All of This and Nothing: Why Didn't You Get a Haircut?

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

This one is even more obscure than most of my Obscure songs, I think - from Math The Band, which is indeed a math-rock outfit, and had gone from a one-man operation to a two-person band by the time this song came out in 2009. (It's since become more of a "real" band with even more people, as far as I can tell.) I don't think this was a single or anything: it's just the song that I glommed onto when I heard their record Don't Worry, semi-randomly.

Some songs we love because of their attitude, and the way that attitude is embodied in the sound. This one of of those for me. It's got that fuzzy chiptune sound that screams "late Aughts" to me, and lyrics that take direct aim the slackers of every generation. (There was a new group of slackers then; there's a new one now; there was one earlier that I was part of. There will always be another one as long as there are people to slack off.)

Good enough isn't good enough
Good enough isn't good enough
Good enough isn't good enough
Good enough is not good

This is another great song to play loudly in your car with the windows down, yelling along about how good enough isn't good enough. If you do that, it might help you even believe, internalize it.

I don't know if I entirely do believe that - "good enough" has often been just fine in my career - but I love the energy and enthusiasm and ambition, and I want to believe that attitude, that mindset. For a song, that's what matters.

All of This and Nothing: In the Branches/The Coal Mine Fall

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

This week we flip back to Obscure, with a band that I've tried to fit into this Monday series almost every year. (The band is all men, I think, so they really didn't fit with Portions for Foxes.) I finally managed to do it.

The Builders and the Butchers have a sound that I want to call unique - it's folk-based, but more in the rock vein, though nothing like the concept of "folk rock." They sound like what would have happened if rock had developed in the Appalachians, out of murder ballads, rather than the Mississippi delta.

Maybe. Something like that, anyway.

They have a lot of great songs, and they have a new record coming out this year that I haven't heard yet as I type this.

And, maybe because picking one song was tough, what I chose was a medley of two songs from their live record Where the Roots All Grow. So my favorite Builders and Butchers song is In The Branches/The Coal Mine Fall.

B&B songs are deeply atmospheric, sometimes telling semi-clear stories but more often full of apocalyptic, specific, haunting imagery, to imply and tease and suggest:

They left the angels singing
In branches of a burning tree
'Said it was all a game.
And your daddy got bent and twisted
In the bed that he made.
You'll end up the same.

Or, in one of the lines that comes to my mind most often:

A true love will leave you on your knees in the rain
A true love will leave you in the rain

This medley has the energy of a great live recording, two great songs full of atmosphere and menace to run through, and sees the band at one of their peaks. I recommend all of their stuff, for anyone who likes dark Americana music, but this is, I think, a magnificent entry point.

All of This and Nothing: Life Design

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

I know this song because I stayed at a hotel. The Hard Rock Hotel in Universal Orlando used to - and might still, for all I know - give away a mixtape to guests, called Sounds of Your Stay. I think it was a roughly annual thing. It was entirely digital even then; it might just be a non-downloadable stream these days.

My family stayed at the Hard Rock, on a big theme-park vacation, back around 2010. I liked some of the music on the collection, and I guess I'm still listening to this song even now.

This is Life Design by the Parlotones. (And I see, right this moment, that the mixtape got the title slightly wrong, and I've been thinking of this song as Life's Design for a decade. But I do also have the record it came from, Stardust Galaxies, which does not have the possessive.)

This is a bombastic song, sung in a register to emphasize that. I do like rock 'n' roll with pretensions, at least some of the time, so that doesn't bother me - it may get to some listeners. But it is big, with vague words that imply a lot more than they actually say, and a theme that, as far as it can be made entirely clear - the point is to be not-quite-clear to be even bigger and more impressive - is about All Of Life.

Again: I like it. It swings for the fences, and I think gets the ball solidly out into the parking lot. I hope you agree.

This is our story, this is our life design

All of This and Nothing: Deny All

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

Nothing particularly fancy this week - no deep personal meaning, no lyrics that mean something entirely different than they seem. Just a straightforward rock song, loud and strong and wonderful, by a band with twenty years of history when they hit this point and more than that since then.

It charted; I think it was decently known at the time. But, fifteen years later, I'm comfortable counting it on the Obscure side of the list for this year.

This week's song is Deny All by the Dutch band Bettie Serveert. It's in English, and the singer was originally American, but the lyrics have that odd obscure quality that makes me think that they can understand and speak English but maybe don't think in English, that metaphors and turns of phrase and ideas are being subtly translated as they go.

You've got to make a choice, that's your life
How many times did it pass you by?
Grab it by the throat, grab it while you can
Don't say that you don't understand

I'll admit I'm not entirely sure what's being denied here - well, all of it, of course, but what does that mean? But I don't care: this song rocks, it's evocative and powerful, and that's more than enough.

Deny all (if you cut it like that)

All of This and Nothing: Dr. Bill

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

I'm back to Obscure this week with Dr. Bill, a 2011 song from a band called 13ghosts. This is probably the first song of theirs I heard, and it got me to buy one full-length and an EP. I didn't like anything else of theirs quite as much as this one song, but there was some good stuff. And that's the way it goes, isn't it?

This is a ominous, noisy, compelling song, focused tightly on the singer's voice and the things he's telling us.

Well, maybe the things he's trying to convince himself of, if we're honest.

