Update, 2/19/2012: I’ve added a streaming MP3 of the one previously unlistenable song in this list, “Caroline” by Kirsty MacColl.
Maybe it’s just been my spending a couple of years unemployed, but I’ve noticed a subtle, glacial shift in the assholism of our culture. It feels like sometime not too long ago we crossed an invisible line on this side of which it’s ever so slightly more probable that people will act like assholes than not.
We choose to just be a tiny bit lazier and not return that email. We decide to spend just a little bit more time on our own stuff instead of doing that thing we promised to do for someone else. We quickly jump on Twitter to badmouth other people instead of spending just one moment to stop and think about whether or not we should, let alone an additional moment to judge ourselves. And we all seem to have finally agreed that it’s probably okay to screw someone else over a little bit if it’s not personal, just business.
NOTE: For the holidays I’m sharing a few of my favorite things that might not be familiar to you, thereby bringing peace on earth and goodwill toward man and single-handedly solving all of the world’s problems forever. You can see the other stuff I like by clicking here.
On Sunday I wrote about French & Saunders, a great comedy team that’s phenomenally popular in the UK but relatively unknown in the US. Today I want to talk about a guy and his band that are equally popular in Canada and equally unknown down here. Sam Roberts has scored multiple number-one songs and albums in Canada, had his very first single nominated for a Juno,1 and has won six since then. He’s released four albums since 2003, but you won’t find anyone in America who knows him outside of the well-quinoaed cult of Adult Album Alternative radio listeners.
Even Pitchforkians are largely unfamiliar with Sam, possibly because his music tracks a few rarely traveled paths. For one, It’s very high quality, but without any distinctive innovation; listening to it is like eating a perfectly made pizza. For another, it’s rock and roll of a type that’s particularly out of fashion, because it’s really just plain ol’ really good rock and roll. So much so that it’s hard to put a name on it. It’s not indie rock, or roots rock, or folk rock, or horrible modern rock, and certainly not punk rock. It’s just melodic, guitar-forward, five-piece rock and roll, played without conceit, gimmick, or nostalgia.
I loved Uncle Tupelo. Discovering their albums in the Nineties was one of a few artistic milestones in my life. They blended country, punk, and folk into a single new genre that shaped my musical and political tastes for years. I used to call Uncle Tupelo my favorite band, and my love for those guys transferred over to the offspring of their parting: Jeff Tweedy’s Wilco, and Jay Farrar and Mike Heidorn’s Son Volt. I eventually grew tired of both (Son Volt much faster than Wilco) and after I left my twenties I grew apart from Uncle Tupelo without even realizing it. Eventually I went years without listening to one of the band’s albums in its entirety. More… »
Recently Sophie and I have had a couple of chances to hang out with friends in bars, something that we rarely get to do on our unemployment austerity budget. That made me nostalgic for the days when hanging out in bars was part of our regular routine and we allowed ourselves luxuries like paying an extra $2 for a beer that had distinct flavors other than mammal spit. It made me particularly nostalgic for Friday nights at my favorite bar in Pittsburgh, Kelly’s.
I want my money back
I’m down here drowning in your fat
You got me on my knees praying for everything you lack
I ain’t afraid of you
I’m just a victim of your fears
You cower in your tower praying that I’ll disappear,
I got another plan, one that requires me to stand
… I GOT A LIST OF DEMANDS
written on the palm of my hands
I ball my fist and you’re gonna know where I stand
We’re living hand to mouth
For decades, newspaper companies managed to subvert child labor laws by inveigling young adolescents into hauling their very heavy product from door to door. Young nitwits bought the papers from the publisher then sold and delivered them to their neighbors at a markup. As such they could be said to be operating a “business,” not just slaving at the dying remnant of a nineteenth-century distribution model.
In 1986-87, at the age of 12, I was one of those nitwits, working for The Pittsburgh Press. My “business” came complete with a goonish supervisor who would regularly forget to drop off my papers — leaving me to fend off phone calls from angry geriatric shut-ins demanding their box scores — and occasionally try to extort extra cash from me by disputing my accounting practices.1 It also came with surprisingly backbreaking labor. Pittsburgh’s a hilly town, so my house was at the bottom of a steep incline that was in turn at the bottom of two steeper inclines. And because I was in the last house on the block, all my customers were above me. On Sundays my paper bag was so heavy that I had to run shuttle: carry a bagful of papers to the top of the first hill, drop it off, deliver papers to half of the next hill, get more papers from the bag, deliver papers to the other half, go home and get another bagful, repeat. It took hours.
