Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Ranking Madonna’s Rebel Heart, track-by-track

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madonna-rebel-heartAny week that includes the release of a new Madonna album is a national holiday for me, and this past week’s release of Rebel Heart was the most-exciting Madonna holiday of all time.

In its Super Deluxe format, Rebel Heart is a 23-track album – Madge’s longest-yet. By itself, that’s cause for celebration – especially given that her early 00s LPs were just 10-tracks a piece! Plus, due to various pre-release leaks, there are another 16 songs from this album cycle in various stages of completeness floating around the internet.

I’m typically not too interested in leaked albums – whether the LP is finished or not, I know I’ll buy it when it comes out, anyway. However, in this case the first leaked tune was the title track, a curious acoustic and strings composition that really piqued my interest for the album as a whole.

With the album in-hand and digested, I realized the final version of “Rebel Heart” was pretty distinctly different than the outstanding leak, and I sought out all the other demos. That’s what brings me to this best-holiday-ever. Not only does that yield 39 total songs – a triple-album bounty – but it’s a rare chance to appreciate Madonna’s songwriting and production process by comparing demos to the final tracks. And, even more amazing – there’s nothing truly bad out of the 39!

(Before you ask: No, I do not have the demos to share with you. Just Google each track name and “Madonna Rebel Heart Demo” and you will find some means of hearing them.)

You should know a three things about me:

  1. I have been a Madonna fan for as long as I can remember, which happens to be around the time of Like a Virgin’s release.
  2. I have been a musician for considerably less time than I’ve been a Madonna fan, but each influences the other.
  3. I have been known to like some of the odder songs in Madonna’s catalogue. I love I’m Breathless and American Life. I love “Love Song” and “Bedtime Story.”

Now that you know what you’re getting into, let’s begin.

[Read more…] about Ranking Madonna’s Rebel Heart, track-by-track

the shocking discovery I made about boy bands may or may not shock you

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This is how I remember New Kids On The Block: The girls in third grade had buttons of them pinned to their winter coats.

“Buttons!” I told my mother after school one day. Why would you need a button of a band? I had NKTOB’s cassette tape and posters of Madonna, but I didn’t wear my fandom as an actual, physical badge (which wasn’t so easy to do back before the internet).

I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. They sang that one decent song, “The Right Stuff,” and that was about all that interested me about the whole endeavor. I think my mother might have liked them more than I did. And then, not so long afterward, they were gone – and Madonna remained.

That was my first and last exposure to boy bands in my youth. If there were any in the 90s, they were invisible to me (aside from Boyz II Men, of course – I am from Philly) and I was headed to college by the time Backstreet Boys and NSYNC broke. I remember the summer after freshman year – just a few short weeks shy of the birth of this blog – dancing with the incoming students to “Bye Bye Bye” during their orientation party, bobbing and weaving across the dance floor with my broken collarbone sending twinges of pain through my body with every choreographed wave goodbye.

Weirdly, that’s a positive memory, and so NSYNC has always benefited from a bit of unearned goodwill from me even though I have – and this is the honest truth – never again heard a single verse of a song by them in the intervening fifteen years.

Unless last week. Last week I liked to “Bye Bye Bye” a lot. Probably not enough to make up for my decade-and-a-half of abstention. Certainly not as much as a girl with a button on her winter coat might in a single 24hr period. But, a lot. Enough to have it mapped out cold in my head so we could rehearse it today as a result of sustained requests for more “boy bands,” plus the avalanche of cheering and drunken singing along that greets our cover of “I Want It That Way.”

Here’s the shocking discovery I made about boy bands along the way: most of their members are not really so much better at singing than the rest of us plebes (again: aside from Boyz II Men).

Okay, maybe it’s not so shocking for you. For me – brought up on non-stop Doo Wop on every car ride – it came as a bit of a revelation.

Sure, you need a tenor or two in there to fill out the chords, but there’s a reason that Justin Timberlake is the one one of the two guys in those two bands with a significant solo career – most of their voices aren’t all that interesting or amazing on their own. There’s no David Bowies or Freddie Mercurys in the bunch or else all of their songs would be as fucking weird as “Under Pressure.”

