Hey Senator

June 18, 2010


WellstoneIt’s been seven and a half years.

I didn’t know Paul well, but I knew what he stood for, and what he meant to Minnesota, and what he meant to me, a Minnesota transplant who cared deeply about education rights and the future of the country.

And I knew how it felt to hear he went down. That he was gone. Forever.

It’s no wonder I still feel chills when I hear Mason Jennings’ “The Ballad of Paul and Sheila.” And when I think of what could have been – what role Wellstone would play in today’s government, where it’s hard to trust either side, where we’ve all become so disenchanted with the story and the acting that we’ve forgotten what the roles stood for in the first place.

To make the nation better. To keep things honest. For us. And for our kids.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: I still miss Paul Wellstone.

October morning; little plane on the forest floor.
Up on the TV between a rerun and another war.
Here in a hotel, trying to make some sense of this.
Two thousand miles from my family in Minneapolis.

Hey Senator, I wanna say,
all the things you fought for did not die here today
Hey Senator, I’m gonna do,
all the things I can to live my life more like you lived.

-Mason Jennings, “The Ballad of Paul and Sheila”

Tags: Music, Politics |

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Sometimes, Big Picture sucks

May 26, 2010


A project is made up of smaller parts. Each smaller part is developed on its own. The success of the project depends on the smaller parts, working together, doing their smaller part thing and being of general use to everyone involved.

A Web site or a marketing campaign or a book or anything creative – they’re all created using some combination of strategy and action and implementation, and within each of these stages is a billion more pieces, and after those pieces are thrown together there’s another round of revision and .. seriously.

What a lot of work, right?

It’s no wonder we often let little mistakes slide. We go through a lot to get it close to a final project, and we fall in love with our mistakes because they came from us. They’re part of us. They make it us.

So we ignore them. And we chalk it up to seeing The Big Picture.

The Big Picture Screws You Up

I’m the kind of person who looks at the complete picture. That’s important. That’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s what it says in all of those fancy marketing books, and that’s what you learn in college and, so, you know, it’s got to be true, amen.

But sometimes, looking at the big picture can distract from the details.

Sorry. Did I say sometimes? I meant all the time.

The Big Picture blurs the details. It allows us to forget the mistakes. It projects success to areas it may not belong, creating a net effect not unlike an optical illusion, our mind filling in the holes with what we assume should be there. It’s an effective way to plan, but an awful way to execute.

See, here’s the reason the Big Picture sucks sometimes: every detail matters, and when you’re working Big Picture, you have a habit of forgetting the frames therein. There’s a balance, dude. A balance.

A Real World Example: The Albums of Pink Floyd.

Yeah. I’m going there.

In the annals of Rock Stardom, Pink Floyd is often pushed into the top 10, especially by those who grew up in the 60s and 70s. They were innovative and wrote some great albums and opened up the airwaves to weird experimental stuff.

Growing up, I loved Pink Floyd. Could not find a single item of fault, from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn to The Division Bell, I was utterly in love. They could do no wrong.

Essentially, it was a Big Picture fandom. At the time, I didn’t possess the filter that allowed me to love a band while simultaneously hating an album FROM that band. I couldn’t do it. So while there were certain albums I’d never listen to – because, you know, I didn’t really like them – I couldn’t transfer it to the band as a whole.

There’s a reason Pink Floyd isn’t mentioned in the same breath as The Beatles. Outside their stretch of five albums in the 70s, in which no one could touch them (Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall), they put out a lot of crap.

Big Picture, they’re a classic band. Look at the details, and you’ve got The Final Cut. And that album is an absolute piece of shit.

Which Brings Us To…

Okay, so here’s the awful truth: changing our process from campaign-driven to detail-driven is impossible.

Well, hey. It’s POSSIBLE. But it’s not RECOMMENDED.

Because, when it comes down to it, we need the Big Picture. Without it, we have no direction.

But we need to change our mindset, understanding that the overarching strategy and plan is a roadmap toward a final product, not the final product itself. And, we need to understand that the Big Picture may change as we wade through the details, and we need all parties on the same page, realizing that the Devil’s in those details, and the Devil never wants to make things easy.

The Devil would just as soon you not notice him at all.

Tags: Career, Music, On... |

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On Spoon and white space

May 14, 2010


Why Spoon? Why can’t I get them out of my head?

First, they’re awesome. They’re unique. More than that, though, they have a hidden talent for doing an awful lot with only a few sounds.

Spoon – Written in Reverse from Merge Records.

Spoon, sonically, are the embodiment of effective white space. They get so loud, with such a deep groove, without wasting a single note; it’s as if they’ve carefully selected each individual sound, one at a time, like a real-life version of Mario Paint.

In doing this, they make the loud parts so much more dynamic – each long note allowing the song to come up for air, inhale, fill the lungs, and dive back down for more bursts of turgidity.

I have always had a hard time turning away from Spoon. Now I understand that, unwillingly, they’re steeped in good design. Makes perfect sense, I guess.

(And, dude. The bass player from The Get Up Kids is in the band, now. FROM THE GET UP KIDS. People, DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I’M SAYING?)

