There's a great story behind Life and How to Live It, the fourth track on R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction.
Once upon a time in the band's hometown of Athens, Georgia, there lived a reclusive old man named Brivs Mekis. He hardly ever left his house, and most of his neighbours simply referred to him as 'that Russian guy'. When Mekis died, they discovered that the inside of his house was split down the middle - he effectively had two houses in one, each individually inhabitable, each equipped with all necessary facilities and mod cons.
Welcome to the world of Courtney Barnett. Actually, 'world' may be something of an overstatement - it's really more of an island, consisting of nothing more than the armchair and the blue-and-green rug featured on the cover of her debut album:
And what does Barnett do on this island? Well, sometimes she sits and thinks; sometimes she just sits.
I didn't really 'get' dance music as a teenager. Sure, I enjoyed hearing the odd snatch of Darude's Sandstorm at parties, but my adolescence was an era during which most of my proper music listening was done alone, either on the stereo in my bedroom or via headphones while out for a walk. Dance music was party music, and so I never paid it that much attention; I preferred music that meant things, songs that made you feel things, and as far as I was concerned, the only ambition of this entire genre was to serve as background music for dancing, drinking, and shagging (none of which numbered among my favourite pastimes, at least not until I went to university).
LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver was the album that showed me the error of my assumptions. I purchased it around the end of 2007, having noticed it near the top of practically every 'Albums of the Year' list I encountered, and it instantly proved to me that dance music could mean things and make you feel things (whilst still serving as a perfectly serviceable soundtrack for dancing, drinking, and shagging). James Murphy knew his way around a beat, for sure, but he also knew how to write seriously amazing songs: funny songs with attitude like North American Scum and Time to Get Away, and beautiful, emotive songs like All My Friends and Someone Great.
Humour and emotion. Those two attributes are central to so much of my favourite music, and they're two things I never thought I'd find in HMV's 'Dance' section. For sixteen-year-old Joel, Sound of Silver was a revelation; he could feel all cool and edgy whilst singing along with Time to Get Away, he could feel wild and unhinged whilst listening to Watch the Tapes, and he could pretend he was cynical and jaded and grown-up whilst wondering what NYC had done to warrant New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down.
And, unlike so much of the stuff that spoke to me when I was in secondary school, Sound of Silver still resonates now that I'm 24. Sound of Silver is the obvious example - look at me now, looking back on what it was like to be a "real-live emotional teenager" - but there's also All My Friends, which should probably be kept in a box marked, 'Do Not Open Until You've Grown Up And, Feeling Wistfully Nostalgic, Find Yourself Trying To Recapture Your Youth':
"You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan, and the next five years trying to be with your friends again."
Sound of Silver always sounded kinda futuristic (the spacey, metallic-looking cover art probably helped in that department), but I'm realising now that it was also future-proof; no matter when you first heard it, no matter what year it was or how old you were, you'll come back to it several years later and realise that James Murphy is singing about you, now, revisiting the past and pining away for your younger days like some sad old fool with a face like a dad and a laughable stand.
The great thing about pop music is its ability to elevate simple, ordinary statements like "I love you" or "I'll see you soon" to the level of poetry, of high art, of grand drama. There's a perfect example of this on The School's new LP, Wasting Away and Wondering; the album's fifth track, Don't Worry Baby (I Don't Love You Any More), doesn't venture much further than the nine words that make up its title, and yet it somehow manages to wring gallons of tragedy and melancholy from the subject of breaking up:
A subject so well-worn and oft-explored that it shouldn't really have any emotional impact whatsoever at this point.
GD, of course, is shorthand for Grandaddy, Lytle's scruffy sci-fi alt. rock band. After disbanding in 2006, Grandaddy reunited for a few gigs in 2012, but we haven't heard any new material from them since Just Like the Fambly Cat, which was released over nine years ago.
Frankly, I wasn't expecting to ever hear another new Grandaddy song (let alone a full album), and judging by the reaction to Jason Lytle's tweet, neither was anybody else:
However, it appears that Grandaddy are indeed hard at work on a new LP, and while we'll probably have to wait a while even to find out the release date, we can at least speculate on what the follow-up to Just Like the Fambly Cat might sound like.