As it turns out, I can deliver perfectly serviecable versions of both “I Want It That Way” and “Bye Bye Bye.” The Backstreet Boys tune is on the high side for me, but I can nail the NSYNC without much strain. Even the harmony – which I had always assumed the whole point of assembling five good-looking guys to be a singing group – is easy enough that Ashley can jump into it and easily teach it to me.

This made me a bit curious about my original boy band: those New Kids. I listened to that seminal album on my way to work one day and made it two songs – just far enough to hear the first ragged and somewhat tuneless attempt at falsetto.

That will probably be my last listen to NKTOB for at least another fifteen years. I’m open to hearing some more NSYNC, though.

type a-ness

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Tonight Jake came over to play bass.

This is kind of a big deal. Jake had become a sort of essential, twice-a-week presence in my life in 2012 when he was the bass player for Arcati Crisis and – more than that – a rare male friend. Then he was off to Rochester for some life changes, and a year into that Arcati Crisis ceased to be an ongoing concern.

There were some good things and some bad things about both of those happenings, but the worst by far was not playing music with Jake at least once a week. Tonight remedied that situation by a measure, as we began to get him up to speed on some of our many dozens of Smash Fantastic cover songs with an eye to him joining the band.

That’s a lot of songs, for which I have a lot of finely detailed lead sheets. They each have a little “At a Glance” box at the top that details their key, BPM, and a quick summary of chords and special performance notes. No song enters our repertoire without a sheet. The practice of making one all-but-assures that I not only know a song before we attempt it, but that I understand how it works.

I insisted on printing our entire binder of leads for Jake at the end of our rehearsal. That took a little while, and resulted in a large chunk of a ream of paper which I methodically alphabetized and hole-punched as it emerged from the printer while Jake noodled on a series of Dave Matthews songs that I half-sung under my breath. I grew frustrated with the jumble of sheets and muttered, “fine, we’ll do it as a merge sort,” as I spread them on the floor.

Finally, I was satisfied. I carefully tapped the sheets against the floor to get their edges flush, and then handed the packet to Jake.

“Wow,” he replied as he received them.

“What?”

“Just… you,” he left that hang there for a moment before gesturing to the stack of nearly a hundred songs I had handed to him. Some of the pages were no longer perfectly flush. “This Type A thing you do. Your Type A-ness.”

“It’s a thing,” I said, honestly. It’s not quite OCD in a unpreventable, diagnosable fashion, but it’s close. “Plus,” I continued, “who wants to constantly ask to have things reprinted or figure out the chords again or have the sheets out of order or argue over lyrics, right?”

“Wow,” he said again.

This is why Jake is joining a second band with me. Not that he covets the sheets – the guy plays a by-ear circle around me. Because he understands that I need to do it that way, and he just says “wow” and then does things his way too, and when we’re both doing our things our two ways at once it makes some lovely sounds – lovelier than the sounds that would be made by two people doing things the exact same way as each other.

Happy Birthday To This

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The Collector

I cannot remember the first thing I collected with the studied intent of completion.

I think that is because the collecting was being done for me before I can recall. Both of my parents bought every record from their favorite artists. My mother documented our adventures in homemade photo storybooks. I had a complete collection of He-Man toys. Collecting is just what you did.

Why have only one record, or memory, or toy, when they are meant to be strung together with magnificent context?

That urge stuck with me past my childhood years. In fact, it was the urge to obsessively collect all of my words into one place that lead me to create this blog, fourteen years ago today.

The Limits

When I was a child, the main limiting factor in my quest for completion was resource availability. I knew who all the GI Joes were, but old lines were impossible to find and even newer ones yielded rare figures. Later, I wrote up a wishlist of every comic issue I wanted, but even after researching how to mail-order my missing issues my budget was the limiting factor. I also wanted to see every episode of X-Files, but I could never catch re-runs of Season 1 even when the show went into syndication.

As I began this blog in 2000, the only limiting factor was my interest. I had all the technical resources and time I could want for, and my other major hobby of songwriting was a natural complement to the content here. The only element that could be in short supply was the will to write.

