Odds & Sods

Some thoughts.

1. Whenever I (make myself) put on the new Cat Power album, I genuinely enjoy it, both track-by-track and as a whole. And yet, I still never actually want to put it on. Weird.

2. I’ve not heard the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs record and don’t know when or if I’ll get around to it. But is “Gold Lion” – a joyless, plodding piece of neo-grunge – really the most single-worthy track they could find? (Love that zipped-up Diplo remix, on the other hand, though he had to get pretty invasive to make the thing pleasurable.)

3. The Daniel Johnston documentary that’s turning up in (a few) theatres now was the highlight of my Toronto filmfest experience last fall. It’s a sad story made sadder by filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig’s tireless & chronological approach (“and then this fucked-up thing happened, and then this fucked-up thing happened, and then this fucked-up thing happened…”), but the film also captures the joy & pain resplendent in Johnston’s music, and it admirably refuses to play up either the genius angle or the novelty-act one, neither of which has ever been wholly accurate.

4. Let’s see if I can get through one of these without resorting to either italics-for-emphasis or parentheses. The work of Daniel Smith under his various rubrics, such as Danielson Famile, has previously escaped my notice. But I am now officially in love with this new song “Did I Step On Your Trumpet?,” recorded under the “Danielson” flag and found on the upcoming album Ships. I tell you, more songs of all genres should have backing vocals that respond to or interact with the lead singer! It’s one of the things I love about so much African & Brazilian music.

You can hear Cat Power and the YYYs just about anywhere, but here are a couple Daniel Johnston classics. “Some Things” will sound pretty familiar to anyone who's seen the movie, since it seems like they use those piano chords in it every two minutes or so. And most people already know “Speeding Motorcycle,” of course, but what the hell. A few years ago I saw him sing it live with Yo La Tengo backing him; it was one of those now-I-can-die moments, & it made up for once missing a chance to see him play in Berlin by, like, an hour. Buy some Daniel Johnston of your own here.

• Daniel Johnston, “Speeding Motorcycle”
• Daniel Johnston, “Some Things Last a Long Time”

And here’s that Danielson number. Sing! Ships is out in May and you can preorder it here.

• Danielson, “Did I Step on Your Trumpet?”

Murder Brings a Touch of Colour

Barry Adamson was in Magazine and had played for Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds when he made his first solo record, Moss Side Story, back in 1989. It’s an elaborate mock soundtrack, the score to some imaginary piece of black & white Britflick suspense, and listening to it is always a fascinating experience on levels both abstract & visceral. There’s that great jazz-noir swing, for one thing, like Ellington’s Anatomy of a Murder but brittler, grittier, defaced with ’80s industrialisms. But of course the songs also create stories in your mind, or indistinct echoes of stories, or suggestions of stories, or anyway vague waves of unease or tugs of anxiety, like you know there’s something you have to do but you can’t remember what it is but you should try to remember because you have an idea what’s about to happen next and you know it’s not going to be good.

It’s interesting too that even though most of the record does indeed sound like incidental music for images we can’t see & dialogue we can’t hear, actually adding those images/dialogue would diminish the effect instead of enhancing it. Take the opener, “On the Wrong Side of Relaxation” (and note that the panting & screams are courtesy of Diamanda Galas) – I sort of think if we had a specific situation to pin it on, the sounds might just sound like hackneyed damsel-in-distress button-pushing. But since we don’t, since all we have is what we hear, it always leaves me jittery, nervous.

I could have easily posted just about anything else from this record as well – or from the CD bonus tracks, which include a cover of “The Man with the Golden Arm” and a deconstruction of the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” theme – but I went with the little mini-suite “The Swinging Detective.” And if you dig this buy the whole record here.

• Barry Adamson, “On the Wrong Side of Relaxation”
• Barry Adamson, “The Swinging Detective”

In My Port Sight, In My Tail Light

Sad news today – Nikki Sudden has crossed over suddenly, at the age of 49. Zoilus has a fine rundown of why you should care about Sudden if you don’t already, so there’s little for me to add. Instead, some music. (The playlist is a little weighted toward the past; I’m sorry to say I haven’t been keeping up with Sudden’s recent work.)

