The album I want to talk about is...
Here is my suggestion for this thread, which I am hoping will be a long-term slow burner. I'd like to hear anyone talk about an album (any genre) they particularly like, appreciate, or find personal meaning in. It does not have to be a new release, on bandcamp, in your all time top ten, or in any way new to the rest of us - there are other threads for those kinds of things. The comments do not have to show musical expertise or musicological analysis. If you do have technical knowledge or great musical vocabulary to bring to the description, that's great too, but I am not thinking of this as an expert thread.
What I am after is some account of what you have found in the album (or even song) that might enrich my appreciation of it if I listen to it, like sitting with you on a back porch playing the song and having you tell me what you hear in it, so that maybe I can hear it too, gaining something by borrowing your ears. It might be sound- or lyrics-related or just how the piece spoke to you. I'll kick the thread off in a moment.
What I am after is some account of what you have found in the album (or even song) that might enrich my appreciation of it if I listen to it, like sitting with you on a back porch playing the song and having you tell me what you hear in it, so that maybe I can hear it too, gaining something by borrowing your ears. It might be sound- or lyrics-related or just how the piece spoke to you. I'll kick the thread off in a moment.
Comments
I love all of the last 3 loscil albums, (and the EP releases in between), but perhaps especially this one. For me, It belongs to the small category of music of which it's hard to imagine tiring - I can loop it happily.
I want to talk about track 3, the title track. To me it encapsulates all of the virtues of a great loscil track - the dreamy atmosphere, with languorous underlying drones, with meticulously placed skittering touches keeping the surface complex, bass doing things that become interesting once you focus on them, and mid-range acoustic (I think) instruments keeping a hypnotic almost-melody going to carry the whole thing forward, creating a remarkable combination of stasis and forward motion that is somehow both relaxing and fascinating.
Last year I did some lecturing in Vancouver, Scott Morgan's home (he is loscil). "First Narrows" is a part of the Vancouver estuary, and the picture on the front of the album is the First Narrows bridge.
One afternoon I took a musical pilgrimage down to the shoreline and sat listening to this album while looking across the water; gradually the music made perfect sense of the scene. In the background, mountains solid, unmoving, static blue sky, an anchoring drone. On the water, a few huge industrial ships, one or two anchored, others moving at a pace that required repeated looks to be sure that there was indeed motion, a solid bass. Smaller ships passed to and fro at a smarter clip, giving the scene its liveliness. Sailboards and small yachts skipped here and there, and at surface level the wind and sun created a continuously shifting, sparkling, skittering pattern. Music and landscape were one, a painting in sound.
I have no idea whether this is what Scott Morgan was seeing or thinking when he composed this. For all I know he sat in his basement with his laptop and the bridge occurred to him as a cool name for the album. I am not sure how much that matters - for me it added a new layer of appreciation to a track and an album that I already thought were brilliant, tying them to a vivid memory.
This is the album I play more than any other. Originally released in 1975, partly with the aim to make Springsteen more commercial, aiming to get a top ten single from the album. It has certainly stood the test of time, as most of the tracks are still staples of live performances nearly fifty years later. When the Boss plays Born to Run you know he is approaching the end of the set!
I first heard the title track on a CBS sampler of new artists, probably around 1976. It immediately struck a chord with me - the soaring guitars and saxophone, for example. But I didn't explore more for a couple of years. A friend played me the album. I went out and bought it, along with his two earlier albums. I now have all his official releases, some less official, plus numerous live sets, with around 25 versions of the title track, for example, and a not dissimilar versions of Thunder Road. When I hear the first few notes of Thunder Road, the first track, I'm taken back to the many times I've listened to the album. I know the words off by heart...
I've bought the actual album three times! There was the LP in the late 1970s, followed by the CD, about ten years later, then the 30th Anniversay edition in 2005. The highlight of my live concert listening is seeing Bruce Springsteen singing Born to Run three times - London Hammersmith in the mid 80s on the Born in the USA tour, then Birmingham NEC in 1999 on the Reunion Tour, and Coventry Ricoh Arena several years ago, my first outdoor venue for Springsteen. Clarence Clemons' sax playing for me is the height of rock saxophone
It is an album I will never tire of listening to!