I never run out of a will for the things I love to do. I think that is the secret of being a good collector, actually – the delight in the effort and chase. It is that delight that made me a good blogger, but also a great bandmate and professional. I would organize all the songs and make all the lead-sheets and know the harmony like the back of my hand. I would reach Inbox 0 and have notes on every project and measure my efficiency every week.

And so I did for many years of happiness and continued improvement in my two chosen careers.

Now, a little over a year into this experiment of raising a small human being, there is no question that the main limiting factors to anything in my life are not will or delight, but space and time. I want to be at Inbox 0, but there are sometimes more emails than minutes I have to read them. I own every issue of X-Men ever published, but I’ve run out of places to put them and I have to sneak them a handful at a time before bed or on my commute. I have every X-Files episode on DVD (well, all of the Mulder seasons, anyway), but when will I watch them again? I barely have the 42 minutes to spare in any given day. What used to take weeks or months to enjoy could now stretch on for years.

I have thousands of songs in my collection, but if I try to listen to them all when will I write, learn, and perform my own music? Even if I gave up performing and focused on recording my music for posterity, I’m out of recording space on a tremendously huge set of hard drives. Plus, when would I fine time to grind away at the perfect track for hours at a time?

I have a blog to collect every fleeting memory and opinion with a veritable unlimited amount of space to fill, but when will I set the words down?

If I am a collector because I yearn to complete every collection, what happens when I realize I cannot have it all every time, forever? Who am I, and what have I spent all of these years doing with my life?

What’s Lost

I can remember the first time I lost something irretrievably.

I was four years old, at the beach with my father, wading out into the water until it reached my waist. I brought my favorite toy – Wonder Woman – with me and had her tied to the string of my swimming trunks. As the water ebbed and flowed around my tiny body, her arms caught the current and she drifted out from my body for a moment before sinking, inexorably, never to surface again.

I later received another Wonder Woman – the first of many – but the lesson was not lost on me. Don’t be capricious with what you’ve collected. Don’t risk.

I was a forgetful teenager, so I lost a lot of other things. Pencil cases, keys, and calculators. But, never anything too important – a thing I collected. Never a GI Joe or a comic book. Only twice the lyrics to songs. Never a friend I meant to keep.

If there is is a second disappointing truth I’ve learned in the past year, it is that I cannot always control the things I lose, no matter how much care I take. Moments left unrecorded are forgotten. Instruments are worn and can break down irreparably. Teams of colleagues splinter and move on. Friends depart.

The Mystery

Every day I debate if I am trying to raise another collector. It helps that one of EV6’s nicknames is “chaos baby,'” and that she enjoys knocking things over and spreading them out much better than amassing them in a neat pile.

Earlier this year a friend gave EV6 a trio of adorably wobbly wheeled dinosaurs, and I noticed on the back of one of their packages there was a fourth. Of course, you can imagine that I immediately set out on an online search for the wayward member of the quartet. After five minutes I looked down to see EV6 mashing one of their heads into her mouth. She’s perfectly happy with three, I thought. The fourth could remain a mystery.

When you’ve spent your whole life being a collector the mystery is both your inspiration and antithesis. You thrill in tracking down a missing piece, but its absence seems to detract from the parts of the puzzle you’ve completed. So you strive to eliminate the mystery, brighten all the corners, place every piece – only to find that your completed collection sans the mystery isn’t as satisfying as it was with one last thing to strive for.

I’m trying to learn to appreciate the mystery. It’s still hard for me to not go back for an episode of a show I dozed off while watching, or to avoid picking up an awful back-catalog album from a now-mature musician.

However, I have come to accept that this blog isn’t complete. It never was. Each year I spend this day highlighting my favorite posts, but also the memories that went by the wayside – now disappearing through a haze of recollection like that tiny plastic superhero into the waters of New Jersey.

The best thing I can do here is the same as the best thing I can due with my tiny ball of chaos: be honest. Be honest about what I do write, and about what doesn’t need to be written. Be honest that I appreciate my memories and your attention to them, but that if I don’t go out and live I’ll never have stories to tell later. Be honest that it hurts to lose things, but you’ve never truly lost a thing you’ve loved.

