A Wednesday Morning Mix tape ( with words)

First song of the day, Charlotte Martin’s “Days of the Week”. Non-invasive, non-abrupt switch from silence to sound, but not innocuous. Simplicity, not too much instrumentation, no really high pitched sounds first thing in the morning. Vienna Teng is usually a perfect for choice for first thing in the morning, last thing at night.

It’s as though I actually need to listen to something that doesn’t jolt my nervous system.

So second song of today, Vienna Teng’s “Blue Caravan”.I never thought I’d like Vienna teng’s music, much less be in absolute awe of her piano playing and find her voice to be of the least agitating tonal quality of almost every artist I listen to. Which doesn’t sound good, but I get headaches from listen to certain people sing. It doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate their work, it just means that I have trouble listening to thing for fun. For example, Rufus Wainwright always gives me a headache, and now, my brain has learned to recognize the musical intros to some of his songs, and gets a headache before he even starts singing. I still think he’s an amazing artist, making challenging and interesting work, I just can’t listen to it. But if there is one artist who is the least likely to give me a headache, it is Vienna Teng, which is actually why it took me awhile to appreciate her music. On the surface it sounds too poppy and simple. As I spoke of, though, in a previous entry, in her most staggering songs she has this deep sense of space and warmth in her playing and singing. Part of it is the warmth of the production, but most of it is that it just feels so organic and unforced, a whole, with her playing and her voice flowing together.

Which is why songs 3,4,5,6, 7 and 8 are Vienna Teng’s “Fields of Gold ( cover song)”, “Eric’s Song”, “Momentum”,”Gravity”, “Soon Love Soon”, and “Recessional”. “Recessional” still being one of my life altering songs. It’s because she sings these quiet and heartdropping lyrics, then gives you these following moments to relflect and let it sink in, before going on to the next perfect line. Not many songwriters can capture absence and sadness in such a strangely light yet profound way.

Then, at #9 comes Tori Amos’s “Bells for Her”. This song is almost a funeral to me. When I hear it I have to stop what I’m doing and just listen, it’s a funeral, the nearly numb, pretty much tranced out state of grievig, rather than the sharp and shaking tears part. In this case, though, it’s a quiet, and this song is quiet, with the piano filtered through soemthing called a Leslie cabinet, and mixed very low, almost whispering vocals. Searching through the ether for a heart gone missing, for a soul gone missing. Memorializing it’s existence. Like “Recessional”, very close thematically, actually, absence and loss. I’ve never listened to the two of them side by side before.

#10 is Tori Amos’ “Baker Baker”. I don’t think that I can underestimate the power of Tori Amos’s music in my life. It’s something that I never abandon for long, that I keep coming back to all the time. My first love will always be her third album, “Boys for Pele”, and it’s taken me quite a long time to truly pay attention to her second album “ Under the Pink”, but when my nerves are frayed and everything is overwhelming and I need to retreat into some safe place, it’s with the quieter songs off of “Under”, and it’s b-sides, one of which, “Black Swan”, is my #11 song for today. Very few people can manage both quirky and deep loss in the same song. “Sister Janet” is my #12 song, a song which always reminds me of Roseanna when I listen to it, because I heard it for the first time on her walkman, at school. To me, this song is the perfect example of the tying together of the otherworldly and archetypical and the concrete everyday that is Tori’s trademark. And that’s one of my primary difficulties, concerns, things that I’m preoccupied with: living in two worlds at once-the inner and the outer world. The world of the self, the inside the head world, and the external world of relationships and society. My inside has never coherently blended with the outside.

(song #13 is “Just Like Heaven”[cover of The Cure] by Charlotte Martin, which I adore because you can hear the low roudned sound of the piano pedals, and because I always just wanted to hear this song on piano, and she does a great version)

Song #14. “Blindness” by Hawksley Workman. Song #15 is the same. And an abandonment of writing in favor of staring off into the void, seeing and not seeing. Moments of the inside overwhelming the outside.Sometimes, I have absolutely no sense of how it’s even possible to exist in the external world (Song #16. “No beginning and No End”, Hawksley Workman), my inner life is that much different from what I see. I don’t mean that I’m living two lives simultaneously, that I have this whole parallel yet skewed imagination life, because I don’t. It’s more about image and depth and perception (Song #17-song 16 repeated). It’s as though everything coming at me from outside is bright and sharp and clear and jagged, while everything inside is gentle, and hazy, like a surrral yet lovely fairytale floating through the smoke at the coziest fireside ever. Inside of my mind feels curved and flowing, organic, deep, and symbolic. And often, it feels like the outside is constantly trying to maim and mutilate, painfully kill the sense of peace and wonder that is inherently a part of me.

