20 Essential Albums: The Nymphs

The Nymphs - The Nymphs

The only album by LA’s The Nymphs appeared in 1991, at the ascendance of grunge to the mainstream, when I was spending time playing in rock band and spending my evenings living an appropriately rock-influenced lifestyle.  The Nymphs, though, weren't grunge, they were dirty glam.  The sound is of a life lived large.  A sound and a life that demands high volume.  It was music to be played out of open car windows and the way to a night out.

Singer Inger Lorre’s voice sails above guitars that slide along both rough and glossy.  The rhythms, even when playing straight ahead, lay back, everything coming down right behind the beat.  The song “Heaven” does exactly this.  The second guitar slugs along while the lead’s notes fall down, and again Lorre’s voice has to cut through.

Unfortunately, The Nymphs never went on to make another album. And this one is relatively unknown. I would take another dozen albums like this.

20 Essential Albums: Shabooh Shoobah

Shabooh Shoobah - INXS

Named after the sound of the drum beat prevelant on the album, INXS’s Shabooh Shoobah contains a couple of the staples of 80s retro. Both “The One Thing” and “Don’t Change” remain great songs, no matter how they get overplayed today (and appreciated today by people who never would have listened to INXS in the 80s). They showcase the Michael Hutchence swagger, but the album’s deeper cuts reveal the band’s creativity.

The second track of an album is often the most representative of the character of the record. Here it is the case with “To Look at You.” The strong rhythm guitars steps aside to leave space for us to get inside, the drums stagger and shuffle, and Hutchence holds back on his strong voice until the chorus. And it is like this throughout the album. It forms a unique sound that I’ve never heard anyone imitate successfully.

The drums are a lot what makes this album great, but it is the voice of Michael Hutchence (and his swagger) that made INXS one of my favorites. My long hair in the 80s had a lot to do with Mick’s hair during the 1985 Listen Like Thieves era.

20 Essential Albums: The Head on the Door

The Head on the Door - The Cure

Originating in the ‘70s and still going today, The Cure has had a long and varied career in alternative music. And no single album by the group is more representative of everything they have ever been than The Head on the Door. The pop hits are here, the darkness is here, and then there’s Robert Smith’s hair. Released in 1985, The Head on the Door came to me when I was 15 years old. It was easy to like to dance to songs like “Close to Me” and “In Between Days”, but it was the open, atmospheric melancholy of “Kyoto Song” and others that, while never really knowing what the song was about, reached inside. And then there’s “Sinking,” which perfectly captures the sort of depression that can strike someone at 15. When Robert Smith sings “I am slowing down / as the years go by / I am sinking,” over that perpetually descending bass line, you get the feeling that someone knows exactly how you feel.

This album prompted me to reach back through The Cure’s back catalog at the time, unearthing other pop treasures (Japanese Whispers) and true darkness (Pornography). Then 1986 brought the compilation Standing on the Beach and its companion b-side compilation, followed by 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (a close runner-up for this list), and The Cure was solidified as one of my favorite bands.

20 Essential Albums: Introduction

There are great albums. There are influential albums. There are also albums that make us who we are. These are the albums we wouldn’t give up, that we continue to play, and that hold up over the years. These albums that, when heard in the right mood, one can recall a pivotal event or some small memory that is emblematic of the time in which it came into your life.

These are my essential albums. Or at least twenty of them. It is no easy task, to identify just the twenty albums that have made the difference. And how do I limit it to one album by artist over the whole list? Some titles on this list barely won out over rival albums by the same artist.

This is my list. From the albums listened to on weathered tape players carried around to a teenager or even albums played off vinyl by my mother when I was a child, to records discovered in my late twenties, when one stops expecting to be surprised by music anymore. Certainly there have been other albums from the last decade that are often in my rotation, but they have yet to stand the test of time.

These albums are the ones that have made all the difference to me. These are the albums that both reflect and made me who I am.

Over the next several weeks, I will post about each of them, starting with....

My Year in Reading: 2011

Since I didn't finish the book I’m reading last weekend, I have read 21 books in 2011. Not a bad count considering the pace at which I read.

Looking back over the year, I am amazed at the number of forgettable books I read. Maybe it’s because I didn’t immediately sit down and record my impression of every book, or just because the book left no impression, but there are a number books of which I cannot even remember the plot. Aimee Bender’s An Invisible Sign of My Own and Lorrie Moore’s Like Life both fall into this category. I would have expected to like and find inspiration in both, yet nothing remains. Then there are the pairs of books I read by William Faulkner (Sanctuary and Absalom Absalom!) and Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing and Cities of the Plain). I don’t doubt the quality of any of these novels, but over time the stories conflate and each pair becomes a muddle.

