Feeling It All Around, and All Of The Time...
Song: "Feel It All Around"
Artist: Washed Out
Story: This song has sort of been following me for damn near a decade now. When I first heard it, I was in the thick of my college tenure, and my whole life outside of the walls of my classes was consumed by music. I was getting my hands dirty every single day scrounging through blogs of all sizes, looking for new music, turning over ever break on every little independent music blog from the furthest corners of the blog bubble, that in 2008/9; seemed to be growing exponentially. I was insatiable. The rate at which music was being released, documented on the net, and made available for immediate consumption had never been this fast, and I couldn't get enough. This is the era of aughts music that birthed "blog house", "Bedroom Pop", and more to the point of this story: "chillwave"; a type of descriptor for a new wave of EDM music that seemed to be finding infamy through these new democratic sources of media, where anyone and everyone could be and often were a purveyor of taste, and anyone reading was a participant. The lines between artists, critic, and audience had never been this blurred before. It was exciting. A lot of great music that influenced my own creative process came out around this time. The music industry started to really feel a shift in the landscape as they saw their gilded link as the middle-man in the chain of commerce start to buckle and break. DIY resources for artists to self release to a massive audience like Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and YouTube weren't just taking off, they were misplacing generations old institutions and cutting out every facet of the middle-man paradigm altogether: labels (major and otherwise), managers, publicists, producers...every.one. This really was the new DIY movement for a new generation. The music was pretty and sweet, but don't get it wrong...there was something very 'punk' about all of this. This song was sort of a catalyst for the 'chillwave' boom that immediately followed it's release. Neon Indian, Toro Y Moi, Memory Tapes, and other notable luminaries in the electronic-pop scene cut their teeth during this fertile and much blogged about period. When I first heard it, I remember thinking that it sounded the way nostalgia feels...warm but distant, familiar yet hazy. Whether it was pure circumstance and practicality at play, or artful intention (no doubt the latter more than the former after all the success a lot of these artists found), so much of the music from this time sounds like this. It sounds like it was made by someone with cheap equipment, alone in their bedroom because it was. And it was beautiful. It was inspiring. It inspired my friend and I to do the same thing, and to also make our own found footage music videos (which were the trendy visual component that often accompanied all of these lo-fi gems). After having been in rock bands for close to a decade, my best friend and I dropped the guitars and picked up the synths and computers and started making our own brand of dreamy lo-fi music. We we're getting coverage on the very same blogs that I had been discovering all of these artists on just a few months prior. I made a website for the band and installed a little tracker that told me where people were visiting the website from and the hits we're coming from all over the world. The UK, Japan, Canada, Jamaica, Chile, Brazil, all over Europe, and on and on. Seeing this from my desk, in my room, in a tiny backwater town in the panhandle of Florida...it was overwhelming. There were more people listening to us on this website than people that lived in my actual town, where we played the same bar twice a month. The return time in this feedback loop, within this new music landscape, was immediate. It was mind boggling. Two years after I first heard this song my friend and I moved to New York, along with a handful of other local cohorts with big city dreams, or at the very least; the desire to get out of that backwoods shithole we called home most of our lives. The funny thing is I didn't want to move. I just followed all of my friends because I didn't want to be alone in that shithole. But it was *my* backwoods shithole...it was ours! And what my musical compatriot failed to understand was that the days of needing to move to NY or LA to find exposure and success as an independent musician were gone. Long gone. We didn't need to be in NY to be heard in Japan, or be in LA to get a vinyl deal with a label in Prague (which we were offered). I would try to talk to him about these ideas, but to no avail. My words fell on deaf ears; the romantic notion of 70s New York running rampant through his mind. He reminded me of Rob Lowe's character in St. Elmo's Fire who jumps on a greyhound with nothing but his sax and smokes and blindly heads into the great unknown, comforted by sheer sense of self, delusion, and tight pants. (It