Earn This

This post is part of The Month of Billy Joel series.

Billy Joel is my favorite musical artist of all time. I’ve enjoyed his music literally longer than I can remember, and I still do. There’s a Billy Joel CD in my car’s CD player. That’s not to say he’s always been my “current favorite” — I’ve fallen in love with plenty of other bands and artists, and even had a few challenge Joel for the top spot. But none ever have, and I’d be lucky if any ever did.

I suppose this could serious harm my credibility as a music fan. After all, the AllMusic entry on Billy Joel begins with “Although Billy Joel never was a critic’s favorite, the pianist emerged as one of the most popular singer/songwriters of the latter half of the ’70s.” From that, you can infer the high-minded consensus on Joel is dismissive of his artistic merits.

Still, I love his music, and it’s largely shaped many of my musical ideologies and tastes. His strengths and weaknesses run in my DNA at this point; any music I encounter will be evaluated subconsciously on a scale of what Billy Joel taught me to care about in music.

But before I track his solo career arc from beginning to end with a series of reviews, I wanted to share eight overall elements that define why his music is meaningful to me:

1. He was the first artist I loved

It’s unlikely but possible that another artist may one day surpass Joel atop my pantheon of favorite artists. But nobody will ever take this trophy away from Joel.

Many critics dismiss Billy Joel as formulaic, cookie-cutter pop, and they’re right from time to time. But it was through Billy Joel that I learned that formula. Simple things — like falling in love with a beautiful ballad (She’s Got a Way, live version), discovering rockers that changed tempos (Scenes From an Italian Restaurant), and savoring the marvelous flavor that a great instrumental solo can add to a song (I Go To Extremes) — I can only take for granted because Mr. Joel taught me how.

2. Consistency

Billy Joel released nine albums in the decade spanning 1973-83, and in my eyes, every one of them except Streetlife Serenade (1974) is at least “great,” if not “classic.” All nine albums feature at least one “classic” track, and only a handful of the several dozen songs on those nine albums is worse than “good.”

3. Nobody writes better pop hooks

Billy Joel is one of the kings of pop tunes. In all earnestness, I believe that only maybe Lennon-McCartney has created a more impressive catalog of fantastic melodies. Others come close (Oasis, U2, Elton, Jacko, Journey, Elvis, among others), but none top him. His balance between immediate and substantial hooks results in easy listens that you can revisit indefinitely.

4. There’s a aching, incessant longing and loneliness in his lyrics

Headlined by the pitch-dark Piano Man album, Billy Joel has a certain desolation in his heart that he could never quite quench until 1983 with An Innocent Man, and even that respite was short-lived.

His nonstop search for meaning and connection gives the his music a meaningful center with plenty of satisfying moments when he finds small victories (Just the Way You Are).

Writers and critics give plenty of crap to Joel for being derivative and simplistic and cold. They somehow missed the gaping depths of Joel’s genuine aching. He’s not a poet on the level of complexity of a Springsteen, but the emotions and ideas he encapsulates in his music are no less palpable.

5. His career is complete; he hasn’t lapsed out of retirement

When Joel released River of Dreams in 1993, he sounded like a tired old man who had lost his edge but still had enough left in the tank to shine from moment to moment. It’s a clunky album, something like a former ace throwing a 5.5 ERA at 36 years old during a farewell season where he still throws a few memorable gems.

Joel himself knew more than anyone that he was losing his game, so he called it quits — “These are the last words I have to say,” he sings in the closing song.

And somehow, even with the prospect of millions of dollars of revenue, he’s resisted reneging on that retirement promise. He’s released no new studio albums since then, and claims to have written only one lone song since (All My Life in 2007).

It’s pretty tough to think of anyone else who has gone from releasing a #1 hit album to immediate retirement without much reason except for maintaining artistic integrity, and then never looking back.

6. His musical sense has aged gracefully

And yet, he still sounds spry. By many measures, his live collection 12 Gardens Live from 2006 isn’t just his best album in decades, it’s his best album ever. His vocal cords have maintained impressive tenacity for a sixty-year-old.

7. There’s just enough variety in his discography

While he uses only a handful of chord progressions as his main tools, the crafts themselves have been pretty diverse.

