Song of the Day

35-for-35: 2003 – “Locked Box” by Frankie Big Face

November 21, 2016 by krisis

artist_frankie_big_face_image [Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]I can almost guarantee you’ve never heard this song before.

In 2003 Gina moved into our 44th street apartment and I was armed with my first set of serious recording gear. We were both writing a lot of new songs, many of which remain in our Arcati Crisis repertoire until this day.

I had stumbled upon a website called SongFight, which called out a random name for a tune into the void each week and then presented all of the songs written for it the next. (This is still happening today, by the way.) A few weeks after Gina came by to sing my first attempt at fighting, “Goodbye Monster,” she walked into my room, sat down, and played me “Moscow, Idaho” for the first time.

We didn’t win that SongFight, but I still think it’s one of the best songs ever written.

But, this isn’t about Gina. You see, through discovering SongFight, I discovered a massive online community of indie songwriters just like me – people who weren’t necessarily gigging out in bars and clubs, but who were holed up in their rooms recording each song they wrote – sometimes entire albums at a time.

I had found my people. And one of them, Frankie Big Face, was one of the best songwriters I’d every heard in my life.

This man could take any inane song title and tell you a story with it, breaking your heart a little along the way. With a voice like a hoarse David Bowie and songs that ranked from plaintive folk to Van Morrison 60s songwriter to synth pop, I was in awe of him. And he was just a regular guy – a high school music teacher and band director who lived within a hundred miles of me!

I loved (and still love) many Frankie Big Face songs, but none so much as “Locked Box,” which is like the secret best song Squeeze ever wrote but never recorded. It’s a song about a girl who is going through the motions while trapped in her own anxieties and it is catchy as hell. You’ve been warned.

The song comes with an awesome story. A handful of the most prominent and prolific SongFighters decided to have an album fight – an entire full length comprised of pre-determined song names, of which “Locked Box” was one. Frankie’s version of Smile If You Absolutely Have To is available to stream on Amazon or directly from his website (where he also provides the lyrics and lead sheets for all of his tunes). In fact, you can download “Locked Box” for free right now. Here’s another of my favorites, “Funny Enough For You.”

There is so much Frankie Big Face music out there for you to hear – he’s been writing at a pace much faster than mine for the dozen years since I discovered him, and recording exponentially more than I do. Honestly, I have about 10 years of his stuff to catch up on and am presently in a downloading frenzy to get it all into my iTunes.

Here’s his website’s discography. You can also check out his SoundCloud for more, including his interpretation of Beck’s Song Reader.

35-for-35: 2002 – “5 Minutes” by Garrison Starr

November 20, 2016 by krisis

garrison-starr-promo-shot [Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]We’re getting into double-jeopardy now that I’m blogging about music from the years I’ve been blogging. I keep searching my archives thinking, “surely I’ve said something about this one before?”

This story starts in 1998. I don’t think Garrison Starr had written “Five Minutes” back then, but that when I first saw her play a live acoustic set in HMV on Walnut Street the day of my Junior Prom with my friends Ayelet and Susan.

I had been listening to Starr’s Eighteen Over Me ever since hearing “Superhero” play once on a local record station. It loved its framework of acoustic guitars with a heaping of heavy, squalling electrics on top. It made me feel like the music I had begun to write on my own acoustic guitar could transform into something bigger.

I desperately hunted for any other songs by her, including her 24/7 disc of promotional songs, and her indie Stupid Girl EP that I had to beg Mother of Krisis to let me order from the internet. (It was 1998 ! We couldn’t use credit cards on the internet, heaven forbid!)

Then, one random day while I was sitting in my dorm room in the spring of 2000, Garrison’s name popped up on MP3.com (remember that?) next to new music. It was an EP called Something To Hold You Over [now only available on iTunes], filled with seven songs that showed a clear progression in her songwriting. Some, like “I Can’t Wait” and “Take It Back” were fully produced and hinted at another LP with a massive sound. Others were just acoustic guitar and voice.

One of those songs was “Five Minutes.” It hit me like a punch in the gut.

It feels like love
Not some rigged-up holiday
Where I believe in somebody who can bring me down again
It feels like love
Is this how you make me pay?
Branding me with deep cuts that will never go away
Never go away

To say that I wore out this EP (which was eventually available to buy in physical form) is an understatement. I have the rhythm of the pick scrapes from “5 Minutes” seared into my brain. It’s one of the first songs I ever made up my own harmony to sing along with! I saw her play it live a year later with my friend Hillary (the first time I did not have to bribe my mother or a family friend to take me to see her at a 21+ venue), and I remember thinking as she thunked that first chord on her Martin acoustic guitar, “That is what an F should sound like every time.”

I can’t find that initial acoustic version on the internet, but you can still hear it – which is what brings us to 2002. Garrison Star released her second proper full-length record, the slightly country-tinged Songs From Take-Off to Landing. “5 Minutes” was the only song from Hold You Over to graduate to this disc, and after ten nude seconds of the acoustic EP version a full band slams into motion tracked directly on top of the original performance.

(They remembered to leave some room for my harmony.)

I will always be a fan of Garrison Starr. I’ve seen her many times since that first Junior Prom Day show almost 20 years ago and beamed with pride as she’s placed songs in movies and co-written with some of my favorite songwriters. I admire that she is still a performing songwriter after all these years andI own every one of her records.

She has never once put out a bad one.

I highly encourage you to follow her on Twitter, check out her discography, and listen to her band, Silent War.

PS: Since I can’t find the chords anywhere on the internet, they are:
Capo 1
Verse: Am E F C G/B
Chorus: (Am) F Am G F C Am G F

35-for-35: 2001 – “Subdivision” by Ani DiFranco

November 19, 2016 by krisis

My second-favorite shot of Ani, shot by Danny Clinch.

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]As occasionally problematic and non-intersectional as Ani DiFranco can be, sometimes her willingness to just say stuff makes for compelling, provocative songs.

Case and point: her song “Subdivision” from 2001’s double-album Revelling/Reckoning, which starts with the line “White people are so scared of black people.”

Despite the bombshell opening line, “Subdivision” is not a song exclusively about racial divides, but about Ani’s beloved home town of Buffalo and her beloved country. Her city has seemingly been left behind by a march of modernity. Here, she wonders if that march is just about having the money and privilege to put more space between ourselves and our fears. Maybe if we’re far enough away we no longer have to confront them.

Except: when we’ve forgotten, buried, or sublimated all that we’ve been running away from, how will we know when it is stil driving our biases?

I had a sense of foreboding when I picked “Subdivision” as my song from 2001 as I prepared for this campaign last month. I’d be posting it just 10 days after the election. I wondered how its message would play in a post-election America, the same country we lived in the day before the election but potentially seen through a new lens. What would it say about a world where Hillary Clinton won the election? What about a world where Donald Trump won? Would it be equally true in both?

Now we know the outcome, and I ask that you simply listen and take from it whatever message you hear. That first line will always stand out for me, but in this redefined world it is teaching me something different than it was a few weeks ago.

Subdivision
by Ani DiFranco

White people are so scared of black people
They bulldoze out to the country
And put up houses on little loop-dee-loop streets
And while america gets its heart cut right out of its chest
The Berlin wall still runs down main street
Separating east side from west

And nothing is stirring, not even a mouse
In the boarded-up stores and the broken-down houses
So they hang colorful banners off all the street lamps
Just to prove they got no manners
No mercy and no sense

35-for-35: 2000 – “The Easy Way Out” by Juliana Hatfield

November 18, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Do you know what “slept on” means?

It’s a slang term for overlooked, forgotten, or ignored and I feel like it describes at least half of my record collection.

Juliana Hatfield’s Beautiful Creature was slept on. Criminally. I almost slept through it, actually. I acquired it in the spring of 2000 from a basket of unreviewed promo records during a day apprenticing at Philly Weekly on assignment for my first journalism course. “Take whatever you want,” they said.

I vaguely knew who Juliana Hatfield was because of one of her two breakthrough hits, the peculiar 5/4 ode to kissing in the closet, “Spin the Bottle.”

Somehow she had escaped my omnivorous appetite for 90s women in rock, which is a sad confirmation of how slept on she was already before releasing this LP. I saw the cardboard sleeve for Beautiful Creature (paired with her harder rock record, Total System Failure) in the review copies bin and thought it would be worth a listen.

A few months later, and it was an LP I was plugging in several of CK’s earliest posts. It’s a perfect blend of Hatfield’s 90s rock bonafides with a late-Beatles acoustic simplicity she had left behind to get increasingly grungy.

“Easy Way Out” is a song that’s more on the grungy side, a riff-heavy rock tune that betrays the heaviness that Hatfield tried to constrain to Total System Failure but keeps the focus on irresistible melody.

It also keeps up Hatfield’s habit of being just as ribald and rude as the boys of rock in her songs while still cutting to the bone. Her last effort, Bed, was all about sleeping around, and this disc is all about love and drugs. “And he cries like a girl,” she yells in the refrain. “And he lies to the world. And the hate and the guilt and the pills – it’s an easy way out.”

julianahatfieldtop13 I kept lending Beautiful Creature and putting it on mix tapes for years. I tried to convince acappella groups to cover its songs as late as 2007. I kept on waiting for it to break through, for Hatfield’s unrecognized genius to be acknowledged by everyone I knew.