• Swell Maps, “Spitfire Parade.” From their debut, A Trip to Marineville. Volted to life on the same great rock & roll current that the New York Dolls siphoned from for “Pills.”
• Swell Maps, “International Rescue.” This one’s a bonus track on my Mute copy of Marineville.
• Jacobites, “Big Store.” From the first of a few albums for Sudden and co-Jacobite Dave Kusworth, in which he gives up the art ruckus of the Swell Maps for a debauched-rocker stance. This and the ache-inspiring following song are probably the most instantly lovable ones on the record, but the whole thing is worth knowing.
• Jacobites, “Silver Street.” What a drag it is getting old.
• Mercury Rev, “Silver Street.” The same weary rue as the original, but ghostlier, translucent. Let’s say the Jacobites record the sickbed watch, and Mercury Rev snaps the soul moments after it’s left the body. (From a radio session & put out on the B-side of one of the Deserter’s Songs singles, I think.)
• Epic Soundtracks, “Sad Song.” Epic Soundtracks was Nikki Sudden’s brother and fellow Swell Map. Late in his life – he died at the age of 38 in 1997 – he made some lovely solo records that recall the work of a couple other doomed & troubled (respectively) souls, Pete Ham & Brian Wilson. This is from the first of those records, Rise Above.

You can buy some Swell Maps here, some Jacobites here, and some Epic Soundtracks here.

Groovy Times in the Land of the Dead

Well, I was a little slow off the mark in writing about Material’s “Seven Souls” in the Sopranos season premiere – Said the Gramophone has the track up already, and they in turn point to this post on The Face Knife about The Sopranos. But I’ll throw the thing up here anyway.

• Material (featuring William Burroughs), “Seven Souls”

This says more about my own biases & expectations than anything else, but I was totally thrown by the use of this song. It was brilliantly done, with the bassline percolating up through William Burroughs’ speechifying & up through the visual montage at the same time (really well edited, I thought – fading the song out for that snatch of dream conversation between Carmela & Adriana and then bringing it back up again was a stroke of genius), but it was that speechifying that threw me, the spoken-word bit. I realize the words (which consist of Burroughs outlining his take on the Egyptian theory of seven souls – The Face Knife has the full text) & the music combine, um, holistically to form the song, just as they do in any other song, but the fact that in this case those words were spoken (& possibly the fact that in this case they were spoken by a writer, not a bandmember or a singer) seemed to give them more weight, at least for me. When they used that great Afrika Bambaataa track in the season opener a couple years ago, I never found myself trying to parse what exactly David Chase et al were trying to communicate by choosing a song that had the particular lyrics that one did; same goes for just about any other song they’ve used (and they’ve used plenty of good ones) – I always just figure that apart from maybe a chorus line here & there, the lyrics correlate to the narrative only incidentally or coincidentally. But Burroughs had me wondering just how mystical Chase was going to get this season– were we going to see the seven souls theory further dramatized via the usual power struggles & family squabbles?

Now, though, I’m thinking it was specious to immediately assume that “Seven Souls” was a special case. After all, that Afrika Bambaataa song, “World Destruction,” alludes to Nostradamus, just as one of the wiseguys did in the very same episode, I seem to recall, and the Lydon-spat line “the human race is becoming a disgrace” does seem a little like one of the defining premises of David Chase’s worldview, at least as expressed in The Sopranos. So now I’m thinking that if I didn’t look for connections before (that Johnny Thunders song, “You Can’t Throw Your Arms Around a Memory” – what was happening when they played that one?), it’s just because of my own admitted tendency to devalue the importance of lyrics in rock & roll songs in general.

Haven’t seen the second Sopranos of the season yet, but from what I hear they’re getting pretty mystical indeed.

More on music, words, narrative, etc., to come in the future, I think.

Tell Me Why, Tell Me Why, Tell Me Why

• Timmy Thomas, “Why Can’t We Live Together?”

S got me onto this one last year & it’s been in heavy rotation ever since. The “we” in the title refers to racial demographics, and the sweet-but-tart singing seems to wobble back & forth between wild hope and defeated resignation. The whole thing has a wonderfully eccentric vibe – check out the minimalist production values & those shrill, fractured organ lines.

What I really like about this song, though, is the extended instrumental intro – it goes on for about a minute and a half, or fully a third of the song, before we ever hear a voice. (Everything’s relative, but that does seem rather unusual for a song that was a big mainstream hit in 1973.) It’s as if the singer’s gathering the courage to lay out his case, or maybe just gritting his teeth & putting up with the status quo until he can put up with it no more.

