Digging myself out of the Rut

For the past few months I'd found myself stuck in a music rut. It's when I have nothing new grabbing my attention and when nothing in the ol' iPod seems terribly appealing. I actually blame the iPod for this; the thousands of songs at my fingertips make me completely indecisive and also cuts into my attention span. I was once content to put a new album on repeat for weeks, but now am more likely to feel like a week of not reading music blogs will leave me far behind what's new or what artist or album I should be getting into next.

Will Sheff of Okkervil River, in a messageboard post that has been traveling the Web, very eloquently describes his feelings on file-sharing in similar terms. Essentially, the ease with which technology has allowed us to obtain music these days makes us all a little less invested in the very music we so eagerly seek. Below is an excerpt of Sheff's post; or you can see it in its entirety here.

The internet – with its glut not only of information but of misinformation, and of information that is only slightly correct, or only slightly incorrect – fills me with this same weird mixture of happiness and depression. I sometimes feel drowned in information, deadened by it. How many hundreds of bored hours have you spent mechanically poring through web pages not knowing what you’re looking for, or knowing what you’re looking for but not feeling satisfied when you find it? You hunger but you’re not filled. Everything is freely available on the internet, and is accordingly made inestimably valuable and utterly value-less.

When I was a kid, I’d listen to the same records over and over and over again, as if I was under a spell. The record would end and I’d flip it over again, doing absolutely nothing, letting the music wash over me. My favorite record albums become like a totem for me, their big fat beautiful gatefolds worked as a shield against the loud, crashing, crushing world. I would have laid down my life and died in defense of a record like Tonight’s the Night or Astral Weeks. I felt that those records had, in some ways, saved my life. These days, with all the choice in the world, it’s hard for me find the attention span for a single album. I put my iPod on shuffle and skip impatiently to the next song before each one’s over. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.

Because my work is the most important thing in the world to me, I sometimes feel uncomfortable about it existing freely in the digital Library of Babel, these songs that I worked so hard writing and revising and rehearsing and recording and mixing (and re-mixing) and mastering (and re-mastering) shucked off the album and thrown up on the internet in hissy and brittle low-resolution versions with no kind of sequence or order, mixed in with odd leaked tracks and some sub-par live versions. In a world overstuffed with stimuli and choking on information, I feel like a musical album should have a kind of purity and a kind of wholeness, that every aspect of an album – from the sequencing to the artwork even down to the typesetting – should feels labored over and loved, and that the finished product should feel like a gift.

Anyway, point is, I'm recommitting myself to enjoying the purity and wholeness of an album, and trying not to get so caught up in the Next Big Thing. That said, after a long hiatus, I just picked up a few new gems, which I'm trying to appreciate one by one with the resurgence of my Grado headphones.

I started with a run through of Sufjan Stevens' The Avalanche, merely composed of "outtakes and extras from the Illinois album," but which comes together as gorgeous compilation that is as worthy as any studio album. Like Illinois, it's lengthy (21 tracks and more ridiculously long song titles), but worth listening to for three new versions of "Chicago," including an "Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version," among other standout tracks -- "The Avalanche," complete with banjo, woodwinds, and harmonies, and "Pittsfield," a simple, quiet, guitar-vocal harmony ballad. And just for fun, there are tracks like "Adlai Stevenson" which sound like they could be high school band performances.

Here is the title track for your sampling pleasure:
Sufjan Stevens :: The Avalanche

Next on the roster: Thom Yorke's Eraser. His highly-anticipated solo effort (though he's uncomfortable with the solo term) is full of drum beats and electronica and is sure to please Radiohead fans between albums. So the Kid A Radiohead was never my favorite, but this has potential so far...