When I heard Brain Stew for the very first time I became obsessed with Green Day, followed by the terrible Limp Bizkit in fifth grade. After this my musical tastes began to calm down. Back then I didn’t know what drew me to Johnny Cash, but now that I’m older and supposedly wiser I think I have figured it out. I’ve always been drawn to a good story and Johnny is one of the best story tellers I’ve ever heard. His songs are more like short stories accompanied by music.
The very first song I ever heard by him was, “The Man Comes Around”. It had just the right amount of edginess to draw me in. It was dark, it was intense and it wasn’t like anything I had ever heard before. The fact that “Hurt” was the follow up song only served to suck me in even more. I couldn’t help but get hooked—it was like this decision was not up to me. I listened to Johnny Cash for the better part of four years and when I say “listened” I mean I didn’t listen to anything else. I had a Cash cd in the car, I had a Cash cd wake me up in the mornings, and I had a Cash song kicking around in my head at all times. I could sing entire albums, with the songs in chronological order and all of the correct pauses for guitar solos and I could do this without the music playing.
I was absolutely in love with Mr. Cash’s music and because of that I have many fond memories of driving too fast and screeching Folsom Prison Blues with my friends at the top of our lungs. But like all good things Mr. Cash’s reign as my undisputed musical champion came to an end.
Shortly after I entered college I discovered Led Zeppelin.
They had all of the things that Johnny’s music was missing. Lyrically they weren’t as strong, but musically it was no contest. Led Zeppelin’s music was the most complex thing my little ears had ever heard. I was mesmerized by Jimmy Paige’s guitar playing and the way that it meshed perfectly with Plant’s hypnotizing vocal work. They literally blew my mind. Johnny’s Tennessee Three could not hold a candle to Zeppelin’s instrumental prowess. Cash had even admitted that in the early days none of them were good players so they built a sound around their limitations, so I’m not saying anything controversial here. It’s just simple fact: Johnny built a band around limitations and Zeppelin built a band around their seemingly boundless limitations.
Led Zeppelin had one of the shortest reigns of any of my musical obsessions, as they were replaced after only one year. My friends began to make fun of my musical choices because I only listened to “old people music”. I distinctly remember one of my friends saying, “You listen to stuff that our parents listened to. Don’t you listen to anything modern?” Now normally my friend’s musical comments wouldn’t faze me, but it was true. I was missing out on the music of my own time by getting stuck in musical history’s past.
I started to listen to modern music.
At first I decided to try listening to Death Cab For Cutie. They were good and they were unlike anything I had listened to before. They were a very calm, light-rock band. I listened to their album, “Plans” over and over again. I knew it inside and out, but I found it to be lacking the hard driving sounds that Led Zeppelin had introduced me to, so I quickly grew tired of them.
It was then that I entered what is arguably the most depraved time of my musical tastes.
Earlier in my life I had received a copy of My Chemical Romance’s “Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge”, but had quickly dismissed it as “scary”, so I never gave it a real chance. But now was the right time to give them another chance. I was tired of Death Cab’s soft rock sissy crap and I was longing for something harder. My Chemical Romance fit the bill. They harkened back to my first love—musically speaking—punk rock, but they were edgier than that too. Their sound was dark and they had a sort of sleek comic book aesthetic. Their lyrics told epic, sweeping, violent, and strange stories and I was almost instantly sucked in. Listening to My Chemical Romance is like listening to a comic book or a Quentin Tarantino movie. It’s a strange experience and there isn’t much on earth that is like them.
I became obsessed—and we’re talking Johnny Cash obsessed—which was a good feeling for me. I hadn’t been this obsessed with a band since him and I didn’t really think that I would be again, but oh how I was wrong. I listened to nothing but My Chemical Romance for two years. Which is quite a feat considering that they only have three albums out and I only had Three Cheers for the first couple of months that I listened to them.
My obsession with MCR was highly annoying to everyone around me, but I had no idea. Every time anybody rode with me whenever we went for car rides I forced them to listen to MCR and pretty soon nobody wanted me to drive. I was proud that I listened to them and I would tell anyone who was willing to listen all about them, but what I didn’t know was the horrible stereotypes that went along with telling someone you listen to them.
