Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

my music

My Favorite Trio Tracks:
#15 – Crashing (from Trio Season 1, #2)

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I recorded and uploaded my first Trio seven years ago tonight.

After a week of blogging at all hours of the day I realized that I had something more to offer to the internet than just words – I had songs. Just over a hundred, at the time. And, it was time for them to be heard as a regular part of Crushing Krisis:

As of this instant i have added a new weekly feature affectionately dubbed trio. … i will sit down in front of my computer and play a continuous live take of three songs … i’ll always play a trio of songs – no more and no less.

In the seven intervening years I’ve violated each of those introductory terms. Trio certainly didn’t stay weekly … at one point it went on a two-year hiatus! On the other hand, last November I posted nine Trios in a single month – some on consecutive days.

Furthermore, starting with the latter half of Season 3 I stopped recording all three songs in a continuous live take, instead working on them one by one. The first trio of Season 4 Trios were dubbed and mixed just like album tracks, though I have since abandoned the process (it was too time-consuming).

Finally, a handful of Trios have featured more than four songs – quite intentionally in the first season, but since then just as spontaneous extra tracks.

I’m due to start the sixth season of Trio in a few weeks, now armed with twice as many songs as I had when Trio first began.

While I am rehearsing behind the scenes for the new season I’ll also be counting down my fifteen favorite live Trio recordings from seasons one through four (since nearly all of five was a favorite), offering a la cart versions of each song as excerpted from a newly remastered mp3 version of the original Trio.

My first selection, “Crashing,” is from my second-ever Trio, recorded on September 10, 2000.

At the time “Crashing” was hardly a year old, and still a regular staple of my live sets. Since then it has sped up, slowed down, included piano, and quoted Destiny’s Child. However, through all of those recordings, its Trio debut has remained one of the most definitive, and one of my favorites.

And it’s mucked up that I can’t decide… ?

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Gina and I just came from a rehearsal with the Melange Theatre house band for our appearance at the September 20th show. The band rocks, and thus we will rock mightily. I hope you’ve bought your ticket.

During the course of said rehearsal I received my first ever request to censor a lyric. The lyric in question is in “Wait,” and goes as follows:

You call me on the phone
and I wish I pretended I wasn’t home,
’cause every time I hear your voice
I let you get too close.
You twist my guts up baby,
and it’s fucked up how we can’t deny
these feelings for long enough
to avoid climbing on for another ride

They asked very nicely, yet I still went into fight or flight mode. Why take out the “fuck” when the song has other gems in it like “next thing I know you’ll come over and stain the sheets”? Is the use of fuck, not even referring to fucking, any more explicit than that line?

The real issue is not that I want to say fuck so bad, but that “fucked up” maintains the assonance on the line, and the device is not satisfied by “effed up,” “messed up,” or “screwed up,” which were so helpfully suggested by others at the rehearsal.

Also, it provides an emphatic point for me to rejoin Gina on harmony, which was one of the reasons we split up the vocals the way we did in the first place.

(At the time I snapped defensively at the change I didn’t realize that I had all of those reasons running through my head, but now that I’m sitting down to write they’re all plain as day, which is exactly the problem with censorship – sometimes content is only part of the intent, and changing one piece of it to a soothing alternate often has a bigger impact than intended.)

If it was a song other than “Wait” I think I’d probably cut it from the set rather than change the line, because I don’t like the precedent it sets for further artistic direction. However, we really like to play “Wait,” and the band liked to play “Wait,” and we don’t really have another tune that fills the same sort of sonic space. So, I’m probably going to change it.

What to, I’m not sure. Suggestions welcomed.

Happy Birthday To This

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I spent the majority of my day yesterday moving my best friend & bandmate Gina and her boyfriend Wes into their first house.

We were a small team of movers – just five, plus one in the truck – yet the move went as smoothly as it could possibly go… with the exception of one instance of Gina and I collapsing into giggles while trying to carry her futon around a bend in the stairs, and the fact that the laws of physics bar them from sleeping on a queen-sized box spring anywhere other than their living room.

Gina and I have now known each other for over half of our lives – through middle school, high school, college, post-college, and now whatever this is. It was amazing thing to be a part of her big move yesterday, just it continues to be amazing to be able to see so far into the past of someone, someone with whom silliness comes so easily, and with whom I am the epitome of comfortable, willing to speak my mind even when I know we disagree.

