Song of the Day: “Breathe Deeper" (Tame Impala)

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Artist: Tame Impala

Album: The Slow Rush

Song: “Breathe Deeper”

Label: Modular Recordings Pty

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[0:01] The funk-bass refrain that opens the song has such a pleasant, round-rubbery chonk to it. It almost sounds like a taut rubber band being flicked and amplified.

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[0:17] After every line, singer Kevin Parker tacks on this this plucky, upbeat little “I can!” Like a tagline on a tie-dyed, motivational blacklight poster. A one-man band creating his own background-singer doo-wop garnish. It’s both catchy and low-key adorable.

Also, I love the vocal effect on his voice. It has this silvery, swishy reverb that occasionally echoes back, call and response.

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[3:02] The elongated synth notes that enter here sound AMAZING. Like the burbling fart of an electronic didgeridoo. Parker might as well have sampled it directly off the opening bars of Warren G’s “Regulate”.

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[4:56] OK, the song’s over!

Whew, what a great song. I loved it. Maybe I’ll start it over again from the beginning so I can hear it again.

SIC! There’s more! You slurped the last drop of milkshake and didn’t realise there was a metal canister with EVEN MORE MILKSHAKE. But not only is there more milkshake, but it’s magically – impossibly, confoundingly – a different flavour entirely that’s even tastier than the original milkshake.

This unexpected, standalone outro section grooves like mad, introducing a scrape-y distorted synth pattern that just shakes its ass all the way until the song’s real ending. Parker sings a few little background lines but you can hardly understand the lyrics and it doesn’t matter. This parts all about the synth.

It’s almost unfortunate that this minute-long groove isn’t its own track that can be put on repeat by itself. Because I would definitely listen to it on repeat.

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Here’s a badass live version if you’re still thirsty…

(Yeah, thought you might be.)

Song of the Day: “Saturday Morning" (Melorman)

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Artist: Melorman

Album: After Noon

Song: “Saturday Morning”

Label: Sun Sea Sky Productions

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The mentalist and stage illusionist Derren Brown once described mindfulness as the ability to wake up in each moment, anxious and thinking you’re late for work, only to realise it’s Saturday morning and you can sink back into unhurried slumber.

There is no emergency. 

We do not need to latch white-knuckled onto every thought that bubbles up from the murky soup of consciousness. The brain’s amygdala only cares that we stay alive, it has no interest in expanding the frontiers of well-being.

The title of Melorman’s song “Saturday Morning” reminded me of Brown’s comments about the uses of stoicism.

Antonis Haniotakis, aka Melorman

Melorman is the ambient-electronica project of Antonis Haniotakis, who hails from Athens, Greece. His music feels like a mix between lo-fi bedroom hip-hop and the chiptune-inspired soundtracks of composers such as Disasterpeace.

The chiming melody of “Saturday Morning” circles in a hypnotic loop. I imagine the music orbiting like a slow-motion funnel of wind. As it continues to circle and re-interrogate its core musical idea, there’s an upward lift that commences. 

You start to feel less heavy. Then you float a centimetre off the ground, your shoes imperceptibly brushing the dirt. Then you rise.

Floating, feeling, falling back asleep.

Song of the Day: “Unite" (Mint Julep)

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Artist: Mint Julep

Album: Stray Fantasies

Song: “Unite”

Label: Western Vinyl

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Sugary sweet. Refreshing. Chilled out and bourbon-warm at the same time. Occasionally a band’s name writes the sonic menu description for you.

Mint Julep is the electro-pop side hustle of husband-wife songwriting duo Hollie and Keith Kenniff, the latter of whom records ambient and solo piano music under the monikers Helios and Goldmund.

Though not one of the lead singles off their latest album Stray Fantasies, “Unite” is the track destined to end up on my Spotify most-played round-up at the close of 2020.

Hollie and Keith Kenniff of Mint Julep

Throbbing, metronomic synth notes and lo-fi drum-machine snare hits set the tempo out of the gate. It’s a mostly unassuming preamble, however the song proceeds to blossom and expand like an orchid opening in timelapse photography. Tremulous keyboard flourishes. Then the chorus explodes with the joyous blast of a springtime supernova.

