Sometimes it's about a song. But sometimes it's about just that one part of a song, the moment when it all breaks down, when the chorus snaps in, when the solo erupts, when the singer hits the note or screams out that line. A lot of life can be captured in these moments-- these snapshots-- of songs. We asked our staff to write about parts of songs that have made an impact on them in some way over the years, and here's what they came up with.
Electric Light Orchestra
"Mr. Blue Sky"
0:49 - 1:10
By Mike Powell
Growing up in southern Connecticut, I played rhythm guitar in a traditional ska band called the Radiation Kings. One thing you may know about southern Connecticut is that there are some fancy towns there. One thing you may not know about southern Connecticut is that there are some not-so-fancy towns there, too.
I was from a fancy town; my bandmates were not. Most of them were in their late teens; a couple of them were high-school dropouts; some were record-store clerks; some were just loud, friendly guys of indeterminate station who had soul patches and told dick jokes. I adored them. I think they adored me too, primarily because I was a decent guitar player, always had a ride somewhere, and was very resilient when it came to being picked on.
Before joining the band, most of my relationship to music was solitary: I listened to it alone, watched MTV alone, read magazines like SPIN in my room alone. Anyone who lives mostly in books and magazines knows that they are at best a blurry facsimile of life in the real world, and by that point I had become extremely fussy about the relative merits of certain reggae sidemen and where Chocolate and Cheese belonged in the hierarchy of the Ween catalog. It turned out that nobody else-- especially my bandmates-- cared about so-called shit like that. However stringent the local punk and ska scene was, and it was fairly stringent, they seemed to live in a liberated, un-hierarchical world when it came to being entertained.
In some ways, I figure it had to do with our backgrounds: I was taught, however implicitly, that certain things were on your level and other things might be beneath you; they seemed to operate on the principle that fun should be had wherever you find it because fun turns out to be really hard to find in South Norwalk.
One afternoon before a show, I was dropped off in the parking lot of Coconuts, a music store where our bass player, Justin “Slim Jim the Ruler” English, worked. At 14, I only had a dim understanding of why anyone would ever want anything more than to work a job that gave you discounts on cassettes. I was wearing a suit and a golf hat, with a Fender telecaster slung around my shoulder and an amp at my feet. The other cars pulled in a few minutes later and we strategized packing. I ended up in the backseat of a Honda. Justin was in the front. At the end of his shift, he had purchased a cassette entitled ELO’S Greatest Hits by the band the Electric Light Orchestra, who I had never come across in my reading. (These are the perversities of becoming a music snob at a really young age: You understand the career trajectory of bands like Pussy Galore but have never heard Electric Light Orchestra and have probably mistaken them for Grand Funk Railroad, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Kansas, Boston, or any number of ultra-popular bands with absolutely no critical credibility.)
As we pulled out of the lot, Justin turned around and began shaking the tape in my direction. “Fucking ‘Mr. Blue Sky,’” he said. I sat quietly with my little golf hat in my lap. He inserted the cassette. The song began. Nobody sang. Nobody smiled. What ensued was a kind of coordinated, almost telepathic understanding between equals: Everyone-- besides me, of course-- started bouncing up and down, slapping the dashboard or the back of the seat in front of them, their heads bumping against the drooping felt ceiling. When the song came to its chorus, they unleashed their most awful falsettos. They were a pack of dogs. They had been down this road before.
The song was one of the dumbest things I had ever heard. It was also one of the best. Being in the car with the band constituted some of my earliest memories of listening to music with people other than my parents.
“What did you think?” Justin asked excitedly when it was over.
“It’s really good,” I said, looking into my lap.
He rewound the tape to the beginning and played it again. I didn’t bounce. I didn’t smile. But when the chorus came, I looked out the window at I-95 disappearing behind us and quietly started to sing along.
By Amy Phillips
In 1994, at the age of 13, I became obsessed with Hole’s album Live Through This. At the end of the chorus to the third track, “Plump”, Courtney Love growls, "Your milk's in my mouth/ It makes me sick." But my Live Through This CD (purchased with Bat Mitzvah money at Wee Three Records in the Plymouth Meeting Mall) didn’t come with a lyric sheet. And back then, there was no Google, no Rap Genius, no pop-up-addled random lyric websites cluttering up the internet. (Not that my family even owned a modem.) So all I had to go on was my ears. And I was convinced that the line was: "It melts in my mouth/ It makes me feel."