(Song #18 “Oh, You Delicate Heart” by Hawksley Workman-it seemed appropriate). So must of the world’s energy is this aggressive, driving forward, thrust energy, and I am just so not that, and I experience that speed and force as a painful blow, as a constant attack. (Song #19 “Bones” by Charlotte Martin”). (Song #20, replay of the last). (Song #21, “Bones” again). One of the theories behind anxiety and sensitivity, put forward by Elaine Aron, is that a certain percentage of the human population actually has highly sensitive nervous systems, more so than the average percent. Hence the sense of being bombarded and overwhelmed by a world that most peole can shrug off and walk through.

(Song #22 “Clam, Crab,Cockle, Cowrie” by Joanna Newsom).However, I suppose that the concept that most people exist happily and easily in this world isn’t very true in any sense. The high quick development and high speed of industry and technology, while solving some problems has created such a huge amount of self inflicted/inflicting problems that most people do not live thriving, healthy, beautiful lives. (Song #23 Jennifer Terran-“The Painter”) We spend our time working jobs that mean nothing to us, just to house and feed ourselves, eating food that is processed poison, living vicarious and deadened lives through tv and movies. So few of us manage to break out of, or even have the possibility of breaking out of this treacherous way of living.

I’m just so sick of being considered sick and unmanageable, of being the problematic and unrealistic quantity, while it is actually the world itself, our society itself that is ill and completely damaged and cruel. (Song #24, Patrick Wolf “Teignmouth”). It makes complete sense to withdraw away from a world full of atrocities and biternesses, cruelty and constant pain and competition. Who would choose to stand in the middle of that? I guess some people are able to avoid seeing the world as a whole, don’t understand how intrinsically everything is connected, how close we are to each other, though separated by such seemingly strong walls. Withdrawl, whether it be anxiety, agoraphobia, depression, is one of the few responses that makes complete sense to me.

(Song #25 “Little Light”-Terami Hirsch). Yet. All of those things are considered disorders, are in need of being cured, are wrong, are a disease of the person, not a reaction to a dying world that pretends it is the pinnacle of thriving success. Evolution oe snot move as quickly as industry, so no wonder our biology is going haywire. (Song #26 “A Broke Machine”-Terami Hirsch{not intentional trying in with what I’m talking about, but subconsciously obviously. A broke machine indeed.}). So, one of my struggles, actually probably THE struggle of the last eight months or so, has been with coming to a place of understanding and acceptance that I am not in fact broken, no matter how much I refer to myself as such. Broken resonates with me, I feel broken in the face of the world, I feel that I have crumbled under the weight, under the strain, that yes, every pain of the world has made it’s way through my heart, through my mind, through my body. (Song #27-“A Broke Machine” again). And it has broken me, standing delicate and brave in the face of sharpness and cruelty has caused me to shatter. I held it together, cracks in the glass and all, for years, until I shattered, and I’m still shattering. There is so much more fragmentation that is happening, that needs to happening. But I’m managing to piece things back together, at the same time, now. Regluing, into another structure, another formation of self.

(Song # 28-“Timberline”-Terami Hirsch). “ I tiptoe softly to the edge of the timberline, where a part of me is waiting on the other side. Have I lost her? I feel a rushing from the underground, where part of me is blooming, where my silence is a sound”-Terami Hirsch

(Song #29 “Memory Picture”-Terami Hirsch) According to my Last.fm chart, I’ve listened to Terami Hirsch 800 times in the last two months. I’ve never been that dedicated to one artist before, in such a short period of time.

(Song #30 “When It’s Dark”-Terami Hirsch).”but I am still tender in the spring, with new grass pressed beneath me, with the darkness singing me to sleep as the stars are weeping”-Terami Hirsch

(Song #31 “A Hundred Flowers-Terami Hirsch).She’s just lyrically amazing. Comfortable, yet constantly surprising. I just get so caught up when I listen to her songs, especially on “Entropy 29” and “A Broke Machine”. “All Girl Band”, “Stickfigures” and “To the Bone” were beautiful and deep and personal, but her two most recent albums hit those imagistic and archetypical places that are so much stronger than emotional revelation on its own. It’s that Tori place. A very different place, but Terami’s got her own world, and is truly beginning to be able to express it potently.

“It's been a long timeSince we've seen beautyLet a hundred flowers bloomAfter a hundred days of rain(From the head through the mouth to the ground in the root to the heart in the vein, in the vein, in the vein)”-Terami Hirsch

It’s fitting that I began at Charlotte Martin, and ended up at Terami Hirsch, by way, mostly, of Tori Amos, Vienna Teng, and Hawksley Workman. I discovered Charlotte Martin about two months ago, around the same time that I rediscovered Terami Hirsch.

