#i think this approach loses the album-ness of it all

[jakeperalta]

also she doesn’t need the money…

tbh I think the money is only like a secondary perk, it's because she's just always gunning for the biggest first week sales possible (which is why we got all those folklore variants, but then after they changed the rule that preorders only count in the week they're dispatched she only bothered with one evermore variant because she couldn't get the extra first week sales from it). I don't really mind variants like different colours or cover art, those feel more like a case of picking your favourite or being a collector, but I hate when it involves exclusive tracks on different variants — it feels like it's turning the core of what the album is about (the music and specifically how this collection of songs is arranged to form a single work) into a business move which is :/

[rolandrockover]

Strange Parasites Dying in the Rain

For a certain song from Carnival of Souls (1997), a crazy idea has been buzzing through my admittedly somewhat effervescent mind for quite some time, and I think it's about time I let it loose on you.

And it goes something like this:

Rain sounds as if Parasite is trying to carry the much too heavy Strange Ways, both from the '74 album Hotter Than Hell, on its shoulders, which are not really made for such heavy performances, and thus loses a lot of light-footedness.

That would be the imaginative version.

Of course, one could take a more sober approach to the whole thing and make it quite clear that all those responsible for the music were inspired to a very, very specific degree by Alice in Chains and their Rain When I Die (1992). Which shouldn't be too much of a surprise for fans of whatever generation, because Carnival of Souls was written and recorded in the 90s, and Kiss have always been able to adapt whatever zeitgeist (1) quite skillfully without ever losing too much of their own identity.

But the unfortunately still and often shunned Carnival of Souls still occupies a special position, which in my opinion and in this case is less due to Kiss than the general aversion of this particular group of people to the rock music of those dreadful 90s.

As you can imagine, the fact that Carnival of Souls has not exactly become a cheerful, light-hearted party album, but rather a collection of music that implies not only heavy guitars but equally heaviness of thought, is not really well received either.

But that should come as no surprise, because wealthy to rich rock stars in their mid-forties naturally don't ask themselves any existential questions, especially not in the midst of a consumer-oriented world of facade-ness, which fundamentally and from the outset negates any search for meaning, and makes bliss or even enlightenment seem about as easy as a drunk blind man trying to find his way out of a maze right next to a noisy building site.

This would be of course inauthentic, and therefore completely unacceptable, and almost certainly a whole lot more ludicrous than grown men in their mid-40s who smear inches of make-up on their faces and then pretend to be animals, aliens or monsters or the like in public, and then sing about their genitals for the most part. And after all, credibility is everything.

So, which version do you prefer?

Side Note:

(1) Flavor of the day would also be a wonderful description.

Rain (1997)

Rain When I Die (1992)

Parasite (1974)

Strange Ways (1974)

[thelarryficrecplace]

Best ABO fics? I don't mind who is alpha or omega! Thanks :)

Hello! Here’s some of my fav:

Love is like this; not a heartbeat, but a moan by angelichl:

Summary: “He hates this, more than anything in the world he hates this. His title, his rank, his DNA. Unchangeable. Fated.

And then there’s Harry, born to be unobjectively superior to Louis and all other O’s. Unlike other A’s, Harry doesn’t wear his alpha-ness very well. He’s clumsy with it, like walking around in a pair of shoes a size too big. His life is defined by uncertainty and tentativeness, and those are definitely not qualities alphas should have.Sometimes, when Louis ponders it for too long, he thinks that maybe Harry resents being an A just as much as Louis resents being an O.

"In which Harry loves Louis, but Louis has been cold to him ever since he presented as an omega at age fifteen.

Eight years later, Louis approaches Harry with a request, and who is Harry to deny him?

Word count: 13,150

Swim In The Smoke by whoknows:

Summary: “What about this, Captain?” Liam asks, nudging the boy kneeling between their feet with the toe of his boot. The boy hisses and swipes at him, slurring out something unintelligible around the makeshift gag Niall had to stuff in his mouth. He misses by a mile and tries again, just as ineffectively.

Harry looks down at him, at the way the sun streams over his face and shoulders, at the way the gag stretches his mouth, lips pink and chapped. He’s lithe and pretty, smudged all over with dirt. They had found him tied up below deck, mostly unconscious, next to a barrel full of gold. He’s clearly a prisoner, but there’s something familiar about him, something that niggles at Harry’s brain. Something he can’t quite put his finger on.

