Sunday, June 12, 2011

Dead Souls

Dead Souls - Joy Division (1980)

This is why I wanted to start this blog in the first place: finding out about bands and songs that I've never heard of before, and spreading the knowledge to you. 

See a live performance here.

Joy Division formed in 1976 after 2 founding members,Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook , friends since elementary school, both attended the second ever concert of the Sex Pistols  and became inspired.  And if you don't know who they are, stick around, they'll be featured later on.  They quickly got the other two members of their band Stephen Morris and Ian Curtis

After a few years of local touring in the UK and their self published EP , they caught the attention of the independent label Factory Records and released their first album Unknown Pleasures in 1979.  Then, Ian, their front man and primary lyricist, was diagnosed with seizures and his health began to diminish.

On the eve of their first American tour, Ian Curtis committed suicide. 

They released their second album Closer after his death which gave them their highest chart success with Love Will Tear Us Apart

This brings us to the release of the song Dead Souls.  A rare single titled Licht und Blindheit gave us the songs Atmosphere and Dead Souls.

My own take on the song is this: I like it. Yeah, that's a bit of a quick
review, but it's accurate.

The song goes for about 2 minutes before the
first word, making me think upon first listen that it was an instrumental. The
melody itself has a touch of emotion to it, but in my opinion it's not
depressing at all. Then the lyrics come in: "Someone take these dreams away /
that point me to another day." This invokes in me the darker feelings that Ian
had inside of him - his concerns about his health (he was experiencing
increasingly serious epileptic seizures), his inability to sleep, and his
worries about his relationship with his wife - were closing in and leading to
his eventual death.

I can definitely see their influence, even though
they weren't around long. Before "Alternative" was a musical style, they were
doing it. Their influence is still felt today from bands like Smashing Pumpkins
and Nine Inch Nails who did a cover of this very song for the soundtrack of The
Crow.
Definitely a song worth checking out.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Welcome!

Well.  I've started a blog. 

For those of you who know me, you would have never thought this would happen, but there were a few things that have happened the last few years that have brought this idea to light. 

The first thing happened one fateful 4th of July when I got a call from my good friends Josh and Annie.  Without getting into a tremendous amount of detail and potential embarrassment, we'll just say that I found out during that call that Josh didn't know very much about Classic Rock music, which is something that is very near and dear to me. 

I resolved to teach him about the music that I loved so much, so I set about to make him several Cd's that ranged from the beginning of Rock and Roll until the end of the 80's.  Instead of just handing him a bunch of songs with no context behind him, I created liner notes for each song which detailed title, artist, year of release and a little tidbit related to each song.  That tidbit might be about the song itself, the artist, or perhaps something personal to me about the song. 

In creating these liner notes, I discovered many things that I never knew.  And I considered myself fairly knowledgeable about the subject, but by no means an expert.  Researching these songs created in me another eventual reason for this blog, the enjoyment of learning so much more about one of my favorite things.

Now, the final piece that brought this idea into my head, was the discovery of a book called 1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die And 10,001 You Must Download.  In looking through that book, I saw many songs that I was completely unfamiliar with, so therefore, my thirst for more knowledge was piqued.  Having just bought the book, I really haven't looked through it all that much, but came up with the idea for this blog on my way home. 

My plan for this blog is to get a random number from Random.org between 1 and 1001, listen to whichever song is represented by that number, then post my thoughts and maybe a bit of information about that song in the hopes that you, whoever you may be, will want to check them out yourself.

This may work, this may not work, it's very possible that nobody will care, but oh well.  I think it'll be fun, and I'm nothing if not self-indulgent.