I also really like that when Sade covered this for her first album, Diamond Life, she also started it off with a long intro. (After all, it’s not hard to imagine many singers thinking, Hey, my vocals are what people are showing up for.) When I heard the Timmy Thomas original, I felt like the song’s appeal was inextricably linked to his particular performance/recording, but Sade puts the lie to that.

• Sade, “Why Can’t We Live Together?”

(You can buy some Timmy Thomas here and Diamond Life here. I probably won’t keep these up here for long.)

We Got Time

It’s startling to realize that that song by the Haunted from a few posts back was the first bit of Canadian content on this site. So here are a couple worth-your-while tracks from one of Bob Wiseman’s early solo records, one with the ungainly title of Bob Wiseman Sings Wrench Tuttle: In Her Dreams. (There is no Mr. or Ms. Tuttle – it’s just the old fake-collaborator conceit at work.)

If you’re a domestic reader, feel free to skip ahead, but…. Here in the land of Canada, Wiseman is best known to many as the keyboardist for Blue Rodeo in their early days. His work did indeed greatly enliven their first couple albums – those organ swirls on “How Long” always make me grin – but what I’ve heard of his solo stuff is more interesting. Here we have some highly Dylanesque folk-rock (including a genuine narrative protest number à la “Hurricane”) filtered through cracked Canuck sensibilities. When Sings Wrench Tuttle first came out I sneered at the loopy vocals & haphazard rhythms, but, well, I was young & stupid.

• Bob Wiseman, “Airplane on the Highway”
• Bob Wiseman, “Bhopal (Driftnet Plan)”

(Not sure how in-print the album currently is, but Wiseman’s own site is here.)

Cleveland Rocks

I’m not sure what exactly Russell Smith was trying to say in this (subscriber-only) Globe and Mail column about the most recent round of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions – awards bad? cultural institutions unnecessary? rock & roll and “hall of fame” don’t mix? – but whatever it was, he further muddies his own waters with some shameless Cleveland-baiting.

Such as, “How could anyone accept the conjunction of Sex Pistols and Cleveland, much less demand it?” And, “Surely we should condemn any so-called rock ’n’ roller who accepts the corporate call of Cleveland, who is thrilled to be deemed safe by the official voice of Middle America?” And, “rock ’n’ roll is, sadly, alive and married and living in Cleveland.”

I would like to think that “Cleveland” here is just a metonym for the RnR Hall of Fame itself, which sits on the city’s lakefront. Or maybe for “our corporate overlords.” But I suspect that if it’s a metonym for anything, it’s for some imagined mass of small-minded small-towners on whom art & beauty & rock are wasted. You know, dullards who choose to live in benighted Ohio instead of, say, gleaming Toronto.

That is, after all, a recurring theme in Smith’s work. But this time out it’s especially misguided, since Cleveland is a total rock & roll town. Alan Freed? “Time Won’t Let Me”? Pere Ubu Rocket from the Tombs Dead Boys Electric Eels?

I realize we’re not talking Swinging London 1966 here, or Lower East Side 1975. And we can’t expect every general-interest cultural commentator to be down with Pere Ubu. But surely we can expect them to not be so proud of their own unexamined prejudices?

Ah, well. Anger is an energy, as, er, someone once sang. Here are some of Cleveland’s own. (Well, I think Great Plains/TJSA were from Columbus, actually, but hey, that’s close. And that track gets bonus points for relevance & timeliness.)

• Pere Ubu, “Laughing”
• Rocket from the Tombs, “Foggy Notion”
• Electric Eels, “Jaguar Ride”
• Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, “RnR Hall of Fame”

You can buy some Pere Ubu here and some Rocket from the Tombs here, and the Electric Eels’ online home is here. And here’s a Great Plains/TJSA discography.

In the Whale There Is a Man Without His Raincoat (Or, On Nostalgia)

Warning: Memoirish Content Ahead

In the fall of 1995 I was pretty miserable. I was out of grad school & unattached & scratching out a few bucks writing freelance for the local daily but mostly I was paying my rent by waiting tables part-time, and I was living in a house with my sister and three other women. I got along fine with my sister but basically hated two of my other roommates, and I tried to avoid the common areas of the house as much as possible. Most nights I was out, and I spent many mornings lingering over a leisurely (and cheap) breakfast at a diner a few blocks away, reading a book and sipping tea. When I was home I tended to hide out in my tiny room. In an irritating quirk of the reno-to-rent process the house had undergone, I had to pass through the main-floor bathroom anytime I wanted to enter or exit my room.