I got into a heated argument about this with the girl I considered to be my best friend at the time. She insisted it was “milk/sick”; I insisted it was “melts/feel.” At a sleepover party, after a viewing of The Princess Bride, we brought our argument to a larger group of friends. Unanimously, they agreed with my BFF. And they all laughed at me. Thus began a steep downward spiral in which this group of girls, over the course of less than one school year, went from my best friends to my worst enemies. In that peculiar fashion known only to teenage females, they systematically destroyed my life-- by the time they were done with me, the whole school thought I was weird and lame.
Why? Because I was a poseur. And being a poseur was a fate worse than leprosy. According to them, I didn't really like Hole. In fact, I didn't really like any of the bands I said I liked. I was just pretending so that everybody would think I was cool, when in actuality, I probably only truly liked Color Me Badd or Paula Abdul. And they had to get away from me, lest my loser dust rub off on them.
Once I realized what had happened, I vowed to myself that I would learn everything I possibly could about Hole, and any other “cool” band that had ever existed. I would buy every CD (or, more frequently, dub a cassette tape from someone else’s CD). I would read every music magazine and every rock biography. I would go to every show that my mom would let me go to. I would become so knowledgeable that nobody could ever call me a poseur again. So, thank you, misheard lyric to Hole’s “Plump”! You lead me down the path to who I am today: a person who gets paid to know stuff about music. I am a professional non-poseur.
And hey guess what? After all that, some random lyric websites actually back me up now!
When I was a little bit younger, I was going to tattoo the Great Bear on my arm. (Ursa Major, yes, though I admittedly had to Google it to confirm the Latin name after I got the idea.) It was not about the stars; it was about a song.
There used to be a band from Olympia called Kickball who played manically gleeful, stutteringly off-kilter indie rock. Though they broke up only a few years ago, the way I and a couple of my friends loved them now seems like a relic from another era. A few cases in point: I first made a Myspace account solely to send Kickball a lengthy private message to tell them how much I liked one of their records. Around this time I also lied elaborately to my boss so I could cut out of work one night and see them in somebody's living room; "OLD SHIT!" my friend yelled at the stage-- which was actually just this slab of carpet in front of a long-dormant fireplace-- and the lead singer seemed humbled and genuinely confused about how somebody from D.C. could know the old shit, let alone love it enough to request it by name. I raved about this show for years. At the merch table that night, I bought their best record, Everything Is a Miracle Nothing Is a Miracle Everything Is, and I loved it quietly, privately, fiercely. With each year that passed I got a little bit older and became more and more afraid that it signified the end of something, that I (or-- as the internet began to make the whole notion of "privately loved" things feel like an anachronism-- anybody else) might never love a record exactly like that again.
There's this violently beautiful moment at the thirty-seventh second of their song "Orion", when the modestly amplified ditty explodes into something unexpectedly cosmic. It would catch me by surprise even when I knew it was coming. Maybe it's because the beauty in that moment sounds palpably labored: singer Jacob Wilson stammers each word like a butterfly wrestling its way out of a cocoon: "I did all that I could to protect you from harm/ Tattooed the Great Bear on your arm/ Blue stars tipping out the blood (was that really what he was saying? I'd never met anyone who knew for sure)/ So you would know where North was."
"Well that solves it," I thought one day, listening to this song and worrying about the sort of person I'd be when I got older. I would tattoo the Great Bear on the inside of my forearm, and it'd be like my younger self was watching over my older self, to make sure I didn't become an asshole. I'd ask the artist to give the Bear a face so he could glare at me for all of eternity, taunting, "I sure hope you haven't gone and become someone who listens to boring, shitty music now."
I didn't get the tattoo. (Or any others, for that matter.) But when I play this song I still treat that part with a quiet reverence, like you might walk on the lawn of a house where you used to live. And that first transitional chord at 0:37 grills me with its beady bear eyes: Do you still like things? Isn't Kickball rad? Does this part of the song still knock the breath right out of you? It is always with great relief that I still say yes.