More precisely, it took three hours. To make those three hours bearable, I bought a TDK 180-minute blank cassette and made myself a mix tape for my Walkdude.2 For some reason I was suddenly reminded of that tape yesterday, and I decided to try and recreate the playlist. I used Spotify to do it, so sign up for a free account and you can listen along and relive the memories I’ve repressed.
I was timid and hated doing weekly “collections,” so to pay my bill I relied on the check from one 174-year-old subscriber who always gave me a three-month advance payment (which seemed like perplexing financial decision for someone who should’ve been happy every time he made it through a Metro section alive). [↩]
Note: You can learn the point of this series in part one.
#5: “Dead Into West Virginia” by Nonfiction In 1994, a CD arrived in my WNYU mailbox from an unknown label and accompanied by nothing but its cheap, padded envelope. It was called Confidence, Man by a guy named Stephen Yerkey, and I quickly became obsessed with it. One of my most vivid memories of my mid-nineties years in New York is listening to that CD on a late-fall night at 2am in a deserted Staten Island ferry floating halfway across the harbor. It seemed to me then and now that those are the precise circumstances in which Yerkey had intended his album to be heard.
(Updated Jan. 8, 2011) Note: You can learn the point of this series in part one.
#4: “When I Turn Ninety-Nine” by Devin Davis The only things I know about Devin Davis are a few sentences on Wikipedia and the bio page of his web site (the new version of which is supposed to launch promptly three years ago). Basically all of the above amounts to this: he’s from Chicago and 2005′s Lonely People of the World, Unite! is his first and only album.
You can learn much more about Devin listening to the lyrics of his record, which are all about loneliness, fantasy, loneliness, desperation, hope, and loneliness. That said, Lonely People of the World, Unite! is one of the least sad albums you’ll ever hear. It’s 35 minutes of perfect power-pop energy, and a masterpiece. Yes, I’m dropping the M bomb. It’s a masterpiece that Devin wrote, performed, produced, and recorded entirely by himself, in isolation.
Note: You can learn the point of this series in part one.
#3: “Hometown Again” by Jason Eklund
I struggled a bit trying to pick song number three, the only one of the five that I wasn’t sure of. Ultimately I discarded several that I love, or that are really important to me, because I thought that too many people might know them. I might do a part six with a few of the songs that didn’t make the cut.
Seth Madej has written, produced, and performed award-winning projects for television, radio, print, stage, and the Web. He was once known as The-Seth. You have never heard of him. Remedy that by clicking here.
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Maybe it’s just been my spending a couple of years unemployed, but I’ve noticed a subtle, glacial shift in the assholism of our culture. It feels like sometime not too long ago we crossed an invisible line on this side of which it’s ever so slightly more probable that people will act like assholes than not.
I loved 
Recently Sophie and I have had a couple of chances to hang out with friends in bars, something that we rarely get to do on our unemployment austerity budget. That made me nostalgic for the days when hanging out in bars was part of our regular routine and we allowed ourselves luxuries like paying an extra $2 for a beer that had distinct flavors other than mammal spit. It made me particularly nostalgic for Friday nights at my favorite bar in Pittsburgh, Kelly’s.
For decades, newspaper companies managed to subvert child labor laws by inveigling young adolescents into hauling their very heavy product from door to door. Young nitwits bought the papers from the publisher then sold and delivered them to their neighbors at a markup. As such they could be said to be operating a “business,” not just slaving at the dying remnant of a nineteenth-century distribution model.
In 1994, a CD arrived in my WNYU mailbox from an unknown label and accompanied by nothing but its cheap, padded envelope. It was called Confidence, Man by a guy named Stephen Yerkey, and I quickly became obsessed with it. One of my most vivid memories of my mid-nineties years in New York is listening to that CD on a late-fall night at 2am in a deserted Staten Island ferry floating halfway across the harbor. It seemed to me then and now that those are the precise circumstances in which Yerkey had intended his album to be heard.
The only things I know about Devin Davis are a few sentences on 
I struggled a bit trying to pick song number three, the only one of the five that I wasn’t sure of. Ultimately I discarded several that I love, or that are really important to me, because I thought that too many people might know them. I might do a part six with a few of the songs that didn’t make the cut.