At this time for some reason I became obsessed with Brian Eno’s early solo records, the rock & roll stuff. I’d had them for years, but now suddenly I couldn’t get enough of them. Most of my vinyl copies were in storage (did I mention my room was tiny?), but I had the Another Green World LP on hand as well as a cassette dub with Warm Jets on one side and Tiger Mountain on the other.

I played the hell out of that tape. I became especially taken with the middle section of “Mother Whale Eyeless,” the part when the organ and then the female singer kick in (it’s around the 1:55 mark, for those keeping score at home). I mean, really taken. For a while I was listening only to that part of the song, which lasts a minute and a bit. I’d play it, rewind the tape for a couple seconds or so (believe me, I got good at the timing), and play it again.

It’s always fascinated me that nostalgia seems to attach to unhappy periods of my life, much more so than to happy ones. It’s always the times of everyday depression & drudgery that – once I have a few years on them – most fill me, in the remembering, with warmth & dazzled affection. Not for the person I was or anything, but for the bright spots that flashed now & then: friendship, music, etc. For the whole world that was around me when I appreciated it least. Just a fluky spark of the brain’s circuitry, I guess – but still, even though I’m not a religious person, I’d like to think there’s some kind of glimpse of transcendence in that.

Another song that was really big for me around this time was Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More.”

• Brian Eno, “Mother Whale Eyeless”
  
  

(You can buy Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) here. And I promise, that’s enough about me for a while.)

Movie Music (Sort Of)

Usually I don’t care much about lyrics (he said with a guilty cough). It’s sounds, textures & rhythms that catch my ears & my heart, and when I need to hear something, it’s likely to be closer to “Louie Louie” than to, say, midperiod Elvis Costello. I’ve loved plenty of songs for their, er, songness even as the lyrics have made me wince (hello, Luna), but the reverse has never been the case. No matter how wise or witty the words are, if it ain’t got that swing I’d rather just be reading Philip Larkin or Peter Van Toorn.

But I’m not so much the fool or posturer as to insist that words don’t matter at all. My fave record of the year so far is probably Destroyer’s Rubies, both because of its skewed classic-rockisms and because it always keeps me listening closely to whatever it is he’s going on about.

And sometimes words just make me shiver, and this song is one of those times. In just a few lines Mountain Goat John Darnielle gives his title character (one of the evil beasts from Beowulf) a voice, a deep sadness, a vague fear, and a cold rage, and marries it all to chord changes so archetypal that you could almost believe they were passed down through the centuries along with the original epic poem.

• The Mountain Goats, “Grendel’s Mother”
  

All this has been on my mind because I’ve just seen the disappointing Beowulf and Grendel movie. The writer & director tried to add some context and backstory to make it all less good-vs-evil and more nuanced, which I certainly support in theory (love John Gardner’s novel Grendel, after all), but here it was clumsily done. Add a low-budget feel and some erratic acting (hello, Sarah Polley), and ultimately the movie seemed like a lifeless muddle with some nice shots here & there.

But enough about that. I’ll leave you with some lines from Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf that set up Darnielle’s song: “Grendel’s mother, monstrous hell-bride, brooded on her wrongs…. [she] had sallied forth on a savage journey, grief-racked and ravenous, desperate for revenge.”

We Are the Essex Green Preservation Society

If you were drawn here by the recent Belle & Sebastian coverage, you should probably check out this Essex Green song pronto, if you haven’t already heard it elsewhere.

• The Essex Green, “This Isn’t Farm Life”

See what I mean? Sure, B&S hardly invented that sound – the electric keyboard surfing on top of the bouncing bassline, I mean – but right now I certainly associate it with them, if only because of the newness of their new album.

Not to take anything away from the excellence & spirit of the Essex Green. “Farm Life” is from Cannibal Sea, which comes out later this month and which I already suspect I’ll be listening to an awful lot this year. Loved their last record, too, especially this piece of harmony-luscious sixtiesish pop, which I can’t imagine the past three years or so without.

• The Essex Green, “The Late Great Cassiopia”
  

On an administrivia note, there’s an Atom XML feed of this site available here, if anyone wants one. I’ll try to put up a proper link in the sidebar column one of these days.

