The first episode of Fewer Songs Considered can be found and streamed here:

FEWER SONGS CONSIDERED

Fewer Songs Considered Vol. 2: The Nostalgia Show can be found and streamed here:

FSC II: THE NOSTALGIA SHOW

Give them a listen, and tell us what you think! Although we won’t be able to record our show at NPR anymore, we’re definitely not saying that we might find our way to a pirate boat and broadcast using assumed identities…or are we?

Today, it’s Beirut, aka Zach Condon: My musical crush, performing paramour, the brilliant traveling troubadour.

[Wow. I'm gushing. This is kind of embarrassing.]

I’d been hearing about him for a year or so before truly discovering his music last summer during my self-financed, responsibility-procrastinating, post-graduation backpacking trip. His wobbly, gypsy horn revelries recalled drunken Balkan Bohemians, slinging wine without pretension alongside ritzy young Parisians in the Belle Époche. To the romantic wayward traveler in me, it was the perfect soundtrack to 7 hour train rides, watching brilliant landscapes pass by.

Beirut played the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in D.C. a couple weeks ago, and I managed to keep my cool, though inside I was one step away from spraying love letters to him with perfume.

Here’s a video I took of Beirut performing “A Sunday Smile.” Quality’s not great, but you get the feeling of the show. It was intimate, acoustically pristine and Zach, though often cavalier, led the 6-piece band with the magnetic understanding of an orchestra conductor. For the record, this was supposed to be a detailed concert review. Instead, what came out is mostly a junior high diary entry.)

Sometimes I fear my fancy will get out of hand. But thanks to people like NPR Music Editor Stephen Thompson, I’m often grounded back to reality:

“Zach Condon called and said that he’d make out with the NPR Music interns…but we told him ‘no’.”

That morning, I whistled “Beat It” all the way to the train, thinking little of it… but as I passed the neighborhood nursery school as parents were dropping their kids, I noticed that I got some strange looks–some hostile looks even. Only later did it occur to me that whistling a song by an alleged child molester in the vicinity of some 30 four year-olds and their parents may not have been the best idea.

But that got me to thinking… can we separate someone’s art from who they are as a person? Is it no longer considered couth to listen to the King of pop? I admit I’ve never really been a huge MJ fan, but I readily acknowledge the impact he has had on pop music, and I admit that I have been known to throw on “Thriller” or “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” at parties. I once even gave my little brother (seven years my junior) a heart-to-heart about Michael Jackson’s musical career after being saddened that he only saw the scary, emaciated, defeated man with a bad nose and equally bad hair who dangled babies from hotel balconies. 

I was actually shocked recently when I read about the potential auction of Jackson’s possessions. Sure, it didn’t actually happen, but just the idea of his signature white crystal glove going for only $10,000 was shocking to me. I mean geeze, I typically don’t agree with the practice of paying exorbitant amounts of money for things like that, but only $10,000?! I mean a normal person could almost have afforded that–at least in 2002 before our economy fell apart.

I guess it becomes a question of whether or not a person’s art is an embodiment of who they are. Of course, this question isn’t really about Michael Jackson. Last summer, I was accosted on the train by someone who said, “You know a Nazi wrote that book, don’t you?” (I had actually picked up Hamsun’s novel Hunger on a whim since I noticed that he won the Nobel Prize for literature and had no idea who he was at the time.)

So what do you think? Can we separate the art from the artist? If a person who has legally been declared insane is not responsible for their reprehensible actions, should their positive or artistic contributions also become null?

He’s got a dream, too. He lives with his mom and his cat…WAIT A SECOND. Didn’t Susan Boyle ALSO live with her mom (until recently) and her cat?! I’m sensing a trend here. This must be the criteria for instant YouTube stardom.

If I didn’t think this show was staged last week, then I certainly do now. How planned was it that Simon wasn’t into the kid’s Amy Winehouse cover? Simon stops him, then the sad, sad music comes up. Cue close-ups of people’s horrified faces. But Simon, bless his heart, gives poor Shaheen a secon chance: It just happens that he also sings a song by Michael Jackson. And how great is the not-so-subtle middle finger mouth-wipe by Simon, right before Shaheen starts singing?

The video cannot be embedded, so watch it here.

I can’t help but wonder if the backlash is going to be anything like that against Susan. Wait…Susan who?

In my memories, the guys behind the counter were giants, covered head to toe in tattoos and leather jackets, ripped jeans, and faded band t-shirts from shows the magnitude of which I could only dream. They were the gatekeepers between me and the music I loved; pay the toll and the seas part to an ocean of sound, ready to be bathed in. They were the only people standing between me and the pure joy of hearing a record (ahem, tape) for the first time, only they weren’t blocking my way, they were opening their giant arms and ushering me into their world, to hear things the way they hear them, an exclusive club which opened only for the chosen few.

