good morning ~

(click the link / wegman’s bathroom art to listen)

My Big Breaka pond unstirred

unlike most of these tracks, today’s features singing, although not in any super recognizable way

we’re one day early on it but there’s some great music about to hit the Early’s Bandcamp page, check back tomorrow :)

recently we were goofing around in the car and I found that Reba McEntire has an album of rarities and club remixes. Couldn’t help noticing that she also has a “classic paradise” mix, a phrase I recognized from one of my favorite tracks of all time, a remix of Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” I need to do some further research to verify this - I fear faulty AI results might be lumping things together - but it seems like these are both the works of a trio of British brothers known as Love to Infinity and if this extremely hot track is any indication there is a whole world of high energy cornball dance tracks out there for me to discover.

I have a distinctive memory of being of being eleven years old or so, drunk on the power of the power chords I had just learned to crudely form on my brother's guitar. It was just after the turn of the millennium and my middle school world felt alive with possibility. One day my braces would come off. My hair would stand up straight and spiky, its tips bleached and deadly like the point of a poison arrow. The wildest assortment of flames, jungle tigers, and floating skulls would grace the fabric of my polyester button downs. And with my brother's Peavey Bandit 112 amp cranked I could see myself - a hyper vivid fantasy - performing in front of thousands. The song I imagined myself playing was everywhere that spring, although slightly less everywhere than the band's other big hit. I saw myself absolutely laying into those flat5 chords on Lit's "Miserable," felt the heat of the spotlights turning off and on in rhythm to the riff.

Later my taste changed, but I continued fantasizing. With guidance from peers, elders, and my brother - and the continued use of his amplifier - I branched out from just accepting - eucharist-like - whatever was on heavy rotation on "the World Famous KROQ," southern California's long-running alternative station and perhaps civilization's number 1 disseminator of Sublime-related activities. We passed around burned CDs, I heard Modest Mouse going nuts in my friend's Rav4, and my freshman year English teacher introduced me to a whole world of weird shit. I earned his esteem by pointing out the Johnathan Richman poster he had hanging in his classroom, in return he let me borrow a cassette tape with 90s recordings by William S. Burroughs - I was not prepared for such an experience and returned the tape to him within a week, too unsettling to hang onto the thing. That same English teacher got me into the Talking Heads - I don't remember why he was playing "Remain in Light" on the basketball court that morning, but when I asked what kind of guitar they were playing he explained the whole thing about Adrian Belew and guitar synthesizers and Brian Eno, still one of the bedrock myths of my cultural experience. He also showed me footage of the Plasmatics playing that somebody had sent him on a VHS tape and seeing Wendy O. Williams cut shit in half with a chainsaw on stage also certainly rewired something in me.

One of my closer friends in high school seemingly overnight took a hard turn towards twee, never quite figured out what predicated the swap in vibe - he was previously really into hip hop. He started wearing cardigans and somewhat performatively reading collections of Keats poetry and being around him inevitably got me deep into the sad, Scottish world of Belle & Sebastian. Dear Catastrophe Waitress was fun and camp, though - it was their most recent and in hindsight it was sort of a Trojan Horse, that the same band is responsible for the abundant winks of "Step Into My Office, Baby" and the heartbreaking loneliness of "Fox in the Snow" is kind of amazing. Also - a fun fact I just learned as I was looking up these records: apparently Trevor Horn, the super producer behind (among 1,000 other things) both Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Seal's "Kiss From a Rose" is the main producer on Dear Catastrophe Waitress, wouldn't have guessed.

Why I bring them up: they put out a new record my senior year which I listened to all the time on my way to school and I had this persistent - if a little cliche - fantasy of seeing them live and, for whatever reason, them needing someone to come up and play a particular song on the drums. I did see them live on that tour but I was not called on stage to play drums - I didn't even technically play the drums at the time, just bashed around on Tat's kit whenever we had band practice. And that was the funny thing - I made my dreams of playing guitar in a band come true to a certain extent, but still I maintained this other vivid and less attainable fantasy.

At some point as I continued performing and recording music I stopped dreaming of outlandish things. Instead of impossible fantasies I harbored goals that were usually pretty attainable. I wanted to put out a vinyl record, my band from college did a Kickstarter, then we got to go pick up our albums from the plant in East New York. The veil between desire and actual became thinner. It's not like I'm living out some incredible life that only a teenager starting out could imagine, but there are a few accomplishments that would absolutely devastatingly blow the mind of the middle schooler looking up guitar tabs on the family desktop if I could show them to him - you were in a magazine, you played the Troubadour one time, this one piano album of yours has been listened to over a million times.

But I think I am missing something in terms of fantasy. My greatest and most impossible dream right now is that making music or writing this newsletter could adequately support me and my partner financially. I'm not pulling down a ton of income from streaming services, there is no middle class of artists. Is that the improbable peak should I focus my energy on? Aren't we guided towards that anchoring point whether or not we get to the top of the mountain? Perhaps its this - income/money is practical and objective, but it represents something for which I'm sure all of us yearn: actual lived peace. Freedom from anxiety, a pond unstirred and unriddled by the falling debris of thoughts. In my younger years I lusted after adulation and acceptance from without, perhaps now I should focus on hyping myself up and acceptance from within. A rockstar fantasy - the work is done from a place of calm, more powerful than any power chord.

But what about you? What are your anchoring fantasies currently? Have you also lived to become someone you could only ever dream of being when you were a teenager? Who got you into what you’re into?