Welcome to Records and Rants!

This is a blog where I talk about music but mostly rant. I don't really know what the point of this is, but it's fun to have a place to get my voice out there that isn't on the hellhole of modern social media.

This will be intentionally hard to read. That's the point. If I was better at HTML I'd write this in comic sans.

01/13/2025 12:30 AM

I have attached a photo of a piece of toilet paper with my blood on it in an empty Juicy Drop Pop container. As I’m staring at it, I honestly feel nothing. There’s no powerful metaphor. I just shoved a used nosebleed plug into an empty container so I wouldn’t get blood on my sheets. I thought it might mean something if I took a picture of it, but it doesn’t.

As I’m going through my CDs, I’m reminded of how underwhelming Belle and Sebastian’s late career output is. There’s clearly energy and passion in it, but something about it lacks the relatability that If You’re Feeling Sinister provides me. Right now, I happen to be listening to the band’s 2018 album How to Solve Our Human Problems. How to Solve Our Human Problems. is a compilation of a series of EPs that the band put released from 2017 to 2018. It’s named after a book lead singer Stuart Murdoch found while participating in a yoga class. I’d say more about the sound of the album, but now I fear that I’d just copy exactly what the Vogue article that I gained that info from said about the album.

Since I’m not paid to promote this album, however, I will say that there is something missing from this album. There’s a real tenderness and sincerity that can be found in Belle and Sebastian’s early work that I just don’t hear in this. It’s a shame, because some of the songs are very personal to the band, with I’ll Be Your Pilot being a love letter to Murdoch’s children. It’s frustrating to listen to some music by a band that makes you feel seen in this chaotic world, only to never feel that spark again from any of the other stuff that band put out.

Looking at my Juicy Drop creation again, it’s just trash. There’s intent behind it, but not enough intent to really make it work. I don’t really make art like that. I can’t just throw some things together and develop meaning from the chaos they provide. Some things are just trash. Some albums are things to which I just won’t connect. I don’t need to be seen by every piece of art because not everything is about me. I know the popular stance to take these days is siding with the death of the author, resulting in the mindset that anyone can make their own meaning from things, but some things are just impossible to find meaning from. I feel as though I can reasonably claim that Belle and Sebastian have gotten worse through the vocal population of music fans who agree with me, but ultimately, it’s not fair to the effort the band made to record and write this album. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, I guess. Maybe you’ll feel something from this image of trash. Who knows? I won’t.

01/05/2025 3:02 PM

I know some random people on the internet are claiming it’s “too soon” to consider Ants From Up There one of the greatest albums of all time, but frankly I don’t want to care that all I’m doing is perpetuating the same mountains of praise on the same 30 albums instead of bringing light to any lesser known stuff and helping those artists get the recognition they deserve. I do care, but I don’t want to.

Anyway, Ants From Up There by Black Country, New Road is one of the greatest albums of all time. The fragile and shaky vocals that Isaac provides are haunting and relatable. The vast instrumentation is subtly eclectic. Instead of drawing your attention to how vast and nerdy the instrumentation is it instead uses the space to show you how each of the instruments builds perfectly into the next. The lyrics are so incredibly specific that there’s just something so raw and relatable about them. I frequently hear people saying they prefer lyrics that cover general emotions rather than specific experiences, and I strongly disagree. Lyrics to me are like a good movie. It’s a world I’m unfamiliar with, but the genuineness presented through the characters puts me into the mindset of everyone involved. I understand the emotion better because of how unique it is. I don’t know if that makes sense. It’s just when Isaac sings about kids signing casts in the playground or nobody having Wi-Fi it paints a vision in my mind of people living their lives, everyone just as distinct and beautiful as the last.

I wish I could feel like the lyrics I write could be as powerful as the lyrics in this album. I know it’s not productive to compare myself to others. I also know that no artists really listen to their own music or find the same enjoyment from it that they might find from other music. I know a lot of things. That doesn’t change how I think. I know them, but I don’t really believe them.

