before the glorious days of high-speed internet and Napster at work (r.i.p.), and way before myspace or bittorrent ever existed, finding and listening to new music was pretty low-tech. For me it generally involved scouring amazon.com looking for listmanias based on some albums I liked and reading the user comments to get an idea of how that CD was. Listening to song snippets (snippet, what a wonderful word) was useful too, but back then amazon only had the first five songs available for listening to, and the quality wasn't that great. So often i'd have a pretty good idea of whether I'd like an artist or band I'd newly discovered, but I still had to take a leap of faith in buying and actually liking the CD.
That's exactly what happened with Red House Painters. I was looking for some slow indie rock music back in the late 90s, when I first got into that genre (aka shoegaze, slowcore...). I saw a bunch of great comments on amazon about their album Songs for a Blue Guitar, just before leaving for NYC to go spend Xmas with the folks. So when I went present shopping at the 34th St HMV, I made sure to look for it, and, even though it was priced ridiculously high ($17.99+ tax I think it was), I had a hunch it would be good. That night we left for 3-4 days of skiing in Vermont, and I was presented with my first opportunity to listen to it. The road was half-empty, the car silent, thus the mood perfect for me to enter the world of Mr Mark Kozelek. To this day I will remember the melancholy and simultaneous joy I felt at hearing such perfect music. The first track Have You Forgotten, about a man who reminisces about his life, immediately entered my personal top ten after, oh... 21 seconds. The voice, the instrumentation, the lyrics; it was all there. And the rest of the album was just as life-affirming (as much life-affirming as sad-sack music can get, anyway), varying between slow, mournful numbers (Have You Forgotten, Song For A Blue Guitar, Trailways) and more enthusiastic mid-tempo rockers (All Mixed Up, Long Distance Runaround). I'd consider the Red House Painters to be my favorite band of all-time, and that first taste of their music will definitely stick with me for a long time. I've got a couple of other personal moments in which RHP music was prominently featured, and it is my hope that many others have felt the same bond to a band's music, through a specific moment in their lives, as I have. If I were part of a Cameron Crowe movie, this is where I'd say it is how music becomes part of the fabric of our lives. Cheesy, but true
That's exactly what happened with Red House Painters. I was looking for some slow indie rock music back in the late 90s, when I first got into that genre (aka shoegaze, slowcore...). I saw a bunch of great comments on amazon about their album Songs for a Blue Guitar, just before leaving for NYC to go spend Xmas with the folks. So when I went present shopping at the 34th St HMV, I made sure to look for it, and, even though it was priced ridiculously high ($17.99+ tax I think it was), I had a hunch it would be good. That night we left for 3-4 days of skiing in Vermont, and I was presented with my first opportunity to listen to it. The road was half-empty, the car silent, thus the mood perfect for me to enter the world of Mr Mark Kozelek. To this day I will remember the melancholy and simultaneous joy I felt at hearing such perfect music. The first track Have You Forgotten, about a man who reminisces about his life, immediately entered my personal top ten after, oh... 21 seconds. The voice, the instrumentation, the lyrics; it was all there. And the rest of the album was just as life-affirming (as much life-affirming as sad-sack music can get, anyway), varying between slow, mournful numbers (Have You Forgotten, Song For A Blue Guitar, Trailways) and more enthusiastic mid-tempo rockers (All Mixed Up, Long Distance Runaround). I'd consider the Red House Painters to be my favorite band of all-time, and that first taste of their music will definitely stick with me for a long time. I've got a couple of other personal moments in which RHP music was prominently featured, and it is my hope that many others have felt the same bond to a band's music, through a specific moment in their lives, as I have. If I were part of a Cameron Crowe movie, this is where I'd say it is how music becomes part of the fabric of our lives. Cheesy, but true
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