probably worked out for him. It eventually worked for my friend). The band broke up only a few months after moving there. We had to work too much. And when we weren't working, we were getting distracted. I hated NYC for the first year. My friend loved it. All of that lazy, humid, Florida free time we were so accustomed to was gone, rushed away like air pushed through a tunnel by a speeding subway car. My friend started a bedroom pop group with his girlfriend. Lol. Four years later I moved to Portland, Oregon. I won't go into all the reasons that led me to this little town in the Pacific North West, but let's just say that New York is a cruel mistress. I loved her, but she hurt me so. Anyway, you might've heard of this little show called 'Portlandia'. It's a satirical comedy about the area I now live in, but I find it hard to watch as it comes across less 'comedic fiction' and more 'sardonic documentary', and it just hits too close to home to be outright funny. More often than not, I'm just shaking my head at the accuracy of the barbs thrown than laughing at the jokes. Now this song, which had meant so many things to me, so many years ago, was introducing a thing which seemed to mock where I inevitably wound up. There was some sort of cruel irony about it. It was like a front cover and back cover to a story that started out great and ended just kind of...'meh'. Something you wouldn't want to read more than once. Hearing it made me sad. It made me nostalgic but not in that warm romantic way it originally did. I wasn't reminiscing, I was lamenting. I put this song away. For years. If I heard it, I would just ignore it...tune it out, as jaded by the song as locals were by the show it was prefacing. But in thinking for a song to write a story about, I couldn't help but think of this. I can't recall another song that was bookmarked so many pages in my own story thus far. And today, maybe ten or so years after hearing it for the first time, I actually read the lyrics that have always just been a wash of sounds and melody to me: "You feel it all around yourself You know it's yours and no one else You feel the thought of love again It's all alright In spite of all the things you did We'll work it out" And I can't help but smile, and think of my friend and our band, and that little window in time and space we made together and I know, in spite of all the things that happened then and since, we'll work it out. For Jorge, Love Thom
Feeling It All Around, and All Of The Time...
Song: "Feel It All Around"
Artist: Washed Out
Story: This song has sort of been following me for damn near a decade now. When I first heard it, I was in the thick of my college tenure, and my whole life outside of the walls of my classes was consumed by music. I was getting my hands dirty every single day scrounging through blogs of all sizes, looking for new music, turning over ever break on every little independent music blog from the furthest corners of the blog bubble, that in 2008/9; seemed to be growing exponentially. I was insatiable. The rate at which music was being released, documented on the net, and made available for immediate consumption had never been this fast, and I couldn't get enough. This is the era of aughts music that birthed "blog house", "Bedroom Pop", and more to the point of this story: "chillwave"; a type of descriptor for a new wave of EDM music that seemed to be finding infamy through these new democratic sources of media, where anyone and everyone could be and often were a purveyor of taste, and anyone reading was a participant. The lines between artists, critic, and audience had never been this blurred before. It was exciting. A lot of great music that influenced my own creative process came out around this time. The music industry started to really feel a shift in the landscape as they saw their gilded link as the middle-man in the chain of commerce start to buckle and break. DIY resources for artists to self release to a massive audience like Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and YouTube weren't just taking off, they were misplacing generations old institutions and cutting out every facet of the middle-man paradigm altogether: labels (major and otherwise), managers, publicists, producers...every.one. This really was the new DIY movement for a new generation. The music was pretty and sweet, but don't get it wrong...there was something very 'punk' about all of this. This song was sort of a catalyst for the 'chillwave' boom that immediately followed it's release. Neon Indian, Toro Y Moi, Memory Tapes, and other notable luminaries in the electronic-pop scene cut their teeth during this fertile and much blogged about period. When I first heard it, I remember thinking that it sounded the way nostalgia feels...warm but distant, familiar yet hazy. Whether it was pure circumstance and practicality at play, or artful intention (no doubt the latter more than the former after all the success