I love this blog and every moment I’ve spent writing it, so it will never be lost. I delight in adding to it whenever I am able because I am always willing.

Thank you for finding it and reading it for these past fourteen years.

Thank you, and happy birthday to this.

In Memoriam, Dante Bucci

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On Sunday I went on my first hike.

I’ve walked through a forest before, even along a trail when we visited Muir Woods in California last year, but this was the first time I needed to prepare in advance of our journey. What would I wear? How would I stay hydrated? How would I know where I was going?

The internet could have told me, but I have friends who hold that knowledge and were able to share with me directly. My well-travelled friend Jessica coached me on what to wear. My sister-in-law Jenny helped me find the right CamelBack for my battered L.L. Bean bookbag. My dear friend Jack took charge of our little group of hikers to make sure we took the right trail.

The hike went well. We spoke, sweated, laughed, and sang until we reached the top of the mountain and it’s Pinnacle Rock.

An outtake from Dante's press kit shoot with E.

An outtake from Dante’s press kit shoot with E.

We were there to say one final goodbye to our mutual friend, Dante Bucci, who had passed away the week prior due to a tragic and random accident in his home. That mountaintop was one of his favorite places – and where he recorded a video that thrust him into the spotlight as one of the world’s foremost players of the Hang drum.

Dante was in the first play I acted in on the main stage at Drexel. The Man Who Came to Dinner has 29 listed cast members, of whom Gina and I were two. Neither of us had any idea of how much impact some of them would go on to have on our lives, while others would quickly recede. Two were members of my wedding party – three, if you count Gina. One would become my co-worker and good friend. Another, my first kiss.

It took some time to understand what Dante would become to me. I still don’t know if I can articulate it. I remember so clearly how he had to emerge repeatedly from a pair of pocket doors to deliver these brief, exasperated lines, and how the doors would get stuck and eventually Dante’s exasperation and the character’s exasperation were indistinguishable, which made it even funnier.

That lack of distinction between Dante and the part he played was his hallmark. He was not merely an actor, a singer, a musician, or a human being. Dante embodied his art from the first note to the last. He was a work of art himself.

Dante acted. He joined Drexel’s male acappella group 8 To The Bar midway through a season, lending his astounding vocal percussion to their songs. He sang in choir and in a select Madrigal group, whose intricate, interwoven melodies first escaped my comprehension and later delighted me to no end. He was the first drummer I ever recorded, playing the talking drum on the demo of “Amphibious” with Gina for Blogathon. When he was E’s roommate he focused on guitar, playing and replaying songs until he got them right – down to the last little riff. Shortly after, he was on congas when he invited me to join my first band, a rough-at-the-edges covers act with our friends Justin and Geoff. That fall he cut the first drums on any of my original songs for a hi-fi recording of “Icy Cold” for my old podcast Trio.

Dante was always growing and refining. He could play any instrument he picked up in a mere moment. (One of my proudest memories is producing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on a cello slightly faster than Dante could manage when we were both introduced to the instrument.) As we moved up and on from college his tastes in instruments became more electric. Didgeridoo (of which he constructed his own). Nose flute. Theremin. Hang drum.

The Hang drum had something none of the other instruments had. It was more restrictive – it could not play a full chromatic scale, and Dante could not bend or slide notes as he could on so many other instruments. Yet, the Hang is otherworldly. It’s a drum that sings. It’s meditative but insistent.

It was a perfect match for a musician who was as much music as he was man, so it made perfect sense that it was the instrument of his sudden explosion of popularity on YouTube and in the Philadelphia music scene. I watched many times as Dante and his Hang brought a chattering room to awed silence, the air filled only with his melody.

Despite preparing me for my hike, in the preceding week no one could explain to me how to grieve for a friend who was so dear, so talented, and so essential to to the world and to my own life’s story. When E and I first learned the news I couldn’t breathe, my mouth frozen in a silent scream, hands clutched to my heart as if to make sure it would keep beating. I didn’t know how I would walk into his viewing and speak to his family, let alone go on living and listening to his beautiful music without breaking down. I gamely asked our friend Tony the next day, a doctor of Psychology, just in case there was an easy solution that experienced grievers would know about.

He said, “There’s no right thing to say or do. Just be there, and hold people close.”

I have held many people very closely over the past ten days. Some of them repeatedly.

I felt happy and alive at the top of the mountain despite the mournful purpose of our journey. I hiked to the top with friends who I used to see every day at rehearsal and impromptu parties, who now I see every few months or years. We clambered from rock to rock, laughing and watching hawks and vultures circle in the distance. When the rest of our company joined us, including Dante’s family, the mood grew more somber. We gathered around a high rock jutting out into the sky with nothing surrounding it. Lindsay sang “Blackbird” with Dante’s friend John to begin our ceremony with her daughter seated on her lap, smiling. After others spoke and read, Anthony (yet another face from The Man Who) held up his iPhone above his head.

From the speakers wafted Dante’s voice, now gone from this world, singing Paul McCartney’s “Junk.”

I attended the record release show where Dante debuted the song to an audience. I cried there, silently smiling. I used to stand next to Dante in choir to steal his notes, and later in our acappella group Progeny. I knew the perfection of his voice, how it was just one more instrument to bend to his will. (No, not “bend” – Dante never bent, just coaxed.) I never thought of him as a bass or a baritone, but instead a complex machine like that cello – one who could resonate low and deeply only to then sigh so high and delicately.

“Junk” has all of those parts of Dante’s voice. When E and I left his show with his album Kinesthesia in-hand, I turned to her and said, “That is the song I’ve always wanted to hear Dante sing.” I couldn’t stop playing it. I played it for anyone who came to our house – mostly my mother, who kindly said after the second time, “Yes, you’ve played that before – it’s beautiful.”

At Pinnacle, Sunday.

At Pinnacle, Sunday.

All this past week I couldn’t play the song. On the morning we learned the news, I was crying desperately on the floor with E and EV6 squeezed between us and said, “I want to hear him sing so badly, but I’m afraid to hear him, because then I’ll know I can never really hear him again.” E held me close and said, “We already can’t hear him again, but you can listen to him whenever you want.”

Dante gave us songs, and he gave me so many memories – many of which are documented here. He was the best possible friend no matter how close you were or how often you saw him, always supporting, laughing, and dispensing hugs. He and Lindsay brought me to New Hope for the first time. We held music festivals at his family’s house from 2004 through 2008, and in 2005 he agreed to join me for a solo set. I practiced for it so much that I completely wore through all of my calluses, but I would just keep playing – how could I not take advantage of time to play with Dante? Later he would play drums with Arcati Crisis for a Winter Mixer show, and again at a little coffee shop where my father saw me play for the first time.

When his Hang music grew in popularity, his was the first press kit I ever put together, revising repeatedly to try to express the truth of his music in inadequate words. In 2010, he got me booked for my first solo set at the Tin Angel on a bill he was headlining. I don’t think he ever missed an Arcati Crisis show in Philadelphia proper, always hugging and congratulating me as I stepped off the stage.

I did the same for him twice this year, at two record releases – one for his solo album, and another for a thrilling project he undertook with Angela Sheik, who made it a point to have Dante play as many instruments as he was able on stage at each show. Those two shows were a delightful greatest hits of Dante, all those things E used to hear through the wall or that he would excitedly introduce me to in his parents’ basement. This was the true Dante I loved, the human work of art on display for all the world to see.

When Anthony played “Junk” at the top of the mountain, for a moment I was transported back to my first moment of grief, breathless and terrified, clutching my chest. Then the song reached the point between the verses where Dante simply moans the melody in delicate harmony with the strings.

I could breathe, then. I looked up into the beautiful sky from atop the mountain – Dante’s mountain – with nothing between the clouds and I except the air and the waves of sound carrying Dante’s voice away into the distance.

I cried there, silently smiling up into the sunlight.

Dante gave me that moment, too.