Like a top-down convertible stepping up through a superfluity of gears, the chorus just keeps climbing, ratcheting upward, gaining momentum. Hollie’s vocal melodies, which have been understated up to this point, suddenly open up, all sunbeam radiance and arena-rock, fist-in-the-air transcendence. An alternative universe in which The Killers tapped Hazel English as lead vocalist.

A winged creature not so much burning up in the sun as drinking it through a straw before belting out an iridescent dream-pop melody that could be heard a couple galaxies away.

Drink up.

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[Support Mint Julep by purchasing music and merch on their Bandcamp page. They’ve been donating profits in recent months to Treehouse, a Seattle-based foster-care charity.]

Thoughts on meditation from a rank novice

The day is young and dark.

Every minute or so a wind stirs up outside that has no discernible direction. A sharp, forceful billowing emerges for a few seconds and then subsides. I have no way of guessing when the next gust will emerge. The house holds its ground but you can feel the walls bristle as the force momentarily engulfs it.

Weather teaches a lesson in chaos. Perhaps that’s why people – especially here in Ireland – love talking about it.

We enjoy talking about things we don’t understand. Like weather, religious mystery generates enough human breath to form its own mighty wind. No wonder that nature was humankind’s first religion. When we began to understand the physics behind natural phenomena, however, we banished the gods to a realm of physics that more effectively defies understanding. So that humanity could relish the dizzying high of ignorance once more.

I am nearly two weeks into the Waking Up course, a series of guided meditations by author and neuroscientist Sam Harris. I have wanted to develop a practice of mindfulness meditation for quite a while now but have failed to do so. It’s one thing to complete a task. Developing a regular discipline requires far more effort and the combination of the ease of the app and my prior affection for Harris created just enough anticipation to push me out of my inaction.

The common theme I have discovered so far is the repeated challenge, in each new moment, to sit with impermanence. Each new thought that emerges, each sensation in the body, each sound you hear will arise and then pass away. You did nothing to occasion any of these phenomena, and there is no way to pin them down. My practice is to simply observe them arise and then let them dissolve from consciousness without judgment.

My tendency is to cling. To become lost and tangled in such thoughts, to mentally bow like a branch in whatever direction the blast of wind pushes. To meditate, I am learning, is to be this very house in which I am sitting cross-legged, to note the existence and insensibility of wind and weather and yet remain still.

Though I meditate in silence, sitting on a cushioned ledge my office with legs crossed and spine erect, I am now on my feet at my standing desk, music playing. The band is Hammock. Soundscapes ebb and flow, swell in volume and then recede, steadily like ocean waves, no punctuations of silence in between. Like massaging hands on the back, maintaining a connection of touch. The hands most frequently slide to their next location but when one hand is forced to break connection, the other hand lingers on the back to preserve the continuity. No distinct boundaries as long as the experience persists. Like waves on a shore, overlapping.

If you asked me to hum a melody from a Hammock song, I could not. Melody is too distinct, too ordered. So much of life is the same. We get hypnotised by the ebb and flow of experience. We forget to pay attention. The voice coming from my phone speaker during the guided meditation reminds me to pay attention – to the breath, to sounds, to sensations in the body, to the present moment. When I inevitably become lost in thought, Harris’ voice gently, non-judgmentally calls me back to the present moment. A minute before the guided session ends, he invites me to start over.

As long as I remain focused on the present moment I am not fretting about the future, I am not regretting or stewing on the past.

Impermanence. A beautiful-sounding word yet so often a bitter thought. My fledgling meditation practice assures me it needn’t be accompanied by suffering. The people that have come into my life and gone almost as quickly as a breeze, or a torrent of harsh weather. My aging parents who will die, probably before I do but not necessarily.

My mind returns to a colour meditation I heard on the “Sex Ed” episode of the Radiolab podcast. The father in the story shares an example of the sort of guided meditation he’d use to help his daughter weather the excruciating menstrual cramps she experiences as a result of endometriosis. The degree of pain we experience, just as with pleasure, heightens with expectation. By focussing on the present moment and accepting its impermanence, we can let go of unnecessary suffering. Not all of it, but some portion.

Think of the sea, think of the clouds, think of blue

Consider the vastness of the ocean

It goes on and on

And waves come and waves go

And nothing stays and nothing is permanent

It all seems very real

And yet it is gone

And waves come and waves go...

