This photo is freakishly accurate, as long as you’re willing to replace the little boy with a chihuahua and the gun with…well anything that’s not a gun.

Taryn and I have talked it over and feel that Portland’s a good fit for the family. I’ve spoken with a lot of people involved with CASH Music and it seems like a good fit for the organization too. So when I say “we’re moving” I mean everything. My family and I are headed out to Portland, OR in September and we’ll be bringing CASH Music to Portland too.

We looked at a few cities, but in the end Portland had the draw of friends and a great community, with all the West coast benefits of California. On a family level, Portland offers connections, great food, other young parents, and frankly the rents are more affordable than we’ve seen elsewhere. From the CASH Music perspective, Portland has an enthusiasm for nonprofits and social change, there’s a rich tech development scene, and the music community is second to none.

Moving cross country takes a lot of planning. We’re in the process of selling a lot of our stuff, packing up other stuff, and figuring out how to ship the big stuff. (Lots of stuff!) We’ve gotten transfer papers for the girls’ WIC account and we’re trying to figure out health insurance on the Oregon end. The biggest challenge, and the hardest thing to do from Rhode Island is for us to find a place to live.

We’ve been looking on Craigslist for a 3 bedroom place, and it looks pretty realistic that we could even find a small house to rent for $1300/mo or less. That’s a pretty big stretch for us — doing a startup nonprofit doesn’t exactly place you in a comfortable middle-class bracket — so we’re trying to find a rental in a good situation: a known landlord or friend with a house, a great close-in neighborhood, or a nice place further-out that might be less expensive. Any help would be greatly appreciated and repaid ten times over in cookies and curry.

Once we settle the housing thing it’s on to transferring the nonprofit, setting up regular CASH meetups, and all the other parts of establishing the organization as a part of the community. You know…no big deal.

So there’s clearly a lot ahead. Exciting times, but to sum it all up:

Oregon, ho!

So naturally I prepped a blog post about how Benji is a direct descendant of Norse gods, an amazing talent who should be immortalized in posters on every teen girl’s bedroom wall. I wanted to call for a movement of fifteen-year-old boys wearing fake beards and growing their locks long. To say I’m enraptured with his wild mountain-man looks balanced against delicate songwriting would be putting it lightly.

But then a few days later John tells me his (rad) label, vosotros, is putting out a split single with Benji featured on the A side over Willoughby on the B. Clicking through I found Benji’s track, ‘Country Love,’ and basically haven’t stopped listening to it since.

When I first started dating my wife I found a photo on the ground. Over seven years, two daughters, and five apartments I’ve kept this torn up, beat up, out-of-focus photo with me. It’s a picture of some trees, some grass, and a hazy sky. It’s the reason I work so hard, the thing I’m reaching for. It’s a photo of a place that I hope to find some day. I have a picture in my head of ten perfect years — I’ll work the other ninety or so to make those ten happen, and they’ll happen in that place in the photo.

Well ‘Country Love’ is the song that goes along with my photo. It became instantly important to me and my story. It’s a simple song, true country music with none of the genre trappings or bullshit cowboy-hat-macho bullshit that soaks through the commercial ‘country’ music. It tells a story, simply, and sells you on the romance of the American South. In your mind you can see Tennessee and it’s a perfect place to be, all the complications and realities of modern America stripped away. Every lyric carries meaning and is sung with emotion. It’s real. It’s full. It’s a wonderful piece of music.

And it’s the song that goes along with my dream.

Benji Hughes – Country Love

Get it: sargentrecords.com

Even in the drawing we look like kids. Now there are two kids and one less dog. (Miss you, Zombie!) Life, as it does, marches on.

Today is Ada Lovelace day, celebrating the contributions of women in technology worldwide. For the uninitiated, Ada Lovelace was a nineteenth century English mathematician, writer, and thinker who is regarded as the author of the world’s first computer program. She focussed a lot of her energy around Charles Babbage’s famous analytical engine, and advanced the concepts by producing its first algorithm — essentially creating the separation between hardware and software.

The idea behind Ada Lovelace day is to celebrate women in technology by telling their stories. And while there are plenty of worthy candidates, one woman in technology stands out more than all others to me: my Mom.

My mother introduced me to computers before I could walk. Even in the late seventies, computers were a part of our home life. Jean “Bonnie” Myers worked as a statistical programmer doing geographic data analysis before that kind of thing as popular in the hipster set. I cut my teeth on write-protect rings for magnetic tape and I mean that literally — those funny colored plastic rings that most of you have never seen were the first toys in my house and apparently soothe the gums like nothing else.

I have early memories of Mom plugging our rotary phone into a modem and waiting patiently as she called up a VAX terminal from our kitchen table. She taught me to type, to think, and to understand what was going on behind the blinking green and yellow cursors.

