AUDIO SHAKEDOWN: Volume 7

Rock and roll history has a logical flow to it, and I find that once I get into the groove of a certain era, after a while my brain just naturally starts to crave what came next. You may remember that the last Shakedown found me delving into the psychedelic music of the late 1960's and the later bands that went back to explore the sound, but now lately I find my brain sliding toward the sounds of the early Seventies. Rock and roll was moving away from psychedelia toward straight-up bluesy hard rock. So as you might expect, I've been neck deep in great music from bands of the early Seventies as well as the more modern artists who are still mining those same rich veins of wild, mustachioed rock and roll glory, and I've also been taking a look backwards at some of the artists who helped create the sound.

Graveyard - Hisingen Blues - Not many people know this, but a few years back, a time rift opened up over Sweden, and now the temporally afflicted country is a hotbed of 70's retro-rock revivalism. The Gothenburg based band Graveyard have emerged as one of the more artistically successful bands of the scene. Everything you'd expect is here, heavy blues-based rock, touches of metallic riffing, vintage recording techniques... but the way they put it all together is something special. The guitars have the kind of crunch that comes from high-gain amps instead of boutique guitar effects, and Joakim Nilsson's voice, with its slight Swedish accent on the English lyrics, is expressive and forceful. Revivalism is an odd thing, as it short-circuits any debate about originality. It sounds like it does because they want it to, so don't try to place it in any sort of context. Just put it on and let the music speak for itself, because inasmuch as this album does exactly what it sets out to do, it is very nearly perfect.

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Blood Lust - It strikes me that "dark side of the psychedelic era" is a very narrow space, historically speaking, to draw inspiration from. I mean, you're really just pulling from the vibe of the last half 1969, when the drugs have gone sideways on everyone, the Hell's Angels are stabbing people at Altamont, and the Manson family is stalking the streets of Los Angeles. But Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats have crafted two albums with this very concept at the heart of the music, and it seems to be working out well for them. The stronger of the two releases is 2011's Blood Lust, where a garage rock blast carries with it the tattered, sickly shreds of psychedelia. This record has a druggy nihilism woven into it that mashes LSD-exploitation film and Hammer horror film imagery together, making it sound like a party where the guests are all just trying to make it through the night alive.

Lightnin' Hopkins - Lightnin' and the Blues - When you think of slow, smoky electric blues, chances are you're channeling the sound of Lightnin' Hopkins, and this collection is one of his best. Unlike many early electric blues collections, the sound quality is impeccable on this disc, allowing the listener to hear every little bend and vibrato on Hopkins' guitar, and his worn-leather voice settles right over top of the mix. Hopkins was a master of blues economy, and could do more with three or four notes than most players can do with an entire scale. He was a major figure in the definition of the vocabulary of electric blues, and these songs are the bricks that later rock and rollers would build their empires from. It's gratifying to hear that they've lost none of their charm in the intervening years.

Dust - Dust - In the early Seventies, heavy metal (or what would classify as such at the time) was dominated by British bands: Black Sabbbath, Led Zeppelin, etc., but there were a few American groups beginning to throw their hat into the ring. One of the more interesting, if not the most well-remembered, was Dust. Their self-titled debut is chock full of heavy, riff-laden blues rock, and it's played with authority. The guitar work rivals the heavy-hitters of the time, and there's some pretty agile drumming by Marc Bell, who would later in the Seventies take on the name Marky Ramone, and be known for much simpler drumming. It's fascinating to hear him putting so much more detail into his music here, especially the busy cymbal work.

Free - Fire and Water - I really enjoy that even though Free's sound is undoubtedly of a piece with other Seventies hard rock staples, their focus is not the electric guitar. It may be present in their songs, but it's not necessarily what's in the spotlight. Most of the time, that honor belongs to Paul Rodger's soulful vocals, and with good reason. The songs seem built on a framework of drums and vocals, with the other instruments adding color and texture to the sound. Because the guitars aren't cranked, Fire and Water has a more mellow groove to it than many of their contemporaries. Great for driving around aimlessly on a sunny day, or at least imagining you live in a parallel world where that activity didn't become prohibitively expensive.