Muscial time line time ( purely for my own interest):

Bought “Boys for Pele” by Tori Amos when I was 13. Didn’t really listen to it until I was 15. Then bought “From the choirgirl Hotel”, and saw her in concert for the first time. I think I’ve been to four more. Best was probably the one here and in Seattle, for the “Scarlet’s Walk” tour. Have since acquired and passionately listened to all of her albums and b-sides over the last ten years, except her most recent one, which I haven’t been able to get into at all.

Found Terami Hirsch’s “All Girl Band” when I was 17, and listened to it non-stop. I happily received her “Stained ep” and “Stickfigures” cd in the mail for free, and the three songs on “Stained”(later on “To the Bone”) were pretty much the only thing I listened to for about a month in my first year of university. Then I ordered “To the Bone” when it came out (I loved receiving cd’s in the mail, it was such an exciting thing, nobody else I knew did that), and listened and loved it. But then her music sort of fell away from my life for about five years. She released a new album this year “A Broke Machine”, I kind of stumbled upon it, and it was so extraordinary, so different from yet similar to her older, work, that I instantly became fascinated, and just dove into all of her music again, discovering “Entropy 29”. If I ever get a worded tattoo, it just might be “From the head through the mouth to the ground in the root to the heart in the vein” from “A Hundred Flowers”.

I bought Hawksley Workman’s “Last Night We Were the Delicious Wolves” for $3.99 at a used cd store about four or five years ago, purely based upon the fact that he had produced Sarah Slean’s “Night Bugs” album, and I loved each and every thing about that album. I listened to it once, and didn’t like it, and didn’t play it again for a long, long time. Last summer, seemingly all of a sudden, almost everyone I knew adored Hawksley Workman. So, I felt out of the loop, and found a copy of “Treeful of Starling” at the library. I was right at the cusp of my total emotional breakdown. I was creating theatre, somewhat in a way I wanted, with project after project. I was relearning how to sing , I was playing the piano and singing in public, which had been my dream for as long as I can remember. And I was so unhappy, and alone. I listened to “Treeful” nonstop, everyday, in rotation with Joanna Newsom’s “Ys” and Arcade Fire’s “Neon Bible”. Every night on my walk home from the bus stop, after rehearsal, or a show, I would lay down in the grass outside my parents complex, and listen to “When these Mountains were the Seashore”, desperately hoping for soemthing in my life to break or change, because I just couldn’t handle it anymore. From there, I spent the next few months discovering his other albums, fell head over hells with all of them ( excepting “Lover/Fighter”, which I find kind of hollow and badly produced ,although “Autumn’s Here” is one of my favorite songs), and have been so ever since. Especially after the concert at St. Andrews-Wellesley sometime in May. Completely extraodinary, I can’t even begin to explain it. Ask Adriana, she’s better at explaining these kinds of things.

Charlotte Martin is one of those names that always comes up in conjunction with “ if you like Tori Amos, you’ll love…”, and I always dismissed her. I guess it’s a case, much like Hawksley Workman, where it’s all about finding the right song at the right time. In May I was sort of obsessively buying as much piano based singer-songwriter music that I could possibly find on CD BABY, amongst which was Jennifer Terran ( another artist whose work I’d found uninteresting on many other occasions), whose “Full Moon in Three” is another one of my life altering albums, and Charlotte Martin’s name just kept popping up everywhere. I loved the picture on the cover of her “Veins” ep, so I listened to the title track, and the second, “Bones”, and I was gone. Veins and bones, of course I loved it. Since then, I’ve managed to acquire almost all of her work, some of which I like much better than others ( I rarely listen to “Test-Drive Songs”, for example), and listen to her almost as much as Terami Hirsch-and on an interestign note, the two of the are actually friends.

Vienna Teng. Much of the same story as Charlotte Martin, except I’d had her most recent album, “Dreaming through the Noise” for about a year, and had never been able to listen to it, it was too sleepy, too slow for me. When I opened my Last.fm account, Vienna was one of those artists who kept showing up on every radio station I listened to, and it was about the tenth time I heard “gravity” that it suddenly clicked, and I was truly floored. As I mentioned earlier, it’s about warmth and space. She has such an intimate and inviting way of playing and singing. However, the reason I don’t listen to her quite as much, is that for every song of hers that I’m astounded by, there are a couple that I don’t really like. I’m sure that one day I will, but “Recessional” and “Momentum” on their own are worth hundreds of songs.