When I was still just knee-high she’d bring me to her office, show me the plotters and servers. As I got older she explained systems to me, drove the family to shareware centers to copy new programs onto 5.25″ floppies, and taught me to be unafraid to tear into the hardware powering our home computer. The education has continued my whole life. She taught me to use PINE when l was assigned my first email address at UMass, helped me hone code structures as I learned to program, and we talk Internet security to this day.

As a kid I never understood just how cool my mom was because I assumed all mothers were geniuses like mine. She’d bring home ASCII art coloring pages spanning sheets of large-format dot matrix paper. (Clearly something all mothers did.) I was too young to understand all of the interesting work she was doing, but I’m eternally grateful that she made it a part of my daily life.

Now Bonnie oversees an IT department at Tufts University in Boston. A quick look at IT-worker statistics shows that’s no small feat. I’m immensely proud to call her my mother and I’m thankful for everything she gave me — from my worldview right down to my write-protected teeth.

I love you, Mom.

You can preorder Dear God from KRS here, or get it from iTunes right now.

And it’s a safe bet that if I had posted this here originally it would have contained more swear words.

Read almost any piece about Xiu Xiu and you’ll see words like ‘harsh’ or ‘brutal’ — the same words that appear before ‘truth’ when an unwavering eye is turned on any intimate detail of our lives. Fair descriptions of the themes central to the music, they sit incongruous to the refined, intricate, and beautiful approach taken in crafting the twelve tracks on Xiu Xiu‘s new album Dear God, I Hate Myself.

The two biggest constants throughout Xiu Xiu‘s catalog are honesty and evolution. This remains true with Dear God, I Hate Myself as it delivers a look at responsibility, fear, healing, and societal roles wrapped in rich gothic pop music. The sound is still distinctly Xiu Xiu, but Jamie Stewart‘s vocals are effortless paired with vibrant melodies full of subtlety and the distinct sonic accents expected of this anticipated Xiu Xiu release. The result is a record that proves that art can be pop and pop can challenge you to look inside yourself.

Stewart is joined by new full-time band member Angela Seo on piano, synth, and drum programming; with production handled by Jamie and Deerhoof‘s Greg Saunier. Together they’ve crafted a fully grown sound for Dear God, I Hate Myself with elements from goth and pop that are expertly performed by a crop of brilliant musicians. Saunier himself plays on much of the record as does Ches Smith (John Zorn, Terry Riley, Marc Ribot) who supplies timpani, conga and moog along with a broad range of other instrumentation. Deerhoof‘s John Dieterich is all over a rendition of the traditional folk song “Cumberland Gap” and Xiu Xiu is even joined by the Immaculata Catholic School Orchestra in Stewart‘s ode to heartbreak and healing, “This Too Shall Pass Away (for Freddy).” The title track, one of four songs done primarily on a Nintendo DS, explores the relationship between faith and despair with a layer of commentary provided by the bizarre sounds of the music itself.

Each new Xiu Xiu release has evolved alongside the lives of Jamie Stewart and company. On this record you’ll find more intensity and introspection than ever before, but sonically and lyrically it continues to move forward with a subtly new perspective — hyper-focussed yet aware of a larger, external picture unfolding. The pace of the record grips you, the music offers layers of detail, and the themes focus on not just the past or stark present but hint towards vespers of the future as well. Dear God, I Hate Myself will challenge you and force you to look inside yourself, but only after you get lost in the music. It’s passionate, it’s energetic, and it affects you.

Dear God, I Hate Myself is a beautiful piece of humanist art. It’s an important addition to the growing body of intelligent music from Xiu Xiu. And it’s a brilliant gothic pop record that can stand next to anything.

Vic was a friend of a friend.

A few days before Christmas, as Taryn and I were planning out our three year old daughter’s first real Christmas I heard that he was in trouble. In the hospital. In a coma. Probably not coming back. I asked Billy to keep me posted, because I knew it was hurting Kristin. He said he would and I went back to forging notes from Santa and spending time with my family.

On Christmas day I got a call that Vic had died. Billy and Kristin wanted to help and thought it would be a good idea to set up a page that could collect money for Tina, Vic’s wife. It was the middle of a holiday, I still had never met Vic, still had only seen him play once, and still wasn’t connected to his music. I said the only thing I could: “Of course I’ll help.” It was the only right thing to say, because somewhere in Georgia everything just changed. One life ended and a family changed forever. There’s a house that used to have Vic in it that needs to find a way to continue without him.