Crushing Krisis has now been alive seven years – since August 26th, 2000. That’s more than half as long as I’ve known Gina, and nearly as long as I’ve known the rest of my best friends.

To the best that I can discern, Crushing Krisis is the longest continuously running blog in Philadelphia, and has been since 2003. It’s an amazing thing to contemplate, especially considering that Philly was recently measured to be the second most bloggingest city in the United States. It also means that CK is increasingly one of the most established blogs on the face of the internet.

Just as significantly, since it’s inception Crushing Krisis has been a home to my original music, featuring the original (and, correspondingly, longest-running) singer-songwriter podcast, Trio.

Maybe more significantly than either of those distinguished roles, Crushing Krisis is a part of me – a persistent virtual reflection that helps me to see myself as I am, as I once was, and how I wish I would be.

This page is a lot of things, and a lot of me, and for each year that passes it gets a little more important, because I am getting older and starting to forget feelings from certain moments or stories from specific parties.

I long ago accepted that birthdays and new years days are not inherently transformative experiences – you don’t come out on the other side a new person more than you would emerge reborn from any other day of the year. Yet, they can mark your graduation into being a changed person.

As I wrote last year’s birthday post I felt as if I had finally reached a stable place in life, and if Year 6 of Crushing Krisis was about finding stability, then this past year has been converting stability into happiness.

Some of that conversion was literal. I went from writing and editing letters to managing publications and ad campaigns. I went from being a house-bound recluse of a songwriter to a semi-regular at area bars. and open mics. I transferred Crushing Krisis from Blogger to WordPress on November 12, in the midst of participating in the amazing National Blog Posting Month. I vowed to have a consumerless Christmas (and succeeded). And, Gina and I finally became the band we’ve always teased at being.

And now I am actually, unequivocally, at an equilibrium of happiness – which, if you read through as many hundreds of old posts as I have in the past few weeks, you will realize is a state I wasn’t sure I would reach. Not so soon, at least, and maybe never.

Year 7 of Crushing Krisis includes a slew of favorite posts. I cursed at the television. I had a headache so profound that I gave it a name. I reinvented myself for NaBloPoMo. I recounted my first heartbreak. During a single Trio I redefined one of my favorite songs, and debuted one that had been incubating for half a decade.

I almost burned down the house baking cookies in the microwave. I finally told the story of my life-altering nap at Bonnaroo. I recorded a perfect version of one of my favorite songs. I took my first trip to a casino. Septa carried out an act of terrorism against my favorite garment. And, I finally celebrated the 4th of July the way I’ve always meant to.

But, for every favorite post there’s another that’s just as essential. I offered the most succinct description of myself ever made. I retold the story of the Queen of Darkness, complete with soundtrack. I mercilessly deceived a toddler to get him to eat his vegetables. I contemplated six years of knowing (and reading) Rabi. I listened to the Beatles entire catalog while racing through my last letter of NaBloPoMo reading.

I examined my role as a narrator in my own songs, comparing it to that of an inanimate object. Elise and I found a new favorite restaurant, where we’ve since become regulars. I documented my seemingly endless struggle with organizing my home office. I started documenting my visual life. I reflected on how far my 2004 resolutions have got me.

I recorded my favorite Garbage song, as well as one of Madonna’s most obscure. I reflected on how feminism sometimes makes me cry. I drank a lot of limoncello. I helped present the fifth annual Lyndzapalooza with hardly a hitch. I recorded my catchiest song, ever. I nearly lost my mind in the middle of Broad Street.

After recapping my year in words or links I usually spend the penultimate paragraphs of these August 26th posts talking about what Crushing Krisis is to me and what I hope to make it in the future, but I don’t know if this iteration warrants the introspection.

After seven years of blogging Crushing Krisis is me or, more accurately, an integral, inextricable part of me that I hope will exist as long as I do and beyond. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how many posts I make in a year (105), or how many unique songs I feature (37), or how many times I tell you how I really feel (?). This is just what it is, and I wouldn’t want it to be anything else.

While the penultimate paragraph changes, the final sentiment never really does: thank you. Thank you, no matter how many posts you have read, or how many songs you have listened to.

Thank you, because each of our identities are half about our self-perception and half about others’ perception of us, and if this is a form of me it would only be half-alive without a you to complete it.

Thank you. And, happy birthday to this.

Not Stamps, Nor Coins

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As sad as a commentary as this is on my recent listening habits, the excitement I feel about purchasing new music is as of late hardly ever a tangible one.

