For The Record- 13. April. 2024

So their eyes are growing hazy, 'cause they wanna turn it on

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Welcome to another edition of For The Record, the weekly newsletter that brings the world of music news straight to your inbox. Part essay, part good old-fashioned link drop, this is a benefit for paid supporters of On Repeat.

On Repeat is 100% reader-funded. You can back independent ad-free music journalism for less than $1 a week.

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This week, we’ve got news from Pilot, Kate Pierson, and The Pixies

All that and a LOT more, including Spoon, Built To Spill, Paul Weller, and Chechnyan legal news.

Let’s get to it!

📻📻📻

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This past week’s article on REM generated quite a bit of commentary and email replies (thank you for both!). We are a diverse community, but one of the emergent trends that emerged from the discourse was that your onramp to the band—year, environment, etc.—had an outsized influence on where you'd rank their records.

I’m not writing this to argue against that at all— in fact, I'd go the other way and say it reinforces much of what we’ve been bantering about over the last few weeks. Reminiscence bump? Sure.

Maybe I like Green ‘cause it reminds of seeing the band with my best friend. Or my ranking of Up is down to my love for the opening track ‘Airportman.’

Every record is different enough to be its own thing, but there are three relatively distinct eras:

• The IRS era

• Green-New Adventures

• Post-Bill Berry.

Zooming out, you can tell a lot about a person by the music they like. A favorite record is a tell. It reveals a lot about a person. Obviously, there is nothing inherently wrong with that (we like what we like!), but our choices say a lot about our age, where we went to school, and more. We used to discover that by flipping through someone's records, tapes, or CDs (again, a tell). Does looking at a playlist do the same? Probably, though it’s not as fun. The people who swear it’s a perfectly fine substitute? That’s a tell, too.

But what about someone that’s no longer with us? Can their musical tastes fill in the blanks for someone who never got the chance to know them? That was top of mind, too, after reading Frances Bean Cobain’s IG tribute to her dad last week and this article from Sarah O’Neal about finding her dad through his love for Fishbone.

I don’t know either of these two, but we share the common ground of losing a parent early. ‘When you grow up in the shadow of a dead parent, everyone wants to tell you about how good a person they were. From the stories I’d been told, my dad often seemed more like an angel than a person—impossibly perfect, which only made him feel further away,’ O’Neal wrote, and all I could do was nod my head and say, “Seriously!” at the screen. Funny how that works; everyone is trying to make you—or themselves—feel better, and the opposite happens.

O’Neal learned about her dad through her aunt’s sharing his love of Fishbone. I learned about mine through the records he played, then left to us a few years later on his way off this mortal coil.

I used REM as a recent example, but that’s just a part. The grand story is the medium itself. These quirky slabs of vinyl and their cardboard sleeves serve as an icebreaker, a common ground, and a nexus, connecting points people. They’re a snapshot of a person you know or might meet, and your records are a story they continue to help you tell long after you're gone to anyone lucky enough to stumble upon them.

You can learn a lot about someone from the music they like, and if I tell you that my dad’s collection over-indexed on records from the likes of George Benson, Earl Klugh, and Grover Washington, you can start coloring in the lines. Maybe even more so if I tell you we had top-end speakers in our house and that he never quite forgave one of his close friends who borrowed them for his wedding only to blow one of them out.

Knowing these things and having those records now 10 feet from me as I type makes him a little more human and a little less of a caricature. He liked jazz, and my mom liked the Beach Boys; our record collection was an anachronism. Sonically, neither seemed made for these times—even more so today, to be honest.

O’Neal wonders if she and her dad would've bonded over punk. I don’t know much, but I guarantee my father & I would not have. It would’ve been a bridge too far. Would he have liked R.E.M.’s Green when I brought it home? A band I never once heard mentioned in our house. Would he have let me go to the show I mentioned earlier? The smart money says the answer to the latter is yes.

Fishbone was out of place with everything else O’Neal knew of her father, yet finding that last piece made everything else make sense. There would be no similar unlock here—my dad liked what he liked and gave little quarter to anything else—but I’d like to think an exemption would be made for our band from Athens.

And what would he have thought about the music that took our corner of the world by storm a few years later? Music made by the likes of Francis Bean Cobain’s dad. We’ll never know, but I like to think he’d say he hated Nevermind while secretly blasting it when he thought no one else was around. Maybe he would’ve blown the other speaker.

Links are below the jump: