I've been double-crossed now for the very last time and now I'm finally free!

These situations of mine are cousins.

These songs are cousins, too. I can't decide which is which.

I'm giving my wife a CD of "Blood on the Tracks" for Christmas. Mistake?

***
--> Igloo, Clear Tigers
--> Idiot Wind, Bob Dylan

Takes guts to be gentle and kind

Where my head and heart and ears are at these days.

All over the place.

***
--> Temporarily Like Achilles, Bob Dylan
--> Why Can't I Make You High, Dani Siciliano
--> Waitin' for the Day, Townes Van Zandt
--> Keep Walking, Saturday Looks Good To Me
--> I'll Walk Right On, Noonday Underground
--> I Know It's Over, The Smiths

(Optimistical parenthetical—
--> Love Me Again This Summer, The Woods)

But it takes so long

Pop songs spelling out your life to a 't': It is at once reassuring and depersonalizing. Is what I am going through so typical?

Apparently, yes. Yes it is.

How do people live?

Second song is just pure defiance. A man's gotta live, after all!

***
--> Make It Together, Beachwood Sparks
--> One Way Ticket, Breakaways

(buy)

(Image: Quino Terceño)

I've got it in my brain now

My dad came for a visit this weekend. I love him, but I wonder what would happen if I introduced him to the full range of my musical interests.

Ka-boom!

***
--> The Brain Center at Whipples, The Melvins
--> Uncommonly Good, Jesus Lizard
--> Vamos, The Pixies
--> The Ruling Class, Jeff Tweedy (live, Jan. 25, 2006 in Chicago)
--> Support Our Troops, Devendra Banhart

Is it destruction that you require to feel?

I feel used, condescended to, and really just flat annoyed, to be 100% honest.

And sad. Still so sad. Sadder still, in fact.

But enough about me. How are you? Is everything OK? Can I get you anything? Fluff your pillow? Spritz your drink? If there is anything I can deliver, I trust you will please let me know. I'll be back in a moment to check on you.

***
--> Pretty (Ugly Before), Elliott Smith
--> Slow Show, The National

When the Bible is a bottle

Not much to say at this time. I am drained of every feeling. Tonight is for the meltdown.

You know what these songs are? These songs are condensed Cormac McCarthy novels. The second one, especially.

***
--> Still Be Around, Uncle Tupelo
--> Looking For A Way Out, Uncle Tupelo

Say hello to the boy who wants to be your man

I'm not there, but I would be, were my absence not so simply necessary.

This has been hard for her — so hard — but it hasn't been easy for me, either. I want to be there.

Second song. The scene. A couch. Candlelight. Arms draped. Around. Entwined. And this. Song. Not right. Somehow. I think. So tentatively. (Pretend casually.) I say. "The drummer is having way too much fun."

Says she. (Dreamily.) "Yeah. I like it."

Me: "Mmm."

***

--> Say Hello, Whistle Jacket [Buy]
--> When the Going Gets Dark, Quasi [Buy]

How young are you? How old am I?

My buddy-boy, tomorrow you are four.

It is hard to come to a satisfactory understanding of that, because whole universes of time — my high school and college and a host of my first jobs — ticked by in four years each. Yet I can feel your infant form in my arms as though it were yesterday.

I remember all too well the nights and early mornings exhaustedly pacing you around in the dark basement. I thought one of us would die, and it was my duty as a father to make sure that if that happened, it was to me. :)

You were a stinker from the start. You're difficult, self-centered, insensitive and demanding. *And* you are bright, charming, possessed of uncanny timing & poise and utterly loveable.

And so I love you. And you know it. It always impresses me how easily you give and receive of the world. You are my little prince.

Here are your birthday songs. Paul Westerberg (of the Replacements) is the type of grandeloquent smartass you would grow up to be, if only I rubbed a drop of my own sad musk behind your ears every night, to grow you olive green. You would be smart and defiant and unbreakable and still doomed.

The Spoon song was your favorite music all summer. It is the nature of things that you will have forgotten that by now, but in July and August you got me to play this by requesting what became known in our private language as "the first one."