Tinariwen - Tassili -  It seems like every Shakedown has a general theme, but there's always one outlier record that I've been listening to lately for whatever reason. This time out, it's Tinariwen, a band with an unmatchable biography (it's too long to do it justice here, but to read their bizarre and incredible story, check here). Tinariwen are a group of nomadic Tuareg musicians from the Saharan desert who play a wholly unique kind of music. The sounds of their native North Africa are certainly present, as well as certain American rock sensibilities, but most fascinatingly, you can hear the influence of the blues, or more accurately, the African music that serves as an ancestor to the blues. Whatever specific sounds inspire them, the quality and passion of the music is indisputable. So carefully are their lives woven into their music that you can hear the sand and heat in their songs even without being told where they hail from, especially on this album, where they switch from their usual electric guitars to acoustic, providing a sound that's as dry as Saharan dust. Considering the struggles and tragedies they've had to endure in their career as a band, it's all but certain that you don't know anyone who loves music as much as Tinariwen.

ALBUM REVIEW: Keaton Henson - Birthdays

Ladies and gentlemen, gather close and listen to a harrowing tale of a pallid Englishman with a knack for making you cry! No, it’s not because his music is bad; it’s because he writes songs that are so fragile, it feels like you could crack them by simply listening too hard. As I’m wont to do, I will start this review with a semi-long winded story, fasten your seatbelts and grab your complimentary onboard vomit receptacle. HERE WE GO!

Long ago, in my heartbroken days of squalor and alcohol (specifically, early last year), I was recovering from a long-term and emotionally invested relationship. The fallout was terrible and could probably be compared to the Oppenheimer nuclear test experiments. My apartment was a wasteland and the only solace and comfort I possessed was a newly found passion for finding new music. I discovered a young British musician by the name of Keaton Henson through an affiliated (but in no way similar) act. The first song I heard was a live performance of the track “Lying To You”, which can be heard on the album Birthdays. I was astounded by the performance. It wasn’t anything dazzling really, just a dude sitting out in his garden playing a song of discomfort and heartbreak. The tune was lovely, but I was particularly moved by his manner of conveyance in his emotions. You could hear his mental state in his voice more than his lyrics.

I immediately went in search of any albums he may have released. Unfortunately, at that point, all he had was a dinky winky EP (I’m not a huge fan of EPs, if you couldn’t tell) and my thirst for a full-length installment of material went unquenched. I was thirsty for Keaton, I tell you! Nothing could get in the way of me acquiring music at that point, except if said material didn’t exist. So for a little while my operation was derailed and the dragon that was my ravenous acquisition remained safely sedated.

Then came the magical day, April 2nd, 2012! Keaton Henson unleashed a sweeping saga of sadness that was sure to overwhelm you with emotion and beauty. It was somewhat difficult for me to procure this album since it was not, and is still not available in the US. Now, let me digress further and tell you how much disdain I hold for importing music. If importing music were like coaxing a fat man to give you his burrito (which I have had to do on occasion, for his safety), it would be like him charging you 50 dollars for a 5 dollar burrito treat. ‘Nuff Said. All of that aside, my desire for the album outweighed my desire to keep money in my coin purse and I paid handsomely and waited…

Two weeks later, I received a parcel from the United States Postal Service of Give Me My CD. Upon opening the parcel, I greedily ripped open the plastic wrapper and annoying security seal and stuffed my very own, brand new copy of Dear into my decrepit, archaic CD playing device. What I received was a personal message from Keaton Henson, in this correspondence, he told me of heartbreak, depression and frustration. I listened to every word that came out of his mouth with awe and enthusiasm. I wanted to make music like this.

Alrighty then, still reading? Good, because I’m getting to the point. Early in January of this year, I was made aware of a new Keaton Henson album. A new album? HOT DOG!!! It seems like he just released Dear and he is releasing another full length album already! My excitement was explosive.

I ordered his new record, cheerfully entitled Birthdays through Amazon import, as I had with his first album. Little did I know, they would release his album here in the states not two months later. I kind of knew what to expect, to think that he would change his style drastically in just one year was asinine. So I waited patiently for another personal message to be shipped across the Atlantic Ocean by Mr. Henson and lo and behold, a day came when the United States Postal Service of Give Me My CD dropped off a parcel on my doorstep. I almost felt nostalgia or a sense of déjà vu; a package with a personal message, a decrepit old CD player, and me sitting on the floor on the verge of crying like a little baby. Now, without further ado, Birthdays.

Birthdays. Birthdays… A beautifully arranged set of sad songs presented in a minimalistic, personal style. It almost seems like he performed each of the solo songs in one take right after hearing that his cat died. His voice fragile, not weak; tells of times passed when he actively sought love but was unfairly damaged by rejection. Some critics have characterized Keaton’s music as “sad bastard tunes”, we call those people “assholes”.

The structure of the album is different from Dear, though it starts off very similar. Quiet tunes, just guitar and vocals with some sparse accompaniment and minimal backup vocals. Then, out of nowhere, Keaton punches you in the face with two very loud, full blown electric songs. Then it calms down again. My interpretation of these songs being placed in this specific structure is that Keaton is expressing an emotion he didn’t really touch on in Dear, anger. He also hints that people have come to him and asked him why he writes such nasty songs about them. It’s all very scandalous if you ask me and makes for an interesting listen.

