I’m not sure if there are too many other people who share this, but my favorite records are almost universally too painful to listen to with any sense of casualty. Same with poems, art, certainly novels or narratives or poetry. When I must, I revisit them. It is the compulsion of must which makes them the most dear, but it’s not particularly pleasurable. It’s frankly nothing like that; it’s something closer to bloodletting.
There have been a couple brief moments where I have tried to make music with other people whom I admired. They were always incredible both technically and intellectually and I was always crippled by my own embarrassingly inept attempts to contribute. Unfortunately, I may have a mush mouth, but I could never manage keep it shut despite knowing nothing more about music than that I like it; there were two songs I loved so much, I got real ornery about covering them no matter how ill the tribute turned out. The songs were so excruciatingly true and raw, even the most unmusical asshole couldn’t mangle them too bad. One was Shellac’s ‘Prayer to God,’ and the other was a Townes Van Zandt track.
I just now read somewhere it was his favorite, which I cannot help but feel like a silly validated little goose.
But like I was saying, Townes. It’s been almost 4 years since I could even take in one of his records the whole way through. It makes me laugh at myself and the way I can so neurotically squirrel away anything I write or make out of shame when the only thing that’s ever mattered to me in art is truth, earnestness, urgency, compulsion–in a way, a real ugliness.
I feel no connection to slick or neat or hidden or any deliberate sensibility of control. Ugliness, being the antithesis of what’s exalted, has always felt to me too grossly human for glamour. For that reason, this song feels like a knife in the gut.
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