RACING THOUGHTS 009

On Built To Spill

I really recommend the app Music League. I especially love their mobile ads, which certainly cannot all be for real games. Animals & Coins, specifically, seems like the kind of video game a TV show makes up when they can’t afford the rights to Donkey Kong. 

Unfortunately it also requires using Spotify. One of these days I’ll try to make a clone that takes in any YouTube link. But for now my crazy friends just manually generate playlists for Tidal, Apple Music, etc. So, the premise: You gather some friends who have the same depraved mix of competitive drive and ceaseless desire for new music. Every week, the player our league has dubbed “the commissioner” selects a theme (past themes include Songs with a name in the title, Songs for the afternoon, Cover songs, Songs for A Night At Diva Manor — if you need to ask, you don’t deserve to know). All players submit a song for each theme, Music League compiles a Spotify playlist, and everyone votes in the app for their top songs without knowing who submitted what. There’s even a downvote function, for when friends submit “Supercut” by Lorde. 

I LUV IT! This is not sponsored! (But if the makers of Animals & Coins are reading this – I can be bought!) I’m actually pretty bad as a competitor – I came in third-to-last in our most recent “season” (we just wrapped our sixth). But it helps me stay in touch with friends who live far away, and I consistently learn about so much new-to-me stuff. For example, last week my friend who lives in sunny L.A., and whose short film Flail is an absolute must-see, submitted this 9-minute Built To Spill song I had never heard before: 

It is called “When Not Being Stupid Is Not Enough,” and it won the week hands-down. One player commented that he liked the guitars, which do indeed slowly curl towards a central melody like vines creeping up an ancient oak tree. I am a huge fan of Built To Spill. I first found them when I listened to the song “Big Dipper” 25 times in a row while I housed a package of Snickers in my friend’s kitchen as I waited to sober up from a huge bong rip. That same friend then came over another day and added about 500 Built To Spill songs to my iTunes library. 

My favorite Built To Spill songs do for me what I imagine Yes does for my Dad – episodic spurts of unassuming (well, maybe this is where it diverges from Yes) brilliance building towards a transcendence that can only be fully appreciated in the rearview. As I learn guitar, I am more interested in the songs I think I’ll never grasp than the ones that feel within my reach. There is something about appreciating art I can’t understand that feels pretty religious to me. “Randy Described Eternity” is a song like that. Even if I get the hang of the chord voicings, I don’t think I can ever really intuit the way the rhythm seems to suggest itself. Certainly I wouldn’t be able to achieve the momentum Doug Martsch reaches when he goes full crazy-mode for “I’m gonna be perfect from now on, I’ve gotta be perfect starting now.” 

Back to that winning song. Another player commented that the “last half is really amazing” but the “first half is only normal.” He gave the song no points. I would say this is the exact opposite of how I feel about “When Not Being Stupid Is Not Enough.” I could take another ten minutes of that first half, when we’re not even sure if we’ll make it to a human voice, when it sounds like Songs: Ohia but also Beat Happening and also just a hint of something bluesier from the organ buzzing in the background. (This is what I imagine all of Boise, Idaho sounded like in 1995.) Martsch doesn’t utter a word until almost halfway through the song’s third minute, but when he does, he doesn’t beat around the bush: He sings the damn title of the song. And what a great title it is, too. 

As I approach 30 years old and grate against the daily indignities of this damned existence, I am often struck by the harrowing realization that not being stupid is not enough. I can be kind, and I can be gracious, and I can be funny, and life is honestly going to fucking suck anyway. I am always, to be honest, thinking about how history has no natural arc – I think it grounds me in moments of mania, when I feel like some big shot because my tweet got a lot of likes or whatever. “When not being stupid is not enough” is perhaps a blunter way of saying, “Nothing gold can stay,” or a less blunt way of saying, “You can’t always get what you want.” Martsch writes like how I hope to write in this newsletter—purposely plain, occasionally funny. But somehow I don’t think I’ll ever achieve the rusty knife gut wound of “In a world that’s so bad/ It’s not hard to feel good.” Small consolations, like the $16 cabernet sauvignon I’m drinking while editing this, are just like picking at scabs for old Doug. It’s the bleakest song I’ve gotten into in a really long time, but I feel great every time I finish it. 

I listened to “When Not Being Stupid Is Not Enough” as I went for a run yesterday. I have learned that long and slow songs work best for me—they help me avoid the impulse to speed through the first mile, which is how I got injured a few years back. I’m excited to get into writing new stuff for my running newsletter again soon, but for now just running feels like an accomplishment. I saw this guy walking a bunch of dogs on my run, and the leaves on the ancient trees were just starting to turn red and orange. Beautiful! 

When I got back, I tried to do some research on the band Built To Spill played with on that song—Caustic Resin—and I found out that they were founded in Boise in 1988 and broke up in 2003. The guitarist now sometimes tours with Earth and Boris, and the drummer is a web developer for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, which are actually the only two possible paths for indie musicians from Boise, Idaho who signed to Up Records in the 1990s. Now when you search their name on YouTube, the first result is actually a video of Built To Spill playing their song “Cable” with them live in 1999. 

Brett Netson—the guy who joined Earth after—has kind of got a Bon Jovi thing going on with his voice. It’s extremely moving to me: Doug is locked in, the whole band feels at the peak of their powers. And yet, barely three years later, Caustic Resin released what would be their last album. Sometimes being really damn good is not enough.

I have to go — if I don’t keep reading a little bit of Blood Meridian every night I’ll never finish it by the time it’s due back at the library. Loving the vibe so far!