If there were a rating system that I could stand behind and believe in, I would give Birthdays the Bob Saget award for excellence in capturing raw emotion and making my soul weep openly. This is in the running for my favorite album of 2013 and now that it has been released in the states, you have no excuse not to get it. So why don’t you go and get it right now! I’ll wait.


Written by IV Freelancer Tobias Gaia.

PS: Here's the original video mentioned earlier in the article:

MUSICAL TOURISM: with LuckytheTourist

NOTCHES IN THE SPINE OF TIME

     Impossible as it may be to alter your place in time by force of will, truth is we are all threads in a four-dimensional tapestry stretching backwards and forward for as far as memorabilia becomes memory. And motion through, though not directly affected by our will, will submit to our senses if only to be noticed. My evidence of this is as follows:

1. I Wanna Be Around (Tony Bennett- The Essential Tony Bennett, Track 17)

One of pop culture's more perfect examples of "right place, right time," Tony Bennett has routinely peeked his suave bedroom eyes around time's door post just as the market was ready for him. To say he has a genre-defining voice is redundant in the extreme for anyone who's seen movies or TV in the last handful of decades. There only so many options to perfectly evoke both sophistication and carnal desire. In the fifties and early sixties he was one of a field of great songbook professionals that included Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and the whole Rat Pack roster besides. By the eighties he was a comfortable fit for the semi-annual nostalgia waves one could nearly set a clock by, and now he's the last of a breed. The Harry Connick Jr.'s and Michael Buble's of this world will only ever be shadows of their heroes, of which Tony Bennett is the last great example. Starting off with a smooth jazz piano stating the melody in an enticingly roundabout fashion, this sad eyed (and deceptively barbed) ballad stays nimble over its entire length and never sinks into the sort of orchestral blandishment that can sometimes turn this kind of pop to twaddle--

2. A Shot In The Arm ( Wilco- Summerteeth, Track 3)

Wilco, though adventurous and perpetually name dropped by the musical literati, can often come off as sodden and excessively downcast. But every now and again they turn that corner toward daylight, as they do here with jingling percussive bells, a strong snare beat, bright piano and occasional fogs of sound effects, "A Shot In the Arm" is easily one of the most bombastically theatrical selections Wilco's ever worked up. The first self-encouraging mantra-like refrain hands off to a more surreal repeated statement before the first verse repeats and finally hands off to a third over-and-over assertion all of which lend the illusion of narrative arc, but really just amounts to a piece of fully realized if slightly opaque chamber pop--

3. Dear Darkness ( PJ Harvey- White Chalk, Track 2)

Trying to keep up with Polly Jean Harvey's album by album code-switching can become a bit tiring. From urban sophisticate on 2000's Stories from the City Stories From the Sea to lo-fi indie rocker grrrl on 2004's Uh Huh Her, and all the ones before that that I didn't really keep up with. With White Chalk she stands atop the stairs in a pale night gown, like a haunted child in an Edwardian ghost story, and tells of her visions and darkness. This is one of those songs that, if you like it, tells you that you should immediately buy the whole album. It's of an inseparable narrative and stylistic piece with the entire work. Harvey is said to have learned piano just before this recording. And the childlike clarity and simplicity of the piano parts, surrounded as they are by a nearly audible emptiness and Harvey's purposely pianissimo vocals, will nearly spook your socks off--

4. Ceremony (New Order- Substance, Track 1)

This song marks the moment that Joy Division ceased to be Joy Division. But neither was it yet New Order. Lead singer Ian Curtis had died and the remaining band members were attempting to carry on. To a very real extent it still sounds like a Joy Division track. Specifically the thin guitar tone guitars and syncopated bass line. But the content and mood are on an ascension, looking up. You can hear what was and also hear what would happen next. An anomalous song, there are people who disliked both Joy Division and New Order who might like "Ceremony"--

5. Loose Nuts on The Valendrome (Liars- They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, Track 3)

You know that venomous mood that accompanies city driving on a hot day? The traffic jams, noise, rude drivers and cavalcade of idiots? Well, on their first album, Liars bottled that, stuffed it in their garage and made a rock band out of it. No surprise they hail from NYC and less surprising still that they are most easily described as prog-punk. But there is always a loss of substance in the transfer to a category; "Punk" doesn't quite say it. This music is loud and dense but also catchy and semi-melodic. It counts as angry/mad and just plain insane/mad, like mercury poisoning. I would welcome any viable explanation as to what this song is about. The lyrics seem to be notes from an extended free associative therapy session and the music reminds me of The Minutemen, The Pixies and Bone Machine-era Tom Waits--

