Why haven’t I bothered with writing a single music-related entry for nearly the entire summer? As evinced in my Grouper un-review I suffer from seasonal affective disorder during the summertime. Most people identify it as a winter-related disease, but there are a few of us out there (I’ve talked to a handful—we exist, we’re just a bit quiet about it). The truth is that I’ve had so much that I’ve wanted to do to push through the season that I’ve not really done any of it. During this time I’ve decided that writing about music is a bit futile—at least from my perspective. Why should a curmudgeon who hates people and is burned out on going out to live shows and writing about music in general continue to write about music? I’ve had no trouble continuing to assemble my playlists.
I’ve been trying to work on some kind of a memoir about being a completely insular daydreamer who is overwhelmed by everything and spends his days in a dreamlike reverie. It’s also about soldiering on doggedly making music that very few people ever end up hearing or caring about. The scope of it has ballooned to the point where it’s become daunting, overwhelming and thus difficult to sit down and chip away at. It’s a similar mountain to the staggering amount of credit card debt I’ve accrued.
I still buy quite a bit of new music. The only album that I’ve felt it might be necessary to sing the praises of is the new Medicine album (which got delayed by almost a week in the beauracratic maze of the Chicago-area postal service before it reached me). I wanted to write about them mainly because they’re a constantly overlooked band. I’ve also been spending a lot of my time readying the ‘field of flowers’ singles. The second one is available now via bandcamp, for instance, and the first is being pressed at Rainbo Records as we speak.
You could say I’m in the doldrums. Those record mailer shaped packages show up in the mail, I unwrap them and play the limited edition coloured vinyl beauties on my turntable and the hypnotic spin has a tendency to drag me into existential crisis after existential crisis. What’s all of this for, anyway? Why doesn’t anyone give a crap about what I’ve been doing? All of this leads me into the suffocating k-hole of that memoir of a delusional person that I talked about above because I realize that that might be all I can offer the world—the perspective of a permanent and truly isolated lone crazy dreamer.
So much that I expected to have happened by now simply hasn’t at all. I always figured if I stuck with the music thing long enough that people would have no choice but to start to take notice and things would start to take off by now, but it simply hasn’t happened. A lot of my band’s prime years ended up getting bogged down in all kinds of external nonsense drama and once I was finally able to shake the cobwebs away and get all of that taken care of I found that we were almost back at square one. I often go straight to ‘we should’ve toured more’ but I have friends who’ve sacrificed years of their lives on the road who aren’t really in that much better of a position than we are. I also always figured I’d progress in some professional capacity by now, figured if I’d ever wanted to settle down and have kids that that would’ve happened as well, but none of it has. I’m not particularly discontent about where I am. I could use a bit more money, sure, but even millionaires think they could use more money so that’s the type of thought that seems entirely useless. Plus I’ve had more money before and I wasn’t particularly good with it. Every extra penny ends up being pumped into the band and releasing more records, buying beer and records.
This could be because I have another shalloboi record in the can. It’s all mixed and ready to go—I just need the money to master it and put it out (haw haw haw). My world has a tendency to crumble when I finish a record. When I finish a project the initial joy and sense of accomplishment always melts into a deep depression soon afterwards. ‘Great Tyler, you’ve finished another record that only a handful of people will ever actually hear or buy. Now I guess you’re going to have to start another one and do that forever and ever. Good stuff.’ I guess I crave outside validation more than I care to admit.
I will probably write about the new Medicine record, though. They are a band that has been overlooked for more than two decades now and they deserve something written about their first new record as a band in 18 years. That said, I have a saved entry about the newest Primal Scream record that has just been sitting as an empty saved entry.
There’s a ‘death to summer’ playlist coming up within the week. So stay tuned. Onward and upward.
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