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Tuesday, Sep 10 2019, 6AM
Sharon Van Etten struggles with social anxiety and panic attacks, though she's figured out ways to manage them — one of them is asking a friend to talk to her. As she was working on "We Are Fine" she realized she wanted the song to be closer to the way she experiences an attack, by adding a voice. "We Are Fine" is a duet with Beirut's Zach Condon, who has social anxiety, too. When asked what she hopes people take away from this song Sharon said: "I hope that it has a really positive message about letting yourself go through something and learning how to talk about what you're going through and opening up yourself to friends — letting people help you because I think that's a sign of strength. Acknowledging your weaknesses and growing from it."
Lea Porcelain on "I Am Ok": “The song describes a time in everybody’s life that make you lose faith in yourself, in someone else or in life itself and you just need to hear from someone that one day everything will be ok again. That no matter what, with time and patience we all will be ok.”
Nick Cave speaking in an interview with The Guardian about his struggles with writing and tragedy: "“I haven’t gone near these songs in years. Some of them, I’m literally shocked to find that their meaning has changed completely to me. They suddenly mean something else entirely. Like Into My Arms or something like that. It just suddenly feels like I’m not singing it to whoever, it’s …”
He trails off, pausing to consider his point. “You know, I’m just telling you this, in a way, because one thing I don’t want is people having to come along and involve themselves in someone else’s drama. I don’t want the shows to be like that. I want the shows to be uplifting and inspiring and for people to walk away feeling better than when they came, not some sort of empathetic contagion that goes through the crowd and people walk out feeling like shit. I don’t want that. Because I’m not feeling that way. On stage I feel great. It just sort of feels beautiful and inspiring. The songs are strange things, you know. They’re patient, and wait for the meaning and then meaning changes through the years.”"
This was a highlight of Nirvana's Unplugged In New York, an acoustic album recorded for an MTV special. Nirvana recorded the Unplugged session November 18, 1993 and it aired almost a month later. The album was released November 1, 1994 in the US, seven months after Cobain's suicide. In that context, it sounded like a goodbye message from Cobain.
Vedder described this song to the Toronto Globe and Mail: "There's never a dull moment on the road – every day it's something. Maybe that's why my goal is the dull moment. That's what this song is: It's saying, 'Just stop, and be together. Don't talk now, just breathe and feel each other's presence – now that the kids are in bed.'"
Scott Hutchinson's brother Grant: "Scott had this voice when he was alive that he used to help people. Whether it was purposeful in that way or not, he changed people's lives through his art, and we have to continue that."
6:38 AM
17th spin
The surviving members of Frightened Rabbit said of Scott and this tribute album: "Scott was a vital part of bringing this album together and it’s something he was very excited about and worked hard to bring to life. ...This is a celebration of a record that connected thousands of people to Scott and connected thousands of people to each other and ten years on it is still managing to do it. Scott would probably have put in some joke here about when the album hits puberty and starts rebelling by smoking weed and getting things pierced. We’re not that funny so instead let’s just raise a glass, blow out the candles and make a wish."
Listen to this amazing performance from Death & Music 2017 here: bit.ly
The lyrics do not specifically mention heroin, but Bono has introduced the song at concerts by saying it is about heroin addiction.
Bono watched a lot of teens fall victim to the heroin epidemic in Dublin in the late '70s and early '80s. "They gave up everything they held sacred to this drug," he explained in the band bio U2 by U2. "I tried to describe that with the song, 'Bad,' what it was like to feel that rush, to feel that elation, and then to go on to the nod, the awful sleep that comes with that drug, and then scream: 'I'm wide awake, I'm wide awake, I'm not sleeping!' I can see what's going on."
In 1987 Bono explained that everybody in the group knows what the line "And you give yourself away" means: "It's about how I feel in U2 at times - exposed. I'm not going to do many interviews this year. Because there's a cost to my personal life, and a cost to the group as well."
“You keep telling yourself, ‘Everything’s gonna be OK,'” TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe belts on the anthemic Seeds track “Trouble.” The band drives home that encouraging message with the song’s new video, which finds the singer encouraging and consoling strangers he meets on the street.
