Eight days ago, I took Amanda out to a new Japanese steakhouse and sushi place. We both enjoyed everything about it, but this post is about two micro-stories related to that date, not the date itself.

1. The restaurant was playing what seemed to be a mix CD of au courant radio pop, heavy on female dance pop vocalists; it was pleasantly incongruous. At one point “Kiss Me Thru the Phone” played, and I told Amanda about the time I was driving to visit Tyler (and Bane and Skala) in the summer of 2009 and heard an Indiana State University radio station DJ sheepishly introduce what she said was a special song to her and her boyfriend. The song was “Kiss Me Thru the Phone.” I suppose it’s appropriate that I heard it on a college radio station during the summer; a time when college students are often separated from significant others.

2. As I mentioned, the restaurant was exceptional. Amanda said that the pickled ginger that came with our sushi tasted “like Anthropologie. Or Christmas.”

Sure, they couldn’t touch Mariah’s melisma. The song’s in the constantly-in-vogue 60’s Spector style, however, and, well, I’m surprised there aren’t even any bad covers of it, you know?

1. To forgive once is to be blessed once. The more we forgive, the more we are blessed.
2. IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO FIND PEACE IN THE SOUL WITHOUT SECURITY AND HARMONY BETWEEN THE PEOPLE.
3. GENUINE COMPASSION IS UNBIASED

*[so that she could finish a craft. Also I have preserved the punctuation and capitalization from the packaging in its presentation above]

Nitsuh Abebe says all sorts of fascinating things about PRR, music, status, etc.

(via agrammar)

rawkblog:

“Goes in on”

“Catching _____ vibes”

I really, really like The Year of Hibernation, but it occurred to me recently that it shares a lot with other songs and records that get that genre tag - hazy, drum machine beats, keys of various types smeared all over, selective use of electric guitar, and so on. Obviously there are some elements that fall outside of typical chillwave boundaries - rather emo lyrical and vocal approaches, to name one - but the same is true for, say, anything Toro y Moi has done this year. A quick googling shows that it wouldn’t be true to say that no one calls YL chillwave, but the project definitely isn’t being grouped with, say, Washed Out.

So again, I ask: why aren’t people calling the Youth Lagoon record chillwave?

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I remember dreams so rarely that I can’t recall the last one that stuck with me, but last night I dreamt that I was seeing Surfer Blood perform with the Vienna Boys Choir. They said they were going to open with Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue”, but their first song, and the only one I remember, sounded nothing like that. It also sounded nothing like Surfer Blood, the Vienna Boys Choir, or whatever you might imagine would be the result of that combination.

I’ve actually seen both Surfer Blood and the Vienna Boys choir, but separately. If the internet is to be believed, the Vienna Boys Choir show I saw in Dublin, Ireland was on October 8th, 2006, and I know that I saw Surfer Blood on February 20, 2010 at Grimey’s, because I wrote about it. Of course, this doesn’t explain last night’s dream; I haven’t listened to or talked about SB in a couple of months and I don’t really listen to choral music unless it’s live.