(Podcast show notes are in the post before this one)
This is going to be another shortened post. I'm trying to go a little easy on myself; I'm frikkin' exhausted. I started work this week, and because of my cat's illness, I have to get up at 5:30 each morning to feed her and give her her medicine. It takes half an hour or more just to get her to eat all of her food, then we have to wrangle her to get her to take her pill (the pill pocket treats aren't working anymore). Then when I get home I have to do the same thing. Also, I made some tea for her called essiac. It's more than a 12-hour process to make it and I had to get up at 5 this morning to reboil the tea and bottle it. That took an hour. So I'm letting myself off slightly easy this weekend with the post.
The Annuals, "Hot Night Hounds" (Scroll to the bottom of the page and left click on "download" or "stream" to stream the song).
I believe music is often influenced by its surroundings. You'll find out that a song you love was recorded in a beautiful old wooden cabin, by a lake, for example. When I hear this song, I think it must have been recorded in the clearing of a huge forest. Everywhere you look there are huge, strong, ancient trees stretching towards the clouds. The sky is clean and the clouds are lazy. The water in the shallow lake is still, not disturbed by anything; not by bugs, reptiles, fish or a child's disruptive play. The birds swoop in modestly, conscious that too much noise will alter the quiet. The song starts and you realize the entire scene had been holding its breath, waiting for this music to start--almost as if the music were formed from the surroundings themselves. Guitar harvested from the trees? Piano played from the earth? The composition of the music is as sophisticated as that found in seasoned musicans'. The varied ways the instruments sneak in, forming intricate, subtle and at times bold and bombastic sensations show evidence of a group of polished, natural musicians. Young musicians, though. These folks are barely old enough to drink in public. I could barely remember my way home at that age. This is an unexpected sound from a surprisingly young source.
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Them Annuals are sly, they are
Dawn Landes, "Kids in a Play (Not a direct link)
I remember as a kid there was very little difference between what I imagined and what was really happening. My imagination was mapped onto everything I did. I was an only child, too, so I processed everything through the lens of play pretend. The pediatrician became the Mad Hatter (but I was never Alice 'cause that girl was foolish). The restaurant my parents and I went to that had the weird, dark hallway--that became a dungeon and each time we drudged down the hallway I never knew if I would emerge safely at the end, macaroni and cheese in hand. Sometimes there would be jello, too. If I'd had a brother or a sister, I imagine I would have shared my pretend life with that person. We would have sat together on the bus and made up our pretend lives. We would have composed our entire lives on that bus: who we are, where we came from (the moon? Mars? Wilmington Island?) and we would probably devise our own language just to befuddle the other, nosy children. We would have "practiced at home, or rehearsed on the bus, next to kids just like us, who couldn't help but think we were weird". We wouldn't have been concerned with those other children, though. We would have turned our noses right up at them. We would just keep giggling and exchanging stories in the back of the school bus.
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Dawn Landes, mid-composition
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