Really, it’s just the thrill of acquisition, and the subsequent thrill of careful examination and deconstruction. I could just as easily be a philatelist or a numismatist, so irrelevant can the actual fact that I am acquiring or examining a song be.

That said, at the moment I have two discs on my desk that I’m profoundly excited about.

The first is Grace Potter and the Nocturnals This Is Somewhere.

GP&N were one of the bands I had penciled into my Bonnaroo itinerary last summer. The festival was dotted with a precious few front-women, and most of the review I read were positive. So, on Saturday shortly after noon I planted myself in a dusty side-tent to hear the band for the first time.

They utterly blew me away. Grace Potter and the Nocturnals sounded like a feral, weedy, Joplinesque overgrowth of Sheryl Crow’s funky self-titled disc. Grace was an incendiary lead singer, wailing, screaming, thrashing her guitar, dancing behind her Wurlitzer, and leaping off of stage pieces to mark a number of huge crescendos. However, through all of that she was somehow still folksy – more an analog to Bonnie Raitt than to the PJ Harvey she was invoking.

Also of note, guitarist Scott Tournet was terrific, not only to listen to but to watch – a trait so many of the jam band guitarists I witnessed in passing didn’t seem to possess. (Listen below to his superb solo on the still-unreleased “Over Again” – I’m in there, screaming, somewhere. It’s currently available only on the overseas versions of the new disc.)

On the drive back I insisted we stop at the first civilized-looking mall to pick up the debut GP&N disc, but I was quickly disappointed – the disc was a calm, sterile affair, showing none of the vim of the live performance that had riveted me the day before. And, all of the best songs were absent from the disc!

This Is Somewhere has a few of those songs, and I’m hoping it fulfills the promise the Nocturnals made to me last June. Even a whisper of it would make my day.

If Grace Potter represents yet-unheard promise, then Rilo Kiley’s Under the Blacklight is a reverent hope for a return to form.

In 2002 I had no idea what Rilo Kiley sounded like – just that they were fronted by a woman and on Barsuk Record (which, back in the Death Cab’s better days, really meant something). I remember distinctly my first listen to their second disc, The Execution of All Things; I was meant to be drifting off to sleep in Elise’s bed, but I was instead riveted and wide awake.

At first RK seemed like a sort of indy-rock version of Garbage to me, one whose lead singer – lacking the queer confidence of a supervixen – instead wrote wryly about friends and potential apocalypses. But as I continued to listen I came to appreciate the significance of contributions from co-leader and guitarist Blake Sennett, who brought a tuneful, Elliott Smith-like melancholy to the proceedings, even when he was relegated to the background.

As my appreciation for the Rilo increased I also continued to play – and, now, co-write – with my best friend and musical partner Gina. One day, listening to two of Gina’s best paeans to the end of the world – “Real End” and “Fisher Price” – I realized that the strange pair of us had a chance at the same hooky, kitschy relevance that I had grown to love about RK.

It was like realizing for the first time what you want to do when you grow up – because I had. So, it was with great excitement that I purchased 2004’s More Adventurous – hoping to vicariously live out the next chapter of Gina and my musical development. Unfortunately, my excitement was quashed from track one – despite its title, the disc was a shapeless lump of peculiarly unhooky narratives, headlined by a spare duo of the superbly indie “Portions for Foxes” and the 60s Country spin through “Never Again.”

Having conceded that Rilo had lost their touch to the sappy post-folk, it came as no surprise to me when lead singer Jenny Lewis struck out on her own with an acoustic solo disc – Rabbit Fur Coat. More meandering nonsense, I assumed.

Well it wasn’t. Not quite, anyhow. As opposed to Adventurous, on which the band often seemed aimless if not excessive, Rabbit seemed like an eager bed made for absent riffs. And, it made some waves – indy and not.

Under the Blacklight is Rilo Kiley’s first major label disc, and its first after Jenny’s solo breakthrough. And, from the throbbing bass and reverberating guitar on the – yes, queer – lead single “Moneymaker,” I think the band may be back on some sort of track, even if Gina and I have since gone off the rails in our own direction.

I can’t yet recommend either disc, but I recommend getting this excited about a record. Not because you have to have it to complete your collection, or because you love an artist so much you can’t stand the wait, but because you have a fervent hope that you are about to be introduced to life-altering music.