Constrained Bliss Point

Last week I purchased Tegan & Sara’s new album Sainthood, which has quickly become my second favorite musical purchase this year. For those of you just tuning in, Tegan & Sara are Canadian identical twin lesbian singer-songwriters, which is even more awesome than it sounds. They are streaming their new album on Myspace, so if you’re into that sort of thing you can navigate over there and listen to their glorious tunes as you read the rest of my post. I implore you: such a decision is full of epic win.

Even though they are like seven years older than I am, I feel like I’ve been watching (listening) to them grow up. I was introduced to Tegan & Sara through Grey’s Anatomy, back when it was good. I think I bought their album So Jealous first, which was new at the time, and which, while I still like it a lot, was and stayed my least favorite of their albums. So Jealous was their third-or-so album at the time, not including a beautiful little gem called Under Feet Like Ours which they released on cassette when they were just starting out, and which you could order from a website that charged you in Canadian dollars.

Under Feet Like Ours was insanely worth the purchase. It is incredibly genuine, without the studio finish that comes with big budgets and famousness, and all the better for it. You can hear how T&S developed and matured through their albums. Every album is different, every one is good, and they all lead to where they are right now. Which, right now, just happens to be Sainthood, but it used to be The Con, and before that So Jealous (and then If It Was You and then This Business of Art).

And some day in the future they will grace us with something we will have been waiting for the whole time.

I have a very particular method of consuming music, which I feel a strong urge to pontificate about.

I outgrew illegal music downloads some time in high school. This had little to do with a fear of legal repercussions. In fact, I began to implicitly value my time more, so that the opportunity cost of manually downloading every song I wanted and then organizing my music collection became prohibitive. Not to mention how difficult it is to build a playlist worth listening to.

Luckily at this time I started earning discretionary income, and through the magic of the internets I could purchase used albums on Amazon. Ripping albums is straightforward, my music collection organizes itself, and each new CD yields a band-vetted play list. I listen to albums all the way through now. If it’s difficult for me to get through each song in order, that’s something wrong with the album (or more specifically, I don’t like the album). More than a hodgepodge of songs, each album has a feel to it, a theme that it plays out through each sequential track, leading you on a musical journey. Here I postulate: one can more accurately judge a band by the quality of its albums than by the quality of its songs. Producing an album is hard work, and much effort goes into ensuring a certain flow, a certain style. A good album is a conceptual whole.

There are other benefits to an album-centric view of music. Like not missing out on b-sides or less “popular” songs — which are actually just those songs the main stream hasn’t picked up on. Example: off of Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill, which song is most often played on the radio? Probably the worst on the album, “Ironic”. Both “Forgiven” and “Not the Doctor” are at least twice as good, and you probably aren’t familiar with them. (That’s right, I’m being pretentious about Alanis Morisette music.)

Another example: greatest hits albums suck. Originally I theorized that I could be more money-efficient by purchasing greatest hits albums, just getting the best songs and leaving all the unworthy ones behind. But that is entirely the wrong model. While some songs are better than others, the concept of some set of songs being “best” and using that criterion as basis for a playlist is folly. Greatest hits albums are exactly a hodgepodge of songs. They are like the Frankenstein monster, discombobulated parts stuck together, seemingly alive but distinctly lacking a soul.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go listen to Jagged Little Pill. Again.

I am a nerd for grammar, among other things. I think English has somewhat complex grammatical rules for a reason, and that systematic mistakes in usage should not be tolerated. I’ve prided myself on knowing the corner cases of language ever since I became self-aware.

For example, farther and further are mostly interchangeable, but they are subtly different. For example, farther should be used with measures of distance, whereas further is for measures of degree or time; further is also used as the comparative form of far. Although Wiktionary tells me that experts have never made a fuss about this distinction, I tend to err on the side of grammar nerditry.

Songs are different than regular usage, though. Grammatical constraints are often relaxed or broken for artistic effect or because of the exigency of other types of constraints. It used to irk me when artists would use the improper form of lay or lie in their songs, until I thought of how weird it would sound to use the correct form. At the same time, I have the utmost respect for artists who navigate treacherous grammatical straits properly and elegantly.

Quick grammar lesson: to lay is transitive, as in “I lay the book down on the table.” To lie is intransitive, as in “I lie down on the couch to take a nap.” The confusion arises because the past tense of lie is lay. I lie / I lay / I had lain. I lay / I laid / I had laid. I’ll try not to judge you for getting this wrong.

A recent example is The Bird & The Bee’s Love Letter to Japan: “and now, all my heart I will lay down precisely at your feet”. The present tense of to lay. The transitive one. Perfect.