What I've Been Listening To 2025.3.2
I’m in Spokane this week. I’m here frequently and it’s amazing how different my listening is on this side of the mountains. Part of this is biographical. I’ve lived in this city off and on for over two decades, so I have a lot of anchors cast about the place. On my way to the neighborhood cluster of bars, I pass by the building that an ex moved into after we broke up. I met some friends for beers and passed the corpse of the one good jazz club in town, which didn’t survive COVID.
At the risk of never beating the “nostalgia” allegations, I’ve been listening to a lot of songs that I obsessed over back then. One trend I noticed is that a lot of them open with a killer guitar lines.
I promise that I won’t always theme these weekly missives, but when a theme presents itself, I’m not above following it.
The opening of “Incinerate” is etched into my brain as one of the best in media res openings in rock and roll. The song starts just as it means to go on, with guitars accompanied by more guitars and a wandering, hooky collection of melodies that are going to trade off to make sure you don’t get bored.
It always surprises me that Sonic Youth is so divisive. Not that everyone has to love them, but the vitriol they elicit from some of my friends certainly doesn’t seem warranted. To dislike a song like “Incinerate” you basically have to hate the very idea of the electric guitar.
This is the song that also drove home to me that while I despise love stories, I’m a sucker for love songs, as long as they’re not maudlin or straightforward. Any love worth committing to art is by definition strange. I think this song does an excellent job of elicits the feeling of being strangely fucked up about someone in a way that feels all encompassing.
The riff and solo at the start of Queens of the Stone Age’s “3’s and 7’s” rips so hard. I got this record the day it was released to review it for my old music blog. I remember being a little disappointed with the album as a whole, but not really caring that much because I loved this one track so much. I love every bit of it, from the shredding opening to Josh Homme’s bored stoner lyrical delivery to the chaotic, shifting bridge that ends up taunting its way into a killer solo. It’s a gorgeous fucking mess from start to finish.
In fact, I loved the song that I ended up making a critical mistake. The following story will be completely inscrutable for anyone too young to remember 9/11.
I loved that opening solo so much that I clipped the first 14 seconds of the track and made it my ring tone. On my Motorola Razr, this also made it the default alarm clock sound. Every time I got a call or my alarm clock went off, a tinny, compressed-to-hell version of that opening solo blared out of the phone speaker.
The first time I woke up to it, I thought “fuck yeah time to start my day”. But I am not a morning person. Waking up every day is an exercise in misery. I didn’t realize it at first, but I was slowly subjecting myself to Ludovico Technique levels of aversion therapy. I slowly began to hate that solo. I didn’t realize how much until one day I was driving to Coeur d’Alene and the song came up on shuffle from the mix CD I’d put in the stereo. I instantly got the unpleasant adrenal jolt of my body telling me it was time to wake up, even though I was very much awake and doing 80 miles an hour towards the Idaho border.
It took me months to recover.
If you’re not a Steely Dan fan, I hope you’ll suffer through “Don’t Take Me Alive” for me. (Unlike Sonic Youth, I get why Steely Dan is so divisive; I love them but they can be pretty wanky.) If you start it, you’ll get to hear an incredible opening solo by Larry Carlton. If you stick around, you’ll get to hear the absolutely insane way that Donald Fagan sings the word “Oregon”.
It’s not my favorite Steely Dan solo (that would be Carlton’s solo on “Kid Charlemagne”), but as a way to kick off a track it’s hard to beat. The casual slide into the lazy virtuosity that presages some of the motifs without ever stating them verbatim just gets me every time.