Wanting to see for myself again

I'm supposed to be prepping for an interview, so I thought I'd share this song I absolutely love.

I have a lot of words about Hum, as I've been a fan for 25 years and this is their first album in 20, but I'll have to save that due to the aforementioned lame reason.  Generally, though, this was my favorite release of the last year.  It took me entirely by surprise, having found out about it about a month after its release.

This is a complex album with some really amazing moments, but this song is the first one that really grabbed me.  I'm kind of beyond the point of telling if an album is "good" or not, but for Hum that's kind of irrelevant to me anyway.  This song hit me like I'd unearthed a favorite song of mine from childhood.  It's just so immediately familiar and personal.  It literally feels like it was lifted from Hum in 1995.  

Amazing.

Dazed and overloaded

Eric Bachmann makes some of the best background music for writing academic articles.  I mean, I know that's not his goal, but it's true nonetheless.  It's not that his music blends into the background - just the opposite.  It's music that keeps me alert.  It doesn't allow me to become mindless.  It's catchy and thoughtful, but it also tends to be low-key enough that it's overpowering my senses.

The song above got stuck in my head for a long time.  The whole album, actually.  It coincidentally came out right about the time North Carolina decided to give a middle finger to compassion and civil rights by passing HB2.  It was accidental timing, but North Carolina was injured and needed to know that people still loved it.  I've been away for a long time and I only have a smattering of friends left there, but it's the place where my childhood was.  It's where I keep my memories.  I guess that makes it home?  Either way, I still have a love for it, and this song was the warm hug and band-aid the state needed.

Also, can we (I) talk about how fucking amazing this song is?  Holy shit.  The lyrical content could have taken this song anywhere - it could be one of those slow, non-crazy Tom Waits almost-torch-songs ("Alice.")  It could have been sung at a bar, drunken and dark, by a slow, piercing piano.  Instead, it's lively.  It's powerful.  It's still unimaginably dark.  It's an emotional state all to itself.  Like many of his songs, I'll be puzzling over the music for years.  See my earlier post about 'New Drink for the Old Drunk.'