6. Parachute Woman (The Rolling Stones- Beggar's Banquet, Track 4)

The cover photo of Beggar's Banquet, along with being nearly iconic in it's own right, is possibly the most appropriate in subject and texture ever to its respective band and album. At their most potent the Rolling Stones play music that makes you feel as though you've stumbled upon a haggard musician doing lines in a stall with an ugly prostitute and slurring exclamation about privacy. "Parachute Woman" is a brief album track, not their best but among the middling crop of the Stones' strongest material, an example of a band in stride. Short and ragged with a good hook and hollow sound that suggests the band singing and playing are just too high to remember--

7. Summertime [organica remix] (Billie Holliday {Remix by Scott Schlacter}- Billie Holliday Remixed and Reimagined, Track 7)

A nearly unimaginable nexus of time and style... this is what music has the potential to be. Piece one in this puzzle is George Gershwin. His soulful-unto-spiritual American opera Porgy and Bess will be subject to revision and study for years to come. And "Summertime," the drama's opening scene-setter aria contains wistful sorrow and chiaroscuro flourishes of a tainted nostalgia that absolutely cry for the expressive range of a Billie Holliday. Which brings me to piece number two, Billie Holliday is an American Icon as only the twentieth century could've produced, a hybrid of jazz and blues with a romanticizing dark side that sits quietly beside the cultural tensions her position in history imbued. And in Gershwin's nuanced and loaded composition she finds a piece fully the equal of her assets. The current generation of musicians may have done little to rival Gershwin or Holliday but they have become master re-interpreters. It seems to be our historical task to forever reassess and gain new perspective, and this track is a masterful example of the re-mixer's art, collaging elements to enhance or re-evaluate or simply re-discover. It's a game of repetitions and for all of their talent these re-mixers can only be as good as their source material. This track delivers on the promise of its constituent parts. There is a fragmented adventurousness that fans of DJ culture will immediately recognize but there's also a strong imprint of the history contained. The result, on the surface, is a beautifully languid piece of trip-hop jazz soul. But with even a cursory sense of the history, it blooms into a rich montage of American song-craft and historical pathos--

8. I Will Dare (The Replacements- Let it Be, Track 1)

Youth and young manhood are eternal subjects of both rock music and the rock and roll mythos (self-aware post-millennial rockers Kings of Leon even named an album that very phrase). Few better examples of that fact exist than The Replacements. To listen to their albums is to stare into the hollow, laughing eyes of a slightly tweaked teenager with a guitar and knack for tune. To observe their reputation is to see in detail the less-than-superstar allure of living your youth on tour, in the studio, and drinking with friends you didn't even know the night before. A bopping, countrified rocker, "I Will Dare" rides its bass up and down through the verses, hitching occasional chorus and bridge work from lead guitar. The thin production absolutely screams, "80's indie band!" and Paul Westerberg's John Lennon-meets-Johnny Rotten vocal makes you wonder if Billy Idol used to secretly listen to Replacements records at night and cry...into a pile of money--

9. This House is a Circus (Arctic Monkeys- Favourite Worst Nightmare, Track 8)

Of a thematic piece with The Replacements, The Arctic Monkeys had the good fortune of coming up in a market that had an ever-burgeoning demand for "snarky lads." They played the same cards but two decades later and a full ocean away. So they till the same fields of youth and noise as The Replacements but boast the massive sales their elders never managed, as well as the critical acclaim they both share. Sounding more than a little bit like The Jam but with a tad of their contemporaries The Libertines mixed in, The Arctic Monkeys may have come into the decade barely teenagers but after two albums they were apparently the numero uno baby-Strokes legacy holders (it came down to them and Franz Ferdinand as the decade closed but neither band could manage a respectable third album and the question seemed largely moot as the only long lasting legacy of the 2000's garage rock boom was Jack White's career as an indie-rock tycoon)--

10. Comfort Eagle (Cake- Comfort Eagle, Track 7)

The Nineties have come roaring back of late but, lest we forget, quintessentially Nineties irony rockers Cake never actually went away. They survived the intervening decade by realizing a very important piece of industry wisdom; niches die slowly, and will likely return. As long as you can still deliver, chances are your audience is still out there somewhere. Songs like "Frank Sinatra," "The Distance," "I Will Survive," and "Never There" may have passed into nostalgia-night jukebox immortality but there's still more to be had. From their 2001 album Comfort Eagle, this song of the same name is one of the strongest tracks Cake's ever recorded. A spirited call down the corridors of power, the dryly spoken lyrics lampoon politics, religion, and the businesses of both as the strong melodic lines, handled by a growling guitar and occasional trumpet, turn it into an effective head-bobbing anthem--