There Must Be Evil Going On

It sounds like it could have been recorded at any time or place over the past 40 years, but as it happens it was 1981 or so, in England. That great thuggish thump from the drums is enough to make you believe that boy- or girlfriend blues really ARE the same thing as an oppressive, all-encompassing dread. But it’s the harmonica that really makes it for me. Not an instrument I have any love for, but this one is on the edge of bursting out into a richer, fuller life as an organ.

• The Terraplanes, “Evil Going On”

Speaking of thuggish, it doesn’t get much more so than the Monks. It’s beat time, it’s hop time, and it’s Black Monk Time – one classic stomp of a record that, incredibly, seems to be out of print at the moment. This one’s a little more dated than “Evil Going On,” if only because of the words (“Why do you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam?”). But I guess the music is timeless enough – I saw this used in a beer commercial a few years ago. And a little part of me died.

• The Monks, “Monk Time”

And while we’re enjoying that garage sound, the Onion AV Club website has a newish feature where they get someone to run their MP3 player on shuffle and talk about the first few tracks that come up. This week it’s comedian Patton Oswalt, and incredibly (yep, this is a two-“incredibly” post), the first song up is the Haunted’s great “1-2-5.” Says Oswalt: “I think this was a garage band from the ’60s, and I can’t remember. I think they’re British, because they’re on the British Nuggets set. I don’t know, you do the research. I love the ’60s garage shit. I’m obsessed with it.” Dude, I’m happy to tell you that the Haunted were not British but in fact were Montreal’s own.

• The Haunted, “1-2-5”

Broken Songs

I heard there were some movie awards or something on Sunday, but for my household it was Howe Gelb Day, with a brief in-store at Soundscapes & then later a full show at the Horseshoe.

Both sets were in solo mode (which meant, sadly, little sense of what’s in store for us on the about-to-be-released ’Sno Angel Like You, recorded with a gospel choir in Ottawa). At Soundscapes he played five songs on a beautiful old acoustic, and at the ’shoe he alternated between the guitar and a Yamaha keyboard set to “piano.”

Gelb tends to nod & noodle at the best of times; let’s just say he seems easily distracted (see previous post). But at Soundscapes a mistrust of momentum seemed built into his very writing & playing style. The songs were full of tiny fissures & stops-and-starts, little pauses for especially meaningful hazy-crooned lines or shards of guitar twang or perhaps just a split-second reorientation. None of this is a criticism: it was a far cry from the shaggy majesty of the best Giant Sand records, but it had an earthy appeal of its own, a sonic homage to the dried-out, sun-cracked Arizona desert.

He really went wild – gloriously so – at the Horseshoe show, which was the last night of his tour & felt like it, finding him happily punch-drunk & even less interested in showbiz proprieties than usual. He ran through long mashups at the keyboard, his fingers hopping around all eccentric & Monklike, cramming ragtime runs next to standards next to nursery songs. He did jokeless comedy routines, asides & rambling mini-anecdotes that had me laughing even if I can’t remember them a day later. He threw shamelessly hammed-up snippets of “Helpless” and “Tower of Song” into “Felonious.” At one point he abruptly stopped playing “Shiver,” took a seat at the keyboard, and launched into “Moon River” with not a word of segue.

Weird thing is, it was always immensely entertaining & it never felt like Gelb was being churlish or unduly self-indulgent. Just willing to follow the stream of his consciousness wherever it led him, & confident that the rest of us would come too. And I think I speak for the majority of folks there when I say we were happy to meander along with him. (Though S for one confesses that she wished for “a little more structure.”)

In fact, it took Gelb a bit of doing to close the set. “Just keep playing,” someone cried when he first made to exit the stage, so he shrugged & did. Finally he pled fatigue and an early flight, threw a stack of tour-only promo CDs into his guitar case, and told us to help ourselves for $10 per. And then he sat at the keyboard and played “Over the Rainbow” while fans rooted through the booty, and then he left the stage. Left the guitar case out there, too, still full of CDs & banknotes – first time I’ve ever seen a merch sale run on the honour system.

And now, a Gelbfest. I’ll keep these up for a week at the most, I think.

• Howe Gelb, “Felonious” (from The Listener)
• Howe Gelb, “My Grandfather’s Clock” (from the new John Fahey tribute comp I Am the Resurrection, in which the ever-contrary Gelb brings a piano to the fingerpickin’ guitarist’s belated wake)
• Giant Sand, “Shiver” (from Chore of Enchantment; he played this at both Soundscapes and the ’shoe)
• Howe Gelb, “Jam Ache; Ahhh!” (Howe goes dub; from that tour-only CD, officially called (Upside) Down Home 2004: Year of the Monkey)
• Arizona Amp and Alternator, “AAAA 2” (from yet another recent Gelb-led project; he played this one at both Sunday sets too, and the record holds no less than four versions)
  

Let’s go let’s go!