The Flaming Lips
“The Abandoned Hospital Ship”
1:59 - 2:03
It was hard being a Flaming Lips fan in Toronto during the 1990s. Even as "She Don't Use Jelly" turned them into MTV darlings, the Lips’ headlining tours never seemed to come our way-- which meant paying package-tour prices to see them. So instead of a proper club show, I had to make do with a short mid-afternoon Lollapalooza side-stage set (3 p.m. = not the best time for strobe lights) or an opening slot for Tool before a hockey arena full of hostile heshers. (Best way to kill a mosh pit? Open with a cover of Flocking Seagulls’ “Space Age Love Song”.) Alas, Canadian radio’s surprising resistance to Candlebox meant the most mismatched alt-rock tour of 1994 didn’t extend north of the border, but I totally would’ve forked out for that one, too.
The Lips’ first Toronto date to promote the release of 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic promised even more dispiriting conditions, as they were scheduled to open for the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the SkyDome. But, a day before the gig, Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith broke his elbow, forcing a cancellation of the show, and since the Lips had already crossed into Canada, they booked a last-minute local headlining gig, for a walk-up cover of $5. (I’ve never arrived earlier to a show in my life.)
The venue was the Opera House, a historic 800-capacity room with a glorious archway looming 35-feet above the stage. The Lips started their set in near-darkness with “The Abandoned Hospital Ship”, the melancholic ballad that opens Clouds: Steven Drozd tapped out the melody on a little piano set up adjacent to his drum kit, Coyne crooned the song’s first and only verse, and guitarist Ronald Jones squeezed his strings until they shed teardrops. Two minutes in, the singing stopped, Coyne and Jones churned out a gnarlier version of the main riff, and Drozd hopped onto his kit to get his Bonham on. And then this happened. The entire 35-foot-high back wall of the stage: covered in Christmas lights. The archway hanging over the stage: covered in Christmas lights. The side walls of the venue: covered in Christmas lights. I’m Jewish, but even I started to believe in Santa.
Since then, The Flaming Lips have written many songs about the perseverance of joy over sadness and hope over despair (and lord knows their stage shows have become more involved than merely turning on a lot of little lights at once). But that moment in “The Abandoned Hospital Ship” instills the same spirit in less explicit, but no less profound, terms. To this day, it remains my personal benchmark for experiencing pure, unbridled, spine-tingling ecstasy through music, the high that I’m chasing with each new song that I hear. Every time I hear those drums come crashing in, I see 800 sets of arms thrust into the air in unison, and I feel the heat of 10,000 light bulbs searing a smile into my face.
Cam'ron
"More Gangsta Music"
0:00 - 0:20
By Ian Cohen
Dipset reminds me of law school, and I suppose that statement explains why winning “Most Likely to Find a Fulfilling Career Outside the Law” at a post-grad superlatives party remains the highest accolade I received from my peers. (I've got a sash and everything to prove it.) The Harlem rap crew infiltrated my life in many everyday ways in 2004, like how I internalized Diplomatic Immunity’s “My Love” (“If your man act dumb, I’ma shut him down!”) while distinguishing myself from a chumpy rival suitor from the (ugh) Public Administration grad program.
So with a couple of hours to kill before a Trusts & Estates final on the Tuesday afternoon of December 7, 2004, stopping by Circuit City to pick up Cam’ron’s Purple Haze was a no-brainer. Now, I’d been on the receiving end of Juelz Santana’s yelling sprees dozens of times, but the first 20 seconds of “More Gangsta Music” is the sort of thing you hear recovered drug addicts and bitter divorcees talk about in retrospect: that small break in time, the flashpoint where you think, “I know this is wrong, but I need to have it.” I pulled over into a stripmall on the shoulder of Atlanta Highway wondering if I lost my goddamn mind. I was about to take some of the most important tests of my life. I couldn't be distracted. But the track would not be ignored. "This could end up very poorly," I thought. I had a lot of arbitrary rules during finals: no drinking, no studying after midnight, staying off Blogspot, and no Purple Haze. I had to. My future was on the line.
That said, I spent the rest of 2005 making up for those four days of lost time. “More Gangsta Music” became an inexhaustible, rejuvenating pep talk I needed to face any huge undertaking: watching an Eagles playoff game, Mock Trial, a daunting shopping excursion at Kroger, meeting my girlfriend’s parents for the first time. And Purple Haze crystallized a similarly fevered yet deadpan, heavily referential, smart-dumb writing style that connected a lot of overeducated and overstimulated Dipset nerds who ended up becoming my bosses, peers, and colleagues. (You’re probably reading some of them on this very website.) But that only came after years of falling down Lexis-Nexis rabbit holes, redlining contracts, or, if we’re being real, suppressing and denying what I originally faced in that stripmall parking lot, something that Juelz was imposing on me in his bug-eyed, unblinking intensity: “You’re gonna write about this, not fiduciary administration.” The joke is true: Purple Haze is the album that launched a thousand rap blogs. But it also may have created more music-writing careers than any journalism school.