Tags: Music, On... |

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Why You Should Remember to Listen to the Radio

April 29, 2010


Radio, at its most basic, is free-form thought. It’s sound and sound only; your imagination filling in the color, erasing the blanks. When it’s good, it seems effortless, though anyone who’s done it live knows better: radio is a cruel mistress, unwavering in its ability to make you look bad, yet increasingly rewarding to those who can game the system and mold it to their needs.

At its best, radio is a stream of stories: music, commentary, editing, all layered to create a soundscape. Its ability to form around our experiences – like mud around a stuck boot, soaking into our thoughts and muddying our expectations – brings us closer to the elements of human communication than any other medium. Its mission isn’t to entertain as much as it’s to entrench, to leave us in the driveway waiting for climax, for a punch line, for satisfaction.

At its worst, radio is commercial. And when it reaches that point, it’s lost the ability to truly communicate, trading build-up for instant gratification, sacrificing creativity for popularity until it’s no longer palatable to anyone but the most middle-of-the-road; the most safe.

I guess what I’m saying is this: listen to the Rock Garden Tour.

And not just because I happen to make two cameos this week.

Do it because it’s probably time you were reminded how fantastic radio can be if you just manage to tune the dial correctly.

Tags: Journalism, Music, On... |

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You guys, I co-made a podcast!

April 21, 2010


So I chatted with local music guru (and former Venture writer) Scott Hudson last night and picked out some music and played with his iPad and – LOOKIE! – now it’s on the Internet as a podcast! WHICH MEANS THE INTERNET IS PRETTY MUCH MAGIC.

The playlist:

1. White Stripes, “Little Room”
2. Modest Mouse, “Never Ending Math Equation”
3. Ugly Casanova, “Things I Don’t Remember”
4. Lucero, “What Else Would You Have Me Be”
5. Blitzen Trapper, “Furr”
6. Bright Eyes, “If the Brakeman Turns My Way”
7. Jim Ward, “Broken Songs”
8. Mason Jennings, “The Times They Are a Changing”
9. The Beatles, “Dig a Pony”
10. Spoon, “The Underdog”
11. Ween, “Vallejo”
12. Frank Black, “Calistan”

It was fun. Check it out. If you want to know what I sound like when I’m geeking out about music, that is.

Then, head over to the official Mevio site of The Ledge. You can even save it for your future perusal on iTunes if you like. Rawk.

Tags: Music |

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Harvest never sounded so good: on uncovering my grandfather’s turntable

April 19, 2010


I doubt my grandfather’s turntable ever spun a Beatles album. I’m almost equally positive that John Lennon’s Imagine and Neil Young’s Harvest never crossed its needle. In fact, of the records I played tonight – in tribute both to the art and the history of this turntable – only Johnny Cash was a probable match.

I don’t know how long he had it. I know that my grandmother sent it home with my father after my grandfather had passed away, and my father gave it to me yesterday now that I have room to store it along with his and my mother’s collection of albums from the 70s and 80s, along also with my grandfather’s collection of 50s and 60s country albums, along also with my great grandmother’s collection of 40s 78 rpm albums, most of them big band and classical.

Three generations of record collections. Four distinct different styles. All together, all ready to be rediscovered.

The first album sounded awful – the record player must be broken, I thought. The next sounded better. Not crystal clear, but good enough to bring a wave of nostalgia.

The third – the aforementioned Harvest – sounded crackled and muted and flat, its grooves popping sound into a decades old needle, the album itself waving up and down like a nearly-calm lake, the entire contraption just one bump away from a horrendous record scratch, like the ones you hear in cheesy radio ads.

Which is to say it sounded perfect.

But it was Johnny Cash that tuned my ears to history. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the record player sat beneath a picture of my grandfather. Looking on. Wondering, probably, what the racket was all about.

In the picture my grandfather stands, holding a fish, shirtless and stern and young and optimistic. And hopefully he understands that, though he’s been gone for years, though he never would have approved of the music I was playing, though we had nothing in common music-wise outside of a slight appreciation for Cash and Hank Williams and Merle Haggard, I was at least walking in his footsteps, even with this one little act.

Lift the arm. Set the speed to 33 1/3. Line up the grooves. And relive history.

Tags: Grandpa Boyer, Music, On..., Vilhauer |

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Preparing for Ween

April 18, 2010


Ween
Live at Thomas Wolfe Auditorium
April 9, 2010

Buckingham Green
She Wanted To Leave
Bananas and Blow
Learning To Live
Transdermal Celebration
Take Me Away
Don’t Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)
Even If You Don’t
Voodoo Lady
Happy Colored Marbles
Frank
Ice Castles >
Final Alarm
Baby Bitch
With My Own Bare Hands
Your Party
Let’s Dance
Touch My Tooter
Puerto Rican Power
Stroker Ace
Woman and Man
Zoloft
Tear For Eddie
Freedom of 76
AIDS >
Spinal Meningitis
Gener Jam >
Roses Are Free

You guys, I’m going to see Ween in June and dear God let the setlist be even half this awesome.

Tags: Concerts, Music |

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