Every time I’ve seen Howe Gelb solo or in the Giant Sand configuration, he’s had a CD walkman hooked up to the sound system, & he’s played little snippets of OPM (other people’s music) on & off throughout the show. To the point where it goes from charming to flow-disruptive & irritating, and then swings back to charming, and then back to irksome again, etc. Gelb’s demeanour adds extra pushes to the pendulum swings; he gets a kind of sly childlike smile on his face, like he knows he’s testing limits.

One night in Seattle, one of the snippets he was playing over & over was a woman screaming “Let’s go let’s go!” accompanied by a furious drum clatter. For some reason S & I both found this very striking. So much so that later, back home, S emailed, er, the Gelb organization (Team Gelb, let’s say), describing what we’d heard & asking for an ID. Someone kindly wrote back & told her that the artist in question was Scout Niblett. No song title given, though.

From what we’d heard & would continue to hear of Scout Niblett, this seemed off. We suspected there’d been a misunderstanding. But eventually we learned that you should trust Team Gelb.

• Scout Niblett, “Gymnastic (Fall Over)”

More in a day or so on Gelb’s Horseshoe gig in Toronto on Sunday.

Seems Like a Mighty Long Time

Or, Adventures in TV Land, Part 2.

After reading Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker story about pit bulls and profiling, I had a hankering to see an old Homicide episode in which Paul Giamatti guest-stars as a freakish dogfight enthusiast. Besides the pit-bull plotline, it also had a recurring scene with a bunch of cops sitting around swapping stories about stupid suspects.

It’s called “Pit Bull Sessions,” and it was even better than I remembered. In fact, seven years after Homicide left the air, watching this felt like receiving a transmission from some alternate universe, one where cop shows are actually interesting instead of just watchable. I’ve seen my share of Law & Orders and CSIs, and they strike me as blandly efficient narrative machines, with every cog & gear polished and in place, smoothly servicing the formula. (I know, I know, I’m not exactly breaking hot news here.) But “Pit Bull Sessions” is a beautiful mess. It’s full of offhand digressions & narrative cul-de-sacs, weird shifts of mood & sympathy, and bits both funny & sad that have nothing to do with anything – often you’re not sure what you’re supposed to be thinking or feeling. Where CSI & Order ticks along like a metronome, Homicide at its best feels syncopated & improvised. That’s entertainment.

Anyway.

Homicide also spotlighted a lot of great songs over the years. There weren’t any in “Pit Bull Sessions,” but from another episode, here’s a stoned soul purr that’s one of my faves.

• Barbara Lewis, “Hello Stranger”

There Are Those Who Believe That Minimalist Music Here Began Out There

So I’m watching Battlestar Galactica (the, cough cough, new one, which, as the ads constantly remind us, is, ahem, considered by critics The Best Show on TV), & at one point the Starbuck character is on the Colonial homeworld enjoying a brief & unusual respite from the nonstop action, so she pulls out some kind of futuristic cassette and plays it on some kind of futuristic stereo and explains to her fellow on-the-run soldier that this is music her father wrote & recorded. It’s a melancholy solo piano piece, and it’s a nice underplayed moment, and, and – and wait a minute, this is Philip Glass, Solo Piano!

It was a tad distracting.

“Metamorphosis” was originally written for a stage version of the Kafka novel; away from that context (or the Galactica context), it’s pretty but strong, low-key but not formless. It’s notable, I think, in that it asks nothing from you but gives a lot, more so the more you listen. Or maybe it doesn’t ask but quietly demands; a lot of ambient-type music just drifts away & sticks to the wallpaper, but here the simplicity of arrangement & firmness of composition actually command your attention, until without even realizing it you’ve pulled something up out of yourself & joined it to what you’re hearing.

All of which is to say that you don’t have to be separated from the Colonial fleet & hiding out from marauding Cylons to enjoy it. Nor do you have to awake one morning from uneasy dreams to find yourself transformed in your bed into a gigantic insect. (Though either scenario might of course help.)

• Philip Glass, “Metamorphosis One”