The books I read in 2011 are more notable for the disappointments, led in sequence and importance by Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. The book was so highly lauded, and I was already a fan of The Corrections, so how was I not to like this book? The lack of a coherent arc to the novel is really what did it in. It can be as smart, clever, incisive, clairvoyant as possible and still fall down as a book if you can’t convince me that I need to read the next page.

But Freedom wasn’t the only let down. Add to it Jennifer Egan’s The Keep (reminiscent of Stephen King, but too childish and novel for its own good), David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide (retelling the same story in different ways and with different facts isn’t exploration--it’s confusion), and Richard Yates’s Disturbing the Peace (like John Cheever at his most matter of fact and least insightful).

And then there were the surprises. Jane Eyre proved to be much better than expected. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth proved to me that a book can be a dramatically different setting and culture than my own (and even my own interests) and still be a fantastic book to read. Indignation proved that, despite the failings of Everyman and The Humbling, and other recent novels, Philip Roth still has it in him to write a great novel. And John Cheever’s Bullet Park, thought it was as dull at times as Cheever can be, showed the impact of a sudden, simple action and the well-laid phrase. It has the best final paragraph that I have ever seen.

The best books I may have read this year were two short story collections that didn’t surprise as a whole form. The Stories ofJohn Cheever and What We Talk AboutWhen We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver both revealed everything we think of as typical of each author. Some stories come out as caricature, like people trying to write the Cheever or Carver story. At the same time, there are stories in each that prove the author to be the master we expect.

Despite the masters on the list, it was an unremarkable year of reading. It does inspire a couple of new year’s resolutions. First, to find better books to read in the new year. And the second, to write down at least some thing about each book I read. It’s the least I can do.

The full list:

Freedom- Jonathan Franzen
Like Life - Lorrie Moore
Zombie - Joyce Carol Oates
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
Sanctuary - William Faulkner
Bullet Park - John Cheever
An Invisible Sign of My Own - Aimee Bender
The Keep - Jennifer Egan
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Disturbing the Peace - Richard Yates
Legend of a Suicide - David Vann
Black Water - Joyce Carol Oates
Indignation - Philip Roth
Dusk - James Salter
Absalom Absalom! - William Faulkner
Disturbing the Peace - Richard Yates
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Stories - John Cheever
Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy
Women With Men - Richard Ford
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver
Cold Spring Harbor - Richard Yates

The Usual Year-End Thing

I suppose the year’s end requires some sort of reflection. There can be value in looking back, but it seems like we look back for things to regret, mistakes made, things we’d like to do better in the coming year. This doesn't seem to me like a fruitful exercise.

I know that there is a long list of failures, objectives unfulfilled. But if I’ve learned anything in the last year, it is not to set my sights too high. Trying to achieve too much is bound to lead to failure. Overachiever or not, my expectations for myself need to be reasonable.

In thinking about the new year, and resolutions for it, I know that I need to de-task. I need to get some things off my to-do list. And not by getting them done. By never putting them there in the first place. Starting with the stacks of unread magazines. I will not be renewing any magazine subscriptions in 2012. Sorry New Yorker. Sorry BusinessWeek and Harvard Business Review. My backlog is enough to carry me a year or more without a new edition appearing in my mailbox.

Another objective must be to focus. At any given time I have many projects in the works. I make plans to do this little bit on this project, another little bit of another, filling my spare hours with this variety of tasks with completion expected by the end of the week. This might just be unreasonable. It just leaves me with a long list of partially finished or unfinished and neglected objectives. Pick the next important thing on the list of things to do (let’s keep calling them objectives) and see it through until it’s done. I am more productive when I’m allowed to obsess over one thing instead of multitasking.

This, though, applies to everything but writing. I have found that I work better in short bursts. If I sit down, writing a first draft, for much longer than an hour, I find I begin rushing to the next sign post, the next major event. When I work for short periods, I am allowed to keep my creativity focused on what is before me. In an extended period, I start trying to look further down the road, and rush to get there.

Without the looking back and beating myself up, I’ve managed to make some resolutions. Now to stick to them--and not beat myself up if I don’t.