Brown Eyed Girl, Van Morrison (1967) Or where we learn that things aren't always what you expect

New Orleans, LA

I thought I knew so much about New Orleans. From Music, from films, from books. I thought it was a brooding, mysterious city alive with jazz and blues music. And it is, there are places where the traditional music of Louisiana fills the air, unfortunately on the streets of the French Quarter the air appears to be filled with covers bands and the sound of people hoiking up the $6 44oz beers. I sat in a bar having a beer, and what was the first song I heard... "Brown Eyed Fucking Girl". I love Van, but it's not even a particularly good Van song. "Listen to the Lion", "Gypsy" or "And it Stoned me" are all great songs but why in the City of Louis Armstrong and Louis Jourdan is it that the first song I heard was a 45 year old pop song by a bloke from Belfast?? The city itself is a beautiful place, colonial buildings sweep down to the Mississippi and each corner brings a new gem. But like any big city, shops offering tat fill the streets and the iconic Bourbon street is more like Magaluf or Hastings on a weekend. Shifting slightly away from here and you do find the real city and a streetcar ride to the cemetaries to the North of the city really gave us a feel for a City. A city built on a rich past, a city that has overcome numerous disasters (Both natural and manmade) but thrives still.

Yma O Hyd, Daffyd Iwan ar Ac Log (1981) Or where we learn the Welsh get everywhere

Birmingham, AL

"Despite Everything and Everyone, We're Still Here"

This is a translation of the chorus of the Song Yma O Hyd. It's a Welsh folk song written in the 1980's at the height of the struggle of recognition of the Welsh languange under Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. So why the hell am I writing about this when I'm in Birmingham, Alabama. Birmingham is the birthplace of the Civil Rights movement, The Alabama Police turned their dogs and water cannon on children as they campaigned for equality and Dr King said that Birmingham was the starting point on the March to Civil Rights. The saddest part of the story in Birmingham are the four young women who were murdered during a firebomb attack on the 16th Street Baptist Church. Four Children in a place of worship killed for the colour of their skin. Entering the Church is a sobering experience, a memorial wall to the four children and other martyrs of the Civil Rights movement dominates the entrance, and the church itself is still an active place of worship despite the attempts of many in the 1960's. For that reason alone the words of Daffyd Iwan seemed apposite. Despite the work of the firebombers, and the crowds that jeered as Black children entered newly integrated schools the Church is a still thriving community at the heart of a vibrant neighbourhood. But there's more to it than that. Dominating the back wall of the Church is a huge stained glass window of an artistically rendered Black Christ. The window was a donation from the Baptist churches of Wales, raised by contributions from Baptist churches up and down the country. My grandparents, who were proud Baptists probably tipped in a few coins themselves.. contributing to a Church in a place they would never visit. I must admit I fought back the tears as I looked up at the window, but it also made me think of the Song and as much as it's a song about the Welsh language and Welsh Culture I truly think it's an anthem for any group of people who have had to struggle for their rights, or culture or beliefs. I've seen many unbelievable sights in this country, but none will stay with me like my memories of standing in that Church

Come Around, Sarah Jarosz (2011) or Where we learn Country Music isn't what I think it is....

Front Royal, VA to Galax, VA

There's not a great deal in the town of Front Royal, Virginia. Rows of gas stations, motels and a small sleepy town. The reason the place exists is Skyline Drive. A highway twisting and turning it's way through the Blue Ridge Mountains, ascending to 4500ft above sea level and allowing views across the pine forests and towns of Northern Virginia. Eventually we left the parkway and found ourselves on the "Crooked Road". The Crooked Road is essentially a network of local roads to small towns that are the heartland of "Old Time Mountain Music" or Bluegrass. This is real small town America, everyone greets you and people do genuinely play Banjo's in the street. As we parked up in Galax, Bluegrass poured out of the shops and people picked Banjo's from the shelves in music shops and proved themselves to be virtuosos. The place is alive with music, and it's an interesting town that is proud of it's heritage and despite the fact I'm not a huge fan of Bluegrass and country I loved the music that surrounded us. Unfortunately this came to a stop when we got in the car, the local radio was dominated by Country and not the energising, super techincal music that surrounded us but the stuff you instantly think of when someone says country. Hats, songs about cars and women and the same four chords. I understood the music in Galax and Floyd, VA but this doesn't bear any resemblance to that. I rapidly hooked up the IPod and found Sarah Jarosz's Come Around. She's a ridicously gifted college student from Texas, who's already on to a second album of beautifully written Country influenced pop, her music echoes the sounds of the South that I experienced in a way that the country on the Radio didn't and I came to a realisation- I just don't understand pop music be it N-Dubz or the Country on the mainstream radio stations of the South. I need music to be a little more real, a little less of a product. Be it the Banjo players of Galax or the beautiful songs of Sarah Jarosz there is country music that does that but the Commercial stations of Tennesse and Alabama don't seem to be that interested in it!

The River, Bruce Springsteen (1980) or where we find the World really is a small place

Bethlehem, PA

"I Come from down in the Valley, Where Mr when you're young, they bring you up to do just what your daddy done"

These are the opening words of Springsteens song, and though they are about New Jersey I've always seen the paralells with my hometown in the Welsh Valleys. Like the narrator in Springsteens song, I grew up in a town dominated by heavy industry where you dreamt of escape but the vast majority followed their fathers into the mine or the steelworks. Or did, the steelworks are long gone and the only reminder is a great scar that follows the path of the river through the valley. They've now begun to build houses and a school on the site in a desperate attempt to reclaim the town from it's industrial past and give it new life. Like the narrator in the River I have a relationship with my hometown where I feel safe and secure within it but I also felt that need to escape; and looking at the work along the valley floor I feel a real optimism about the future but the old doubts remain. Bethlehem, PA could equally be the scene of Sprinsteens song. A town raised on steel (the Billy Joel song, "Allentown" is about the same region) but now suffering the post industrial issues of unemployment etc... but instead of building houses, schools or shops the huge steel mills of Bethlehem have become a Casino... yes a Casino. Selling itself as the Vegas of the North, The Sands resort fills the huge industrial spaces left by the steel industry and brings in visitors for the slots and live music. I'm not sure what I feel about Casino's but for the people of Bethlehem it offers new opportunities and a brighter future. It was a strange place, part industrial town and part tourist trap and it only really made sense to me the next day when listening to Springsteen and the River came on that Bethlehem, PA could easily have been my hometown...

All You Need is Love (1967), The Beatles or Where we learn sometimes we should trust pop songs

I've been lucky enough to spend the past weekend celebrating my friends wedding in the Catskill Mountains. I've reached an age now where I'm often going to weddings, or christenings or children's 1st birthday parties... or well you get the idea. But this wedding was different, the groom was a friend of mine from my very first days at university and a group of us had remained friends for nearly 20 years and though I'm probably too old to talk about best friends I genuinely believe that they are my best friends and remain massively important people in my life. The wedding was a million miles away from the modern wedding experience, no matching seat covers, no 25 menu choices, no Balloon arches just a group of people from around the globe drinking, eating and chatting as if we had all been friends for a million years and during the ceremony where we would have sang a hymn another friend stood up and sung "All You Need is Love" and everyone joined in, and it captured everything I was feeling. It's love that brings people from all around the world to join together, it's love that unites friends and keeps them united for many years and yes sometimes it is all you need.

Across 110th Street, Bobby Womack (1972) or where we learn not to believe everything we hear in popular song

What did I know about Harlem? Well not a lot. I'd seen American Gangster, Malcolm X and the Cotton Club. I'd read Malcolm X's biography and I knew the Bobby Womack song. What did I glean from that? Lawlessness, danger and zoot suits- but not necessecarily in that order. To be fair there was an element of truth in that,when passing through immigration control the officer took a look at the address on our customs card and quizzically asked "Is that a hotel?" He then went on tell us he'd been a police officer there 10-12 years ago and if they'd seen a tourist there in those days they assumed it was an accident and quickly drove them south of 96th st- But Harlem is changing, $700,000-$1 Million will buy you a 4 storey house where Midtown it would get you a two bedroom apartment. Some residents have turned these properties into guesthouses, beautiful period properties (Our landlord has held onto the period feel, each room decorated in artfully shabby fashion with a jazz theme)- This gentrification has brought a different tension. The rife crime has disappeared, but locals are being pushed further North by midtowners keen to acquire sizeable chunks of real estate. What is obvious though is the real sense of community, people sit on their stoop watching the world going by but also seem genuinely interested in speaking to passers by whether they know them or not. Community gardens ensure empty space is practically used and local community groups strive to ensure newcomers to the neighbourhood quickly get to know others in their community. So whilst (particularly at night) it can still feel a little edgy, when I did get across 110th St I found a real welcome.

I Am The Resurrection, Stone Roses (1989) Or where we discover that we are older than we realised

Well it didn't quite pan out like I intended. We arrived in Montreal, awaiting a 2 1/2 hour stopover. After five hours it became apparent something was wrong. Probably entirely correctly the decision was not to fly in the middle of the worst rain storm Montreal had seen in years. Hastily finding a hotel in Montreal we made another attempt this morning to arrive in New York. On the very short flight the inflight entertainment system gave us a wide variety of films, deciding that 45 minutes wasn't long enough to watch a film I scanned the music options. Settling on classic rock, I was initially disturbed to find the Stone Roses amongst the Canned Heat and Creedence options. For me Classic Rock means flannel shirts, massive guitar solos and guys name Chet. Not the Roses, I mean they were around in my formative years... and I'm not old enough to have grown up with classic rock. Or am I?? I've reached the point now where when I hear something "new" I generally can say well they sound like Magazine/Talking Heads/ etc ... etc... I'm also pretentious and irritating enough to say that too... Which also comes with age. Occasionally I do find things which sound new to me (James Blake being a prime example) but then I discover that actually "they're quite mainstream actually and about 2 years behind the scene". Well I'm about 15 years too old to worry about the scene, so yes I am probably old enough to be an original consumer of "Classic Rock". As the plane started descending over New York it reached the final track "I am the Resurrection" and as The Statue of Liberty hoved into view the lovely skipping bass line and incessant, chattering drums kicked in. It was like the opening sequence of (an admittedly cheesy) movie, but it made perfect sense. This iconic, cinematic city spread underneath me, as this iconic generation defining music washed over me. And as we swung over Queens, and the Shea Stadium (Scene of the Beatles definitive US concert), THAT PART kicked in (About 3.40 in, where Reni's drumming becomes heroic and John Squires guitar playing shows him to be the guitar hero of his decade) and the thought came to me, of course this is classic rock. 20 years + on the song still stirs me, like this city does too. Who'd have thought that the sound of Manchester would also become the sound of New York too??

Further Listening

James Blake "Limit To Your Love"
South Park "Blame Canada"

A Rhapsody in Blue, George Gershwin (1924) or Where we learn that maybe Woody Allen had a point, but not that point obviously

I'm taking a slightly different tack with this blog now, as of tomorrow I am taking a three week trip from New York to Texas and the contents of my Ipod will be a fairly constant companion- and to keep a record of my trip I'm hoping to blog each day with a song connected to the place I'm in or a song that has become part of my trip. I start in New York City, a city with a surfeit of songs. From the ridiculous (New York, New York), the inescapable (New York State of Mind) and the excellent (Rockaway Beach). They are all songs about the City, trying to capture something that is undeniably New York (It's vitality, it's opportunities etc...) but the piece of music I have chosen is OF New York. It's a product of it's teeming streets, and it's cavernous avenues. I'm not denying the fact that the song is now largely linked to New York due to it's role In Woody Allens "Manhattan" but Allen understood the piece. Gershwin was trying to capture the sound of New York in the 20's. The jazzy squeals and rolls were Gershwin looking North to Harlem and the booming Jazz scene. As much as Gershwin was the acceptable face of Jazz to 1920's US audiences he wasn't afraid to identify and pay homage to the influence of Black American music, but the odd shifts in tone see Gershwin looking East to Europe and the influence of Webern, and Shostakovich and Mahler. He took cues from the Avant-Garde European compositional movement and the piece captures that.

I love the piece because it captures New York:the influences from other parts of America and elsewhere, the busy, teeming nature of life in the city, the towering buildings (the clarinets seem to rise and rise above us). That's why Allen (the life-long Jazz fan) chose the piece, it speaks for New York in a way songs cannot, like the city itself it's possibilities are endless and as I sink into the back of a cab on my way from the airport tomorrow, there's only one song to listen to.

Further Viewing:

Manhattan (1979) Woody Allen

Chicken Bones, John Grant (2010) or where we learn that music still has the power to move

Well, it's been a while. I'm fairly busy. I genuinely am. I have a job that whilst I love it, demands a lot. An awful lot, and the time to sit down an listen to albums whilst perusing the lyric sheets are long gone. And despite suggesting I would never buy into iTunes I did, and music has become a bit more anonymous to me. I've lost the pleasure of living an album for a time (weeks in the case of some, years, or even decades), I've even stopped reading the music press religiously (I'd always read Music Press, Kerrang, Melody Maker and eventually the old man magazines- Uncut, Mojo). I still listened to music, mainly whilst thinking about 900 other things on the way to work, but not in the way I used to. People I know think I'm obsessive about music, which I probably am- but not like I used to be but as a birthday gift my colleagues presented me with an iTunes voucher. I bought a lot of songs, predominantly stuff I used to own on vinyl (Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain) but I chanced my arm on the new album by John Grant (Grant was the lead singer of the Czars, a power pop band I liked about 10 years ago). Slouching off to work, 5 30 in the morning as always I started to listen. I was caught, caught in a way I haven't been for ages. The first track I listened to, "I wanna go to Marz" was amazing, elegiac pop music. Song Writing for adults. I was already wrapped up by the time I got to Chicken Bones, a fantastic funky rant of a song. "Some Days Just Chicken Bones/You Better Fuck off Now/Better Leave me alone" goes the chorus, how could you not love that?

I did love it, and I listened to it over and over again, just like I did when I first heard Metallica "Metallica" or Jeff Buckley's "Grace" or Oasis "Definitely Maybe"- and those albums spoke to me at various points of my life. The mad rush of the teens, the confusing first steps into adult relationships or the realisation that you're at a point in your life where you're old enough to understand but young enough to know the whole world is waiting. John Grant does the same, his album Queen of Denmark is about that point when you know you;ve made some mistakes and had some triumphs and you're sure enough of yourself to not panic, not worry but get on with it and occasionally tell the world to piss off too. I think the album is great, I'm not sure I'll be living it in decades but I'll certainly remember the kick start it had on me. I've started to immerse myself again, not the press any more- books "The Rest is Noise" about 20th Century compositional music and the teeming chaotic world of music that comes with it, and new albums by Anna Calvi, The Decembrists. My life has changed, and I won't be able to lock myself away listening to an album over and over again- but some days as I sit on the train, I can transport myself again

Further Reading

Alex Ross "The Rest is Noise"