Fifteen years later and I guess it’s probably not going to happen for Beautiful Creature. I can’t even call it Hatfield’s best album, because the ones that came before and after it are equally amazing. Yet, it’s this one that remains one of my favorite LPs of all time, and since its release I have become convinced that Juliana Hatfield is one of the best performing songwriters working in America today.

If I get a day to linger in the year 2000, the year of Crushing Krisis’s birth, you can be sure I’m going to spend a portion of it lingering on Juliana Hatfield.

You don’t have to take my word for it – stream it for free right now if you have Amazon Prime.

35-for-35: 1999 – “Center of Attention” by Guster

November 17, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug] lost-and-gone-forever-guster Lindsay, Erika, and I formed an only-child club together in 2001, but its origins were in 1999 and 2000.

That’s when five of the more senior members of The Drexel Players – Erika, Kate, Laurel, Megan, and Anthony – all shared the top two floors of an old row home at 3418 Race Street. For all of us Freshman, it’s where we decamped after every informational meeting, audition, and rehearsal. It’s where I met so many of the friends I still hold dear today, and where I met my entire wedding party (aside from Gina, who still factors into this tale).

There were certain records that never left the CD spinner in that house, such that their songs have become synonymous with one or more of those people for me. (Yes, CD spinner, though we were into into the heyday of Napster at this point.). Some of the records were the stereotypical white college kid things you’d expect – Dave Matthews was a frequent play, especially his Live at Luther College with Tim Reynolds.

Perhaps influenced by that choice, there was also Guster’s Lost and Gone Forever, produced by longtime DMB collaborator Steve Lillywhite.

Sometimes when I hear an album for the first time it seems so melodically obvious that I cannot believe I haven’t heard it before. Other times an album is so perfect that I consider every song a slice of 5-star perfection and can listen to it endlessly.

Lost and Gone Forever is both.

There aren’t a lot of catchy, pop-oriented bands that break through mostly on the power of acoustic guitars and harmony, which is the trick Guster somehow pulls on songs like “Center of Attention.” The amount and intricacy of Ryan Miller and Adam Gardner’s harmony is really quite incredible. It hardly ever sticks to the straight thirds most bands plaster their songs with. At points they’re what I’d call the nearest male analog to The Indigo Girls.

“Center of Attention” doesn’t really use any chords. Listen carefully in the first verse as it reaches the “walls inside my head” prechorus. It’s just a pair of riffs churning against each other to imply tonality. It’s also a perfect example of how Guster eschews the typical rhythm section of drums and bass, with most songs rooted by a baritone-range guitar figure and drummer Brian Rosenworcel pounding on all manner of congos, bongos, and even typewriters.

Guster promo flat

That doesn’t sound like it should make for great, catchy pop music and honestly it didn’t on Guster’s first two records. However, the combination of Steve Lillywhite as a producer and this remarkable set of songs created a whole that you could have never predicted by looking at the parts.

Lost and Gone Forever is an amazing record about the changing nature of friendship and platonic love, about selfishness and getting over yourself, and you can sing along to every song on it.

One of us won’t last the night
Between you and me it’s no surprise
There’s two of us, both can’t be right
Neither will move till it’s over

I’m the center of attention
and the wall’s inside my head
And no one will ever know it
if I keep my mouth shut tight

The that motley crew of Drexel Players I met Freshman year shifted in 2000-2001 as I started this blog. Three members of the house moved away, which is how at one point Lindsay came to be renting Laurel’s back bedroom, and I came to be sitting around in the middle of the day with her and Erika watching game shows.

Just as there aren’t many memorable acoustic pop bands like Guster, there aren’t a lot of great, catchy songs about the mental defenses you construct as a clever only-child. “Center of Attention” is, without a doubt, the only-child’s anthem in that regard. I’d say, “maybe that’s just me,” but Lindsay and Erika have proven that it’s not. You’re not only your own protagonist, as every child is, but all of your adventures are entirely contained in the gossamer bubble of your brain.

Somehow (and I honestly still can’t quite explain it, even with copious posts from the time to aid my memory), the three of us wound up renting a house together in the fall of 2001. Three only children, each as selfish and stubborn as the other, all holed up in the top two floors of our own apartment on 44th street (where we’d later be joined by a fourth only-child (sort of), Gina)).

My own little world is what I deserve
Cause I am the only child there is
I’m king of it all, the belle of the ball
I promise I’ve always been like this
Forever the first, my bubble can’t burst
It’s almost like only I exist
Where everything’s fine
If I can keep my mouth shut tight, tight, tight

I think the reason we found each other and became (and remained) so close is because we’d each tried to outlast each other through the night and failed. Once that defense is finally knocked down, you’ve found someone with whom who you don’t always have to keep your mouth shut so tight.