas behind the videos are simple, usually just some arrangement of following Condon as he moves in and out of the other members of his band, but I’ve spent more time watching these videos, going out of my way to listen to these poorly recorded live performances of the songs, than I have the album versions. Little movements, missed notes, looks on his face are now an integral part of my experience of listening to any version of these songs, but the videos have me almost considering giving this whole “job” thing up, becoming an incredibly poor (and, admittedly, less talented) artist, wiling away my days playing music on the streets of whatever cultureless berg wouldn't throw me out for playing uninspired covers of songs on my ukulele.
***
Luckily, my girlfriend seems to really like Mike Doughty’s voice. There is a live version of “Down on the River by the Sugar Plant” that I can’t get enough of. I like to sing along with “Tremendous Brunettes” and wish that I could be more like him.