🎵
I bought Beck’s Mutations album the day it came out, and I loved how Beck collected so many concepts on that record. After listening to it, I made the decision to write down all the ideas in my head, so I started carrying a pocket notebook. It’s been 24 years since then and I still write in one every day. Beck changed my standard of what a modern songwriter could or should be doing. I came from the indie-rock mentality where everything was sort of homespun and amateurish, Mutations made me realize that a contemporary artist could make a record at the level of Bowie, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen.
Nov 2, 2022
Related Recs
This band quite literally changed my life (as opposed to a "Garden State" faux-changed my life scenario).
Later in life, I got to know guitarist Peter Buck (we were both living in Portland at the time and I now own one of his Rickenbacker 12-string guitars a result, ha) and came to appreciate their status as the Bartleby, the Scriveners of rock (you should Google the reference: “I would prefer not to”). I told Peter I began playing guitar because of “Chronic Town” and eschewed wanky dumbass solos because that is how he and Johnny Marr both played. It left a mark, in the most positive way possible.
The first chapter is entitled “The Things They Wouldn't Do” and perfectly captures the essence of a group who did it their way or no way at all, including walking away at the peak of fame and never looking back as a way to both preserve their friendships AND not slide into the trap of making music for cash that was a notch below their very best. And their very best is, to be clear, among the best music made by any pop artist at any time.
Nov 27, 2024
Daniel Johnston's 1983 album "Hi How Are You - the unfinished album" is similar in sounding to Kurt Cobain's iconic song "Beans". The album was popularised in the early 90s when MTV covered Cobain wearing a t-shirt with the album displayed, and at the time Daniel Johnston didn't like/want any of the fame. In fact, after he started growing a cult following for his eclectic and unique sound, he continued working hospitality at Subway because he believed that was where he came up with his best songs (and best sandwiches ofcourse). It's definitely not for everyone, but a niche audience and musician that people should take more note of. Do you think this album was an influence on Kurt Cobain's solo project “Montage of Heck"?
Feb 16, 2025
I'll state it right up front: This is a dad-rock rec.
Try to picture yourself (a theme of this album's third track, "Picture Book") back in 1968: songwriting pairs dominate the UK scene. Lennon/McCartney; Jagger/Richards; Page/Plant. Into this noisy fray saunters the Kinks' Ray Davies, who has had hits earlier in the decade with his group the Kinks that SOUND a lot like to guitar-up-to-eleven frenzy ("You Really Got Me," a number one, was said for years to feature a young Jimmy Page on the solo, until it was debunked) but is now fixated on a sepia-toned sort of quasi-nostalgia that is pivoting his band from England's Hitmakers toward the sort of cult band that would later be cited by Blur's Damon Albarn and Oasis' Noel Gallagher as a seminal source of material and influence (it's hard to imagine "Parklife" or "What's the Story Morning Glory" -- hell, Britpop, period -- without this album and the pathway it created).
Davies was busy wrapping himself in the cloak of the Union Jack, long before this sort of move would have had him branded as National Front (or Morrissey-adjacent). "Village Green Preservation Society" didn't sell much when it was released (it only went gold in 2018) but was notable for its acoustic, singer/songwritery pastoral vibe and a yearning for a return to a Middle England that arguably had never existed. Indeed, the mix of sarcasm and sentimentality that marks the title track ("We are the skyscraper condemnation affiliates/God save Tudor houses, antique tables, and billiards") and other key cuts such as "People Take Pictures of Each Other," "Last of the Steam Powered Trains," the music hall sounds of "Sitting by the Riverside" and "All of My Friends Were There" speak to a love of both the literal village green as well as the metaphorical village green -- many of these mementoes of the past are likely better left behind (which Davies either notes directly or through comparison) but the crank in him just can't resist making the point that a way of life and a slice of history is sliding away before our very eyes.
Davies spent part of 1968 writing satirical numbers for a late-night BBC comedy program, so it's entirely possible that this ironic sensibility (which would inform his writing from that point forward) spilled over into the writing and creation of this album. Earlier songs like "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and "A Well Respected Man" pointed the way toward this endstate but Davies had never sustained it for a full LP. This was a novella about the premature death of England, The Concept and The Empire.
Two contemporaneous non-album tracks -- "Days" and "Wonderboy" -- do as good a job of explaining Davies' motives at the time (a sort of inward and wistful focus on their Britishness, which a five year U.S. performance ban for reasons that remain somewhat vague no doubt also created, by extension) as the album itself, which is nonetheless one of the first extant concept albums ever recorded.
These days, we think of Davies as doing his best work with a quiet, knowing, ironic smile -- this is the album that started his whole downstream career phase as the poet laureate of a quickly-evaporating Albion, which groups like the Libertines (and all their tongue-in-cheek Olde Ways mythmaking) were surely taking note of.
A top-ten all time record for me. All hail the Godfather of Britpop (I'm sure he hates that moniker but it doesn't mean it's not true).
Oct 27, 2024
Top Recs from @adam-green
👃
I started collecting perfumes on the tour for my “Aladdin” movie in 2016, my bandmate was an amateur perfumer and his passion for aromatic materials was infectious. Studying scent unlocked an entire dimension of sensory experiences I had been ignoring. I realized that perfumers were trying to communicate with us, the raw materials had developed symbolic meanings over thousands of years, and could be used in combination to create very specific artworks. I began to see perfumes as snowglobes that carry information as a landscape, that there’s a lot of encoded information in them. Collecting them became an adventure, walking around the city realizing every city block had stores with samples of these precious artworks. I even started to obtain vintage bottles of perfume from 30, 50, even 80 years ago that still smelled great, and I began to understand in more depth how people used to smell and why. I recently wrote an epic perfume adventure book that I hope to put out soon.
Nov 2, 2022
📕
Lots of people love Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychedelic movies like El Topo and The Holy Mountain, there is even a documentary about his famously unmade Dune movie. What people don’t seem to realize though, is that for the last 40 years, Jodorowsky’s been authoring numerous graphic novels that comprise 20+ other movies he would have probably made if he’d had the budget for them - and they are all fully fleshed out in comic book form! For example if you are mourning the fact you will never see Jodorowsky’s Dune, now realize that he put those ideas into a comic book series called The Metabarons. If you are wondering what happens after El Topo, know that there is a graphic novel sequel he recently released called Sons of El Topo. A series, Techno Priests, is like Jodorwosky’s Star Wars. In fact, his graphic novel with Moebius called The Incal was so good that Luc Besson ripped it off to make The Fifth Element. If you are willing to read the comics, you’ll experience Jodorowsky quietly creating a universe of Miyazaki-level creativity. Inspiring is an understatement!
Nov 2, 2022
🎥
People had been telling me to watch this movie for years, I finally gave it a shot and it’s mindblowing. The film is a total artwork that takes place in an interior landscape of the human soul, called “The Zone”, with deeply felt apocalyptic evocations of Christianity. Tarkovsky provides us with aesthetic mastery of all the filmmaking elements, from set-designs both naturalistic and sculptural, breathtaking cinematography, deely psychedelic music, and brilliant portrayals of raw human emotion. With all these filmmaking elements in place, he conducts them all like it’s a Beethoven symphony. This film might contain the most aesthetic merit of any movie I’ve ever seen. Another thing is that the movie actually killed them to make it - some of the cast and crew including Tarkovsky and his wife were poisoned while filming scenes on a river near a chemical plant, and they died as a result. Essential viewing!
Nov 2, 2022