We need so damn many things To keep our dazed lives going Many things to keep our lives Lives going, so many things Laetitia Sadier’s prescient first lyric from the song “Brakhage” seems like something you can sing even louder today: Making music is a gift and should ultimately be fun and joyful, even if it’s hard sometimes. Even if what you are creating is meant to express pain or some darker feelings, I don’t believe that the path to get there needs to be painful. I used to think that there are “right” and “wrong” musical ideas, but I think it’s more about if something works or not. That idea is something I’ve been drawn to more and more these days when collaborating with other people. The new version is sometimes corny (Brian’s voice is Auto-Tuned, the production is really slick… like Broadway or kids’ music slick), but it’s also the sound of a bunch of musicians supporting Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks’ vision which had gotten squashed for almost 40 years. There’s so much darkness that surrounded the original SMiLE sessions (and subsequent Beach Boys albums): substance abuse, emotional abuse, untreated mental illness. Maybe my biggest inspiration (or at least most current inspiration) from this album is in its joyfulness. That idea of simplicity is also present in Brian Wilson’s songwriting they sound more complex but are usually simple chords with uncommon bass notes. A lot of those recordings are really repetitive, but sometimes staying in one zone or one mood is just as engaging as changing all the time. I also made an “Intro to the Royal Trux” playlist here, featuring a lot of Accelerator tracks.Īfter hearing the 2004 version of SMiLE, I found some bootlegs of the original sessions, as well as digging into Smiley Smile. Anyhow, I’ve never sounded anything like them with anything I’ve ever been involved in, but this record has been a tireless reference point for me over the last… 23 years (wow). I’ve seen them more than any other band, and the Accelerator tour show at the Cooler in NYC was undoubtedly the top. This translated to the live show as well. Every single song is good… I would say it is a “no-skipper.” On Accelerator, they really struck a remarkable balance between structure and chaos. From all the times I’ve seen them live and all the records I’ve bought, Royal Trux never struck me as having put a ton of planning into maybe anything they did, but it seems to me like Accelerator’s excellence is due at least in part to some planning or preliminary structure of songwriting. It taught me that we can live forever.īut more importantly to me, the songs held together as individual songs rather than devolving into the noise that I tended to find pretty boring. You can feel the birds on the line, the people on the street, the time of day, the phone rings, a cough, a dog bark. You can hear the room on this album, the city. It taught me that truth put to melody is all you need. It taught me to live first and then document.
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It taught me how to whistle and about the power of rhythm guitar (Jolie is a train). About necessity, about mythology’s role in survival. Catalpa was the first album that really taught me why we write songs. I first heard it during my last year of high school and knew immediately that it was a cipher, encrypting everything that I would come to love most about music.
Though I can say that Jolie Holland’s Catalpa had the biggest impact on me of any album in the last 25 years. It's impossible for me to define my favorite album of the last 25 years-that is a fluid thing, changing all the time.
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