One day my existence, all memory of me, will be erased. And I’m OK with that. No future loss can wrest from my hands – open as they are – this present, already-disappearing moment.

Podcast Episode #2: Derek Webb

In this episode of the podcast, Jason speaks with songwriter Derek Webb about guilt, shame and creativity. Webb discusses what he learned from songwriters such as Joni Mitchell, Amy Ray and Bob Dylan about the delicate art of prying open one's ribs and inserting a microphone. Is getting onstage night after night to sing – and thereby re-live – one's grief an act of healing or masochism?

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Podcast Episode #1: Mugison

In this episode of the podcast, Jason speaks with Icelandic songwriter Mugison about untangling the mystery of creative inspiration. They discuss how Mugison decides which voice and style he will explore in a given song, Icelandic music's reputation for weirdness, creating art without worrying about the permission of gatekeepers, and his fascination with Jesus and spiritual belief.

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Visiting Mugison in Iceland

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Song of the Day: “Desired Constellation" (Björk)

Björk's music is dear to me, and has been for a long time. Her vulnerability makes me feel like maybe it's possible for me to be vulnerable, to sing loudly over quiet music. This morning I rediscovered this track from Medulla, and it vibrated in me.

"With a palm full of stars / I throw them like dice

On the table

I shake them like dice / And throw them on the table

Until the desired constellation appears

How am I going to make it right?"

The question "How am I going to make it right?" is one I feel all the time. I struggle with the thought of saying it out aloud, never mind singing it.

Song of the Day: "Masterpiece" (Big Thief)

It's Sunday morning and I’m getting choked up at the kitchen table. I'm only halfway through my first cup of coffee. It’s that song again, folding me into a hug till my throat cramps. Big Thief's ballad “Masterpiece”, the solo acoustic take. When I retreat into my music-critic mind, I feel embarrassed at how effortlessly the songwriter has snipped through my heart's yellow perimeter tape ('crying scene - do not cross'). Simple guitar chords. A pretty but uncomplicated melody. No production or compositional sleight of hand. An acoustic guitar, for bob's sake. Have I always been such an easy mark?

Back in the mid naughts I served on the editorial staff at Paste, which had a special fondness for singer/songwriters, folk and Americana, disproportionately so in the company’s early years. Three chords and the truth, an acoustic guitar. That sort of thing. We got savaged routinely for promoting music that our critics described as “boring” or “beige” or – if the nuclear strike was to be called in – “safe”.

Why am I getting weepy then? Why do I feel so vulnerable listening to this song? Isn’t that the opposite of safety? Isn’t that the very definition of risk? And if I feel vulnerable even listening to this song, how must the singer feel singing it?

“Years, days, makes no difference to me babe / You look exactly the same to me / Ain’t no time, crossing your legs inside the diner / Raising your coffee to your lips, the steam.”

The coffee-sipping woman in the diner arrives and all of a sudden I picture my little girl grown. The same girl running through our kitchen shirtless in her underpants while I type these words. Rowan, five years old, not yet banished from Eden snake-bitten and self-conscious.

The economy of the song’s details pare flesh with scalpel sharpness. The affection of the word ‘babe’. The neutral ground of the diner table a world away from the intimacy of the kitchen table at which I’m drinking my own coffee. Rowan doesn’t even drink coffee yet. She calls it a “daddy drink”. Some time has clearly passed but a parent always recognises a child. The pair in the diner, perhaps it’s a strained relationship. The crossed legs might suggest a defensive posture, the lower-body equivalent of folded arms.

“You saw the masterpiece, she looks a lot like you / Wrapping her left arm around your right / Ready to walk you through the night.”

'Masterpiece', what a lovely bit of name-calling. Liam, you are a masterpiece. Rowan, you are a masterpiece. The fact that you look a lot (or even just a bit) like me is something I hold dear. That outward clue to our ineradicable kinship.

Tears come more easily as I get older. Maybe it’s parenthood. Maybe my defences are getting weaker, less stubborn. Or maybe I’m actually getting stronger – in my ability to plunge myself into difficult, unsettling feelings. Maybe it’s because my own parents are getting older and the cycle of existence, birth and death, is never far from my mind. I want to experience life free of illusion, hold the milk and sugar.

