It’s a new year. Time for a new direction for this blog. I’m going to try doing weekly posts, and they’re going to have a format. They’ll open with some random thoughts, like what you’re reading now. Well, these ones aren’t random, I guess. Are any thoughts random? Who cares. Then some structured segments will follow. Baseball Corner and What Am I Listening To? are the two I’ve come up with as of now. I think they’re both sort of self explanatory, and both of them will be featured in this very post, in case they aren’t.
I like routine. I’m a routine oriented person, and it’s about time to admit that I actually need external pressures to get myself to do the things I like and want to do. It’s ridiculous how bad I am at motivating myself to write for somebody who ostensibly likes writing. I’m hoping that this weekly thing will get me into a better rhythm with it. It’ll be like when I was using Substack to write short fiction, except better because it isn’t on Substack, and it isn’t hasty, slapdash short fiction.
Longer miscellaneous essays will not go away. I’m actually working on two of them right now. But as close observers of this blog, all two of you, have probably noticed, I’m not exactly regular with those. These little musings about music, Baseball, and whatever else will be like an amuse bouche ahead of delicious main courses such as going insane thinking about the bible or trying to review a movie that hasn’t come out yet.
So it’s an exciting new era for willscoolblog dot neocities dot org. The next step will be learning how to make the website not look like garbage. That might never actually happen, though.
That’s right, I’m making you read the Baseball stuff before the music stuff. But also I’m not your boss. Scroll past this if you want. That’s one of the perks of this sort of structure, you can just skip the bits you don’t wanna read.
Now, there isn’t any Baseball happening right now that I’m actually watching. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have anything to talk about. Until the MLB season starts I’m going to use this segment to muse on reasons I like Baseball, catch up on some Baseball movies, and maybe try my hand at talking about some Baseball news. When the season does start I’m planning on following a different AL and NL team each week, then using this segment to give my impressions of the two teams and their cultures. The name "Baseball Corner" will stick around until I think of something better.
Today I’m thinking about Baseball as social lubricant. This applies to any sport that’s popular wherever you live. Recently I was at my uncle’s holiday party, which was full of family friends I pretty much only ever see at this uncle’s holiday parties. Generally I struggle to talk to most of these people. This year I had a new advantage in having several months prior become a pretty dedicated Blue Jays fan and general Baseball enjoyer. The room, full of sports people, lit up when the conversation turned to the Blue Jays, and for once I was actually able to light up with it. It was nuts.
I wasn’t into sports growing up, such that now as an adult I’m kind of astounded by how powerful a conversational tool they are. Any given sport is sort of a monoculture, in a way that other areas of interest aren’t. Two people who are really into rock music might not actually have anything to talk about. One might listen exclusively to 60s psychedelia, the other 90s grunge. Ditto for say, role playing games. Even two Final Fantasy fans might not have played the same Final Fantasies.
Two people who like Baseball, though, almost certainly like and follow the same Baseball. As soon as you realize the person you’re talking to follows a sport you also follow the conversation switches to easy mode. You can just start remembering games at each other or reciting stats back and forth. It’s like if talking about the weather was fun.
Are the big four American sports leagues the last bastion of monoculture? The internet has fractured our collective attention span into a million tiny pieces in every other cultural arena, but we’re all still basically aware of the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, and MLB, even when that awareness doesn’t go farther than recognizing some team logos or particularly famous players. Sports fans share interests in ways movie or book likers don’t. It makes me wonder if it was actually easier to talk to people back when there were three TV channels or whatever and everybody was watching the same stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, I love that the internet makes it possible to spend your whole life paying attention to niche bullshit, but when you’re at a party, knowing about the Toronto Blue Jays carries some advantages that thinking a lot about individual French revolutionaries doesn’t. Now that I’m sort of a Baseball guy, I feel like a real five tool player conversationally. Explaining who Louis Antoine de Saint Just was can wait until drink number five, at drink two I will be enjoying pleasant small talk about how I hope they resign Bo Bichette.
Carole King’s “Tapestry.” What an album! I’m relatively new to Carole King, but listening to this thing still feels like coming home because of how deep so many of these songs lie in the cultural bedrock. It was actually kind of a shock for me to discover that the same person wrote “You’ve Got a Friend” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” King is one of those artists where if you start looking at her songwriting credits it begins to feel like she may have written everything. Is it actually possible to say anything about an artist like that which hasn’t been said a million times before? Probably not, but oh well.
I love King’s voice, in both the literal sense and the writerly one. As a singer she can be delicate, like on “Tapestry,” forward and exciting like on “I Feel the Earth Move” and “It’s Too Late,” and she can absolutely belt like on “A Natural Woman.” That range is technically impressive, and she puts it to great use, as it really varies the sound of the album and gives every song a unique identity. As a writer, her lyrics have this simple, direct style and tone that I really appreciate. These songs address simple ideas elegantly. “I Feel the Earth Move” gets everything it can out of one straightforward metaphor, “You’ve Got a Friend” is all clear, heartfelt statements. This is an excellent way to write pop music: the songs are instantly accessible and relatable, while still exhibiting depth of feeling. King's lyrics have a concise clarity I find admirable. She's like the anti-Jeff Mangum, and I mean that as a compliment to both artists.
The production here is great, also. It’s just that simple 70s studio sound, where everything is crystal clear, seemingly recorded as plainly as possible. I sort of wish pop music still worked with this kind of invisible style of production, where all the recording is doing is capturing the performance and arrangement. You can actually place yourself in the room with these songs; they aren’t floating in the non-space of the digital audio workstation. Don’t get me wrong, I love some non-space as much as the next guy, but when I’m dealing with a singer/songwriter type I want to hear that room, to feel like I’m sitting there next to them.
“Tapestry” offers me an opportunity to reflect on the last time I dabbled in sharing thoughts about music in public on a regular basis. In 2022 I listened to a new to me album every day and posted my thoughts on social media. That was great in that I listened to a ton of new stuff and broadened my taste a lot, but also it was a terrible way to experience music. Giving each album just one day meant that a single day’s mood could really tank my impression of even a very good album. This happened with Tapestry, which I said I “liked alright,” before noting that it’s “very hard to sell me on a pop ballad.” I’m not sure what I was actually talking about there; earlier in the year I’d swooned over Harry Nilsson and Janelle Monae, neither of whom are strangers to ballads.
I had my lukewarm reaction to Tapestry mere days after having a similarly lukewarm reaction to The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds,” another album I’ve come to absolutely adore in the years since. The sentiment in both of my posts is similar, basically: “I get it, it’s a cultural landmark, but it didn’t excite me.” I think I was overstimulated, or something. Listening to and trying to process such a high volume of new stuff made novelty way too high a priority in my estimation. I couldn’t really process Pet Sounds and Tapestry properly under those conditions, because the last 60 years of pop music have been filthy rich with iterations on Pet Sounds and Tapestry.
So, this segment of this weekly blog thing is going to be intentionally pretty low stakes. I like talking about and thinking about music, so I’m going to do that, but I won’t be forcing any silly gimmick on myself this time around. Each week I’ll just write a bit about whatever I’ve been listening to. Often, but not always, this will be focused on a specific album. If I don’t have actually developed thoughts about a particular album, I simply will not write about it.
Anyway, listen to Tapestry. It’s great.