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy author who published his first book, Elantris, in 2005. Since then he has released several more successful books, including the Mistborn Trilogy, and The Way of Kings, the first part of an estimated ten-book series. In 2007 he was given the honor of completing the Wheel of Time series after the original author, Robert Jordan, passed away before its completion. Mr. Sanderson co-hosts a podcast at the website Writing Excuses, and teaches a creative writing class on fantasy and science fiction at Brigham Young University. Even with all that on his plate, he was gracious enough to set some time aside to answer a few questions for us regarding what psychs him out as a writer, how he plans to avoid “epic sprawl” and sagely advice for new writers trying to squeeze their way into the epic fantasy market.

INVISIBLE VANGUARD: I am curious if professional writers ever get psyched out by their own works. When you are working on an epic series, such as The Stormlight Archive, do you ever have moments of doubt in your ability to see it through to completion? Does it ever feel overwhelming that you have so many volumes ahead of you to write?

BRANDON SANDERSON: That's not the part that psychs me out. Length doesn't do that to me, particularly when I have a series well planned and I have a feel for how each book is going to be distinctive. This really helped me with the Mistborn series, for instance—when I planned it out, I planned each book to have its own identity. That kept me interested in them.

No, what psychs me out is that sometimes something just turns out really well, like The Way of Kings, and then I immediately start thinking, "I have to do that again, and I don't know how I did it in the first place." Writing becomes a very instinctive thing.

Most of the time when I talk about the process of writing, I'm analyzing what I've done after the fact. The truth of it is that right in the moment, right when you're sitting there working on a book, a lot of that stuff isn't going through your head. You're just running on instinct at that point. So it's easy to get psyched out when you're not sure if you can ever do it again.

IV: Do you feel that each new book you release should be better than the last? Is that something you think about while writing, or do you just do the best job that you can and hope that your works improve naturally over time with your skill?

BS: It really depends on the project. Yes, I want every book to improve, but that's a bit of a platitude. It's an easy thing to say. It gets a bit different when you sit down to think about it.

I followed The Way of Kings with The Alloy of Law. Is The Alloy of Law a better book than The Way of Kings? No, it is not. The Way of Kings I spent somewhere around ten years working on; with The Alloy of Law I had a couple of months. In the case of a book like that, I sit down and say, okay, there are things I want to learn in this process. Different books are going to have a different feel. Now, there are people out there who like The Alloy of Law better than The Way of Kings—it's not a better book, but there are people who will enjoy it more.

When I sat down to write Warbreaker, I said I wanted to get better at a certain type of humor. And I think I did get much better at that, in that book. Is the book itself better than The Hero of Ages that came before it? I do some things better, but it's hard to compare a standalone volume to the third book in an epic trilogy. They're going to do very different things.

So it's hard to say "better book"/"not better book." I think "always learning and growing" is a better way to put it than getting better with each book.

IV: Writing an epic series over many years will surely gather you many fans and many haters. In the case of Robert Jordan, it seems like bad reviews and fan backlash mounted up with each new volume as the series went on. Is that something you are concerned about? Do you try to figure out why people responded that way to that series and work to avoid a similar situation with your own, or do you just disregard the naysayers in general?

BS: Of these things that you've asked me questions on, this is the one that I've spent the most time thinking about. It is an interesting phenomenon. Each Wheel of Time book sold more copies than the one before it, yet each one up through book ten got more and more negative reviews. They start out strong, then a few of the books have balanced numbers of reviews, and then they start to take a nosedive—even as the sales of the books go up and up.

The same thing has happened with my own books—as they have grown more popular, they've gotten worse and worse reviews. It's very interesting. You can watch a book like Elantris, which when it came out had more or less universal acclaim, partially I think based on expectations. People read it thinking, hey, there's this brand new author, it probably isn't that good—hey, this book isn't half bad! And then they go and write reviews on Amazon. There are a number of early reviews there that say, wow, this wasn't half bad! This new guy is someone to watch!

As you gain a reputation, more and more people pick you up by reputation—simply hearing "This is a great book" and picking it up, rather than looking into the book and deciding it's a book they will like. That's going to lead to more people picking up the book who it's just not a good match for. I think that certainly is part of it.

