Post #799!
Something happened to me. It’s happened before: in the winter of 2018 I was back in new jersey after a particularly cruel summer in which I had relapsed after being sober and fairly well for around 4 years , I was deeply depressed. One day I was doing my thing that I did every day: drinking black coffee in the retro video game store (in Asbury Park) where I would loiter and I heard a Rolling Stones song coming from the record store next to it. I think I wrote about it before, let me see (I don’t much like to repeat myself).
“It must’ve been late November, a few months into the depression when the record store next to the video game store played a Rolling Stones song that i had never heard, and it was seriously like hearing music for the first time after being deaf, it was beautiful and i knew at that moment i’d be ok. my mental and emotional reaction to music is always the indicator that I’m going to come out of the darkness again.”
So, on Tuesday,I was going to Rivington street to get on some medication for, you know…the moods. I didn’t, but they tell me next week I will, so I’ll back next week. It’s pretty far, it takes around an hour to get over there on the A-train. I’m still obsessed with Fred…Again’s music, especially the DJ sets that I find on SoundCloud. I found one that seems to be from when he was turning from a producer of pop and hip-hop records to the EDM megastar he became, and is now.
I was thinking about how I used to listen to any Phish tape I could find, and some of them were from the late 80’s and early 90’s, before they became the arena rock, jam band staple that I think may have sold out Madison Square Garden more time than anyone else (fuck you Billy Joel) . In those tapes, a lot of the elements of what would make Phish great were starting to gel. I even had a tape of them playing at someones wedding around 1990, ten years before they’d host the largest ticketed concert in the world for Y2K at the Big Cypress Seminole reservation down in florida.
My favorite rendition of “Harry Hood” is probably still the one from their show on their employee’s horse farm in 1991, by the way, if we’re talking Phish, which I don’t do as much as I did in my 20’s.
These pre-pandemic Fred sets remind me of the early Phish tapes, because some of the songs and ideas are starting to take root, and it’s interesting to me to hear ideas develop. The way that works changed the way I look at making music, because it’s not like I ever have to press something to like, a CD and go “oh this song is done now”. I can go dig up something and rework it as many times as I’d like to…I did it with a song in the fall, and it sounds way better.
At about 33 minutes into this Fred set, there is an English hip-hop track by a guy named Headie one that I had never heard of before (produced by Fred…Again.) Man, the people at the Lefferts train station saw me getting the fuck down, and I repeated the 4 or so minutes of that over and over until I got to Manhattan, where I saw the doctor, visited some folks I hadn’t seen in a while, and got my favorite sandwich in all of my (nearly) 5 years here in New York (Chopped Cheese with everything, 3rd and Ave D).
Man, I was feeling this track about as hard as I ever feel any track.. I’m telling you.
https://on.soundcloud.com/LzB2BYw9C6TCZxw16
I found the track list so I can put the single here, and it may be kind of sappy and corny, but I don’t care, man…my head cracked open. I literally couldn’t hear music for a while prior to this, it wouldn’t elicit any response from my brain, which is how I know I’m in the depression rubbish.
https://open.spotify.com/track/3sp4CJbR97KYUnyxup7Zzn?si=8KuTIwdwQxW7HAeaDjRq9w
I’m actually sappy and corny, as a person…so it’s cool.
Oh yeah speaking of music, i’m compiling a sample library and i’m using this cool thing that stems songs apart by instrument for free:
