"From This Place" by Pat Metheny

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I read Metheny's thoughts and then listened carefully. Seems a good song for our times.

Lyric by Alison Riley

From this place I cannot see
hardest dark
beneath rising seas.
From this place I don't believe
all my hopes
my sweet relief.
From here I say I cannot breathe.
Fear and hurt
again we bleed.
Unsafe, unsound, unclear to me
don't know how to be.
From this place I must proceed
trust in love, truth be my lead.
From here I will stand with thee
until hearts are truly free.

Pat Metheny writes:

On November 8, 2016, our country shamefully revealed a side of itself to the world that had mostly been hidden from view in its recent history. I wrote the piece From This Place in the early morning hours the next day as the results of the election became sadly evident.

There was only one musician who I could imagine singing it, and that was Meshell Ndegocello, one of the great artists of our time. With words by her partner Alison Riley, they captured exactly the feeling of that tragic moment while reaffirming the hope of better days ahead.

That said, as I approach 50 years of recording and performing, while looking back on all the music I have been involved in, I am hard-pressed to immediately recall in retrospect the political climate of the time that most of it was made in. And if I can, the memories of those particulars seem almost inconsequential to the music itself.

The currency that I have been given the privilege to trade in over these years put its primary value on the timeless and transcendent nature of what makes music music.

Music continually reveals itself to be ultimately and somewhat oddly impervious to the ups and downs of the transient details that may even have played a part in its birth. Music retains its nature and spirit even as the culture that forms it fades away, much like the dirt that creates the pressure around a diamond is long forgotten as the diamond shines on.

– Pat Metheny

The Year In Records

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I like records. A lot. Listening to records beats streaming. The analog sound isn't quantitatively superior to digital, but I listen better to a record than to a stream. Put an album on and I'm there, really there, for the duration.

I picked up thirty-seven albums this year, mostly used, but a few are brand new pressings of brand new albums. Here's the 2019 rundown:

I've listened to Genesis since seventh grade and have almost completed the collection with Wind & Wuthering, Trespass, ...And Then There Were Three, Swelled And Spent (a bootleg of the The Lamb), Three Sides Live (Import) and Phil Collins' solo album, Face Value which works better as a whole record instead of individual songs.

My favorite albums in middle school were Supertramp's Even In The Quietest Moments... and Crime Of The Century, perfect examples of eighties pop. You don't get much better than "Fools Overture." Just handling these albums feels like the best kind of time travel.

I bought Steely Dan's Gold to have a vinyl copy "FM (No Static At All)" and "Babylon Sisters" on an album better than the one on which it originally appeared.

In high school, I avoided Bruce Springsteen because he was too popular, but I got over that and this year bought Nebraska, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., Darkness On The Edge Of Town, and the brand new Western Stars which, to my ear, is one of his best.

I didn't even know that Lou Reed's New York, one of the best rock and roll albums ever, came out on vinyl, but there it was in the bin. You bet I snagged it.

I grabbed some oldies too. Paul McCartney's Tug Of War (which isn't all that old), Glen Campbell's Greatest Hits (which my wife forbids playing in her presence), Stevie Wonder's Innervisions and Randy Newman's eponymous first album (both brilliant though very differently so).

There aren't many better songwriters than Sufjan Stevens, Neko Case, and The Decemberists. Illinois, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, and The Hazards Of Love represent some of their best work.

I can't get enough of old jazz like Getz/Gilberto #2, Vince Guaraldi Trio's Jazz Impressions Of Black Orpheus, Art Blakey And The Jazz Messengers_, and Cannonball Adderly's, Something' Else. I'm especially devoted to the Dave Brubeck Quartet and Paul Desmond, so I picked up the Quartet's _Time In, Brandenburg Gate: Revisited, Jazz Impressions Of The U.S.A., and Desmond's Bossa Antigua and First Place Again.

Jazz fusion such as Jean-Luc Ponty's Aurora, Andy Summers & Robert Fripp's I Advance Masked, and Al Di Meola's Casino reminds me of record shopping at Spectrum and Desert Shore on the Syracuse University Hill back before I could drive. That Centro bus ride home felt endless with new records in hand.

Brand new jazz this year included The Bad Plus' Activate Infinity and the absolutely spectacular Finding Gabriel by Brad Mehldau. Nonesuch released Mehldau's best solo piano performanceLive In Tokyo on vinyl and sent me a sampler album too. Sweet.

