Introducing 40 Songs for 40 Years

It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.—Frank Zappa

It’s quite possible that playing and listening to music have consumed more of my waking hours than any other activity. With my fortieth birthday now uncomfortably close, it seems like a good time to remember the songs that mattered to me along the way.

I don’t even begin to claim that these are the best songs from these years (although I might make a case for some). I don’t even claim that all of them are good. That said, each of these songs was the most important music in the world to me at some point in my life, and I think that counts for something.

So here is my musical photo album, with one song per birthday. It’s all there: the cute baby years, the awkward adolescence, the experimental college years, the uncertainty of young adulthood, the settling down into a family of my own.

Clyfford Still and the value of technique

I don’t play accurately—any one can play accurately—but I play with wonderful expression.

Algernon Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Portrait of a Man (self portrait?)

by Jan van Eyck

Nobody looks at a Jan van Eyck painting and says, “I could totally paint that. I can’t believe this is in a museum.” There are obviously lots of things about van Eycks that make them worthy of study and preservation, but the most obvious—to anyone who’s tried to paint anything from life—is just how technically accomplished they are. You don’t just pick up a brush and start painting like that.

Things are a bit different in the modern wing, especially among the abstract paintings. Blank canvases, huge blocks of color (often applied quickly or mechanically), splatters, no discernable subject. The cliché grumpy response to these paintings is, “my kid could paint that.”

Making something that looks like a Rothko or a Pollock is a lot harder than it looks (try it sometime), but that’s not really the point. We can grudgingly admit that it might take practice to splatter the paint just so, but that still doesn’t seem nearly as difficult as learning to paint like van Eyck.

But why do we care about technique at all? Why does it matter if a painting is technically sophisticated?

One theory holds that work of art derives value from the effort that went in to producing it. The final painting serves as a record of the artist’s intent, attention, and effort. If that’s true, then sophisticated technique acts as a multiplier on that effort. A large, detailed oil painting might take more than a hundred hours to paint, but it takes thousands and thousands of hours of practice to be able to paint that way.

But technique isn’t really about providing evidence of practice. When we say that someone has good technique, what we really mean is that they can reliably use their tools to achieve their intent. And that’s another source of discomfort with abstract painting. It leaves open the nagging question: Is this what the artist really wanted to paint, or is it just that this limited technique is all they’re capable of?

A last-minute trip to Denver left me with some time to spend at the Clyfford Still Museum, which opened this past November. Clyfford Still is one of the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism (along with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others), and I hadn’t been especially familiar with his work. Both the museum itself and the exhibit are fantastic, and I’d recommend them to anyone.

The museum’s inaugural exhibit is a chronological overview of Still’s painting career, and it opens with a few things he painted in his twenties. The exhibit traces certain motifs—especially the figure—through 50 years of his work, but I found that his early work served another important function for me.

PH-77 (1936) by Clyfford Still

© Clyfford Still Estate

Photo: Peter Harholdt

From a purely technical perspective, his early paintings are very solid. Without realizing it, seeing his technically accomplished representational work gave me the freedom to experience his later abstract work with an open mind. I also delighted in finding evidence of his painterly skill, especially in his work from the 70s, which uses subtle gradations of color to create the impression of movement in a very sophisticated way (which completely fails to come through in an image on a website; you’ll have to take my word for it and see for yourself).

Clyfford Still Museum

Photograph by Raul J. Garcia

Seeing it yourself is good advice in general. Most of the canvases are huge—Still intended them to be immersive, almost environments in themselves—and no reproduction is going to convey that feeling. If you go, I’d love to hear what you think.

Done and done.

The first draft of anything is shit—Ernest Hemmingway

Of all the millions of decisions that go in to producing something creative (software products and rock records being the two I know best), the most difficult for me is deciding when to release that thing to the world. Pace Hemmingway, I find that the second and third drafts of anything are also shit.

When I look at something I’m making, sometimes all I see are the agonizing compromises, the flawed execution, the missed opportunities, the directions I haven’t explored yet. During lunch with a friend the other day, I was telling him about all the projects that I’m working on, and he noted that for each one, I had a reason for why it wasn’t ready to be seen. While the specifics varied, there were essentially three reasons:

• The idea isn’t right yet—The creative process is messy, and it can take a while for the wayward seed of a good idea to find its place to grow. I was looking back at something I designed recently that felt (at the time) like it came together in a quick burst of activity. But then I looked back over my notebooks and research, and I realized that I’d been banging on various facets of the problem for the past 18 months. I just hadn’t found the right way to express those ideas.
• I’m working it to death—I’m letting my inner critic—and my imagined external critics—demand endless revisions. I’m afraid that all of the flaws in the work will stand as an indictment of my limitations as its creator. And the thing is, they do. I have to force myself to see that the work has virtues as well—virtues that nobody will ever see if I don’t release it.
• It doesn’t feel complete—I have a vision of a coherent whole, and what I have just isn’t there. I either need to pare it down to a more fundamental core (and release that) or expand the work to encompass what I’m envisioning. The risk is that I’ll pare it down too far to be interesting or I’ll keep it so large that I’ll never finish it. It’s a narrow strait between these two rocks, and it’s easy to crash on either one. Usually, I steer towards the latter.