I often wish my experience at record stores were this surreal. The kids that worked at Coconuts were inconsequential, bored, unaware of the singular power they held over a young professional appreciator like myself, and millions of other kids discovering the Ramones, the Smashing Pumpkins and Janet Jackson for the first time, right before their eyes.

If I had asked them what to listen to, what would they have told me? I had little guidance in my early years of tape buying. My taste was grounded in that of my dad, who played Pink Floyd’s The Wall on family road trips, always skipping over “Is There Anybody Out There?” because it scared me. The subtext of my father’s music was of little importance to me, even with songs like Crosby Stills Nash and Young’s “Ohio,” whose message is loud and clear, and to which I would sing loudly with the windows down at age 6. I adored Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” which my parents let me listen to on the jukebox at our neighborhood diner. (My relationship to this song alone merits another essay; suffice it to say that the lyrics’ honest, gritty nature was lost on me then, and now that I understand them, it makes me wonder if it altered my perspective on cities and life in general. Subliminally, of course. But I digress.)

My mother’s musical taste was bred during the summers of 1960s Ann Arbor, Michigan: Dylan, Baez, Mitchell, Joplin, Cream, Love and Nina Simone (for whom I am named–-my middle name is Simone). She protested the war in 1969, though I remember very little protest music in my childhood.

I found Chicago’s local Oldies 104.3 radio station on my own, immediately learning every word to songs that are emblazoned by the film American Graffiti: The Four Seasons, Manfred Mann, Flash Cadillac, Del Shannon and a lot of Bobby’s and Frankie’s. These songs were light, syrupy at times, popular in the idealized days before Nixon, before Vietnam, before Woodstock, before Dylan Went Electric.

My friends, as the tradition goes, helped guide my musical taste. One of them had the Ace of Base tape, so I had to own the Ace of Base tape. In my dance classes, my teacher played Paula Abdul and Michael Jackson, so I bought Head over Heels and HIStory. The first CD I owned was Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill. The first good CD I owned was Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, an album that grabbed me by the throat and shook me until I didn’t know up from down. And I learned some great new swear words from it too. I think I was 10. I started associating songs with emotions like I had never done before: I knew which songs to play when I was feeling depressed that the boy I had a crush on liked another girl; the songs to play when I was deep in thought, imagination running free; and I definitely knew which songs to play when I just wanted to go wild. It was exhilarating, to see how much music was able to affect me; I, who had such little life experience yet who read volumes into these rock songs.

Now I buy records—real, dusty, vinyl records—at flea markets and thrift stores, hoping to come across a simple treasure to add to my collection. I inherited a record player from a couple friends as they moved out west to San Francisco. I often contemplate whether to buy vinyl records of albums I really love, or only of old records that were released initially on vinyl, to preserve their legacy as the champions of my parents’ generation. I worry that it’s become trendy. (It has). I wonder if this will affect whether I keep buying them. (It hasn’t).

No matter, I have had truly amazing experiences listening to vinyl, following an entire album with lights out, eyes closed, nothing else in the world mattering in the moment of hearing that music. I call them “active listening sessions.” I have contemplated the existential meaning of Side B of Abbey Road, followed the cavalcade of noise into the depths of My Bloody Valentine’s’ Loveless, and educated myself with the poetry of Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation. You never truly know how lost you can get in music until you’ve experienced it yourself: it never stops until you hear the needle pick itself up off the record and settle down, spent, a couple inches away. Their next intercourse will occur when I can pull myself up off the floor.

Record Store Day is this Saturday. Go visit your local independent record store. Chat with the tattooed giants of your childhood mind about what they’re playing. It’s easy to not be pretentious about music if it’s stuff you truly, truly love, that speaks your name and haunts you ages after you’ve first heard it. Go to the record store, and visit your friends. You’ll be glad you did.

This essay was originally posted here, but it’s more relevant now.

Freak-folk, anti-folk, drone, twee, space rock, dream pop—gone are the days of all-encompassing genre categories like rock, country, jazz, or rap. Classifying music today has become almost like a game… or a very precise science. Sure, part of this micro-categorization is probably a result of DIY things like myspace pages and band blogs that make it much easier for artists to carefully cultivate a very specific image and sound, but there is something more at play here.

For music connoisseurs (or ‘music snobs’), yielding an extensive indie vocabulary and carefully classifying artists seem to have become a source of pride. In some circles, it’s as if classifying a band bolsters indie street cred and even self-worth. Standing outside a club in New York, I once heard someone say, “What?! You don’t know what shoegaze is?!!”