And finally, the Loose Fur song is one of those rare seven-minute tracks I know almost by heart, because it's something I would play on those long, nightly walks that would calm you and get you back to sleep.

You little live wire.

***

--> Favorite Thing, The Replacements
--> I Will Dare, The Replacements
--> The Underdog, Spoon
--> Laminated Cat, Loose Fur

Let them say what they may

I haven't treated myself to a new *real* album from the CD store in some time -- I'm a legal online downloader, thank you very much -- so I treated myself to two new releases this week.

I've been anticipating the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss album, "Raising Sand," for weeks, in part thanks to the tracks I heard on The Current.

The first I heard was "Stick With Me Baby," and I'm sticking with it here. It set off that Everything But the Girl gong in my heart's songbook. Early impression of the album: It's pleasant enough, but if you bought Willie Nelson's "Teatro," you're in for pretty much the same flavor of treat here, with duets.

The other album I got is the perfect argument in favor of online downloading. Iron & Wine's "The Shepherd's Dog" hits one with some fairly ugly cover art, which, combined with a lyric sheet that folds out to a page roughly equivalent in size (and refolding complexity) to a state map, has the discerning listener pleading, "iTunes, please."

Luckily, the music is good.

***

--> Stick With Me Baby, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss
--> Resurrection Fern, Iron & Wine

That picture of you I couldn't find

I've never seen the show "Lost." The first commercial showed me all I wanted to see of it. The plane splitting apart, it was like a form of pornography to me. I could watch it again and again and again.

I'm so often falling in my dreams. I wake up before I land.

This song makes me sweat.

***

--> Aisle Seat 37D, Grandaddy (from Black Session live in Paris, 6-23-02)

You could make me scrawl

I'm secretly a huge fan of funk and soul music -- funny, really, because you'd have a hard time finding a tigher-assed white boy than me. Still, I just love the way the right beat and the right voice can reach down inside of you and scratch some itch you didn't even know you had. I could care less what the song's even about ... but you know what it's usually about. ;)

Such is the case with this Betty Davis track, part of her debut album recently reissued. I hear the Anti Love Song as a summons to a challenge -- a challenge I would probably meet, sadly, with a pathetic Bill Cosby-style strut.

If you liked Betty's hoarse purr on that track, here's the male equivalent from Tom Waits, in an anti-love song of a different stripe. I feel this way practically all of the time.

***

--> Anti Love Song, Betty Davis
--> Shore Leave, Tom Waits

Deserves a quiet night

This song was in my head, and then in my car stereo, a few weeks ago. Then it went away, and then the Web site Stereogum posted a compilation of covers from R.E.M.'s "Automatic for the People" and back it was in my life again.

A long wait at a children's birthday party today, and I mentioned this song to another one of the dads, and he tossed out the phrase "one of the best songs ever." Hmm. Well, it is my song of the day.

I don't believe the lyrics specifically reference fall, but the song reminds me of fall times — the things I'd probably do with friends the first few weekends at the start of the school year — and so it makes this season almost palatable. These gray, rainy days are otherwise hard for me to abide.

Finally, I'm reminded of the time, in 1992, when a girl at the Plant City, Fla., fair asked me if I was Michael Stipe. I did not know whether to be pleased or horrified.

***

--> Nightswimming, R.E.M.

First drop

Hello all......one or two of you? Three, maybe? Fluxblog this ain't, but I intend to have some fun playing DJ a while.

First post is the song for which this site is named. Jeux d'eau translates as "fountains" or "water games" or "playing water," or so I am told. I love this recording of the piece, recorded by Emilia Flegel for the Star Tribune a year or two ago.

No, this will not be a classical music blog.

I fell in love with the loose beauty of this piece the first time I heard it, and could not find a commercially available recording to match it. So I streamed it from the Strib and share it with you now. Please enjoy.

Also, an M Ward song that feels so right right now.

***

--> Jeux d'eau, composed by Maurice Ravel, performed by Emilia Flegel (University of Minnesota)
--> So Much Water, M Ward

(image: Alex Lichtenberger)