I do also think that there is epic series sprawl; there's a legitimate complaint against these series like the Wheel of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire. I think the fans still like the books, but they have complaints about how they're happening. George R. R. Martin and Robert Jordan are really doing some new and unique things. Robert Jordan didn't get to read any ten-book epic fantasy series of that nature; he had to do it on his own without a model to follow. I think that as we go forward in the genre, hopefully we're picking up on things—we're standing on the shoulders of giants, and hopefully we will figure out how we can do this without necessarily sprawling quite so much, which I think is part of the problem. There's this push and pull in epic fantasy where we read epic fantasy because we love the depth of characterization and world building, and yet if the author does too much of that in every book, then we lose the ability to move forward in a central plot. That can be very frustrating.

I will say that when I was able to read the Wheel of Time from start to finish, having the complete story, that feeling that it wasn't going anywhere in places just wasn't there. That feeling came because you would wait two years for a book, and then when you finished it you'd have to wait two more years for the next book, and because of the nature of the epic series you're just getting a little tiny sliver of the story. So that part of it is just the nature of the beast, but I think we can do things to mitigate that, and I will certainly try.

IV: Lastly, what advice can you give to new and unknown authors with limitless ambition who want to write epic fantasy and/or sci-fi books? From my own personal research, it appears that agents and publishers do not want long word counts from new authors. Is it best to start simple with shorter stories and work your way up to your true love: the epic, or should you just go for it and write as much as you deem necessary and pitch your grand masterwork as a whole?

BS: There are so many questions in there that are going to be very situationally dependent. If you have not already written a few novels, I would say absolutely do not write your grand epic yet. You won't have the skill to do it, and it will disappoint you. I've run across a lot of new writers who this has happened to. They want to do their own Wheel of Time, but they don't yet have the skill to achieve it. I tried this myself and learned this the hard way.

That's not to say that it's impossible to do, but I strongly recommend to most writers to try a few other books first. Standalones or something, to really get your head around the idea of characterization and plotting and narrative arcs before you say, okay, I'm going to tell a story across ten books instead.

If you are confident of your skill, and find that you are just incapable of writing anything else? Writing is the most important thing. If something makes you not write, then it's usually going to be bad advice no matter who it comes from. So then I suggest just writing and loving what you're writing. If you can somehow style your book as "a standalone with sequel potential," then that's probably a better way to go.

This is not just for publishers and agents. New readers have a built-in skepticism toward a new author who is trying something that massive. I've found that a lot of readers like to try the standalone to find out what kind of writer you are, before they then read your big series. Having a couple of standalones has been very useful for me for that reason.

At the end of the day, just write what you love. Yes, editors and agents say they want shorter books. This is because historically it has been proven to them that authors trying to write books that are too long for them bite off more than they can chew and the book spirals out of control. But the draft of Elantris that was the first thing I sold was 250,000 words. That's a full 100,000 words longer than what everyone was telling me agents won't even look at. So by empirical proof: They will look at a longer book if it works for them. So write what you love—if you can get into your head that you're going to do this professionally, and that you have years to learn how to do this, then that's going to help you. Taking the time to practice with shorter works will help you get ready to write your epic. But if you just can't do that, then go for it.

IV: Thank you, Mr. Sanderson, for your time and insightful responses, we really appreciate it and wish you well in your forthcoming endeavors!

For more information and the latest Brandon Sanderson news, check out his website /http://www.brandonsanderson.com/.

AUDIO SHAKEDOWN: Volume 6

     Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream with this edition of the Audio Shakedown, because the warmer weather has finally thawed my freezer-burned brain and made me want sunshiny psychedelic music by the bucketful. I've been making my way through psychedelia from the mid-60's, of course, but also wandering around the neo-psych movement from ten/fifteen years ago as well. So pull up a beanbag chair, light some incense, and get in on the swirling orange groove I have cooking here.

Lamp of the Universe - Acid Mantra - Lamp of the Universe is a one-man spacy psychedelic folk project from New Zealand. Multi-instrumentalist Craig Williamson uses guitars, sitars, hand drums, a single gentle voice, and other assorted noisemakers to create long cosmic odysseys that meander and drift with a pleasant breeziness. Brevity is not really a concern here, nor is song structure. This will not get the party started, but if you need a record for long afternoons spent drifting in and out of sleep, this has exactly what you need.

Earthless - Rhythms from a Cosmic Sky - Heavy instrumental psychedelia band Earthless does their best to turn your brain to goo, and comes very close to succeeding. The album consists of three long tracks of winding, molten guitar freakouts, but what's surprising is how listenable they make it, which you can credit to the rhythm section, really. Without their consistent groove, the guitar would be just so much noodling. Technically, I suppose most people will still find this to be so much noodling, but for those in the market for a mind-bending guitar workout, this is really quite brilliant.