Guided by Voices
"I Am a Tree"
2:12 - 2:38
By Matt LeMay
About halfway through eighth grade, I accidentally discovered indie rock. One fateful afternoon, I happened upon CDNow.com’s “album advisor” feature, and entered the name of a band I had seen on a poster that day: Jonathan Fire*Eater. I soon found myself staring down a list of entirely unfamiliar bands with really cool names like Pavement and Guided by Voices. And, hey, all the 10-second RealAudio sound clips sounded awesome over my parents’ dial-up connection. I saved up my allowance for a couple of months, and sent away for a dozen or so CDs.
When the package arrived a week later, I wasn’t so convinced. With a few exceptions, I primarily identified as a classic rock kid who listened to Cream albums on purpose and sneered at “amateurish” musicians like, uh, Kurt Cobain. To my naively overconfident ears, Modest Mouse’s The Lonesome Crowded West seemed too dark and disjointed, Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out too wiry and shrill. But there, in the midst of Guided by Voices’ mid-fi masterpiece Mag Earwhig!, was the best guitar solo I had ever heard. Its technical virtuosity was undeniable, but it also hinted at something a little bit more direct and emotive, a little bit smarter, a little bit less stuffy and more conversational than, say, a Stevie Ray Vaughan solo.
There’s a sense of knowing, weathered defiance to Mag Earwhig! that resonated all too well with me as a frustrated teenager. But Doug Gillard’s solo is a moment of near-acrobatic exuberance. I spent the better part of that year learning how to play it (a challenge made all the more difficult by my not knowing that Gillard played it with a capo on the 7th fret). Taking on that solo everyday after school rewired the connection between my hands and my ears; it got me off the grid a little bit, away from the “right” notes and towards the notes that felt right to me. Suddenly, Modest Mouse and Sleater-Kinney started to make more sense.
Amidst my self-imposed teenage cultural myopia, I initially assumed that I was the only person on earth who had ever heard of these really weird bands. But in the coming years, I discovered that many of the slightly older people in my life-- camp counselors, seniors at my high school-- actually knew about them, too. This music, which I had initially taken as proof positive that I would forever be a solitary weirdo, wound up forming the basis for most of my friendships over the next decade and a half. But the solo from “I Am a Tree” still sounds like a private promise that a strange, bookish, introverted kid can rip a fucking killer solo.
Claude Debussy
String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10: III. Andantino doucement expressif
0:00 - 2:04
I first heard Debussy’s only string quartet when I was 18 years old, while enduring a two-week long camp for chamber music located somewhere remote in Southern Ontario, Canada. I was struggling in the shallow end of the camp’s talent pool, and was reduced to the indignity of working-- and reworking, and reworking, and reworking-- the same rudimentary Mozart string quartet in a closed room with three other strugglers for up to six hours a day. It was the sort of piece the composer dashed off on the equivalent of a cocktail napkin when he was a preteen, and we were being forced to live in it. Worse, we couldn’t even play it the same way twice.
Meanwhile, down the hall, a far-more-skilled group of kids (most a few years younger than me, of course) were demonstrating what actual progress looked and felt like. When the four of us were bored or frustrated by our own fumbling efforts, which was most of the time, one of us would wander two doors down and watch them rehearse. There was an unspoken acknowledgement among the other members of my little Bad-News-Bears troupe that watching these other guys actually build a performance of a piece that was formidably complex and colored with vague harmonies that we could never hope to play in tune was far more invigorating than sawing away at our own assigned work.
It was under the influence of this potent cocktail-- one part impersonal awe, one part exquisitely private self-disgust-- that I first encountered Claude Debussy. The French composer’s music is misty, erotic, and insinuating, exactly the sort of thing to quietly but firmly wrap its tendrils around helplessly young imaginative minds.
The string quartet's third movement, in particular, seemed to open onto someplace entirely new: a damp, shaded, tiny clearing in the center of an enormous thicket. A violin, muted and husky, sings out a longing, tentative question, leaning into the last note and letting it trail off. The viola answers. Slowly, the question in the music dissolves, as everyone finds their way into a bright spot and the longing of the opening relaxes into a fragile, beautiful melody. Something decisive dislodged for me, then. I realized that this was my role: enraptured listener, reporter of my own sensations. If I had a performance to impress anyone with, it was on the page. The piece, being workshopped into transcendence in front of me, was a siren song and a gentle discouragement, at once.
