autumn music

A few years ago, my friend Tony - www.fastnbulbous.com - wrote an essay about autumn music that was quite inspired. There are only two times of the year when the season has a tangible musical connection for me: fall and Christmas. And even though it would be easy to list any band or record that has a melancholy air as autumnal, there are only two, maybe three records that truly evoke the season for me.

The first is REM's Fables of the Reconstruction. Tony introduced me to the album our junior or senior year of high school. I didn't think too much of it at first, but the more I listened to it, the more it grew on me. And looking back on it now, the record has a vibe, a mood - whatever you want to call it - that runs through all the songs and draws them together. The whole is greater the sum of its parts. It sounds simultaneously old and new, which is another way to say timeless. Michael Stipe has never sounded so surreal, or wistful. "It’s a Man Ray kind of sky / Let me show you what I can do with it."

Side note: Fables also reminds me of one night back in high school when I met a woman at a party that I fell head over heels for. I can't remember her name, only that she was from out of town (Cedar Rapids or Davenport, I believe - might as well have been Siberia since I had no car). And I never saw her again. I had never dated anyone before that night, but talking and flirting with her at the party - we were completely oblivious to everyone around us - gave me a tantalizing glimpse into what might be (and wasn't). After I came home late that evening, I went into my bedroom and immediately started playing "Life and How to Live It" from Fables. I don't know why (I still don't), but every time I hear that song, it reminds me of her.

The second record is U2's The Unforgettable Fire. Recorded before the band became bona-fide rock stars with The Joshua Tree, this record also has a vibe which I credit, in part, to producer Brian Eno - the modern father of mood music (aka "ambient" - Eno is same man who made a record called "Music for Films" in 1978). And again, like Fables, the tone of the Unforgettable Fire is nostalgic and plaintive. Bono's lyrics have never been so impressionistic, so evocative. I love the first stanza of "A Sort of Homecoming":

And you know it's time to go
Through the sleet and driving snow
Across the fields of mourning
Light in the distance

And in the second stanza, a fantastic simile:

The city walls are all pulled down
The dust, a smoke screen all around
See faces ploughed like fields that once
Gave no resistance

There are many other records that could just as easily qualify as autumnal - Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind, New Order's Movement, The Cowboy Junkies' The Trinity Session, Portishead's Dummy...the list goes on. But these two crystallize the season, for me at least.