It costs a lot of money to bury a man. The mortgage and bills need to be paid, food bought, and all the things that keep parting us from our money are still there. Except Vic’s not. People are talking about medical expenses. That may be a huge factor, I honestly have no idea how that debt does or does not pass on. But I do know the pain of losing someone in your family, in your house. If there was something I could do to help make sure that pain isn’t compounded by gross financial burden I was damn sure going to do it. I know I hope someone would do the same for Taryn and the girls were I to die.

So on Christmas I found a half hour to put up a page to help the family of a friend of a friend. Kristin did all the hard work writing and Billy pulled everything together. Since then a thousand people have given something to the family. Seeing so many people pull together to make sure that Vic’s family doesn’t need to suffer any more than they already had is about as close to a miracle as I’ll ever recognize.

And on one final point I want to be very clear: we didn’t do this to raise money for a hospital. We’re raising money for a family. Every donation is being accounted for and all the money will go directly to Vic’s wife and dealt with exactly as she specifies.

 
You can leave a donation for Vic’s family here.

I’m unapologetic about the fact that most of these records are from friends, labels and managers I work with, or old comfort zones. That was my second realization: that I consume music close to me with more vigor than music from strangers. So this list isn’t intended to tear down the accolades for Fever Ray, The XX, or any of the bands who made great records on other year-end lists. This list is simply me recognizing the best of the music that’s filled my life and my playlist throughout the year.

This is the sound of my 2009.
 

Honorable Mention
Each of the list above wrestled a week or more of attention from me, sitting atop my playlist and serving as the go-to record for more obsessive plays than I’d like to admit. In a few cases I think they may have stolen attention from other great, deserving records. On that note there are a few other releases from 2009 that merit attention so in no particular order:

I’ve since picked it apart and transformed it into a more clinical onesheet for Xiu Xiu’s (amazing) upcoming release, Dear God, I Hate Myself. I’ll post that here sometime too, but I think this has more warmth, and speaks to that special bit inside of Jamie’s music that I’m always ranting about to friends and anyone who’ll listen…

Xiu Xiu is the reason I work so hard. Xiu Xiu makes me feel, makes me listen, helps me understand. Xiu Xiu inspires me to keep pushing through the lean times, to build something for the greater good, to do what little I can to help nurture the art that supports me. I could never pick a favorite artist, but without doubt Xiu Xiu is the most important band in my world.

Xiu Xiu revolves around Jamie Stewart and in song he covers topics headier than most would ever touch, ranging from abuse and sexuality to finding happiness and ethical dilemmas of a grandiose scale. All at once the music is philosophy, self-portrait, exploration, and bare honesty — but art above all else.

Most people that talk about Xiu Xiu start similarly, and end up speaking to the bravery of Jamie to deal with such hard issues, or they tell their own stories of pain and healing through the music he makes. Those stories are touching, they’re a perfect reaction to the art he creates, and I think they speak to the core of why people can embrace Xiu Xiu so wholeheartedly. They’re good stories, and work well in context.

But no. I don’t want to share my pain, it’s my own. And I don’t want to talk about what the music makes me feel, because that’s mine too. I want to talk about the music.

You see there’s a perception about Xiu Xiu that bothers me. People paint it as hard, for Xiu Xiu fans only, or as something that should be appreciated primarily on a philosophical level. Yes, the early albums were angular and biting. The music itself was more avant guarde, difficult to access and carrying a difficult message. But there was a seed there that’s grown into something very different.

The message has remained true, as has the craftsmanship and writing of the music, but there has been an evolution to a beautiful and rich sound wrapping the thoughtful message. Where before there was appreciation now there is love. Sometime around The Air Force a shift began and any fear of sounding too pop disappeared. The lingering gaps remained as did the sharp angles, but they served as accents to melodic times; punctuation to the ideas presented in the lyrics.

After The Air Force came Women As Lovers, well deserved on any best-of the 00′s lists and a true breakout album. The cover was uncomfortable yet beautiful, a testament to the design skill of Joe Stewart. I remember listening to the advance for the first time, almost nervous after seeing the art options. The first track, ‘I do what I want when I want,’ immediately signals a change. It’s bright, rich, and full of sound. The words challenge the music, revolving around lust versus love, truth versus desire, and elements of safety mixed with BDSM. The record continues on in fashion, simultaneously soothing and challenging — driven by the emotion and beauty of the music.

Here’s my larger point: Xiu Xiu will challenge you and force you to look inside yourself, but you’re also going to get lost in the music. It’s passionate, it’s energetic, it moves and can move you. Go get the music however you can. Listen to it, please. You might not love it all, but I think it’s clearly recognizable as art, as important, and as something that needs to be made.

So ask me why I do this and my answer is Xiu Xiu.

So hello little Clementine, you’re beautiful like your mother and your sister. I’m going to keep working hard every day to show you the right way to live. And short of that I’ll show you love and you can figure out all the small details yourself.