For The Record- 23. November. 2024

Maybe there's nothin' happenin' there. Maybe there's somethin' in the air.

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, For The Record is a benefit for paid supporters of On Repeat. This project is 100% reader-funded. You can back independent ad-free music journalism for less than $1 a week.

Thanks!

KA~

I first shared this story around this time last year. I’m sharing it again because the underlying message feels particularly relevant this year. Many of you have shared that you’re not sure how you’ll handle this year’s holiday. FTR is usually paywalled, but not this week. I hope this shows you that ties don't always bind, and family is what you make it— in whatever form you see fit.

As always, thanks for being here.

KA—

By the time we meet again, Thanksgiving will have passed, and retail advertising will have hit critical mass. This could quickly devolve into a lament about the passing of time or a rant about staging holiday merchandise too early (looking at you, Costco!), but it won’t…at least not yet.

The music world has followed suit, with a few Album of the Year already coming out. It’s wild. I know December is traditionally a slow month for new stuff, but writers still have plenty of time to find something they may have missed!

At any rate, I want to talk about Thanksgiving itself, or rather, how I spend it and why. I try to observe two traditions on T-day. The first (and relevant to On Repeat) will be posted on Thursday. If this is your first Thanksgiving as part of this community, I hope you enjoy it. If not, you probably know what’s coming, but I still hope you enjoy it. Maybe this is a tradition we share? If it is, lemme know when it goes live.

And it’ll go live at the same time as everything else does: 0702 AM Central Time. The reason for the oddly specific time is twofold: one, so I never forget to post, and second, so I can say it goes out “just after seven” (or 8, or…).

I will also be at work when it hits your inbox and having lunch with my coworkers.

This invariably leads to two questions from readers: First, wtf are you doing eating lunch at 7 a.m.? Second, why are you at work?

The first answer is easy. We start at 4 AM, and there is a break in flight activity that makes 7-730 or 730-8 the perfect time. In this case, it’s really no different than any other day. The second question is a little trickier to answer. I get asked every year, and the answer usually ranges from pithy to long-winded. Turns out I’m good at both.

At the risk of over-indexing on the latter, here’s the story:

Everything in aviation is seniority-based. Anyone who says otherwise is either very new and hasn’t learned yet, very old and has forgotten, or works in headquarters. It dictates everything from what shift you work to your days off—even the work area you can hold.

In the late 90s, when I was hired, our airline still used what’s called “classification seniority.” I won’t go too far into the weeds, but the earlier you could establish a date, the better. Like a dimictic lake, our network would flip with the season, and a huge shift in capacity would be allocated to southern stations in places like Phoenix, New Orleans, and Florida. Heading south in the winter is a rite of passage for midwesterners, and doing a temp in one of those cities became a rite of passage for us. It was also a way for anyone not in a hub to establish seniority in a new/different classification. If you were lucky, you spent the winter somewhere like Miami or Fort Myers. If you weren’t, it was off to Detroit or Minneapolis to help all those people chase the sun.

I landed somewhere in the middle and was awarded an assignment to Memphis.

I was 23 years old and leaving Portland for the first time. It would also be my first holiday season away from home. I loaded my car with what I thought I’d need (you always forget something, right?) and happily agreed to give my former coworker Glenn a ride to Clear Lake, California. I was chasing full-time work. He was chasing a girl. Dropping him off, I asked through the passenger window how he would get home. He smiled and said he’d figure it out before disappearing into another car. That was the last time I ever saw him. I hope it worked out. I want to think it did.

I cycled through the entire CD Logic binder I’d brought; I’d forgotten a lot of my trip would take me through the desert without much radio. Rookie mistake. I had thought I’d roll into town serenaded by Memphis Blues, but instead crossed the bridge from West Memphis (0/10 do not recommend) listening to ‘You Get What You Give’ by The New Radicals (11/10).

My time in Memphis was largely uneventful. I liked my roommate, an older South Carolina guy who exposed me to the world of deep frying everything- including the Thanksgiving turkey. On an unrelated note, this was also the year I became a vegetarian.

And I loved the gate crew I landed on. We worked noon to 8, and part of our assignment was to work a daily KLM flight from Amsterdam— an assignment that, by rights, I shouldn’t have been able to touch but was awarded because people thought the workload was too much. It wasn’t. At any rate, Thanksgiving rolled around, and I would spend it at the airport. This was never my favorite holiday (for a whole host of reasons), but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bummed out at the thought of being at work.