From two-minute lamentations (Souvenir) to eight-minute elegies (New York State of Mind), from panoramic narratives (Scenes from an Italian Restaurant) to searing confessions (Honesty), from operatic sound-pictures (Big Man on Mulberry Street) to stripped-down refrains (She’s Got a Way), Billy Joel’s output is as diverse as it is prolific.

8. His music is fun and enjoyable to listen to

He’s not particularly silly, rarely clever, and hardly cool in the way his contemporaries like Elvis Costello are. And yet, in my eyes, his gift of melody, composition, and performance make his work more pleasurable and worthwhile than any “style” could be in the long run. “Cool” changes every day; well-crafted melodies and lyrics full of longing and hard-earned emotion never date.

Due to my summer-heavy work cycle drastically opening up, I’ll have a lot more free time during September than I have in many months. One way I plan to take advantage of this (along with quite a bit of doing nothing, reading, and catching up on TV shows) is to write a bit more for this site.

I’ve decided to revisit my “themed month” idea, which proved a mixed success when I chose to write about animation back in July 2010 before I had a full-time job. This month, I’ll be exploring the work of pop artist Billy Joel. If it seems a strange focus, it is. But there’s good reason about it — I’m excessively familiar with Joel’s work and have a lot to say.

According to Wikipedia, he’s the sixth-bestselling music artist ever in the US, so he’s in no way an unknown or underrepresented artist. But in spite of his popularity (or perhaps because of it), his artistic merits have somehow been drastically undervalued by most.

I don’t claim that he is a poetic savant or a generational keystone the way Dylan or Springsteen is, but I think there’s a lot he’s done that’s worth looking closely at lyrically, sonically, structurally, and — most of all — melodically.

So, over the next month, I plan to review each of his major releases — twelve studio albums, five live albums, a rare tracks collection, and a bootleg of his early works — spotlight and break down a handful of songs, and share a few other scattered thoughts on his career.

Ideally, I’ll keep up a post-a-day structure, but it’s unlikely I’ll be able to maintain that for a full month. We’ll see what happens.

My last warning is one I posted when I introduced animation month: There’s every possibility I could get bored within a week or two and just give this endeavor up. Such is the danger of being a side project that I do for fun.

But I’ve always wanted to do a thorough write-up on Joel’s career. At one point during high school I even dreamed of writing a book breaking down every song on every album. While this project isn’t quite so ambitious, I think I’ll get a lot of pleasure out of completing it. So here goes nothing.

Note: I’ll post all of the links here as I write about them.

• Note: links will start working on day of publication at noon
• Billy Joel retrospective page (coming soon)
• (9/01) – Eight reasons Billy Joel is my favorite artist ever
• (9/02) – Review: Cold Spring Harbor
• (9/03) – Review: Piano Man
• (9/07) – Review: Streetlife Serenade

Suck It and See: 4 stars (out of 5)

One of these days, Alex Turner and the Arctic Monkeys will release a bad album.

At least, that’s what history and convention would tell us.  One might have predicted that the mediocrity would have come with Favourite Worst Nightmare, the follow-up to their debut monster Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.  Or on the dreaded ‘transitional third album.’  Or, now, by album #4, a time when bands have gotten their label from the media and public and can do precious little to change perception.

And yet, it never happens with them.  Five years after Whatever turned the U.K. on its side, Turner and co. calmly drop Suck It and See on us and sit back with their arms folded, content to let their work stand on its own.  There’s no radical change like on 2009’s Humbug, but instead a supremely assured, don’t-need-to-prove-anything-to-anyone feel.

Suck It And See occupies a middle ground between the Monkeys’ early sound—manifest on the first two albums—and the ominous, slower Humbug.  And thanks largely to Turner, the balance works splendidly—there’s a dark vibe here, but the rousing melodic flourishes keep it alive, make the darkness analogous to the chic metallic black of a luxury car rather than a storm cloud.

The hooks—simple at first, complicated later—propel tunes like intriguing opener “She’s Thunderstorms” and the title track.  Musically, they continue Humbug’s slower paces, but guitarist Jaime Cook offers up juicier licks this time.  They still shine at keeping songs just off-center enough to remain compelling (“All My Own Stunts”), but, really, Suck It succeeds by confirming—for anyone who somehow hadn’t realized it yet—that Alex Turner is a premier lyricist of our generation.

Most of the time, he doesn’t make it easy on the listener; lines like “Somebody told the stars you’re not coming out tonight / So they found a place to hide” and “She looks as if she’s blowing a kiss at me / And suddenly the sky is a scissor” might make you pause in contemplation for a moment before you fall for them.  Similarly, on the effortlessly smooth title track, he fawns over a girl who’s “Rarer than a can of dandelion and burdock / And those other girls are just post-mix lemonade.”

On the other hand, sometimes he keeps it straightforward and incisive, as with, “You talk the talk alright / But do you walk the walk or catch the train?” or “I called up to listen to the voice of reason / And got his answering machine.”  If anyone out there has never felt like this, kindly return to your home planet before you scare any small children.

On Humbug, Turner began to express a desire for mature, adult connections, and that continues here—nowhere more so than on the exquisite “Love is a Laserquest.”  This is 2011’s “Cornerstone,” and while that one remains their all-time peak, “Love” finds Turner expanding his range like Bono did when he jumped from his laconic 80s love songs to the dense 90s ones.  Over a haunting bed of music that recalls Bruce Springsteen’s “One Step Up,” Turner spits out Conor Oberst-worthy lyrics about a failed relationship: “I can’t think of there without thinking of you / I doubt that comes as a surprise / I can’t think of anything to dream about / I can’t find anywhere to hide.”

Turner’s voice has never sounded more full, and yet you’re surprised that they’d go so sad, so deep; lines like “When I’m hanging on by the rings around my eyes / And I convince myself I need another / For a minute it gets easier to pretend that you were just some lover” almost make you think you’re listening to the Red House Painters.  Likewise, the breathtaking final verse of the album’s second-best track, “Black Treacle,” features the unexpectedly depressive lament “I tried last night to pack away a laugh / Like a key under the mat / But it never seems to be there when you want it.”

Of course, Turner maintains his playfulness much of the time.  “I’ve been feeling foolish / You should try it,” he teases on the opener, one of those Monkeys tracks that you think is a love song but keeps you in suspense.  Later, he hits with, “If you’re gonna try to walk on water / Be sure to wear your comfortable shoes.”  But the aforementioned moments on Suck It and See make you wonder how intense he’ll go in the future.

As on Humbug, a couple missteps keep this album from attaining the kind of legendary status their debut deserved.  Clunky lead single “Brick by Brick” irritates me for the simple reason that I can imagine a noob hearing it on the radio and saying, “Hmm, they sound kind of boring,” which makes me want to kill someone.  The last couplet of “Library Pictures” sneers with gleeful menace, but the track slides between fast and slow too many times.  A couple memorable lines help us overlook that “Reckless Serenade” and “Piledriver Waltz” are pleasant, but little more.

Yet, by the last three songs, you’ll have forgotten about these flaws.  You’ll have been taken in by the sound, their refusal to fade away, and Alex Turner’s remarkable lyrics.  The concluding trio constitute a thematic climax nearly comparable to the ‘suite of death’ concluding The Joshua Tree or the three-track travel through the end of days on Joy Divison’s Closer.

American listeners might infer the title track’s suggestion as a brawny middle-finger—and I have no problem with that—but the lovely harmony on that chorus hints that the band probably intended to invoke the British meaning of the phrase—‘Give it a try.’  “That’s Where You’re Wrong” deserves its New Order comparisons, as few other bands do smooth, bass-heavy, mid-tempo ballads quite like this.  Then again, Bernard Sumner, for all his gifts, never approached the lyrical prowess of Alex Turner.  When the latter sings, “There are no handles for you to hold / And no understanding where it goes…Don’t take it so personally / You’re not the only one that time has got it in for,” with an ecstatic guitar break in between and a sinewy melody holding it all together, you’ll be grateful that his conflicted youth means there are probably many, many more productive years to follow.

Taylor channeling her inner Hilary Duff

I’ve been on a Bruce Springsteen kick recently (I think I could write a two-thousand word analysis on Rosalita alone), but occasionallyI need something more mindless and disposable. My recent pop album of choice has been Taylor Swift’s Speak Now, which has risen considerably in my esteem the past few weeks. It has a lot less filler than Fearless did, and her lyrics (all self-penned) are remarkably frank for teen pop.

Much has been written and discussed about the targets of a few of Taylor’s songs. She famously writes about her own love life in her hit singles. It got me wondering about the songs with less obvious targets, so I did a bit of digging. Turns out our little country daisy gets around quite a bit, particularly for someone who’s one album removed from a preachy chastity song.

Here is a breakdown of my findings. I hit some of the obvious resources — EW and MTV and People articles — but also braved SongMeanings.net, fan message boards, and — worst of all — Yahoo Answers. Fans have developed a consensus about the meaning behind most of the songs, though some are more obvious than others.

This exercise proves a little bit misguided and confusing at times. Taylor says she often writes about situations she’s imagined in her head with real-life people as characters in these hypothetical scenarios. Thus, Taylor writing specific feelings about a person or situation is not necessarily indicative of her real feelings. And even if every situation were literal, it’s all still speculation; she has adamantly refused to confirm the identities of most characters of her songs. She was kind enough to include some scrambled clues in her liner notes, and I’ve included those where appropriate.

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Welcome to the teens! The aughties have reached their end and all of us who smugly ignored 2000 and celebrated the new millennium as 2001 rolled in are psyched about the new decade. Why? Because a new decade means that it’s prime time for retrospectives on the last decade! So, just in time for the Chinese New Year (shout out to all my fellow Rabbits!), I offer you a recap of those stars who have defined the past ten years in American music, those who are quantifiably the best and the brightest.

Yes, you read that right: my list is mathematically sound. All rankings are strictly by the numbers. Now, there are a great many statistics I could’ve used to compile the list. I have gleaned the record books looking for songs and albums matching any or many of these criteria:

1. Spent at least 5 weeks at #1 on the Mainstream Top 40, based solely on radio airplay
2. Spent at least 5 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, based on a combination of airplay and sales
3. Sold at least 3 million copies in the United States (“Triple Platinum”)
4. Sold at least 5 million copies worldwide
5. Was the best-selling album of the year in which it was released, as reported by Nielsen SoundScan
6. Won a Grammy for Album of the Year, Song of the Year (for great songwriting), or Record of the year (for great performance in studio)

I have combined scores from each of these categories through a complex Sabermetric formula to produce a final score for each song and album, a score that I call the Coltonic Quotient. No, not really, but that would be pretty sweet, right? I just made a big graph of those six values and looked for artists who stood out. Enough with the exposition, let’s jump to the winners!

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As I sat here thinking about how I was wanted to assemble this “The Top 50 Third-Wave Ska Songs” list, it grew more and more apparent to me that no matter how hard I tried I could not satisfy the demands of any true ska fan, skanker, rude boy, or other person who read this.  I mean, it’s in their nature to resist conforming to anyone else’s opinions. I respect and acknowledge that fact.

Anyways, this list doesn’t include any 1st or 2nd wave ska. I haven’t listened to nearly enough of those genres to include them in a list. I apologize in advance for those of you who feel my judgments/end results may be skewed or biased in favor of certain artists or styles. One guy’s list is, by nature, going to be biased.

What you’re probably looking for is the list.  Go ahead and look at it, but I urge you to really read my explanations as to why the songs are in their place.  That might give you a little better understanding as to why the songs are in the order that they are.

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I have a confession to make, and that is — despite my love of movies and music and television and books and video games and the like — I tend not to be very up to date on my media consumption. There’s simply too much for me to pay attention to, and it usually costs more money if I acquire it right away. So my efforts are focused on sifting through the best of older media. It’s just a better use of my time and energy.

However, thanks to more disposable income and free time post-graduation, 2010 was a large step toward the present for me. I saw a lot of movies, bought some video games, and even listened to some of this year’s albums which, in the past, was practically unheard of but for a few bands.

Despite this, my coverage is not great. Consider this a warning that the upcoming list — loosely defined as “My Top 25 Favorite Pieces of Entertainment and Art That Were Published in 2010″ — is flawed in a variety of ways, the most notable of which is that I simply haven’t seen or listened or read or played everything* in 2010.

*Notable holes in my coverage include: all TV drama, most non-blockbuster films. I will catch up on these eventually.

Also, in case the title didn’t make this clear, this is an account of my personal taste. What follows is a list of things that moved and engaged me. I make no contention that these selections represent what I believe would be valuable to the mass public or even my close friends.

Yes, it’s boneheaded to combine all different media into one list. Each format of art and entertainment is incompatible with the others. But I couldn’t get respectable lists out of any individual medium, and I wanted to honor my favorites across the board, so I decided to mash all of them together.

Anyways, let’s just get on with this mess. Without further adieu, my top 25 favorite movies, albums, TV shows, books*, video games, and other thingies from 2010.

*There are actually NO books on this list. I read a lot in 2010 but little to none that was published this year.

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Rating: 2 and a half stars (out of 5)

Sigh.  It was all set up. The Arcade Fire could have stamped themselves as a legitimate nominee in the category of ‘best band debuting in the last decade.’  Certainly their first two albums revealed originality, intensity, and passion.  But, as I’ve noted before, a band’s third effort can be a critical one; and 2010’s The Suburbs, a 16-song, hour-plus masterpiece-by-design, does indeed seem to mark a discouraging transition.

Oh, to be sure, stretches of this album are OK, particularly if you truncate the final 6 (!) songs, but the entire work leaves you wondering three devastating questions: where’s the rock?; where’s the melody?; and what, in the world, is up with Win Butler’s relentless criticism of modern suburban life?

The last point occupies such a central place on the album that it’s worth addressing before any sonic details.  As this band’s first two albums proved, Butler was never a particularly optimistic fellow, although relegating him to the category of pure doom and gloom would be lazy, as his songs often snuck in a bit of nostalgic hopefulness amidst the tragedy.  Indeed, such complexity kept his sentiments from coming off as fatalistic.  Here, however, the lack of such complexity, combined with the shift towards an undeserving target of criticism, make his lyrics a prominent weak point.

The album’s title accurately reflects Butler’s area of concern, as most of the album finds him bemoaning the corrosive influence of modern suburban life.  Clearly, childhood was so much more stimulating and invigorating when he was growing up; now it’s all just “endless suburbs stretched out thin and dead,” where “all we see are kids in buses longing to be free.”

What’s the cause of such numbing oppressiveness?  Aside from vilifying shopping malls, Butler never provides one, although he makes it clear that the offspring of modern suburban life bears the marks of its flaws.  The kids, nowadays, “seem so wild but they are so tame,” declares the annoying “Rococo”; and on “Month of May,” he laments that “the kids are still standing with their arms folded tight,” evidently implying that we just don’t appreciate beauty and art the way they used to.

As multiple songs indicate, Butler wants more “wasted hours,” lazy days like when he “spent the summer staring out the window.”  But by failing to specify what’s so deleterious about modern life, and couching his depressiveness in bland near-clichés, he makes the critical error in persuasive discourse—he pushes us towards the opposite viewpoint.  Wasted hours are all well and good, but summers spent in contemporary society, with iPods the soundtrack for Skype chats, can be pretty damn fun, too.

Butler’s worldview, sadly, tarnishes even the more successful tracks here.  On “Half Light II (No Celebration)”, he ponders, “This city’s changed so much since I was a little child / Pray to God I won’t live to see the death of everything that’s wild.”  The latter sentence, in particular, expresses a viewpoint that’s by and large reasonable—poignant, even.  But here we see why the album has so much negative synergy; given Butler’s attitude expressed elsewhere, the unstated implication that he thinks he might indeed live to see the death of everything that’s wild tempers one’s enjoyment and appreciation.

Given these problems, it becomes incumbent upon the music and the melodies to make us forget about the lyrics; unfortunately, they only marginally succeed.  I read more than one proclamation from the nearly-universally adoring critics that The Suburbs is the hardest-rocking AF album to date, which makes me wonder whether I was mailed a different album from everyone else.  Everything after track 10 suffers from overwhelming flaccidity, desperately requiring some of that Funeral-esque piquant guitar.  Considering the band’s reputation for orchestral bombast , it’s surprising how many passages suffer from sounding sparse and repetitive.  The opener, about twice as long as necessary, saunters along like a leaf blowing idly on a lake; “City With No Children” (redeemed only by the killer line “Do you think your righteousness can pay the interest on your debts?”) clunkily plods through its bass-heavy instrumentation; and the strings on tracks like “Half Light I,” rather than enhancing anything, merely kill time.

Even the best tracks suffer from similar problems.  “Empty Room” begins, to be sure, spectacularly: pulse-pounding drums and a guitar that sounds like a train whistle bursting their way through rhythmic strings; but then everything stalls.  Overall, it’s still the most propulsive track here, but the melody falls off with the insipid chorus, and by the two-minute mark, when it should be hitting a new gear, it’s already beginning to fade away.  The same could be said for “Month of May”—a mercifully jaunty change of pace, but its riff needs changing up after about a minute, and that never happens.