“Put him in my cabin,” Harry decides, turning back to deal with the rest of the loot. The boys screams out jumbled curse words at Harry’s back, muffled by the gag, and Harry can’t understand any of it.

Word count: 101,778 

With love comes strange currencies by mediaville:

Summary: One day One Direction will be over and Louis won’t be around Harry every waking moment. He’ll be able to finally get some space, let their bond dissipate as it’s bound to do, if they don’t mess up again. He can move to Costa Rica and forget that Harry Styles popped his first knot inside him. Until then, he’s going to have to deal with this.

or, They’re Accidentally Mated and Dealing With It Rather Badly.

Word count: 16,508

Who Would’ve Thought by whoknows:

Summary: The idea doesn’t come to Louis until they’ve been at the bungalow for a couple of days. Harry has no idea that he’s going to pop a knot. He’s been living his life with the expectation that he’s going to be a beta, and Louis isn’t going to tell him otherwise.

Louis is an omega, though, and most omegas want to be filled up with a knot, fucked the way their bodies are made to be fucked, and Louis is no different. In ten years he wants to have an alpha waiting for him at home who will hold him down and fuck him exactly the way Louis wants to be fucked without worrying that they’re going to expect him to stay at home, open a joint bank account, raise a litter of babies, cook and clean and, most importantly, be submissive. For that to happen Louis needs an entirely different kind of alpha.

And so the plan is born.

Word count: 44,275

King and Lionheart by stylinsoncity:

Summary: Louis can’t remember a time when he didn’t hate being an omega. But maybe he just needed Harry to come along and make him his.

Word count: 46,130

i don’t wanna be your friend, i wanna kiss your neck by crybaby:

Summary: Harry has been in love with Louis Tomlinson for four years, five months, and thirteen days.

Harry had fallen in love with Louis Tomlinson like how he’d seen in movies, and how he’d read in all the books he’d stolen from Gemma, headfirst and shameless.

The only problem was, that in films and books, love was always either returned instantly, or else it took time for unrequited love to lose the first two letters, and since the first option was obviously not true, Harry decided he would wait for the second to become reality.

And so Harry waited, three years, eight months, and four days, before his heart had been broken by a gentle rejection and a misplaced blowjob, before Louis and Gemma had packed up and gone to Manchester for university.

(Harry is a hopelessly romantic omega and Louis is his sister’s best friend)

Word count: 19,832

There’s No Way That I Could Share You by paladincoolcats:

Summary: Harry had always been possessive of Louis, even before they soulbonded. This is pretty much just a bunch of incidents where Harry, as Louis’s alpha, gets jealous when other people get too involved with his omega. And then there’s part two, dealing with Harry and Louis’ experiences during Louis’ pregnancy.

Word count: 37,954

But Please, Don’t Bite by shyserious:

Summary: "Melodic little jingle sounded from a bell hanging over the doorframe and warm indoor air curled heavily around his shivering body for the first time in months. Harry suddenly felt a sting in the corners of his eyes and had to force down a broken sob. Fuck, he was a mess. Such a mess. He had to focus.”

Word count: 122,320 

Cameras Flashing by juliusschmidt:

Summary: With his breakout single platinum three times over and his second album still selling out in stores around the world, Louis Tomlinson has made it to the top. However, his position as Pop Heartthrob of the Decade is threatened by the edgier, more artistic Zayn, who happens to be releasing an album a week after Louis’ upcoming third. Louis needs something groundbreaking- scandalous, even- to push past him in the charts. Much to Louis’ dismay, his PR team calls in The Sexpert.

Consulting with PR firm Shady, Lane and Associates pays the bills so that Harry Styles can spend his down time doing what he really loves: poring over data. On weekends and late into the evenings, he researches gender, presentation, and sexual orientation, analysing the longitudinal study that is his father’s life’s work. That is, until his newest client, the popstar with the fascinating secret, drags him off his couch and frighteningly close to the spotlight.

As the album’s release date approaches, will Tomlinson and Styles be able to pull off the most risky PR scheme of the millennium and beat Zayn in sales or will the heat of their feelings for each other compromise everything?

Word count: 81,773

as deep as the sky by swallowsmateforlife:

Summary: A passed-out omega on the bathroom floor isn’t exactly what Harry had in mind when he thought about taking a cute boy home. The idea of leaving Louis there, vulnerable and unresponsive, weighs guiltily at Harry’s conscience. Turns out it’s the best decision he’ll ever make.