Over the past year I’ve started drinking my coffee black. Was it fair to say that I liked coffee if it needed all that sweetening and cream before I could appreciate the flavour? I’ve grown to appreciate the hint of bitterness. Life without the assurance of God, of heaven, of rapture, has been the same. A brew too bitter for many, though one whose character you can grow to appreciate.

The experience of listening to music can function in the same way. If you strip away all the production and instrumentation and aural confection that sweetens the taste, sometimes you’re left no escape from the truth. As "Masterpiece" reminds, our children will become adults in the span of time it takes us to blink and reopen our eyes, an experience Frans Hofmeester mirrored so poignantly in the timelapse he made of his daughter's journey from newborn to teenager. After leaving the hospital room hosting our welcome party, it can feel as though we get little more than a stroll around the block before we're back in there for the send-off.

“Old stars / Filling up my throat / You gave 'em to me when I was born / Now they’re coming out / Lying there on the hospital bed your eyes were narrow, blue and red / You took a draw of breath and said to me

"You saw the masterpiece, she looks a lot like me / Wrapping my left arm round your right / Ready to walk you through the night.”

Stars punctuate the darkness. Not by a lot. They’re small specks, to be fair. But their glow is reassuring. Sometimes a bit of milk starlight is all you need. The milk of human kindness, one person's arm wrapping around another's. Not all is dark. The coffee is bitter, the mug is warm.

David Bazan and the scars of intimacy

When songwriter David Bazan impeached Pedro, his former band, and began performing under his own name, it wasn’t clear just how much of himself he was committing to offer listeners in so doing. The bracing parables of infidelity and self-righteousness and murder and religiosity and capitalism that he’d recorded under the Pedro The Lion moniker always vibrated with observations about human nature that seemed almost impolite to voice aloud.

Working in the realm of fiction furnished a truth-telling hall pass. The sensationalism of the plot twists – on Winners Never Quit a squeaky-clean politician murders his wife after she threatens to expose him, on Control a spurned wife stabs her philandering husband – reassured us with the implicit disclaimer that any connection to real persons or events was entirely coincidental. And concept albums, as we all know, are contrived by definition (right?). The wrapper of fiction offered plausible deniability, that we weren’t really that awful to each other. Bazan could hacksaw all the way to the bone and exhibit the black-rot marrow because it was somebody else’s bone, and the bone was all just a metaphor anyway. For all we know, Bazan might even be autopsying a straw man. But if his concept albums could be safely relegated to fiction, what were we to make of songs like “I Do” off 2004’s Achilles Heel?

“And when his tiny head emerged from hair and folds of skin

I thought to myself if he only knew he would climb right back in...

Now that my blushing bride has done what she was born to do

It's time to bury dreams and raise a son to live vicariously through

The sperm swims for the egg

The finger for the ring

If i could take one back

I know what it would be”

How's that for confessional candor? Even if we could be sure this narrator was simply an invented character, couldn’t it still be a sock puppet used by Bazan to vent his own ambivalence about parenthood? The playfulness of the cliche “blushing bride”. The brazenness of a father openly acknowledging his desire to live vicariously through his son. Maybe it’s all just black comedy, even if that final unresolved hypothetical left hanging in the air makes our chest tighten. Regretting a child or regretting a marriage. Which admission leaves the less scorching impression?

Consider the early Pedro song “Criticism As Inspiration” in which Bazan visits this same theme of how we commodify others to give our lives meaning, how we use them to plug up our own emptiness. Instead of the open legs of a labouring mother, this time it’s the posture of a receptive lover.

“Then there's your girlfriend / She opens her legs and gives your life meaning / Is that what you love her for? / It makes me feel so good to always tell you when you're wrong / The big man that I am to always have to put you down / It makes me look so good to always put you in your place / I can write it in a song but never say it to your face”

There it is again, the wallpaper-stripping sarcasm. Bazan seems to be checking his own motives for drawing attention to the messiness of other’s lives. What better way to deflect attention than to indulge in a critique of one’s neighbour. But then came Curse Your Branches, the first album to feature a photograph of David Bazan (however blurry), obscured somewhat by the giant, bright yellow text “BAZAN” in all-caps. It felt like a proper ‘coming out’ moment, the singer megaphoning his disillusionment with Christian fundamentalism, his slow dissolve into the booze he enjoyed a bit too much for his own good, his empathy with sinners, drunks, losers and fuck-ups the world over. Bazan seemed to be engaged in controlled burning as a means of clearing away the weeds and tangle and occasionally whole trees, giving light a chance to hit the forest floor. Self-immolation as the path to being born again, or at least giving new life some room to grow.