A pretty good year for records, but then, any analog year is pretty good. On to 2020!

Without intending to buy any more records in 2019, on December 30, at Barnes & Noble I found The Decemberists' I'll Be Your Girl for fifty-percent off. I couldn't pass that up and so now it's thirty-eight albums for the year. That's one better than thirty-seven, in case you hadn't noticed.

Bootleg Records From Long Ago

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I stopped at a used record shop for an old Genesis bootleg I had seen there last week. If it was still there, I'd count that as fate saying I just had to buy it. There it was and so I bought it. Of course I did.

I buy mostly used records. I buy some new albums, but used stuff is more interesting. Most shops are poorly organized, so I hunt for the good stuff. That's fine so long as I'm on my own. Anyone with me wonders, as the first half hour passes, when they'll be released and when I might look up and rejoin the world. Flipping through, I'm somewhere and some-when else.

Anyone who thrifts for clothes, old car parts, or what have you knows this feeling of drifting away, of solitude that is all too rare these days. I even switch my phone off while in the temples of vinyl. There were no mobile phones back in record days.

Records are things of the past. They're making a comeback of sorts but won't ever be mainstream again and so they harken back to another time. I won't say it was a better time we should go back to. That nonsense leads to racist red baseball hats. However, like cherry picked classic rock, I go back for some of that era's greatest hits.

I'm alone in the house with the bootleg record on the turntable. The recording is terrible (the audience member's microphone seems to have been incapable of recording bass), but the experience is as close as I can get to being back in tenth grade. Then there was no YouTube filled with every bootleg known to fandom. Instead, I dug through bins at Desert Shore and hoped for the best when I brought one home where, by myself or with my best friend, I'd put the record on (often with a fresh TDK or Maxell tape recording it) and listen carefully. I remember hearing this bootleg back then, imagining myself at the concert that had happened ten years before, back when I was only seven. It was a bit of magic. Now, rather than imagining the concert I never saw, I recall the red and black rug, the Technics turntable, the view out my bedroom windows, the scratched and pitted recording that is my memory and which is much less clear than the audio on this bootleg.

Flipping through records I recall my younger self trying work through the store methodically but drifting from jazz to rock, working through A, B, and C but then jumping to G and finding the bootleg I didn't know I had been looking for but which felt just right and so full of possibility. There I am, paying the bill, catching the bus from the SU Hill back home. Up in my room, I open the turntable, slip the record from its sleeve, and set the needle in the groove for a listen. It comes back to me across four decades, like an old song whose words are all still there, whose every melody is etched into me.

That terrible bootleg record sounds awfully good to me.

Just One Thing?

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I'm supposedly listening to an album. The Cars' first album. Friends and I were talking about it last night and then I was going through my records and saw it there. It belongs to another guy who doesn't have his turntable any more but kept his albums. Turns out that The Cars' first album is good. It's from a whole range of music I discounted in my youth because I wanted to seem superior to pop. I'm a bit less foolish now.

But this isn't about The Cars, it's about listening to an album, the thing I'm supposedly doing. I listened to the first and a half but a book on my shelf — The Art Of Noticing by Rob Walker — caught my eye and I picked it up. I had read eight pages before I remembered listening to the album. The record was still spinning, music still played from the speakers, but was I listening?

I put the book down, intent on listening, but kept thinking how this was something I wanted to write. I booted the computer into the writing program and typed until the record ran out, then got up, flipped it, and wrote while the music played.

There are two old Zen things I have just wasted two songs trying in vain to find. The first, I'm pretty sure is a Zen saying, but the second is something else entirely.

The First: When drinking tea, one should only drink tea.

Focus on one thing. Be in the moment. Meditate on it. Really listen to The Cars first album instead of reading or writing. I've failed at this, but there's this second thing.

The Second: A monk watched his master drinking tea and reading the newspaper. Master, he asked, you said when drinking tea, one should only drink tea? The master paused, then said, when one is drinking tea, one should only drink tea. And when one drinks tea while reading the newspaper, one should do only those things. With that, the master went back to reading the paper, steam rising from his cup and disappearing mysteriously in the morning air.

I'm going back to listening to The Cars now.