I try to avoid writing about music. Partly because I’m not very good at it, but mostly because I’m such a dilettante that my writing about it makes about as much sense as my heading up a research study on phenylketonuria.1 I’m always afraid some real music critic will come along to the rec shed and tell me that I’m really good at playing Donkey-Kong Jr. and pretend to like me just so her dumbass boyfriend can laugh and punch me in the back of the head.
But I can avoid that a little bit with these five songs, because I’m fairly certain that no one who reads this blog will have ever heard them before and so will have to delay they’re eye-rolling puh-LEEZEing at least until they’ve gotten to the end of the MP3s.
Also sometimes great music and/or Klonopin overcomes fear. Good music you want to keep for yourself and hate anyone else who likes it because you heard it first and they just don’t understand it like you do can’t you tell just by the way they’re dressed? But great music is different. Great music you want to share with everyone you know, so you they can maybe grab a little bit of the joy you feel when you hear it.
So over the next five days I’m sharing the joy of five songs that are completely new to you, but that are a part of my life and formed a part of who I am, and thus maybe even are partly responsible for my knowing you or at least for you choosing my blog for this particular moment of procrastination. Enjoy.
(And If you don’t like these songs, I’m sure Pitchfork or The AV Club or someone else who is not me will be very happy to hear about it.)
#1: “Here or There” by The Schramms
So after all that shit about you never having heard these songs before, I’m starting with a song that you very well might have heard, if you’re an indie-rock or alt-county nerd. The Schramms are the band of Dave Schramm, an exceptional guitarist and songwriter who played with Yo La Tengo in their very early days. He stuck around the New Jersey scene and put out a bunch of albums with his own band on some tiny labels in the ’90s, and a few more over the last several years. The Schramms play melodic rock with an unidentifiable country tinge and Dave Schramm’s extremely identifiable (cough) voice. Their music is wonderful and criminally unknown, but they’re most important to me because they’re a tether linking me back to my college years, when everything in music was still new to me.
In the ’90s at NYU I spent most of my time at the radio station, WNYU, where among other things I hosted an alt-country show.2 The station’s music director was a young woman whose particular combination of loveliness, intelligence, and extreme pre-hipsterness I had never encountered and desperately, desperately crushed upon.3 Her:Me::Debbie Harry:Well, Me. Fuck. I think she took a sort of Higgins-to-Doolittle shine to me and encouraged my alt-country leanings and even made me a mix tape to inspire me, which I cherished in unclean ways. One of the bands she recommended was The Schramms.
I wanted to have them on my show, so I talked to a guy at their tiny label who gave me Dave Schramm’s number at work. I called, and Dave answered the phone, “Schramm.” He said it in such a quotidian, middle-of-work, this-coffee-sucks, 2-o’clock?-How-the-fuck-can-it-only-be-2-o’clock? kind of way that it came out, “xflgsczh.” In that moment I instantly learned the reality of being a musician. All that obvious stuff that every fan eventually learns: that having a record deal doesn’t make you a rock star; that recording music costs you more money than it makes; that if you’re doing it, you’re doing it because you love it enough to do it after you get home from work. I figured out all those things right then, from that one word.
Anyway, Dave turned out to be a very nice guy who brought his whole band in to do a fantastic set on my show to an audience of me and some guy in Morris Heights whose broken radio was stuck on our frequency. This song, “Here or There,” appears on The Schramms 1998 album Dizzy Spell, but you’ve never heard this version, because it’s from that radio performance. As Dave says in the intro, the song was brand new at the time, not even finished, and this is the first recording of it.
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Buy It:
Dizzy Spell and a few of The Schramms’ other CDs are miraculously still available on Amazon.com. That’s if you hurry; they’re each listed as “only 1 left in stock.” (I’m a fan of Little Apocalypse, by the way.) Otherwise, it looks like you’ll have to scrounge through your own sources. The band’s web site is still at least somewhat active, and their MySpace page has some music on it, but neither have any clues as to where to buy their stuff.
Bonus!
Aw hell, I can’t resist: here’s another track from that same performance, “What I Knew Today,” a B-side from Matador’s 1994 7″ release of “Heart Not Within.”
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----- Madej, S. (2008, January 3). Phenylalanine, Soft Soap, and Squirt: A Cocktail of Hope? The New England Journal of Medicine, 358(1), 18-27. [↩]
- In the mid-nineties in New York City, that was akin to opening a molecular gastronomy restaurant in mid-seventies Pittsburgh. [↩]
- To illustrate what I’m talking about here: at this time, around 1995 and at about the age of 20, she was in a serious relationship with Gerard Cosloy, the founder of Matador Records. [↩]
