Music Mind

I just finished playing guitar for a cool two-hundred and ten minutes... without stopping. My mind is happier now.

The past few mornings (5, exactly), have been punctuated by the neighbors' doberman going completely apeshit between 6:34 and 6:36am. The consistency is frightening.


Today was good. I was doing things with stuff and working hard at it. I talked to some people and agreed with most of what they said. I had a flipshit conversation with an engineer at... I can't remember what it's called. They're in India. The company developed a server monitoring program and this guy was going to email me later in the day with more information about something. This character used the word "yanti" as his phonetic expression when attempting to communicate the letter "y" in his email address. He had already sidestepped two of my questions about the program so after trying to make both heads and tails out of what the hell he was saying, I simply asked him to spell his phonetic translation so I could understand the single letter he was attempting to convey. This provided me with an irreplaceable opportunity to remove the phone from my ear and laugh heartily. "Hey man, you got any yanti?"

Ah, the yanti.

I was listening to the radio for much of the day. I took notes.

"Someday we might learn to tell the truth.
We might even find the fountains of our youth."

That's from a Brandi Carlile song, "Closer to You." It hit a vein and I wanted to write it down. I was daydreaming at the time and considering the piecemeal structures we create over our own heads from the examples set by our parents. And I decided that most people end up just wanting to go back to the same mental state they were in during their childhood. In many cases, this most likely includes the habits instilled in them by their parents and their parents before them. And this led me to believe that knowing what is good is easy. It does not require speech to communicate what is or is not good. What requires communication is the reasoning for either acting or not acting on that goodness. The only reasons many people ever consider are those which were supplied to them initially. We humans treat emotions like instincts, strangely enough. We never consider changing them because they usually come and go at about the same time in the same situations. I consider a boy learning things from his father to be tantamount to a young animal learning how to hunt. Many years later, after the father is gone, the child will still have an unfounded desire to do certain things much like the animal who simply must hunt. We do it because we want to feel close to eachother. Animals do it because they have to survive. Anyway, that quote resonated with me because telling the truth to ourselves will allow us to reclaim the youthful creativity we once had, the youthful creativity that once allowed us to look past the darkness of mundane responsibility and into the corners of creative motivation, comfort and personal inspiration. I believe this is why the lyrics were written in this order, either knowingly or not.

Maybe that's what he meant when he said, "Yanti."

The next note is:

"snare drum in 'in your eyes' by peter gabriel is outstanding... and cymbals"

Enough said. I'd link it but the youtube video has poor audio quality. I'm a sucker for tight heads on thin snares.

Next is the keyboard slam in Ryan Adams's "New York, New York" at 2:31. Most people would just look right past it because it's "part of the song." You're damn right it's part of the song. Except this part picks the song up by its suspenders and throws it's ass back towards the speakers. There's something really great about a musician who's normally in the background and gets the chance to just geek out for a minute in the spotlight. It takes incredible composure as a musician to walk the line like that... to be comfortable enough to play in the background all day but willing to stand up and rip it when the time arrives.

Next is Amy Cook's song "Hotel Lights." I had heard this once before. The initial vocal melody reminded me of an old British or Celtic melody. The rest of the song is just really, really peaceful and I am unable to do any single thing while it's playing. Anything. The audio mix is exquisite. The strings are liquid. The video was shot in Austin. It's a great song and it's good to hear an artist who makes the microphone work for them, not the other way around.

Last in my notes from the day is the following:

"there's nothing like some coldplay"


Done and done.

>> "Hotel Lights" by Amy Cook