Word count: 12,265

[cloudytreefolk]

Exercise: The History of Illustration - E. H. Shepard and Dave McKean

E. H. Shepard (1879 - 1976) began his career illustrating editions of Aesop’s Fables, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and Tom Brown’s School Days  before drawing cartoons for Punch, a popular satirical and comic magazine. During the First World War, in his thirties, he served in the trenches and for military intelligence, recording enemy positions with his illustration skills. After the war, Shepard continued to work for Punch, for a time as Head Cartoonist, before being removed by the new manager in 1953.

Whilst at Punch, E. H. Shepard was introduced to A. A. Milne by a colleague and  established a productive working relationship, E. H. Shepard providing the iconic illustrations for the Winnie-the-Pooh series, which were used as a basis for the classic Disney movie. Shepard also illustrated Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. For the purposes of this exercise I’ll focus on E. H. Shepard’s Winnie-the-Pooh illustrations, as they are the best known of his work and there’s a large pool of work there to analyse.

Dave McKean (1963 - ) is an artist, illustrator, photographer, musician and filmmaker. His career began in 1986 when he met author Neil Gaiman, and the pair published several smaller comics together before the highly successful The Sandman series was released, which brought McKean and Gaiman properly into the public eye. McKean also illustrated DC’s Arkham Asylum. Since then he’s published numerous comics,illustrated several more Neil Gaiman works including Coraline and The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, illustrated  books by S.F. Said, David Almond, Steven King, Ray Bradbury, Richard Dawkins and many more. He’s designed album covers and promotional artwork, produced concept artwork for major feature films and directed MirrorMask, written with Neil Gaiman from 1998 and released in 2005. 

Did the work of the illustrator you chose seem old fashioned? How?

Shepard’s illustrations for Winnie the Pooh have a classic, literary feeling, reminding me of the pen and ink style I’ve seen in illustrations for Sherlock Holmes or The Secret Garden, however with a bit more of a sweetness and cosy humour, a bit more playful and cartoonish than those more representational images. I feel like Shepard’s style fits the books and characters very well, with their reassuring combination of more grown up thoughtful-ness/ character observation and gentle humour reflected by the “classic” pen and ink style and “cartoonish-ness” where the lines become less representational and more humourous. When I read the books growing up, the illustration style made me feel like they were somewhat serious and mature books for me to read, which made me feel accomplished. They feel quietly enticing like doodles in the author’s notebook, as if you were being read the stories directly by the paternal voice of A. A. Milne and being given an inside look. The landscape of the Hundred Akre Wood is relatively realistic, somewhat sparse and scrubby, so feel more relatable and familiar than a big colourful jungle - you could meet the characters in the trees at the bottom of your garden. 

“I was able to draw many of the places with the comfortable feeling of - it really happened here-” E. H. Shepard on creating studies from life at Ashdown forest to consolidate into the finished Winnie the Pooh illustrations.

What attracted you to the work of your chosen contemporary artist?

Dave McKean’s artwork is highly textural, feels cinematic, can feel both bleak and stark or warm and intimate through specific lighting and colour choices. I love his combinations of rich colour and texture with deep black shadows or scratchy black lines, this is something I love producing in my own artwork. His illustration work and faces feel very sculptural and influenced by his 3D work, like masks but also sensual. There’s an off-putting, distant feeling by the mask-like nature, but intimacy from warm skin tones and fleshy shapes. Cinematic feeling from almost theatrical lighting and texture, cartoony feeling where the text requires more comedy with the scratchy lines and wacky shapes and expressions.

I picked McKean’s illustrations of Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves in the Walls to focus on for this exercise because I thought the comparison with E. H. Shepard’s work would be interesting. Both works feature anthropomorphic animals and relatable childhood experiences (playing with soft toys, being scared of monsters hidden in your house) but the nature of the animals is far darker and chaotic in The Wolves in the Walls, and I feel like the multifaceted, abstracted mixed media artwork reflects this mood.

  Sometimes the wolves are completely abstract; mad and dark shapes, they warp and twist, especially when Lucy is at the bottom of the garden worrying about what the wolves will do to her puppet pig. When she enters the house to save her pig, the wolf she sees in reality is white and hairy, a living, sleeping, solid animal instead of a twisted demon. Having faced the reality of her fear she feels braver and encourages her family to take back their house from the wolves. Something I think is really clever is that the wolves don’t lose all their character and become docile cute and fluffy, they are more realistically drawn/more grounded than before and white instead of black but still wacky and scratchy and cartoonish, just the nature of that abstraction has changed. Now having taken over the house, they’re more force of mad chaos instead of a dark ominous threat and feel more comical and cathartic than terrifying.