But the nice thing about music, particularly wordless music, is how quickly this sort of autobiography shifts around it. The line floated through most of my twenties, suggesting how I would come to believe in things: provisionally, carefully, strongly, one-by-one. It expresses the quiet exhilaration that comes with hard-won certainty. Now that I am in my thirties, it has taken on an entirely new role in my life: It was the piece I decided to play, after little more than a moment’s thought, to my unborn daughter in the womb. If she’s anything like me, she’ll be able to use what it gives her for awhile.
Rashaan Roland Kirk
“The Inflated Tear”
0:44 - 1:34
By Nate Patrin
There's something liberating about hearing music that breaks your own personal rules before you've even realized what those rules are supposed to be. My stepdad's an old jazz head, and by the time I met him as a kid, he'd accumulated several crate loads of vinyl that held this mysterious talismanic power over me: They sounded like nothing that was happening on the radio. Not to say these records were necessarily better than what was happening on the radio-- this was mid-80s Minneapolis, after all-- but this music was several orders weirder, and I was one of those kids who tended to equate “weird” with “good.” There was a lot to internalize.
Some of it introduced me to the classic canon (Coltrane's Giant Steps), some of it pushed me towards more esoteric reaches (The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra), and some of it I'm still trying to figure out (Anthony Braxton's 3 Compositions of New Jazz). But a lot of it stuck with me, even as I learned to recognize what made jazz work, and how individual artists differentiated themselves.
As I'd eventually discover, nobody set himself apart quite like Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the blind genius who customized instruments like some kind of horn-splicing Frankenstein and made his fame by playing several of them simultaneously. If that seems like a gimmicky stunt, well, maybe it was. But considering the harmonies he'd coax out of them and the ways he could mold his playing to fit anything on the jazz continuum, from Dixieland to R&B crossover and all points of bop in between, he put that supposed gimmick to beautiful use. The title track to his 1968 LP The Inflated Tear got regular spins around the house because it was the first cut on Side 2. And while the fluttery chiming intro that opened the song didn't leave the most memorable impression, the horns that pierce the veil at around the 44-second mark were enough to put dents on my eardrums. These were wailing, honking, moaning leviathans of sound, foghorns crossed with electrical shocks crossed with rubber stretched to the point where it starts ripping-- and then wrangled into this oddly gentle melodic flourish that carries an abstract melancholy. It slips so seamlessly between harmony and discord that it shocked my younger self into recognizing what those things actually were.
Dinosaur Jr.
"Just Like Heaven"
1:47 - 1:56
When Dinosaur Jr.'s cover of the Cure's "Just Like Heaven" appeared as the A-Side of a three-song 7" in 1989, I was just starting high school and coming out of junior high days that included a lot of Minor Threat, Youth of Today, and 7 Seconds. I was a vegetarian.
But I don’t want to make it sound like I was a completely humorless hardcore guy. My older sister (and New Jersey) made sure I was an expert on hair metal. And my childhood friend Moss and I listened to Metallica, Queensrÿche, Megadeth, and (wait) King's X. I'd also met a bunch of kids, including a girl I was interested in, who loved the Cure, Joy Division, New Order, and the like. But coming from a background in hardcore and punk, I definitely took music a little too seriously, and I tended to be dogmatic in the way teenagers who don't know anything about anything tend to be dogmatic. I didn't really find any room for humor or playfulness in my music at that point because I mostly saw it as a place for revolution and aggression.
The Cure's "Just like Heaven" came out in 1987 and was a song this group of goth kids in my junior high school went crazy for-- I remember a bunch of them shrieking and losing their shit when someone played it at a school dance. (Yes, goths still went to dances back then.) Dinosaur do the cover fairly faithfully at first-- it’s a warped SST take on Robert Smith and Co.-- but once we get that psychedelic doubled vocals droning "kiss her hair" at half-speed, things get weirder faster, all the way to the end of the song, where it eventually cuts out.