I like the instrumentation here, the way it starts with that slow, walking beat, punctuated with emphatic guitar chords and timed out with the spare, mostly single-hit drum sounds. Then the singer comes in, and the music builds slowly behind him - the drumming gets more complex, an electric guitar with a slightly more soothing sound to start out with, but then it all goes on, a little tenser each verse. 

I'm very normal
I'm very like everyone else

The singer is visiting Dr. Bill, we think. Some kind of regular checkup. And the singer is protesting, we think, that he shouldn't be there, that he doesn't need this, that there's absolutely nothing wrong with him.

We might even believe him, at first.

I've got it all
Nine days a week
I never sleep, I never eat
I'm a real breadwinner, a real go-get-her

But he definitely protests too much. We've probably done that ourselves. Everything is completely normal. There's nothing wrong with him. There's nothing wrong with us.

There are no voices in my head
Everything I hear is real
There are no monsters in my bed
Everything I dreamed is dead

All of This and Nothing: Strugglin'

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

This week, we're back to Obscure, with the 2014 song Strugglin' from I Am the Albatross's self-titled record. They're obscure enough that they barely show up in a google search for their quirky, specific name, which saddens me - but the world is big and full of stuff, and most of it is hidden in one way or another.

I'm pretty sure this band is defunct - that their website is gone, that their Bandcamp page lists three releases ending a decade ago, and the aforementioned google search lead me to think that. But art can live forever, and I still listen to this song. (And I can't be the only one.)

There's a lot of people out there in the world tonight
A lot of people out there in the world tonight (x2)
That ain't gonna make it 'til the morning light...

This is another song that starts relatively quietly, and then goes on to burn the barn down. The lyrics are evocative, allusive, metaphoric. Something bad is happening - the singer's "baby" is "struggling," which is as specific as it gets - but the words are almost apocalyptic, all-encompassing.

When things can't get any worse, well that's when they do
Searching for a crack where the light shines through...

It has a shuffly, loud, borderline-lofi sound, and it blasts at top speed for almost five minutes - five great minutes. This is a song that shouldn't be forgotten, so I'll do my tiny bit to remind people it's out there.

All of This and Nothing: Divisonary (Do the Right Thing)

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

Some songs you love because they say things you want to believe. They put into words ideas that might be in your head already, saying it more clearly and precisely than you managed to do yourself. The best of those songs give you an image to hold up, maybe a vision of your best self, of the person you want to be or could be, if you tried.

Divisionary (Do the Right Thing) is the last song on Ages and Ages's 2014 record of the same name. And it's very much one of those songs, as the subtitle implies.

Do the right thing, do the right thing
Do it all the time, do it all the time
Make yourself right, never mind them
Don't you know you're not the only one suffering

That's how it starts, like a meditation or an affirmation - like the singer telling himself as much as he's telling us.

He doesn't give us specifics: this is not about a particular situation, or at least he's not going to tell us here. There may be something specific in his mind. This is a song about how to engage with the world: how to work with people, I think, who claim to be open to change and compromise but will only drag you down.

Cuz they ain't moving, they're just moving around
So if you love yourself, you better get out
get out, get out, get out
now

This song has lived in my head since 2014. I hope it can live in yours as well. 

Do the right thing. Do it all the time. Make yourself right.

Don't you know you're not the only one suffering?

All of This and Nothing: Dylan Thomas

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

This week's song is Dylan Thomas, by Better Oblivion Community Center - last week I had a big famous supergroup, so this week I have something that's a supergroup in its own way, a one-off project by Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers that lasted a couple of years and produced one record. This one was the single, and I think it was moderately successful, five years or so ago.

I put this on the Obscure side, since I doubt anyone really remembers this project, but it was prominent enough that there are Wikipedia articles and the song lyrics are available online. (That was my trigger, during last year's project, to think something was really obscure - nobody put the lyrics online anywhere. So now I'm second-guessing myself about whether this one really counts as "Obscure" - oh well, too late to change the whole plan for the year now.)

This is a catchy, bouncy song, sung in harmony by those two singers most of the time, with occasional lines by just one or the other. And what's it about? It's one of those complex, allusive songs I love, full of quick wordplay and solid rhymes - it's about whatever you can figure out, about itself, about the world, about the experience of being this song at this moment in the world's life.

It's not really about Dylan Thomas, but he is namechecked in the middle. That's close enough for a title.

They say you've gotta fake it
At least until you make it
That ghost is just a kid in a sheet

All of This and Nothing: The Driver

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

I don't know who Andrew Deadman is. I half-suspect that's a stage name, or otherwise not the name he was born with - but I don't know. The world is large and contains multitudes.

I got his record Santa Monica Airport 1987 around when it was released in 2019 - probably as a publicity thing. (Yes, I get music for publicity purposes. I find it hard to believe myself; I can't see how I've ever been useful in the slightest to publicize anything.) It's a solid record, atmospheric and discursive, all supporting Deadman's tense, cracking voice.

My favorite song from that record is The Driver, the story (true or false or fictionalized) of one ride in a car, from somewhere to somewhere. Like a lot of the obscure songs I like, this year and previously, the lyrics don't exist anywhere online I can find.

So I'm sitting here typing, listening to the guitar solo at around three minutes in, wondering how much I want to try to transcribe lyrics myself. Maybe just the chorus; that's always a good thing. Maybe that's what I want to leave you with.

Driver please
I'm too young to be bleeding
Dead on the side of the road
And I'll take what you give me
I will take what you give me
As long as I live 'till I'm old