KLM flew MD-11s to Memphis. This specific airframe (PH-KCD, aka the “Florence Nightingale,” was a frequent guest. Photo: Pinterest.

Someone posted a flyer announcing a potluck with a signup sheet in our ready room. Dear reader, I brought…Fritos (I know! I know!). In my defense, I didn’t cook and was 23. At any rate, the day came, and we all met in the room where the gate agents filed their paperwork and other tasks. Just a bunch of strangers- some natives, some not, whose only common ground was the uniform they wore and where their paycheck came from.

And I gotta tell you, to this day, it was the best Thanksgiving I ever had. The food was fine (KLM holds people to a ridiculously high standard, but they go all out on holidays), but the company was amazing. It had taken me until then to realize that family is what you make it. It doesn’t always have to be those you share a last name with or happen to share a roof with. It doesn’t have to be your favorite cousin, and it definitely doesn’t have to be your least favorite uncle. It can be whatever you want.

This Thursday will be the 27th Thanksgiving I’ve spent at the carrier, and I’ve never not felt that same way while on the clock. Some years, the food is great; some years, it’s not (petty managers, budget cuts). One year, it was a sandwich in a plastic container (COVID). That one was delicious, btw. And even in the middle of a global pandemic, we were all still standing. Even with plexiglass separating us, we had much to be thankful for.

Once in a while, people will post pictures from around the system where they’ve used a belt loader as a buffet table. Someday, my station will level up and do that. I hope.

And I hope that wherever you are, in whatever form it takes, you have a great day surrounded by people you love and a shared common ground.

In other words, family—in whatever form that might take.

Various Artists:

Listen: “Lies Remaining” by

Miter

is fantastic. RIYL new wave, post-punk, and grey fall days. Give it a spin. When you’re done, check out the rest of his work!

Binnie Klein is a psychotherapist, a DJ at WPKN in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and a musician who performs as In These Trees; Chris Frantz is the drummer for Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club, and a fellow DJ at WPKN. In These Trees has a new collaborative project with the Australian singer/songwriter Tartie, and they just released their first record together, The Quiver. To celebrate, Klein and Frantz got on a Zoom call to catch up about it, and much more. Check out their chat here.

It’s that time of year again! Vote for your favorite songs/records in Pitchfork’s annual survey. (Keep an eye out for the yearly On Repeat Records survey as well!)

Wanna play drums in Primus? Here’s your shot!

“I enjoy it, obviously, or I’d do something way more lucrative,” he says. “But especially when you put in a lot of work down here, it becomes a grind, and it becomes a job. Even though I do love it, for me, it’s always been: Ted is a plumber, and Ted goes and does plumbing for work, and I’m a musician, and I come here, and I play a four-hour shift, and that’s my work.”

Making records (and rent) with Nashville’s working country musicians.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This year, I’m thankful that for all of the chaos in the world, GBV is still churning out records—just as nature intended.

Watch: The Magnetic Fields stopped by the Tiny Desk.

Meet the artist that’s gone 0-for-32 at the CMAs.

Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. I hope someone writes a song about him and that it cleans up at the next award ceremony.

The Violent Femmes are hitting the road again,

Just in time for the holidays, here’s a shoegaze version of your favorite Christmas classic!

Longer read:

In person, I actually found T-Boz quiet and guarded (on that day, in any case), Chilli charmingly prim and proper (she’d carefully say ‘Oh my gosh’ instead of ‘Oh my god’, and “BS” instead of ‘bullshit’), and Left Eye every bit as hyper-sassy and sparky as you’d have expected. Like I say, ‘distinguishable personality’ to burn.

But what drew me to TLC, and inspired me to write about them, wasn’t the fire, or even the personalities. It was the record, a hip hop Soul opus which was – as I loudly proclaimed to anyone who would listen – a masterpiece. But, if that were the case, whither the third element of Auteur Theory, ‘Interior Meaning’? A record with so many contributors shouldn’t, by rights, have any kind of cohesive mood or theme. But CrazySexyCool has two main threads. Firstly, it is steeped, as much as any record by white guys with guitars from the same era, in a certain Gen-X malaise and Pre-Millennium dread. Secondly, it expresses a confident sex-positive feminism throughout.

On it’s 30th anniversary, Simon Price takes a look at TLC’s CrazySexyCool

AV CLUB:

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Have a great weekend. Drive south!

Kevin—

P.S. Have you seen this yet? Some of your favorite music writers got together and wrote about your favorite records. Check it out!

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