Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on The Albums That Changed Their Lives
We all have albums that have impacted our lives in some way: soundtracks to a certain summer, lyrics that spoke to a transition (love or otherwise) in our lives. In Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on The Albums That Changed Their Lives, edited and with an introduction by Peter Terzian, the personal musical musings of twenty bright talents are explored.
Stand-outs included Colm Toibin’s “Three Weeks in the Summer,” his story of a deep connection with Joni Mitchell’s Blue album over a stretch of summer in the town of Enniscorth in Southeastern Ireland in 1971. Toibin identifies the particular morning when everything changes: August 9, 1971, when the then-sixteen year-old read Stewart Parker’s review of Blue in The Irish Times:
“Blueberries and waffles don’t change their flavor, but the American Zeitgeist does: this summer I sense a mood of stasis, of passivity, turning inward. Yesterday’s radical oracles about the war and the credibility gap are today’s commonplace facts…. Attention has turned back on the self.”
The article, which shared print space with accounts of bloody conflicts—including one in his home country—struck a chord with the young man, who went down to the local music shop and bought the only copy of the record.
Toibin would play Blue obsessively for three weeks, the time left to him before a return to boarding school signaled an end to record-playing (this was definitely pre iPod days, and the priests were not exactly keen on the latest from an American songstress.)
Toibin admitted to not understanding everything that Mitchell wrote about, especially not the kind of love she describes in “A Case of You.” He writes: “It was hard to imagine—indeed it still is—that all around me in our semi-detached houses was love, or something that had once been love and was still like love in some way or other. Love in 1971 for me was not when the neighbor and his wife tended the garden together, or when my mother made supper, it was when the needle touched the vinyl.”
Even if he hadn’t experienced the love the singer described, Toibin felt a type of longing, identified with something contained in the rise and fall of that unmistakable voice—a voice his parents worriedly called “not quite right.” For Toibin, “not quite right” described his experience as a gay young man in a small, conservative town, surreptitiously listening to a voice from far away that held a promise of experiences to come.
Joshua Ferris’s “Elegy for a Discarded Album,” an ode to Pearl Jam’s Ten, is another great read, explaining Ferris’s journey from musical ignoramus, hawking surveys in a suburban mall outside of Chicago that piped in the latest pop from Sam Goody, to an “initiate” and an “outrider”—and the dangers of such categories of appreciation. He writes:
“The outrider is what the initiate becomes after he forgets his former life as an ignoramus. He dismisses anything smacking of the masses or widespread exposure, oftentimes without regard to the music itself…new music must spring out of the underground for it to pass the litmus test of acceptability. The outrider passes the new album along to one or two like-minded friends, but only if they can be trusted. That way the music remains a secret possessed only by vetted and qualified believers.”
But what if the new music becomes the mass-music, as is the case with Ten?
Ferris writes: “The outrider condemns the newcomers as arriving ‘late’ to an album—the atomic bomb of indie insults—and forsakes the album.”
The latter happened to Ferris after he left his small town and went off to college only to discover that everyone and their mother was listening to Pearl Jam. The disavowal of the album felt a lot like “mourning” for him, and he described his disillusionment as his private pleasure became a very public pain.
Happily, Ferris has since gotten over his outrider views, though he admits that he still has trouble listening to Ten: some things are just better in memory.
If you missed Terzian and contributors Martha Southgate, Clifford Chase, Todd Pruzan, and Lisa Dierbeck at the newly renovated Book Court tonight, you can get your copy signed (and talk music with the contributors) at these upcoming New York City Events:
Wednesday, July 1st at 12:30 PM at Bryant Park Reading Room
Peter Terzian is joined by contributors: Joshua Ferris, Clifford Chase, Stacey D’Erasmo, Asali Solomon and John Jeremiah Sullivan, who will also perform music from the book with his band Fayaway.
Tuesday, July 14th at 7 PM at McNally Jackson
Peter Terzian is joined by contributors John Haskell, Martha Southgate, Lisa Dierbeck, and Todd Pruzan.
[...] and I met Chuck Klosterman). I went last week to hear James Wood play the drums (and also go to the book reading… oh look they have another next week at McNally Jackson). James Wood playing the [...]
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Pearl Jam have always been an individual band and the members are known for their refusal to adhere to traditional music industry practices.
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