… and music.
My favorite band’s latest album just leaked on the internet, if all goes well I’ll be listening to it as I sit in traffic this afternoon.
I don’t know much about it and I only heard about it recently, but it is apparently the second half of a double album (they released the first half last year, around the same time of year this one will be coming out). I don’t think they announced that there would be a “sequel” at the time.
Last winter and spring I listened to Okkervil River a whole lot, two albums in particular, and they made me really depressed. I wasn’t having a great time in general, and the mood of the songs didn’t help that. For a long time I couldn’t listen to those songs without getting sad.
(One happy memory I have of this time and music, and a song that never depressed me, was No Key, No Plan. In one of our showers we had shower crayons to draw and write on the walls with, one day while showering after listening to the song I scrawled some of the song lyrics on the wall. They stayed there for a long time.)
Later in the spring things started getting better, summertime came, I moved out of the co-op and generally felt better. I still couldn’t listen to much Okkervil River, but then I found their latest album online. At the time I was living at the Burns-Tabone Center for Reasoned Enlightenment, I didn’t have a computer, there was no way to hook up my ipod to any speakers, and at first I had no cds. After seeing the movie Once I went out and got a copy of the soundtrack. That was all I listened to until I got The Stage Names, the latest Okkervil River cd at the time. I listened to it over and over again. The songs were less sad, more upbeat, and I could listen to them without getting depressed. It was more or less the only music I listened to for about a month.
(The name of this blog even came from one of the songs on that album. It was about six months later. I had been in Brazil a little over a week, and I was halfway through a 26 hour bus ride, the first of many on that three month trip. I started to panic a little. I was a bit bored and a lot anxious. I started thinking about the future and life and all those things. I put my head phones on and started listening to music when I heard this, in a song I’d listened to many times before: “It’s just a life story, so there’s no climax.” It got me thinking about life, my life, there isn’t going to be a climax. Travelling around South America isn’t going to the the climax of my life, whatever I do when I get back isn’t going to be the climax, it’s going to keep building and be one adventure after another, no peak, with a build up and a decline on the other side.)
When I saw the new album online today the timing seemed very similar. Thinking about it though, that’s all that is similar between this year and last. I’m not living anywhere nearly as interesting as the B-T Center and I have plenty of music to listen to, winter this year was absolutely wonderful (well it was summer where I was), but I’m equally excited about this album as I was for the last one.