The Spacious Mind - The Mind of a Brother - The Spacious Mind have gone through a lot of stylistic changes in their decade-plus career, from druggy folk to ambient instrumental, but this record finds them working firmly in a heavy psychedelic vein. They've got the tricks and treats of 1967 down, but they've put their own millennial spin on it. The trouble with modern psych acts is that they're playing with a style nearly forty years old now, so there can be a feeling of having heard it all before, but The Spacious Mind really pay attention to the way they manage the build and release of their songs. They're quite long, but never seem to overstay their welcome.

The Doors - L.A. Woman - This one is tied up there with The Doors' debut as their most consistent release. From the sleazy rock and roll of "The Changeling" to the low blues shuffle of "Cars Hiss By My Window" to the steamy menace of "Riders on the Storm," every track on this album is a winner. It shows their keen awareness of their musical roots while letting them display the stylistic eccentricities that made them so original. The band is in top form, and Morrison's voice has taken on a huskier tone that fits the music well, even though that was probably acquired from the hard living that occurred over the tumultuous years of their career. An absolute classic.

Blue Cheer - Vincebus Eruptum - Before I ever heard the Grateful Dead's actual material, I knew of them by reputation only. Unhinged LSD parties with wild, trippy music playing at top volume to blow your mind out of your head, that sort of thing... but when I actually heard the Dead I was disappointed. I was told to expect hallucinogenic rock euphoria, and instead I got slightly tipsy bluegrass. The point of all this is that Blue Cheer's first album sounds like what I wanted the Grateful Dead to sound like. For its time, this album was an overwhelming sonic titan, as it eschewed the acoustic folk business for cranked up amplifiers. Blown-out distortion and sludgy blues riffs given the San Francisco acid treatment, dirty bass, and pummeling drums...this is the sensory overload I was expecting.

Counting Crows - Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings - This is a departure from the psychedelic theme, I admit, but I have spent some quality time with this record lately, and for good reason. This album is comprised of two parts, "Saturday Nights," where the band delves into tension and sin, and "Sunday Mornings," the subsequent exploration of memory and redemption. The first half of the record is what I'm mostly concerned with here, because the Saturday night side boasts some of the strongest songs that the band has yet produced, and after that, the gentler Sunday morning half seems to lag a little by comparison. But "Saturday Nights" is more than worth your time, as Duritz and company push their way through six tracks whose stories range between hard-edged, lonely New York and the deserts of the west, brimming with violence and anxiety. It's a miniature travelogue of the astral America, the one we all live in, but frequently forget to see.

BOOK REVIEW: Underworld - Don DeLillo

“Masterpieces teach you how to read them, and Underworld is no exception…”    -Greg Burkman for The Seattle Times

    Rarely does a back-cover blurb make you stop and think, but as I was reaching the halfway point of Don DeLillo's masterpiece (one of several) Underworld, this one caught my attention. It's a very true sentiment. A masterpiece should make you a better reader, and probably a better human, by pulling you up to its expectation of what its reader should be. And in this, Underworld is truly no exception, as my own history with it shows. I've enjoyed DeLillo's writings for a long time. I began with his novel of postmodern disaffection White Noise and moved on to the emotional experimentation of The Body Artist and I was hooked. But as I started Underworld ten years ago, I was still young, and I did not yet possess what the book needed me to possess. I lasted all of a hundred pages before realizing I wasn't sufficiently entrenched to prevent being pulled away by other things. Years later I bought a hardback copy of the 800+ page book, certain that what was inside it was going to be important to me, but after another half-hearted attempt at a time when I was between other interests, I drifted away again.

I started the book again recently, and by page two it was a completely different experience. Something connected, and as I reached the halfway point and saw the blurb about how to read a masterpiece, the difference between now and then became clear. In the intervening years, my focused interests in various periods and cultures of the past hundred years had become a full-blown intellectual obsession with the 20th century in general, and the American 20th century in particular. For my relationship to this book, that fact made all the difference, as Underworld is an odyssey into the heart of that very idea, an investigation of what DeLillo refers to in the book as "the curious neuron web of lonely-chrome America."

The story begins in 1951 as the Dodgers and the Giants (both still New York teams at the time) are playing for the pennant. Baseball fans may remember this game as the origin of the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" as Bobby Thomson sent a home run into the stands in the ninth inning to seal the pennant for the Giants. The book follows the home run ball as it ends up in the hands of a young boy who skipped school to see the game and then proceeds to change owners throughout the last half of the 20th century as various owner's fortunes rise and fall. As one might expect, the story is not really about the ball, it is about the people. The ball exists as its own part of the story, but the conceit of the ball is that it provides access to dozens of different narratives and perspectives on America from 1951 to the mid-1990's.