“I just happen to like looking at people and wondering what’s up,” Adebimpe told Time of the clip’s inspiration. “We got some people together, some of whom we ran into on the street while we were shooting, and did that. We asked if they could quietly (or not) go to brighter or darker places inside themselves [and] let us be there with them for a little while. Everyone’s sifting through something, right?”
Here is that video: youtu.be
This was written in Autumn 1988 by the band's lead singer Tim Booth during a difficult time when he was feeling lonely and depressed. He was encouraged by a book by Doris Lessing and by Patti Smith's music, which helped him to realize he wasn't on his own feeling the way he did. The song was a thank you to them. In an interview with The Daily Record in June 2004, Booth said, "Sit Down is about me feeling so alone in my 20s and reading books by a writer called Doris Lessing which made me realize I wasn't. It was about being awake at 4am and having no-one to talk to."
"To me, listening to Elliott Smith is like listening to someone who knows my brain very well. Because of this, even though many people find his music depressing and emotionally draining, I find that it can relax me like nothing else. His songs are a warm blanket. Some friends of mine have worried that his music has prevented me from moving on. What they don’t understand is that it would have been impossible to move on without him. I’m not a neurologist, but I’d be very interested in seeing a scan of my brain while listening to Elliott Smith. I’m certain the brain waves would be doing all kinds of groovy things." From Canadian mental health blog, Mind Your Mind. mindyourmind.ca
Speaking about "The Day I Tried To Live" with Entertainment Weekly, Cornell said: "The attitude I was trying to convey was that thing that I think everyone goes through where you wake up in the morning and you just don't know how you are going to get through the day, and you kind of just talk yourself into it. You may go through different moments of hopelessness and wanting to give up, or wanting to just get back into bed and say fuck it, but you convince yourself you're going to do it again. And maybe this is the last time you're going to do it, but it's once more around."
Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard: "When that geography changes, it's as if you're not only coming to terms with the passage of time, but it's as if you're losing those people and that time in your life all over again"
The late Purple Mountains frontman, David Berman on "I Loved Being My Mother's Son": "Oh, well, I guess this was the first song that I wrote [for this album]. It was self-soothing. It was immediately after my mom's death, when I was just hanging out in her little house. Something about playing the guitar — the vibration of the wood against your chest… that's really when I picked up the guitar again. I think it was like meditation, but it was also like massage. I played these simple chords and I knew it was about my mom but it didn't have any words. I knew from the uplift and the sweetness in it."
STEREOGUM: What is the sample at the end of “Go Home”?
BAKER: We were recording that track, and the end is the piano arrangement from this hymn called “In Christ Alone.” It holds a lot of memories for me — being young in church, and the lyrics hold a lot of meaning when you analyze them. It’s nostalgic, and as I was recording the end of that we had these two directional mics set up while I played piano into the pre-amp. And then I hear this like, crackly TV noise and the dialogue happening through my headphones. Well, it wasn’t dialogue but the guy was talking. I just finish off the thing, the arrangement and everyone tells me that the pre-amp was picking up church radio, as I was playing. It was like a Twilight Zone thing, and I decided to leave it in there because it was such a cool, organic happening.
Scott Hutchinson on "Not Miserable": "I became more positive in my mind. You know, personal relationships changed; life became better. Just the simple stuff. You know, I settled into a home. Previous to this, I was essentially - when I came off tour I was basically homeless, you know, sleeping on people's couches and at my brother's flat and stuff. And it was just the more settled I became the less melancholy the stressed thing around my head. Things were good.
And it was a challenge to me. I didn't want miserableness to become our thing. It was a challenge to me to write a song about being positive, about being happy. And, you know, maybe everything that I write is lined with a slight dark edge and I can't help that. But, yeah, there are more moments of joy in this album for sure."
There are many unpleasant realities that can interfere with our contentment. For instance, it's hard to enjoy a meal if you're thinking about people who are starving in impoverished countries. We can be happy and oblivious, or we can try to make things right at the price of our conveniences.
"It's that kind of inner dialogue you get when you want to change the world," Exene Cervenka of X said in a Songfacts interview. "But if you let it get to you too much, then it affects you on every level."
