I’m going to be interviewing Vinnie Caruana (I Am The Avalanche, The Movielife) this coming Friday for Brooklyn Underground and am looking for some fan questions. Please let me know if you have anything you’d like me to ask him!
24. brooklyn vs the open road vs a childhood home. an amalgamation of words, pictures, thoughts, ideas, music, stories and insomnia that may or may not be my own. i am a freelance photojournalist (and production assistant) and mostly shoot things of the musical persuasion. a home? i'd like to be somewhere different every day of the week. the lines between nerd & cool are forever being blurred in my life. it's a weird place to be in. hard work doesn't scare me, hate does. keep that PMA forever and always.
Posts tagged music.
My Top Ten Albums of 2011 (informal version)
So many good albums came out this year, but these are my final choices for the top of the pack. Stay tuned for my expanded top thirty albums list and mini-reviews.
10. Jack’s Mannequin - People & Things
09. Aficionado - Aficionado
08. City & Colour - Little Hell
07. tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l
06. Bayside - Killing Time
05. Thursday - No Devolucion
04. La Dispute - Wildlife
03. I Am The Avalanche - Avalanche United
02. Astronautalis - This Is Our Science
01. Frank Turner - England Keep My Bones
we sing along, but the notes are wrong…
so many books that i didn’t read,
but there’s so much air i chose to breathe.
how about the colors that i’ve seen?
so i’ll leave these pages in the trees.
i don’t sit alone, i pick up my phone.
one day we’ll say all that we had.
the beaten path is beaten fast.
i’m practicing hooks and jabs.
i traced a few lines, misread all the signs, slipped many times.
my blood’s still red and i’m just fine.
today, leave good for great.
Matt and Kim — “Good for Great” (Sidewalks, 2010)
the time it takes to let go.
The first Thursday song I ever heard was “Understanding In a Car Crash.” It may have been from a Victory sampler, or mp3.com, or MuchMusic, or however we were getting our music back then. I was 13 going on 14, and I really didn’t know anything about music except that what I had been listening to (jam bands, oldies) hadn’t been working for me. I had been getting into pop punk for a couple years by then, but this was almost too different - so raw with emotion and honest. Haunting, frantic vocals. I didn’t feel mature enough to know what those emotions were, so I actually put the band on a back burner. Later that year, in an unfamiliar, strangely surreal post-9/11 world, I had clearly aged in ways I could not explain. I listened to Full Collapse late one night, after my parents had gone to bed, with my TV on mute to CNN. In those months after 9/11 the news cycled 24 hours a day, there was no escaping that imagery. And I am not at all embarrassed to say that I cried every last ounce of tears out of my body that night.
Gillian Welch — “The Way It Goes” (The Harrow & The Harvest, 2011)
When you lay me down to rest, leave a pistol in my vest.
That’s the way that it goes, that’s the way.
Do you miss my gentle touch, did I hurt you very much?
That’s the way that it goes, that’s the way.
Haven’t gone to Youtube to LIKE & COMMENT on my Vans Warped Tour Pit Reporter application video? Please do so! I appreciate the support.
He hung up the phone, you listened to the dial tone
And you stared at the stove until the beeping started
You read some love letters some threats and some you couldn’t tell apart
That you keep under the bed at the apartment
And then you did what he asked you to do you opened your heart up
Right there on a napkin on the carpet and part of it was frostbit
But you’ve always been a smart kid
Could still distinguish, the blood black as pitch
Valves had gone stiff, veins and scar tissue
Four chambers just a standard issue
But none had room, forgiveness is huge
And you had two full of ice water
One fulla salt, one packed with coal
Eager and ready and willing to find fault
Dessa — “Mineshaft II” (A Badly Broken Code, 2010)
Having a nostalgic moment thinking about 2001-2004. What epic years those were. Fucking Drive-Thru Invasion tours! Victory Records! Thrift store baseball tees! LiveJournal! Track jackets! Pin packs! No matter how good a show gets to be now, it doesn’t feel the same as it did back then. I don’t think it was just because I was in high school and you tend to magnify events from high school as these huge things when they aren’t necessarily that big of deal. It was just a special moment in time, before Twitter, before everyone had Facebook, before all this crap that distracts us from actually enjoying music BUT we benefited from the technology we had to discover small bands that we’d never heard of, and connect with other people who felt the same as we did about music & life. Now everything is too big, too much. And nobody reacts. People don’t seem to derive that same kind of energy from seeing live music that they used to. I’m never going to be one of those people that stand absolutely still at a show. If the music isn’t getting you to move, something is wrong. It used to be about the band’s inability to connect with their audience. Now it’s about the individual and their own apathy.