This band has never minded dramatically switching gears within a song (see “Wake Up,” “Black Wave/Bad Vibrations,” “The Well and the Lighthouse”), and there are so many instances here when a song sounds ready to explode…and it doesn’t.  That’s most painfully true on the underdeveloped “Suburban War.”  It’s an acceptable track, but even when the piano and guitar pick it up, everything sounds too restrained, and the band members are done no favors by Butler’s overly-unassuming vocals.  Likewise, “Ready to Start” carries with it initially a groovy, dominant bassline, but by the midpoint, the sparse instrumentation and forgettable chorus have soured us; and “Modern Man,” pleasant despite more simplistic pessimism, builds up its bridge section to…quietude.   So bizarre.

Where, oh where, are moments as spontaneously invigorating as the “Oooohs” in “Keep the Car Running” or the introduction of “Wake Up”?  Now, it’s as though Butler, so intent on delivering  his somber criticisms, just can’t open up.  Apparently with so much ‘suburban war’ going on, no one can have any fun.

It’s important to note that I’m not inherently averse to bands addressing problems they see in modern life; I’ve recently been praising Green Day left and right for how effectively they’ve done this in the 00s.  But Billie Joe conveys the message that he’ll fight for the best possible society, that he’s just tired of people fucking things up; Butler sounds like he wants to be transported back to the 1950s, a yawn-inducing, narrow-minded worldview that merits no counterpoint.  Likewise, the Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner has had great fun chastising modern, obnoxious teenage prepsters, but he’s done so with wit, exceedingly clever wordplay, and a sense that he doesn’t actually believe the world is collapsing.

And, perhaps even more importantly, those successful bands surround their observations with cathartic tunes and the sort of melodic grip barely present on The Suburbs.  Putting those pieces together is the Arcade Fire’s next challenge.

Goodness knows there are more active musical artists today than there were thirty years ago – or five years ago, or yesterday.  Just like the global population, the “band population” has a birth rate that exceeds its mortality rate.  (Don’t ask for an analogue for shifting line-ups or new group formation – it gets gruesome.)

But two particular bands dear to me have each announced their impending demise in the last two weeks: Mae and As Tall As Lions.  Neither is a pet band of mine, in that I don’t own a full discography worth of music from either.  I’d only be able to sing along to half of their songs at a show.

For that reason, my comments below will be largely from the gut.  I offer a eulogy for each band as the fan that I was, without actually pursuing the extra research that would be appropriate for a proper review of their careers.  If you’re in my age bracket and someone told you Counting Crows was splitting, you might feel sad and go listen to “Mr. Jones” on repeat for fifteen minutes, but you wouldn’t run to the record store and buy Hard Candy to see what you missed when you had the chance.  Just so, I’m encapsulating the experiences I already have with these bands for now without yet mixing in full knowledge of their careers.

Mae, originally or apocryphally an acronym for Multisensory Aesthetic Experience, is an indie band proudly hailing from Norfolk, VA.  If I remember right, they formed as students at Old Dominion University, a stone’s throw from my own alma mater.  Though never admitting to be anything more specific than “spiritual” as individuals and in their music, Mae was often cast as a Christian band due to the contract they had with Tooth & Nail at the time of their rise to fame.

Frankly, I have never been swayed much by the quality of a frontman’s voice, be it glorious or abysmal.  So the Dave Gimenez’s thin quality on Destination: Beautiful, which I picked up blindly on a girlfreind’s recommendation, was easy to ignore next to the album’s credible arrangements and cheery sing-along choruses.  (Want to know the secret to good arrangements?  Get a good bass player.  Every indie kid wants to play guitar.  If the last step of assembling your band is asking around to see who knows a bass player, it shows in your records.)

Destination: Beautiful was not a breakout hit.  Over many years, it grew on me.  Every time a Mae track came up in my random playlist, I liked it a little more than before, which I guess just means the album was “greater than or equal to average” paired with “my kind of music.”  After the release of Mae’s sophomore LP The Everglow, a few of those new tracks snuck their way onto my hard drive somehow.  The production value had leapfrogged to the point where Dave Elkins’s voice suddenly seeemed remarkable in a good way.

