time comes undone

I was forced to endure an absurd presentation skills training earlier this week as part of my required duties. I could go on and on about how idiotic this class is, but one good thing did come of it. For the first morning, we were supposed to have done some pre-work notes on a topic of our choosing. I came to the class unprepared, and was given 20 minutes to put together a 4 minute presentation to be given to the class. I spent the first 5 minutes deciding on a topic and the last 15 minutes trashing the curriculum rubric and instead writing the piece word for word. I told the instructor that I haven’t held a pen since grade school and I’m not about to start again now, fired up my laptop, and hammered this out:

All those UIL extemporaneous speaking exercises came back to me in a flash, and I was able to churn this out in 15 minutes. I’m mighty proud of this! This is blog-ready copy right here, and I didn’t even cheat and clean it up!

I pretty much said “fuck this, I’m leaving” to the presentation class after that.

Allow me to announce my first surefire top ten album of 2008, before ever announcing my favorites of 2007, and before even finishing my SXSW blog about discovering this band in the first place.

The band is Megafaun and the album is Bury the Square.

First let me just say, the degree to which the phrase 'old timey' is dissected on urban dictionary is adorable. And familiar. I especially like the exposition on the relative old-timeyness of facial hair configurations, and the compare and contrast between the distantly related concept of retro chic. One wonders how long you could explore the usage and shades of meaning of the phrase 'old timey' as the sole thesis of a serious grad school paper. But I digress.

Megafaun are an Akron/Family sister band, and themselves an offshoot of another interrelated project. I didn't know they existed until their performance on the tremendous Table of the Elements showcase at SXSW 2008. They moved me to tears with their plaintive set, full of wistful harmonizing. Now whenever I listen to their album, the memory of that emotion is pricked. And I've been listening to it frequently ever since.

I use the phrase old timey here loosely, and with apologies to the wordanistas over at the urban dictionary. It may not be a proper description of Megafaun in the specific musical genre sense, especially since the free-form, electrified bliss outs at the end of a couple of their songs have nothing old timey about them. But it does capture the mood of this and the Calexico/Iron & Wine song I blogged about just the other day. It is a direct descendant of vintage rural folk, and it evokes all the predictable imagery of and nostalgia for sepia-toned times predating my own.

I have an intense love for banjo and pedal steel, and will go to such great lengths to hear it as listening to country and bluegrass, when bands of those styles accidentally end up on stages I happen to be sitting near at the time. Megafaun has a song called Drains that features both, the tune of which has been on my tongue for some several weeks now. The blend of voices on this track so rich and resonant that it sinks into the throat and settles there, until the fullness of sound forces you to crack lips and sing along.

I do love Drains, but after debating it with myself for the amount of time I've been writing this post, I have decided to share the obvious standout track instead: Where We Belong. It is epic in every sense of the word: length, range, and majesty. It catapults out of the acoustic into a stormy, clipped electric climax, and back down to a fiddle led denouement sweeter than the best moments from the Dirty Three.

These Akron-cetera boys can do no wrong by me. It makes me want to buy up every volume of every related project out to six degrees of separation, in a mad fit of completionist abandon.

Last night I was of a melancholy mood, and found myself listening to a long time favorite, Dead Man’s Will, by Calexico with Iron & Wine. It’s the last and best track from their collaboration EP, about a man promising his gifts away to his loved ones after he has passed. This inspired my own morbid thoughts of death and love, and I wondered, as the song poses, will the people who I love and haven’t told know that I do, when I’m dead and gone?

May my love /
Reach you all /
Please say it’s not too late /
Now that I’m dead and gone

Some of them have been told but don’t know, some of them know but haven’t been told, and some of them just have no idea what a gift they are or were in my life.

But wrapped up in the morose thought was the same awestruck feeling I sometimes indulge when listening to music so deeply satisfying and yet so unassuming — music that is perfect without trying to be. And Dead’s Man Will and so many others are perfection in song, and they fill my existence with value beyond measure, even as I contemplate whether it’s worth anything at all.

The way that I came to love this particular song is that a certain local hero and radio DJ named John Aielli plays it frequently on his show. Just a short while ago, I got into my car in order to drive home for lunch, and I turned the radio to his show. I was instantly arrested by the sounds of vintage jazz, and I didn’t start the engine, and I didn’t return that phone call, and I didn’t release my fingers from the dial. I listened and savored the sounds of something unknown and beautiful to me, and waited patiently to hear the back announce of what this great thing was.

When John returned to the mic to talk about it, he said, “So many things in life are so terrible, and yet there are things like that that are so wonderful … just divine. That was Duke Ellington and Mark Strayhorn.” He echoed the essence of my ideas about the soul sustaining power of music, that I had been thinking to myself not even half a day ago.

This is why John Aielli is so beloved here in Austin. He has a passion for music that he communicates with such a plain, unpretentious sincerity that it is infectious. It’s also because music is lonely without the experience of sharing it. At the end of the song, when both listeners find themselves sighing in unison, it marks a kind of mutual intimacy that needs no words. The radio DJ and the listening audience can have this kind of relationship; and having been a DJ myself, I understand how rewarding it is to play a selection that sparks that kind of connection, whether you know for sure that you have reached someone or not.

Today I have reaffirmed my personal promise to announce my appreciation to all who have earned it, now, while I’m still alive and here. So to John Aielli, I wish to say that you are a treasure and a joy. I will continue to fuel my life with the musical gems discovered while listening to your show.