I applied to a bunch of graduate schools over the past few weeks. I had multiple panic attacks over this. I completely destroyed my sleep schedule. I started questioning whether or not I wanted anything. I started questioning whether or not I was actually qualified. So many applications asked for writing samples of 10 pages or more. I’ve never written anything longer than 8 pages. Besides that kid’s book I wrote in high school, but they were looking for academic research papers, not a blatant metaphor for growth and change that I don’t even know if I believe anymore. I know that people’s beliefs change as they get older, but I wish I still had that idea of how possible it was to change.

I’ve been trying to change for so long. So long meaning just over half a year. I been thinking I’ve been trying to change for about half a decade now, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to change. I mostly just wanted to change myself from the powerless and pointless piece of shit I saw myself as. But after I lost my two best friends because of my own choices I realized I wasn’t powerless. I had so much power. I can do serious damage to people. Part of me sometimes wonders if I’m overreacting. If they don’t see what I did as really all that bad. If they aren’t going to be stuck with lasting trauma by getting close to me and then have me try to hurt them where they were most tender. I don’t know. I’ll never know. Even if I reconnect with them why would they ever want to tell me that? It would just bring up old wounds if it did.

This is what I was going through this past week. I care a lot more about my personal life than any career I could get. I don’t often find people who think the same way. I’m surrounded by art students who want to make a career out of their passion. I have no passion anymore. I’m surrounded by people with passion who make awesome things, and I feed off of their emotional highs because I can’t find any of my own. I’m not ready to make a name for myself because I don’t know what I can do. I can just keep pretending and hoping I’ll find something out, but what happens when that stops working? What do I do when I can’t go anywhere anymore. This isn’t even the worst that I’ve ever felt. All things considered I’m in a pretty good mental state. Sure, I have these thoughts and panic attacks, but I still find enjoyment from things in life. I don’t spend every day staring out windows and feeling sad because none of them are high up enough to kill me. I just have sporadic moments where I feel really really sad. That’s progress, I guess.

12/26/2024 12:23 AM

I was going to go to bed on this very nice Christmas night when I was scanning through my songs and I came across Billy Joel's Piano Man. I remembered hearing recently that there are a great deal of people who absolutely despise this song, so I relistened to see if I could understand why. I don't get it, but I got something new from Piano Man that I hadn't noticed before.

This past summer I read a lot of Chuck Klosterman's books, and he has a very vocal view towards Billy Joel as being able to perfectly capture the average American loneliness. That's honestly been unable to leave my mind every time I hear a Billy Joel song these days. With the exception of songs like We Didn't Start The Fire, there is a sense of loneliness in Billy Joel's music, whether blatant or subtextual. I had always felt a sense of loneliness from Piano Man even when I was a kid, and this time around I tried to define exactly why.

There's an somewhat cocky nature to the lyrics of the song. Joel almost sees himself as a hero to these people, with the lines about "It's been me they've been coming to see" showing that he clearly has a duty to fulfill for these people. Despite this, there feels to be some sort of emotional distance between Joel and his subjects. He clearly cares about their lives, but its as if he doesn't see himself in any of them. There's a sort of self depricating "Everyone has it so hard and I'm just the piano man" nature to the song that makes Joel to be a more sympathetic protagonist than if he was merely a coldly distant man. Maybe it's just me, but I frequently feel guilty that I seem to get everything I want. I'm in a program at my school that's pretty hard to get into. I get so many opportunities to make art, but I constantly feel like I'm wasting it. I'm not suffering like any of these people around me. They're the ones with the powerful stories, and I'm just a bum.

That's what I see in Piano Man. I see a man who feels privelaged to have his place and yet feels like everyone around deserves it so much more. John at the bar wants to be a movie star. Everyone else is getting wasted. And Billy Joel sees the beauty and potential in all of them. And part of me thinks he feels inadequate. There's a strong feeling of imposter syndrome in this song for me. It's not a song merely revering the importance of bar musicians, but rather a song about someone who feels grossly unqualified compared to those around him. But to cope with this he's doing his best to tell their stories. If he's the one who has a voice, then he has to share the voices of those that he feels deserve it more than him. I think there's a reason he never talks about his own emotions in this song. His emotions don't matter. What matters is the lives of the drunks and service workers toiling every day just to survive and make it to tomorrow.