a lot of these artists found), so much of the music from this time sounds like this. It sounds like it was made by someone with cheap equipment, alone in their bedroom because it was. And it was beautiful. It was inspiring. It inspired my friend and I to do the same thing, and to also make our own found footage music videos (which were the trendy visual component that often accompanied all of these lo-fi gems). After having been in rock bands for close to a decade, my best friend and I dropped the guitars and picked up the synths and computers and started making our own brand of dreamy lo-fi music. We we're getting coverage on the very same blogs that I had been discovering all of these artists on just a few months prior. I made a website for the band and installed a little tracker that told me where people were visiting the website from and the hits we're coming from all over the world. The UK, Japan, Canada, Jamaica, Chile, Brazil, all over Europe, and on and on. Seeing this from my desk, in my room, in a tiny backwater town in the panhandle of Florida...it was overwhelming. There were more people listening to us on this website than people that lived in my actual town, where we played the same bar twice a month. The return time in this feedback loop, within this new music landscape, was immediate. It was mind boggling. Two years after I first heard this song my friend and I moved to New York, along with a handful of other local cohorts with big city dreams, or at the very least; the desire to get out of that backwoods shithole we called home most of our lives. The funny thing is I didn't want to move. I just followed all of my friends because I didn't want to be alone in that shithole. But it was *my* backwoods shithole...it was ours! And what my musical compatriot failed to understand was that the days of needing to move to NY or LA to find exposure and success as an independent musician were gone. Long gone. We didn't need to be in NY to be heard in Japan, or be in LA to get a vinyl deal with a label in Prague (which we were offered). I would try to talk to him about these ideas, but to no avail. My words fell on deaf ears; the romantic notion of 70s New York running rampant through his mind. He reminded me of Rob Lowe's character in St. Elmo's Fire who jumps on a greyhound with nothing but his sax and smokes and blindly heads into the great unknown, comforted by sheer sense of self, delusion, and tight pants. (It probably worked out for him. It eventually worked for my friend). The band broke up only a few months after moving there. We had to work too much. And when we weren't working, we were getting distracted. I hated NYC for the first year. My friend loved it. All of that lazy, humid, Florida free time we were so accustomed to was gone, rushed away like air pushed through a tunnel by a speeding subway car. My friend started a bedroom pop group with his girlfriend. Lol. Four years later I moved to Portland, Oregon. I won't go into all the reasons that led me to this little town in the Pacific North West, but let's just say that New York is a cruel mistress. I loved her, but she hurt me so. Anyway, you might've heard of this little show called 'Portlandia'. It's a satirical comedy about the area I now live in, but I find it hard to watch as it comes across less 'comedic fiction' and more 'sardonic documentary', and it just hits too close to home to be outright funny. More often than not, I'm just shaking my head at the accuracy of the barbs thrown than laughing at the jokes. Now this song, which had meant so many things to me, so many years ago, was introducing a thing which seemed to mock where I inevitably wound up. There was some sort of cruel irony about it. It was like a front cover and back cover to a story that started out great and ended just kind of...'meh'. Something you wouldn't want to read more than once. Hearing it made me sad. It made me nostalgic but not in that warm romantic way it originally did. I wasn't reminiscing, I was lamenting. I put this song away. For years. If I heard it, I would just ignore it...tune it out, as jaded by the song as locals were by the show it was prefacing. But in thinking for a song to write a story about, I couldn't help but think of this. I can't recall another song that was bookmarked so many pages in my own story thus far. And today, maybe ten or so years after hearing it for the first time, I actually read the lyrics that have always just been a wash of sounds and melody to me: "You feel it all around yourself You know it's yours and no one else You feel the thought of love again It's all alright In spite of all the things you did We'll work it out" And I can't help but smile, and think of my friend and our band, and that little window in time and space we made together and I know, in spite of all the things that happened then and since, we'll work it out. For Jorge, Love Thom
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