Musical Musings...

Just to give a bit of an indication of the current status of my life, I was all set to spend this evening sitting on my couch and watching the Notre Dame game. Then I was paged to ensure that I would attend my weekly trivia game with the promise that the game would be on right next to our table. That, and a mistimed fake punt (do you really need to do that three minutes into the game?) sent me across the street to play trivia. We should have won but came up just short. On the plus side, I ended up winning enough money that I drank for free, which is all one can hope for in life.

I’m going to take a little break from writing about the concerts in particular and spend a little time talking about something that has been bothering me while writing about the shows. This is the third straight year where I’ve done a detailed year-end analysis of the shows and it has historically been one of my most enjoyable things to write. I don’t know if it is fun to read but I always looked forward to it. This year though it has been more of a struggle and I think it shows. And I’ve been trying to figure out why.

I think the main reason is that when I listed my top shows for the year the only person who I had never seen before this year was Aimee Mann. All of the other shows were from artists I have seen before, often a number of times. And to be honest, Aimee was the only person I saw who made me drop everything and start picking up their entire catalog. So that is part of it, I just didn’t come across mainstream acts that caught my fancy.

But the bigger one is that I didn’t come across an act I had never heard of who then became my favorite band. That is really unusual because in the past couple of years it has been a constant that I would see an unknown opening act who would become one of my favorite bands before the end of their set. You had The Ditty Bops with their vaudeville shtick meshing with some wonderful music. When The Brunettes opened for The Shins I thought they were just a silly little band but by the end I was having their discs shipped to me from New Zealand. Even Immaculate Machine was just an opening act that caught my attention. And the biggest one is The Frames, a band whose show I almost skipped and has since become the soundtrack to my life.

It’s tough to describe just how incredible and inspiring finding these gems of a band is. There is something about watching a set where you have no preset feelings at all about the group. You don’t know a single song or what they might sound like but you give them a song or two to convince you they are worth your time. And when they prove that they are worthwhile it’s just this massive thrill that you know something that no one else knows. I’m not sure why that didn’t happen this year other than it just was an odd year for shows. Maybe it was just a cyclical thing. I hope that this year will have some better pickings.

Anyway, I promised in my monthly report that I would list my historic albums of the year. This year’s winner goes to Beth Orton’s “Comfort of Strangers”, a disc that always seems to find its way back into my CD player. It barely beat out Neko Case’s “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood”, which I love but it still feels to me that there are too many tracks on the disc that are ideas of songs rather than songs themselves. There were a few other good but uneven discs (Damien Rice’s “9”, Alejandro Escovedo “The Boxing Mirror”) and one favorite that I would have no qualms listing as the best but just doesn’t feel right (Jon Dee Graham’s “Full”). Anyway, here is the historic list, going back to 1991, which is when I bought my first CD player.

2006: Beth Orton “Comfort of Strangers”
2005: Josh Rouse “Nashville”
2004: Tift Merritt “Tambourine”
2003: Jack Johnson “On and On”
2002: Wilco “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”
2001: Gillian Welch “Time (The Revelator)”
2000: Neko Case and Her Boyfriends “Furnace Room Lullaby”
1999: Kelly Willis “What I Deserve”
1998: Liz Phair “Whitechocolatespaceegg”
1997: Beth Orton “Trailer Park”
1996: Lyle Lovett “The Road to Ensenada”
1995: Son Volt “Trace”
1994: Jeff Buckley “Grace”
1993: Smashing Pumpkins “Siamese Dream”
1992: R.E.M. “Automatic for the People”
1991: U2 “Achtung Baby”