How did each artist produce their illustrations, what tools and materials did they use?

E. H. Shepard began his illustrations by making pencil studies from life in the countryside of Ashdown Forest, the basis for The Hundred Acre Wood. He’d then take these home, make thumbnail sketches to develop his ideas, then trace from his studies to compose his final images. He would “drop in” the characters on top of these scenes, drawn from imagination but originally based off the real life Christopher Robin and his toys, along with Shepard’s son’s bear Growler as the eponymous Winnie-the-Pooh. Then Shepard would ink over his pencil lines with a nib pen, later adding simple and bright watercolour washes when the books were later published with colour illustrations.

Images from The Art of Winnie the Pooh by James Campbell

In keeping with the technological advances of illustration since Shepard’s days, Dave McKean uses a more technologically based approach to create his illustrations, and uses a wide selection of media. On his website FAQ he writes “I use whatever is appropriate for the job. If the story needs close storytelling and a light, simple style of narrative, then probably pen and ink, or brushpen, or pencil would be best. If the story needs a more symbolic approach then maybe collage, or paint, or digital. It all comes down to the emotion and atmosphere you want to convey.” For The Wolves in the Walls he uses a mixture of traditional and digital painting for the humans, scratchy, powerful traditional ink lines for the feral wolves, and photography and found textures to construct objects such as the puppet pig, father’s tuba, mother’s jam and walls and fabrics of the house. Natural forms like plants and fire are totally digitally painted; little abstract elemental flourishes occasionally dotted in. All these parts are compiled and layered together digitally in Photoshop, reminiscent of Shepard’s method of compiling several sketches into one piece by tracing.

[pleiadesounds]

Where To Start With,  Pt 1

 This week, Harry Fanshawe from UK noiseniks Modern Rituals acquaints Kai with the inimitable Silver Jews, while Kai in turn shows him the finer points of British post-punk stalwarts Wire. 

  Kai Woolen-Lewis Wire are, for me, one of the great bands in the history of punk music. Whereas a lot of other bands you’d describe as such would subsist largely on folklore and be a calamity if judged on their incarnation in the present moment, Wire however seem to be one of the rare bands who have managed to be both very influential (if you need punk credentials, they were covered by Minor Threat and if you need trendy floppy haircut credentials, they were covered by My Bloody Valentine) and forever forward-thinking - bridging the gap between the pompousness of progressive music and the snarl and brevity of punk, a bridge between what were two ultra-partisan camps. Though they’re contemporaries of elder statesmen of British punk like the Sex Pistols and The Buzzcocks, there’s far more of an art-school vibe to Wire - one gets the impression that they must’ve stood in stark contrast to the image and the attitude of their peers, with cerebral and challenging songs that refused to succumb to the immediate hedonism of the punk music of the time. One gets the impression that they have far more in common with genre outliers like Patti Smith, Pere Ubu and Kraftwerk than with any of their counterparts in the British punk scene. 

 When I first saw them, at the Lexington in London 4 or 5 years ago, they played almost entirely new songs, with only a few songs from their “seminal” LP’s included in the set. Now that the horror of not knowing many of the songs has worn off, it’s a clear sign of their continuously forward-looking approach. With seventeen studio albums and god knows what else in the way of releases, here’s where to start with Wire - despite their huge legacy, absolutely not a legacy act…

 Playing Harp For The Fishes

 KWL Even after decades of churning out consistently stark, highly original songs, Wire still absolutely excel - although lots of their current and recent material is a lot more digestible than in their early years - this, from 2017’s Silver/ Lead is big slow-grooving song which gives an excellent idea of the kind of discomforting experimental noise Wire have always dealt in. A steady rhythm section struggles against all matter of ethereal out of key guitar, weird oscillating noises and throbbing synth lines. Musically and lyrically challenging and abstract without ever feeling overwrought. Sardonic without any hint of bitterness. Dense without even a smidgen of unpalatability. Is it always so? Aye.