Another significant strand of the story begins on the very same day as the game-winning swing, as the Russians successfully detonate an atomic bomb, which sets in motion the nuclear tension that runs through the rest of the century as well as the rest of the novel. It's that atomic fear that acts as a poetic parallel to the various stresses and the sense of unease that permeate the story, which is broken up into several large sections, each of which could probably have functioned as admirable novellas in its own right. As the cast of characters that ripple out from that home run take their places in the narrative sweep, one begins to see how each perspective is masterfully placed to fill in a piece of the story as well as a piece of the history. Waste management engineer Nick Shay, with his murky past and strange connection to artist Klara Sax, shows us how the guilts and fears that we try to bury never stay that way for long. Chess teacher Albert Bronzini, elderly nun Sister Edgar, and 16-year-old graffiti artist Moonman157 are all pushed and pulled in various directions as the century tosses them about like a rock polisher. Historical figures show up in the book as often as DeLillo's own creations. It's a risky endeavor, but he pulls it off, and his versions of personalities like Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, Lenny Bruce, and J. Edgar Hoover never seem obtrusive or distracting. He plays them as they are, just more bits of the story of America.

The idea of the Great American Novel is that of a piece of literature that excels in its craft while simultaneously providing an accurate representation of the zeitgeist with which it is concerned. With those parameters in mind, I see no reason not to at least consider Underworld as a candidate for the label. The writing is outstanding, with the author's signature dialogue fragments and hitches in character speech firmly in place, but it's the way that the story knits together from the macro to the micro into a panoramic view of forty-some years of American life that really shows DeLillo's mastery of the form. The novel reads true, even as fiction, as it portrays Cold War America as both consistent and invisibly dangerous, just like uranium-235, or for that matter, Coca-Cola.    

ALBUM REVIEW: The Dear Hunter - The Color Spectrum

Brainchild of vocal virtuoso Casey Crescenzo, The Dear Hunter is a brilliant rock band with progressive leanings. Their first three albums each comprise a single act in a planned six act story arc.  The second album, Act II: The Meaning of, and All Things Regarding Ms. Leading clocked in at seventy-seven minutes (whittled down from one hundred and twenty minutes of material). A sprawling masterpiece, this album was the true beginning of their unique, old-time, burlesque influenced progressive style.

On the third album, Act III: Life and Death, the band continued to polish their original style and managed to streamline the work into a much more manageable fifty-seven minutes. Out of the first three albums, this one is their most accessible. Every song on it is solid and compact, without the careless meandering heard on the last record that those with low attention spans may not be able to handle.

After completing Act III, Casey decided that he needed to take a break from the original concept and work on a new project. He announced “The Color Spectrum”, nine, four track EPs, one for each color: Black, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, and White. The sheer ambition of this project was enough to raise an eyebrow from adoring fans. Who would want to buy nine separate EPs, each based on how a color sounds? Oh, me of little faith.

In lesser hands, this would have been an epic, career ending failure, but now I as kneel  humbled and shamed by my earlier doubt before the great alter of Crescenzo, I am thrilled to say that “The Color Spectrum” is yet another amazing masterpiece. This album (and it is an album, all thirty-six tracks comprise its whole) evokes in me a kind of synesthesia. Each four track section sounds like its representative color looks. I don’t know how he did it. But he did, and it is good.

Black hits like you’re lost in a vacuum, being pummeled by extra worldly debris. Red flares with the dirty anger that the lyrics define (“I am cynical,” he says, “It’s a curse”). Orange drops the anger for a pure, grooving, ‘grab life by the tits’ attitude. Yellow is reliably sunny and jaunty, like listening to a Shins album on vinyl. Green is a bit more melancholy than expected. It feels like accepting life on life’s terms, it is bittersweet. Blue is sparse and contemplative. Indigo is all electronic, a sort of psychedelic dream. Violet is a triumphant return to their original style, conjuring up burlesque houses, fur coats, and fedoras, particularly on the track “Mr. Malum”. White is a spiritual and necessary end, the end of a journey or the end of life. There is talk of returning home, that everything is okay and it makes you feel that way.

I cannot emphasize enough how awesome this album is. If you buy it, get “The Color Spectrum Complete Collection”. There is another “Color Spectrum” album out there that only has twelve or so tracks, just a couple from each EP. You want the whole thing, and you want to listen to it from start to finish. Not to mention, The Complete Collection comes with a full color book with an explanation for each EP and a DVD with some interesting behind the scenes footage.