Day 7
TODAY'S SONG:
"Type Slowly (live)" by Pavement
Whereas
yesterday I didn't have many memories attached to the shuffled song
of the day, I have a boatload for Pavement. Since my freshman year
of college, they have been one of my favorite bands. My earliest
memories of Pavement come from a couple years earlier, when the song
“Stereo” was on heavy rotation on the Fredonia college radio
station. They never announced what they were playing, so I was left
in the dark, wondering who it was musing about the high pitched voice
of Geddy Lee. Sometime in my senior year of high school, I
downloaded a 50-mp3 Indie Music Starter Kit compilation, which
featured “It's a Hectic World,” quite possibly the dumbest song
to use to exemplify the music of Pavement: it's lower quality than
Slanted and Enchanted,
Stephen Malkmus isn't singing (or drastically changed his voice), and
it's...not good. So for about a year I thought that I hated
Pavement.
Pretty much the best thing ever. |
That
all changed when I really gave Slanted and Enchanted
a fair chance. Right away I thought the recording quality was fairly
off-putting, but the songs were so strong that it didn't matter. At
all. It became my favorite album in no time flat. I slowly accrued
every Pavement record through the course of that year, falling
insanely in love with each of them. It was reinforced by the
Pavement DVD that came out that Spring, Slow Century.
“Type
Slowly” is on Brighten The Corners,
the fourth Pavement record, which I ordered in the summer before my
sophomore year of college, while I was living in my parent's basement
and working at the college painting door frames and classrooms. I
worked with one other guy who was a few years older than me, a quiet
and surly chap who only listened to Coldplay. When he told me this,
I asked him if he liked Radiohead. He promptly said, “No.” We
hardly spoke to each other the rest of the summer.
Not Radiohead. |
We
had one radio that we listened to. If I got to it first, I would put
it on NPR and listen to the news for an hour before it changed to the
auto-rotation of indie rock. If my coworker got to it, we listened
to garbage. I ended up wearing headphones a lot, alternating between
Pavement, The Postal Service, and Radiohead. On my breaks, I read
Bret Easton Ellis and Douglas Adams novels. I was bored a lot at
that job. I wish there had been podcasts back then. Give me some
Ira Glass, Terry Gross, Improv4humans, or Marc Maron, and I bet that
job would've been a lot more enjoyable.
Here's my song for today, which actually doesn't have a lot to do with the memory I wrote about, but another lonelier memory I have attached with that summer. I ain't here to try to bum you out though, except with this song:
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