I didn’t know that people generally considered them to be a no talent emo band and I didn’t know that I should be embarrassed to listen to them. Looking back I’m glad that I didn’t know that stuff and I just followed what I thought was good music. It added a sort of innocence to the fact that I liked them and I really like the fact that once I did find out all that stuff I didn’t let musical snobbery stop me from liking them.
I had never listened to Pink Floyd, The Flaming Lips, Radiohead or The Shins. After listening to these bands MCR began to fade and I began to see what everyone had been saying about them all along. They were just a pop-punk band and most of the sounds they had on The Black Parade had been stolen from the likes of Queen and Pink Floyd.
But some good things did come from listening to them. I was introduced to the idea of a concept album. I had never heard of a band that had an album that told a story and I liked it. They also taught me to love an album in its entirety and to not just pick songs that I like off of an album. Besides that I learned the difference between catchy music and truly good music.
There was a world of difference between Pink Floyd and My Chemical Romance. They still had ideas behind their albums and they still told stories, but they were more complicated musically. I had also stopped being angry all the time, so I felt like it was time to put MCR to rest. Shortly before I started listening to them the pastor of my church that I had attended for five years stole several thousand dollars from the congregation.
I just couldn’t understand how a supposed, “man of God” could do such terrible things and I didn’t know where to turn because the church couldn’t be trusted anymore. I turned to music to try and help me make sense of the world, more specifically, I turned to MCR. They helped me work out some bitter feelings that I was harboring towards my church and the people in the church that had betrayed my trust and for that I am very grateful, but I just felt like it was time to move on.
I thought that my next musical obsession was going to be The Flaming Lips, but I was wrong. I remember when first hearing them I thought, “They are so weird and I like it.” The first album I heard by them was Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. It seemed to tell a loose story about a Japanese girl who battled robots, which I thought was really cool because I grew up loving G-Gundam. They introduced me to weird electronic music which I had never heard before. The Lips quickly became one of my favorite bands and served as a bridge into Radiohead territory.
Now Radiohead is a truly unique band. Once again I thought that this was going to be my new music obsession, but for the second time I was wrong. Just about everybody who gets into Radiohead hears “Creep” first and I was no exception. I became an instant fan after one listen to that song and I assumed that all of their songs were going to sound like that. I was very wrong, but that wasn’t a bad thing. I moved on from Pablo Honey to Ok Computer. I really liked how they were comparing the whole human existence to a sort of mechanical and distant feeling.
Their music only seemed to get more distant and less human as time went on. Their albums seemed so far away until I came upon Hail To the Thief which brought them back to their rock roots. In Rainbows brought them even further back to their human roots and all but eliminated their distinct robotic sound. This leads me to my current musical obsession. This one came so far out of left field that I didn’t even see it coming.
The Avett Brothers.
The first song I ever heard from them was “The Ballad of Love and Hate”. My then girlfriend put it on a mix cd for me before we started dating. She gave it to me because I drove 4 hours to come visit her and she wanted me to have something to listen to on the way back.
I didn’t think much about them until I went to a concert on September 26th. They gave either the first or the second best concert (It’s a toss-up between them and Mutemath) I have ever been to in my entire life. Their concert was so much fun, because it’s just a bunch of mountain men dancing around on stage. I feel like this is a fairly accurate description. There was nothing between us and the stage and that only added to how great this concert was. The brothers have amazing showmanship and there just really isn’t anything else on earth like an Avett concert. They even gave an encore after we chanted for them to come back on stage for the better part of ten minutes. Afterwards they thanked us profusely and left the stage. They had probably broken upwards of twenty strings that night and much to our delight we were able to snag one of them and a finger pick that flew off of Scott’s hand during the show. After that I gained copies of several of their albums and I am listening to them right now.
They had that human quality that my current musical choices were lacking. I sorely missed the simple story telling that Mr. Cash had introduced me to. These men were not robots and they were not apologizing for their humanity. Growing up I had always idolized men that had grown cold and mechanical and wanted to be more like them—emotionless—so yes I was the kid who grew up idolizing Darth Vader. But as I have gotten older I have begun to realize that this was just a trick so that I would never become too attached to anything or anyone. That is what I like about this band. They tell stories and they are not ashamed to talk plainly about the things they have been through. Once again I feel like I am listening to a story that just happens to be accompanied by music, but this is not a bad thing. I think that getting away from Radiohead will be a good thing for me, since most of their music is almost robotic in nature. In short it just feels good to return to my roots and listen to human beings telling stories about love, loss, and life in general.