Recommendations -- Music

A week ago, maybe two, a friend of mine asked me to recommend a few books he might find interesting. He’s a smart reader with wide tastes and an appreciation for the unconventional, and I figured he might dig Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, but a couple days after I loaned it to him, he brought it back to me, said it just wasn’t working for him. I was more disappointed than I had any right to be. It isn’t that I want people to like the same art I like; it’s just that I take requests for recommendations pretty seriously. There’s something deeply gratifying about considering a friend’s personality and trying to match that friend with art they’ll fall in love with. I’d say it’s probably the same gratification matchmakers are after when they set up dates between single friends. And when the match doesn’t turn out so hot, there’s disappointment. It's only natural.

In this case, I gave my friend Sixty Stories and Forty Stories by Don Barthelme, and he told me he stayed up late into the night reading them, so it looks like I redeemed myself—or, rather, Don B. redeemed me.

I wish I could spend the same effort to make individual recommendations for all of my friends, and I vow to do just that for more of my face-to-face friends in the new year, but what I’d like to do over the next week or so here on my website is a little more general. I’d like to talk about some of the music, literature, film, and other art that has moved me this year. I won’t do a numerically organized “best” list because I am utterly incapable of rating one thing I loved at the expense of another thing I loved. So instead, I’ll just talk about what I liked in various mediums, and briefly say why, and hope you find something here that will keep you up late into the night.

I'll begin with music. I’m not the sort of music fan who knows exactly what albums are coming out in a given year and then goes out and buys or immediately downloads them the day they’re release. I dig old music and roots/blues/Americana influenced music the most, and there’s so much of it out there already that I don’t have to worry about getting the newest thing; there’s always something waiting to be discovered. But there were a couple of albums released in 2011 that I’d been jazzed up about since I’d heard they were in the making. The first is Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes. This was, apparently, a fitful album to make and record, but you wouldn’t know it by the finished product. I like that it represents a progression—it’s a little funkier and more philosophical than Fleet Foxes—but doesn’t turn away from the sound and strengths that make Fleet Foxes distinct.

The other record I couldn’t wait to get my hands on was the Gillian Welch/Dave Rawlings album The Harrow and the Harvest. The Harrow and the Harvest is the best kind of music—-acoustic folk—-written and performed at the highest level. Gillian—-for some reason, I just have to use her first name when referencing her—-brings up Bob Dylan’s The Basement Tapes in a recent interview with Acoustic Guitar Magazine, and I think that’s an interesting connection to draw, lyrically at least. Maybe the The Harrow and the Harvest doesn’t contain the same alchemy of noise that Dylan and The Band cooked up at Big Pink, but like The Basement Tapes, its lyrics work on their own terms and seem to take place not in our world but in some long lost folk world that calls out to our world from across the great reality divide. And Rawlings’s distinctive guitar is that world’s atmosphere.

I was also fortunate enough to run into some good bootlegs this year, but one really stood out. Fans of Neutral Milk Hotel will already know this, but Jeff Mangum decided to come back from the dead in 2011, and he brought live versions of his awesome songs with him. For those who don't know much about Mangum, imagine Kurt Cobain defied mortality and managed to give a handful of shows in 2011. Mangum isn't as well known, but he's every bit as important a songwriter.

The Live in Toronto bootleg gives an idea of what his tour has been like and makes me hope that there's some kind of new record in the works.

And finally, because I spend so much time listening to old music, I couldn't let any talk of what I loved this year pass without mentioning a discovery from the past--a record I'd maybe overlooked, undervalued, or flat out missed. Junior Kimbrough's Most Things Haven't Worked Out is one of those records. It's full of broiling, hypnotic summer blues that all bleeds together into a single 48-minute mood piece. It's amazing music for long solo drives and digging deep into your own head.

Also, I want to give a shout out to Woody Guthrie here. I can't say I really rediscovered him since I've never really stopped listening to him or loving him, but this year, the year of the protest, the whole world seems to be resdiscovering his music and his ideas. Songs like "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Jesus Christ" and "Do-Re-Mi" are as relevant now as ever.

Tomorrow, or maybe Tuesday, I'll talk books.