Robert Smith on his success: “I was coping in a slightly disturbed way with what was going on,” he says. “I felt it was at odds with what I’d started out doing. I couldn’t understand how we could be so successful and still be honest. With hindsight we were, but I couldn’t see it.” So when the Cure were elbowed aside by Britpop, he was relieved. “I felt more comfortable being slightly outside of what was going on, because that’s how I’d felt from the very start. Had we kept pushing it, I don’t think I’d have survived it – not in one piece, anyway.”
The person you’ve lost continues to live on through you and the stories you tell and the memories you share.
When asked about his decision not to tour anymore or maintain a public persona, Mark Hollis said: “I choose for my family. Maybe others are capable of doing it, but I can’t go on tour and be a good dad at the same time.” He later retired from the music industry, and was little heard from publicly.
Hollis’ influence has often been referenced by musicians, including Elbow’s Guy Garvey. “Mark Hollis started from punk and by his own admission he had no musical ability,” he told Mojo. “To go from only having the urge, to writing some of the most timeless, intricate and original music ever is as impressive as the moon landings for me.”
In 1994, Chris Cornell spoke to Melody Maker about creating the song and the meaning behind it. "'Fell On Black Days' was like this ongoing fear I've had for years. It took me a long time to write that song. We've tried to do three different versions with that title, and none of them have ever worked," he said. "It's a feeling that everyone gets. You're happy with your life, everything's going well, things are exciting - when all of a sudden you realize you're unhappy in the extreme, to the point of being really, really scared. There's no particular event you can pin the feeling down to, it's just that you realize one day that everything in your life is f--ked!"
Sesame Street did a parody of this called "With A Little Yelp From My Friends." It was performed by "Moe Cocker," a Cocker Spaniel. This version of the song is about a dog who yelps for help when he can't find his bone or scratch a flea. Sometimes you just need a scratch. www.youtube.com
Neko Case in an interview about another album of hers, "The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You": "I was going through really a hard time and pretty depressed," she says. "Just grieving. Lost a lot of family and stuff. It hadn't happened all at once, but I had never really slowed down to grieve. And I kind of took it in a farming way, you know, like 'They're dead. Gotta keep going.'" She says this with a shrug in her voice. "But you really do as a human being have to slow down and take it in and look it in the face. And I had avoided it for so long that my body basically said, 'Guess what? I'm just going to make you super-depressed now, because you have to deal with this stuff and transmute it or whatever you're supposed to do with it. Or you're gonna be really fucked up.'"
There was no sudden descent, more a steady slide to the bottom. "Just a gradual, 'I can't shake this, I can't shake this … what is this?'" she explains. "Just super-unhappy and acting out here and there, just not being myself." But it was the mundanity that struck her more than anything. "Depression, there's no grand excellence to it," she says. "In my experience it was just almost the gulaggy boringness of it that'll kill you. You're just in this murk. And you're with other humans, but you lose all your human skills and it's just like you're in this plastic bag and you can't quite connect with people. You lose your ability to transmit electricity or something, and to receive it. It's just like this 'bzzzuh'." She makes a feeble, disconnected sound. "It isn't sparking."
Julien Baker on the story in "Happy to Be Here": "I was on my way to therapy on April Fool’s Day and thought, If I don’t laugh about this in my car right now, I’m gonna cry. It’s gonna be sad. I have to find this funny, because it is not a joke. What if I got there and they were like, “April Fool’s! You’re normal. Go home and be happy.”
But “Happy to Be Here” is more about my experience deciding to be proactive in recovery. Once I started trying to do that work, actually going to therapy and participating in a community of people who were also in recovery, I learned that the process is never done. There’s no point where somebody puts a big red stamp on your manila folder and says, “You are normal now.” No one is."
Thom Yorke insisted that he didn't really write this, that it wrote itself. He claimed the band was merely its messengers, for something he called "our purest, saddest song."
At the end of the song, he finds hope and decides he will not accept defeat.
Brandi Carlisle: "Parenting is and will be my greatest accomplishment. And yet, the dichotomy of motherhood continues to catch me off guard, too. Sometimes I look at my children and love them so much it physically hurts. Then there times when my children drain all of the energy and patience from body to the point of not knowing who I am anymore. I can’t even love myself in those moments, and in the middle of pieces I don’t like, I still love being the mother of my three kids."
If you or someone you know is in crisis
and needs immediate help, call the toll-free, 24-hour hotline of the
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255). Find a list of additional resources here: www.kexp.org