The ferocious, shouted "YOU!" at the 1:47 mark, and the distorted metal guitars that surrounded it, is the big moment. It finds J. Mascis and Lou Barlow showcasing their background in the hardcore band Deep Wound (the ridiculous video for the song features a puppet wearing a Deep Wound t-shirt) and, of course, reminded me of music I'd been listening to, and seeing live, before high school. More importantly, though, this forceful "YOU!" was connected to my favorite band’s cover of the most romantic song for outsiders I knew at that time. Very simply, and kind of goofily, it showed me that the beautiful and the terrifying could coexist in the same breath. From the noise and grindcore I discovered in college to the Dennis Cooper I studied in grad school to the recent Paul McCarthy installation I want to check out and the Peter Sotos books I’m reading, this is something that went on to inform my listening habits and life in profound ways. It also helped me lighten up a little.
Led Zeppelin
"Thank You" (BBC Sessions)
2:28 - 3:58
By Ryan Dombal
I'm the only one standing in front of a roomful of parents and kids, and I'm playing Jimmy Page's "Stairway to Heaven" solo. On tenor saxophone. I'm 13 and generally terrified of the lines and dots-- so many dots-- on the sheet music in front of me. The big jazz band recital is happening, and I can't play this solo. I know I can't play this solo. It's too fast. There are too many notes. I haven't practiced nearly enough. And this is a long fucking solo. My blood pumps double-time, the band vamps around me, and my horn makes noises. Somehow. I hit some notes, flub some, completely disregard others. Eventually, I sit back down. Parents and kids clap, because that is what happens when a 13-year-old sits down at a jazz band recital. I'm relieved but embarrassed: I wasn't able to connect the dots in front of me. At all.
Up until that point, my experience with musical education was based on accuracy. I looked at the notes, played the notes as closely as possible, and that was OK. But jazz band was different. It was about improvising-- making up parts within a specific scale-- and I had no idea how to do that. I did not come from a musical family; my father's favorite song was Chris de Burgh's "The Lady in Red". And my jazz band teacher, Mr. Romeo, was a small bear of a man with an open-minded view of jazz (hence Zeppelin, along with Kansas and Steely Dan), but he couldn't quite help me unlearn years of playing the notes.
By the time I was 16, I'd gotten into Zeppelin (I was more of a Guns N' Roses guy at 13), and I bought their BBC Sessions compilation when it came out just in time for Christmas in 1997. It included recordings from the late 60s and early 70s, but this was about the closest I'd ever get to purchasing a "new" Led Zeppelin album upon its release. The whole thing was-- and is-- incredible, but the last track, a take on Led Zeppelin II's "Thank You" changed how I listened to and understood music. The BBC Sessions version was extremely different than the album version. It was longer, for one. And instead of a calm acoustic guitar interlude, Page detonates an electric solo that gleefully obliterates the entire blues tradition while paying tribute to it at the same time. He wasn't reading notes, or simply redoing what he'd done in the past. He was making it up right then. It was shocking. Later on, I'd read about how Page never played his "Stairway" solo the same exact way live. Now, I realize my bumbling, panicked jazz band spotlight almost 20 years ago was, in a way, true to the essence of improvisation. I just wish I knew that before I stood up.
Boredoms
"Super Shine"
5:58 - 6:42
The song as edifice, one you see built brick-by-brick: “Super Shine” comes at the end of a very loud, beautiful, and funny album. Super Ae found Boredoms taking threads from their history-- dada sonic trickery, punk rock, drawn-out psychedelia, pounding rhythms-- and focusing and intensifying them. And in “Super Shine” that focus narrows further into a diamond-hard point until the 5:58 mark, when the group’s many voices come in for a mystical sun-worshiping chant, a kind of self-shattering musical ecstasy. The appeal of this moment is that it draws on a power of music that goes back 10,000 years; it feels participatory rather than performative. This is music you live inside rather than admire.
If you ever see me walking through the city with this on my headphones you will see me joining in-- some hand movements, mouthing the chant, beating the rhythm on my thighs. Music can do an infinite number of things but, for me, its highest calling is to bring you in touch with a feeling of vibrating along with life at its best. And “Super Shine”, when those voices come in, is that moment. When I first heard it in 1999, I thought, “This is the future of rock music.” I hoped that we were moving into an era where technology would crash into the primal and the explosion would produce something that inspired awe. But it was not to be; even Boredoms moved on pretty quickly, as was their wont during this time. But I still have this moment on this record: After all the gear and instrumentation and tape manipulation and musical references, we’re left with the power of human voices massed together, directing their energy back to the sky and the source that brought us all here.