In which our hero attempts to derive wisdom from the ancients

To put the dilemma in a different way, it’s really about Guided by Voices versus The La’s.

If GBV’s Robert Pollard has an inner critic, he must be nearly mute. Famously—or notoriously—prolific, Pollard releases a new record every few months, and each has at least brief flashes of brilliance. But it’s hard for me to make the case that even my favorite GBV records are genuinely great. Take Alien Lanes, a record that has Game of Pricks (one of my favorite rock songs of all time) followed immediately by The Ugly Vision (an obvious throwaway). It’s like a bad relationship.

On the other hand, you have The La’s, who released—against their wishes—one record, which they reportedly hated. They worked on it for years with a stream of producers, and their frustrated record company eventually paid producer Steve Lillywhite to get the record into releasable shape so that they could begin to recoup their (by this point) considerable investment.

But here’s the thing: the record is brilliant. Of the twelve songs on the record, eleven are good enough to be singles, and the twelfth isn’t even bad. While the lead single There She Goes achieved near ubiquity after a very popular (and to my ear saccharine) cover by Sixpence None the Richer, the whole record is stacked with amazing songs. Probably my favorite is Failure which manages to capture both the brilliance and the tragic flaws of the band in two minutes and 54 seconds.

The trite conclusion to all of this is that we should strive to be somewhere in the middle, nothing to excess, etc., but that that feels too neat to me. The two approaches produce completely different kinds of work, and I love them both.

Like a lot of GBV fans, I’ve made playlists that strip out all their failed experiments. In the end though, I always discard the playlists and just go back to listening to the albums. The playlists feel flat, like a mixed drink without the bitters. The surrounding failures give the transcendent songs a sense of depth, a sense of artistic risk. That’s something essential to the work; it’s conspicuous in its absence.

So in the end, I pretty much just listen to the records as they released them, and I marvel how that one decision—is it ready to release?—had such a profound effect.

Self-discrediting language

Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.—William Safire

Having spent most of my career at a consulting firm, I struggle to keep cliches out of my writing. Despite my efforts, I still catch myself writing hit it out of the park or something equally insipid.

While some cliches are benign—at worst, conventional and unimaginative—there are a few that make me cringe, and I think it’s interesting to figure out why.

My all time, number one, world champion most disliked phrase is “think outside the box”. Using a cliche to convey the idea of unconventional thinking is a remarkably compact irony, which is what makes it so awful. It’s the perfect example of self-discrediting language: words that convey the opposite of their intended effect.

It’s a lot like hearing someone trying to sound cool by using slang that doesn’t come naturally to them. It just amplifies the distance between what they are and what they aspire to be.

Net-net is also self-discrediting, but in a more subtle way. To me, net-net is worse than the bottom line, another cliche that means the same thing, but why? The bottom line refers to the last line of a balance sheet which shows a summary of a company’s net value at a single point in time. While it’s dull, it’s a reasonable metaphor for in summary. Compare this to net-net. Benjamin Graham, a depression-era financial analyst, coined this term to describe a technique for valuing public companies (net-net = cash and equivalents + 0.75 × accounts receivable + 0.5 × inventory). It isn’t nearly as good a metaphor for in summary, and that’s what makes it self-discrediting: someone using net-net is trying to sound sophisticated and business-y, but they’re not using the term very well. It indicates that they don’t know (or aren’t thinking about) what it really means.

I imagine that I’m preaching to the choir here (oops!), but at the end of the day (sorry!), you have to tell it like it is (sorry again!).

Do not use any quotes from the drummer

Like a lot of aspiring musicians, I sometimes dream of being interviewed. The movie The Commitments nailed it when the lead singer interviewed himself in the bathtub. “Who are your influences?” “When did you know you were going to be famous?” “What did it feel like the first time you heard your song on the radio?”. These questions must be unbearably tedious for musicians who’ve really made it (the musical equivalent, perhaps, of “where do you get your ideas?”), but for unfamous me, the thought of holding forth on my favorite obscure bands while someone records every word for my adoring fans sounds pretty good.

Unfortunately for me, nobody cares about the drummer. In her funny and engaging memoir But Enough About Me, journalist Jancee Dunn gives her secret for getting a decent interview from a recalcitrant band:

Thus it is [the band’s] duty to convey that these interviews are a nuisance, and they would be just as happy rehearsing in a garage somewhere. At this time you must roll out the heavy artillery. Pay attention only to the drummer. Laugh uproariously at his jokes. Stare with dumbfounded awe as he offers up his philosophies. Shake your head and say things like “I never thought about it before, but you are absolutely right—drumming is a metaphor for life!” […] As the puzzled but excited drummer blossoms under your admiring gaze, his other band mates, particularly the heretofore-mute sunglasses-wearing lead singer, will be at first confused, then annoyed. Finally, their competitive spirit will take over and they will enthusiastically jockey for attention, offering amusing anecdotes about groupies and telling off-color jokes.

Do not use any quotes from the drummer.

For the record, I have never claimed that drumming is a metaphor for life.