Bazan’s solo albums do have this weird obsession with trees, come to think of it. The cover art of 2006’s Fewer Moving Parts featured an illustration of Bazan cradling an axe against shoulder, standing in front of a grove of tree stumps. Clear-cutting. On the track “Backwoods Nation” he sang about America’s most regressive, hateful fringe existing in this metaphorical forest, insulated from multiculturalism and what some might deem progressive social values. Then on Curse Your Branches the tree imagery returns, wholly unavoidable given the fact that Bazan’s axe had finally bitten into the biblical tree of life itself. Leaves fall from branches, unable to determine where they land, or if they even have to fall at all.

By the time you get to Bazan’s last couple solo albums, Blanco (2016) and now Care, his axe has chopped to kindling any guitars hanging about the studio, making way for moody synths and programmed drum beats. The coarse grain of Bazan’s baritone finds its perfect complement in the album’s toasty-warm synth textures, shimmering keys and throbbing bass frequencies. Though the electronic components take on a grungy patina at times, the overall impression is one of cleanliness, clarity and metronomical order. Counter-intuitively, the more Bazan seems to slide into various forms of intoxication (“I recreate in the usual way, shut some breakers off but not the whole box, next day I wake till the fog finally abates, again at risk of being bored by clear thought”), the more sober his instrumental and compositional instincts become.

If Curse Your Branches found Bazan searching arms extended through the cloud of steam left over from the evaporated reservoir of his own baptismal font, Care seems to investigate the dissolution of a more terrestrial bond – marriage. He sings of infidelity (“Stop romanticising cheating, we are cowards everyone, all of us need major healing, come and get yours in the sun”), but this isn’t the hyper-dramatic sort from the protagonist of Pedro the Lion’s Control. The record’s title track follows a platonic relationship between a man and woman that pulses with not-so-naive intensity. “Later on we went out walking without ruining our lives," Bazan sings, "we know the difference between talking and going just outside the lines. It’s not like we’re immune to it.”

“Make Music” captures the struggle to hold together the planks of a marriage’s splintering hull, even as salty ocean gushes through the breach:

“Didn’t the disappointment press in the middle of your chest / Disbelief turned to bargaining, heartbreak turned to stress / Though the words had not been said yet, it was all you were gonna to get / You don’t know what will happen now and it’s caving in your head... / Didn’t I always interrupt that the sun was coming up / You believed it for a little while but you might have given up / I considered getting sober, I don’t want to be left over / But I would need a little more of you to try and fill the void...

"Didn’t we always vote for love when our friends were breaking up / Then they’d go and see a counsellor to find it’s not enough / Didn’t we hope it wouldn’t come for us when adulthood called our bluff / And we tried to turn the volume down and muddle through the hush… / Didn’t we make music? / Didn’t we always risk our hearts to do this?”

I’ve been through stretches in my own marriage where the silences punctuating the hardest conversations felt bottomless, spike-lined. And even those pits, without any safety net below to catch a falling body, felt safer than any web of words that might be stretched across the gap. That is a terrible despair, an almost impossible vulnerability. Maybe it’s something that every married person experiences at one time or another, if only for a season, but the marital scars Bazan spends several songs on Care describing certainly feel like a eulogy. In “Lazerbeams” he sings in unmissable past-tense,

“I woke up thinking I should stay / Awake whatever's coming next / Tears in someone's office / Unpacking our regrets / Now it's time to repaint / But it could be time to sell / All the plans we made together / And all there is, mis-remembered wealth / And though we couldn't see the future / Or comprehend the past / We knew that it would last / When we were lazerbeams”

Though it would be presumptuous to believe we have a perfect read on Bazan’s life simply from listening to Care, it feels like (if only in parable) he's written a second divorce record. And once again he accomplishes the feat with miraculous sensitivity and compassion. Maybe that’s what Bazan’s songwriting is all about – tracing a finger along the bruises, the scarred wrists, not out of disbelief but simply to acknowledge that we all carry them beneath our sleeves. He caresses these bruises. In short, he treats them with care.