Shoebox Full of Tapes

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I’m both happy and sad about this week’s podcast. I’m happy because I’ve wanted this amazing Mountain Goats song to be part of SFoT right from the beginning. I played this song daily for close to a year; it was stuck in my head for five months, shattering the previous four-month record held by “Raspberry Beret”; and now I’ve finally, finally had a chance to do it for the podcast. (No CC license on this one, obviously.) I can’t think of a better way to wrap up half a year of Shoebox Full of Tapes, which is what this coming Saturday will mark.

And that’s where we get to the sad part: I’m pretty much out of songs at this point. See, unlike Jonathan Coulton, I can’t write a song every week. I average about four per year that I want to keep, actually. So, after this week, “we”, meaning me, will be “in reruns” for a while, meaning that I’m re-podcasting these first six months in the original order.

The second time around, I’m hoping to clean up the metadata, as well as make things like volume and EQ a little more consistent. Some of them won’t change much at all, but others ought to be much improved. And maybe there’ll be some other pretties, like photos (I’ve got a box of those too), or explications that I didn’t do the first time around. I’ll do what I can for you guys. It’ll be cool, I think.

The new Mountain Goats record comes out August 22. They’ll be touring, too. See them. Buy it.

Thanks for listening.

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Hey! New song!

This one’s been slowly stewing for a while, and I’ve slowly been realizing that it owes a big debt to Sufjan Stevens — and not just ’cause of the place names. I didn’t always write these collage-y kinds of lyrics. (Also, I think that my roommate, who plays drums and guitar and who helped me record this tonight, wishes that I were more rhythmically creative. She’s not so much into this steady-eighth-notes thing, but I just keep coming back to how my favorite songs on Illinois are the ones with the really simple and predictable rhythms. It’s not that I don’t appreciate cool rhythms — it’s that I don’t want the lyrics to have anything to hide behind.)

Alert listeners may recognize the songs that get namechecked here and/or the Lindsey Kuper Experiences to which they correspond. Or maybe not.

So what are yours?

Snowflakes on the windshield
as we drove north from Champaign
Falling asleep in the front seat
Charms and feigns

The summer I lived in Austin
The night that Shearwater played
Scrawling a note in the front row ’cause
I can’t wait

Sterile and echoing hallway
Close off the windows and doors
If you need me, I’ll be with
The only living boy in New York

So what are yours?

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More dorm-room demos: here’s a song that Tanny and I wrote together back in 2003. The words are all his. (No CC license on this one.) Thanks for listening.

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We worked on adding new things to our repertoire at band practice tonight, since sometime soon, someone’s going to expect us to know more than five songs. I’d been kind of worried about “Rock Star Girl” since I hadn’t played it in so long, but it felt great to dust it off and to hear what Brian’s drumming adds to the song. “Reverting” was a bigger challenge — we’d actually tried to do this one a couple months ago, and it hadn’t gone well, so we’d left it alone for a while, but after tonight I’m pretty happy about how it’s starting to take shape.

Neither one is quite ready to tape, though. So, for now, have a Radiohead cover that Tanny Phillips and I did sometime in 2003. (Obviously, the usual CC license doesn’t apply.) This was one of Tanny’s favorite songs, and hearing it again now, I think it bears witness to the fact that by this time I had listened to the first Reputation record a few hundred times and had sort of started to learn how to sing in a more matter-of-fact, less histrionic way. Sort of.