Oddly enough, though I write about music every day, I find that the more I immerse myself in the scene, the harder it becomes to answer the simple question, “So what kind of music do you listen to?”  Each time I am faced with that deceptively straightforward question, I find myself going through a number of quick mental exercises. It’s kind of like when someone asks you how you are, and you grapple with saying “Oh, fine” or actually disclosing minute details about your day in twitter-feed-esque full disclosure. Should I give them the short answer: “I tend to stick to indie-rock” or delve into the nitty gritty and hope my response is neither overly pretentious nor dry and uninformed?

Through writing the blurbs about the artists featured on Second Stage, I consider myself to be fairly on top of the musical adjective and genre game—at least when it comes to my personal favorite musical niche, but when I stumbled across the tag “post-indie transcendentalist punk” on the myspace page of the band Hungry, Hungry Ghost, and I admit even I was a bit baffled. I mean I got the punk part, and I studied Emerson and Thoreau in college. but post-indie?!  Post-rock or post-punk, ok. I’m familiar with these terms, but this new one sent me reeling.  

Sensing an interesting and potentially satirical explanation, I contacted Alex Haager of Hungry, Hungry Ghost to ask him about the unfolding of this mysterious new genre, and I was intrigued by his response. 

Haager writes, “I coined the genre term ‘post-indie transcendentalist punk’ more or less as a statement about the uselessness of genre-labeling in general. I mean, I’ve deemed myself an ‘indie kid’ since the 7th grade or whatever, but it wasn’t until moving to New York that I saw how out of hand it was getting.  H&M and major label buyouts ruined the world for proper indie kids.  It was only later on that I realised the whole thing was silly. I am who I should be and that’s all I can be.  That’s what post-indie means to me.”

The interesting thing about this post-indie movement, is that it seems to be more about a state of mind that a particular sound. Urban Dictionary, the online, unofficial authority on emerging terms and trends, cites someone who is post-indie as openly admitting to listening to Coldplay even though the band is “too mainstream” for the typical indie kid’s taste (and reputation). In the most basic terms UD defines post indie as “liking bands, regardless of how popular they are.”

Though Haager contends he devised the extended genre, “post-indie transcendentalist punk,” “mostly just for kicks,” his tongue in cheek tag raises some good questions: has the need to classify and tag artists gotten out of hand? Is the mere act of creating a new genre necessary or is it as ridiculous and pretentious as the indie movement mindset it is trying to transcend? Will people start donning the Coldplay or John Mayer t-shirts they once hid in the bottom of the closet for fear of being considered too mainstream? Discuss.

*Go here to learn more about Haager’s band–Hungry, Hungry Ghost.

*Wavves will be performing tonight for FREE @ The Zodiac in Baltimore.

(both are worth checking out, simply because the second one below begs the question: Do I have the musical taste of a 70 year old man, or is Beirut really just that good?)

Hey, kid! Yeah, you! Get off my lawn!

When some of my friends and colleagues recently started talking about synesthesia, I thought they were kidding.  What?  Some people see colors when they hear music?!  Sounds like a joke, right?  Or at the very least–as if hallucinogenic drugs are in the picture.  

Nope.  This one is actually true.  A short visit to Wikipedia and a press release I received today about Norwegian singer Ida Maria confirms the ‘neurologically based phenomenon.’  In layman’s terms, synesthesia is a ‘joining of the senses,’ or in fancy terms, ‘a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.’

In an interview with Paste Magazine, Maria says she tends to include a lot of yellow, orange, pink, and red in her songs.  “I tried the first time to just not dabble too much with the dark colors because I want to save them until I get older,” says Maria.

John Mayer apparently also has synethesia… as did Russian artist Wassily Kadinsky and Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, which certainly explains some things (just read Speak, Memory).

I wonder how I didn’t hear a thing about this condition until recently.  While writing this post, I thought to myself: hmmm… intelligent, evocative, concise… what a great band name!  But a quick search on the music network, last.fm, turns up 6 bands named Synesthesia.  Guess I’m not the first one to come up with that.

Last week was my official Spring Break, which I spent amidst my hometown of Los Altos, CA. The occasion was simple enough: I came home to get my wisdom teeth out. And, yes, I subsequently downed copious amount of pudding and other liquid delectables. 

Many people describe their sage removal process as something awful — mine was fantastic. I watched a few movies (ever see Blackboard Jungle? One of Sidney Poitier’s earliest) and established an unhealthy personal record of listening to 11 albums in one day. It was the closest thing to total entropy I’ve come to in quite some time.

I did manage, somehow, to finish a short film I’d been working on. I won’t reveal too many secrets, but it was shot entirely on my laptop and edited in iMovie. :

The irony here being that I spent  the majority of the time making this indoors.