CAR STEREO

My car stereo is broken. It’s a small miracle that the car is not (completely) broken. Considering it sat in various driveways in North Carolina from 2001-2005 without being driven – until the day I replaced the battery, started it up, and drove it away to California (thanks to Jon, Greg, Dylan, Matt, and Danny for their extreme patience). The air-conditioning is broken and that’s a pretty big deal, since we’ve spent most of our time since 2005 in the desert in California and in central Texas.

The radio works; the cassette player doe not. Leftover cassettes we have, in the car: a Pogues album (Rum Sodomy and The Lash), one tape of Bruce Springteen Live 1975-1985, The Clash's London Calling, the Violent Femmes debut album, a dub of The Muppet Movie Soundtrack that I made – at sixteen years old – in my first wave of nostalgia, a mix cassette my wife’s roommate made for her 22nd birthday, a demo cassette by a Buffalo band called MEGAWEAPON (the caps were part of their name; they were awesome), and I think a dub of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris was floating around for a while. If you try to play a cassette, the car stereo makes a dangerous, squealing sound.

The back speakers of the stereo are completely busted. They buzz and distort, and have thereby totally influenced the way that I think music should sound. Unable to play my cassettes, and un-in-love with the iPod, I resort to listening to the Oldies station (which now includes various REO Speedwagon songs and Phil Collins' solo repertoire) or Austin’s NPR station, KUT (KUT has a tendendency to play an insultingly high percentage of songs on the subject of how awesome it is to live in/ be from/ fall in love in/ have a sweetheart from/ be a river flowing through/ have exes in/ be returning to Texas (subtlety is not Texas’ strong suit). All the frequent commercials on the Oldies station are no better, urging me to buy gold or call a toll-free number to get out of debt, and the playlist is predictably shallow.

But show little faith, there's magic in the night: out driving in the dark, once the traffic has eased and the air has cooled, this stereo sounds just right for listening to Oldies and an Oldies show on KUT called “Twine Time” (Saturday, 7 PM – 11PM). The music comes out distorted and compressed and fucked up, and therefore rendered brand new, through my car stereo speakers. Those round, old bass lines and kick drums really thump and rattle around and burn– even more than usual, beyond 50s and 60's production – dirty and cruel and ugly all over. Where I grew up, the Oldies station was the only one that managed to follow you into the mountains; I remember a girl I loved – in the way only a teenager trying to be complicated can love – well, she made her feelings known, in no uncertain terms. She was trying to be complicated and in love, too; some boy who lived farther away and brooded more convincingly and petulantly than I, she loved him. I drove away from her house and some botched last kiss when the Tennessee Ernie Ford song “Sixteen Tons” came on the radio. To this day, there are few songs I associate so completely with heartbreak as “Sixteen Tons”. I suppose I’m lucky it wasn’t “Band on The Run”.

I’m mixing new songs this week and I endeavor to replicate the harsh sounds of my car stereo: distorted bass, blurred mid-range, abrasive treble. There are three songs. Two will be new to everyone. One of them will be familiar to folks I played music with in 2010. I’m mixing it myself and as quickly and carelessly as my obsessions and compulsions will allow. I recorded these songs completely on my own; the guitars, the vocals, the keyboards, the bass, the drums, the percussion. I thought about getting other people to help – some nice backing vocals, a little cello, some live drums interspersed with loops – but the longer I worked on my own, the more appropriate it felt to finish that way. Catholic guilt and unfulfilling penance; personal suffering and a search for absolution. My last serious band broke up in 2003 – all that time, in various forms and permutations, I’ve been working on Sinners, Repent! (sometimes very seriously; sometimes in broken, tearfully-hiccupping failure) and frustratingly our recorded output is presently six complete songs (which is completely my fault - I've dragged people into the studio nearly every year since 2006). These three new songs are not even mixed yet, so I may be cursing them to falter forever in their incomplete state, just by writing this post. I frequently believe that my every prospective action is cursed, and thus I am extremely successful at fulfilling all my self-inflicted curses. I'm attempting to foil my usual curses by inflicting myself instead with the Curse of a Bad Mix and a Mediocre Mastering Job – for now it is better than the Curse of Inaction.

Wish me luck.