Oh, and Dave Gimenez had changed his name to Dave Elkins.  I don’t know which one is his real name.  I probably should have asked him when I got the chance to say hi after Mae played at the College of William and Mary back in early 2008.

Left to right: this author, Dave "Gimenez" Elkins, and the girlfriend who first recommended Mae

They played in an awful space on the second floor of the student center after opening act Tokyo.  Still, there’s little better than soaring in a crowd full of voices during the swells of anthems like “The Ocean,” “Suspension,” and “Anything” – though I’ll admit there were fairly few in attendance who actually knew Mae’s songs.

Even at that point, Mae had released a CD that I didn’t have.  I still don’t.  I did pay occasional attention, at least, when Mae undertook a “12 songs in 12 months” project that involved releasing a new song every 30 days that could be downloaded from their website for a donation that would go to charity.  Those offerings I streamed all sounded as high-quality as I hoped, but I never bought any.  Those 12 songs, along with an equal amount of otherwise unreleased material, composed a series of three EPs: (m)orning, (a)fternoon, and (e)vening.  How cute!

It was only within the last few months that I bought The Everglow and heard the album in its entirety.  My first listen was revolutionary.  The cohesion, range, and emotional force ranked immediately in my upper echelon among all LPs.  The conceptual design of the album is perfect in construction as the listener is walked organically through the course of an education in love.  The execution is entrancing if you’re willing to “fall into it.”

And now that I get it… it’s over.

In July 2010, Mae foreshadowed their oncoming departure from the scene, promising a “Goodbye, Goodnight” farewell tour.  The last two weeks brought the tour schedule, enumerating the band’s final shows, with the grand finale back home in Norfolk.  Amazingly, despite a line-up change that followed The Everglow, the band has reassembled in its original form for this grand seeing-off.  One lucky venue will even be treated to a cover-to-cover performance of The Everglow live.  Then, on November 28, the band will start “hiding away, embarking on new adventures, trying out life’s opportunities as individuals with freedom and anticipation.”

My involvement with As Tall As Lions was more brief and pointed.  They were an accident – the just-so-happens opening band at an Rx Bandits show.  I heard murmurs before the band came out from fans who had traveled far to see them without any fondness for the headliners.  The name “As Tall As Lions” meant nothing to me and my initial survey of their MySpace had left no impression.  I might have even been confused as to why a ferocious prog-punk-reggae-ska outfit like Rx Bandits would be touring with what looked like a bunch of low-key electric jazz musicians whose only use of a trumpet was for eerie feedback loops.

No such thought crossed my mind that night.  As Tall As Lions conquered me with a frenetic, tightly-woven opener named “Circles” that involved most of the band playing drums of one kind or another under a thick, milky vocal melody.  Go listen to “Circles” right now.  If you don’t like it, listen to it again tomorrow.  Also, you’re crazy.

Rx Bandits played a stellar set, but I bought As Tall As Lions’ You Can’t Take It With You that night instead of Rx Bandits’ new Mandala.  Days later, upon a spin, I felt betrayed.  Live, As Tall As Lions convinced me that they were a prog band of remarkable intelligence and texture.  My computer speakers were playing straight-up jazz fusion back at me.  (Albeit jazz fusion of remarkable intelligence and texture.)  You Can’t Take It With You got buried and I have never dug deeper into their past records.

Naturally, plays from a random playlist have accumulated since then, and a love equal to most of that original dumbstruck spark has been restored.  You don’t need to remind me that the line between prog and jazz is nonexistent.  These guys fill up the whole center of that Venn diagram.  They also make beautiful music.

And their bassist's face looked goofy as all get-out.

Word from headquarters is that these boys are calling it quits.  Thankfully, like Mae, their announcement had more dignity than a simple “Dear John”: three final concerts were announced for three major US cities, all right before Christmas.

The looming end makes me think about all the good times.  Remember that you’ve got to take the chance to love these guys while you’ve got it.  Remember that one ticket sold for a show benefits the average band far more than one CD sale.  Remember that it benefits the fan more, too.  I won’t be able to catch As Tall As Lions (ever) again, but I’ve got my ticket to see Mae in a couple of weeks so that I can say “Goodbye, Goodnight” to some brilliant musicians who couldn’t keep this up forever.