Harry Fanshawe Wire for me have always been a band on the periphery of punk history. Not to say that is rightly so, but they're a band that I've seen has being earmarked as integral by the nerdier music fans (I mean that with fondness). Take Joy Division, they formed because they saw the Sex Pistols, but they made something much deeper and more meaningful. My mental placement for Wire has had them alongside the likes of Killing Joke in that history (weirder and less easy to associate with the common idea of 'punk'), and I feel like their evolution has been similar. Like you say this track favours simplicity with the steady beat, allowing a nicely sized canvas to throw as many different colours at, which they do with the layers they chuck on top. That is an approach that I see as being more contemporary of today than the 70s (favouring simplicity and excelling in it has really come back in the last few years). It shows how adaptable this band has been over the decades. 

Lowdown

 KWL Wire’s first album Pink Flag has gone down in music history as one of the seminal British records of the early punk movement, largely down to it’s combination of abrasiveness, melody and brevity. 21 songs in 36 minutes, often fleetingly abrupt, played at breakneck pace and infused with an abstract sense of humour and an art-school sensibility that set them miles apart from their contemporaries. This one, Lowdown, sounds like a soul single on 33rpm; a fascinating disco dirge and highlight of a pretty highlight-heavy first LP.

 HF Right back to the 70s and for me that Crazy Horse vibe is straight in there. This is the THE Wire album. Fight me. Musically, it's a whole different sound to the last song, it's got vibe and groove and all the amazing characteristics of the best 70s bands. Vocally I find it more alike the stuff of the 2010s, though I reckon that's probably debatable! It's obviously got that old school, British punk oi! to it and today they're much calmer. But you can hear it. For anyone who knows Kai and his musical projects of the last few years, this riff is SO Kai.

 Marooned

KWL Here’s an older one - from 1978’s Chairs Missing. The jump between Pink Flag and this in the space of a couple of years is absolutely insane, and the jump from this to the next year’s 154 is also pretty nuts. A highlight on a rich, chilling and unique record of challenging post-punk, Marooned is slow, meandering and awash with oceanic wetness, big synths and sheet glass guitars, with Newman singing about hanging out on a sinking iceberg - both sonically and in terms of sheer epic-ness of scope, it’s closer to Pink Floyd than to any of their genre contemporaries. I put this on at a house party once and the atmosphere nose dived and the whole room just totally explicably got really fucking awkward. Take what you want from that, I guess.

 HF Forward a couple of years and the Pink Floyd sounds are in there, the experimentation is kicking off and yeah we're sat on a soft synth cloud here. It is a massive jump and I love that, I fully dig that 'fuck it who cares what anyone thinks I wanna try that'. I reckon that idea is nicely reflected in your house party play of it. I know that feeling, I did it with Primitive Man myself around a bunch of posh hipsters listening to surf rock in Cornwall. Lasted like less than 2 seconds. Proper wankers. Anyway, point is Kai, it's their loss. The tune slaps.

Map Ref 

KWL By 1980’s 154 - so called because at the point they recorded it, they had played live 154 times - Wire had cemented their place as both stalwarts and genre outliers by following up the seminal Pink Flag with the enormous impenetrable curveball-shaped Chairs Missing. 154 is full of big bangers and awkward, atmospheric synthesiser-led songs - this by the way is one of the big bangers. Lyrically it seems to be a geography nerd gushing about the enormous epic expanses of landscape that make up the American midwest. Before you go look it up, the Map reference is somewhere called Centerville in Iowa or Ohio or something. Map Ref has a chorus I frequently cite alongside “That’s When I Reach for my Revolver” or “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” as a contender among underground punk rock’s biggest fist-in-the-air choruses.

HF Again, 70s vibes are rife, the energy of the rhythm section just holds it all up so strong. Weirdly, I find his voice sounds loads like Blake Schwarzenbach [Jawbreaker, Jets to Brazil]? Any influence on him there? Who knows. Way more in the way of vocal melody here and the vibe is moving more along the way bands like Talking Heads were at the time. Definitely a banger. Love the lil satirical 'chorus' drop in there. As for landscapes inspiring songs, fuck yeah why should it always be about people? I mean animal rights punk is usually dreadful and dull, let's talk about something inanimate for once.

 Blogging

 KWL Brazen, streamlined and groovy, with a chugging downtuned riff and a glorious uplighting chorus - Blogging showcases Wire’s admirable ability to follow their own pretty standard formula and keep churning out highly original and interesting songs. The lyrics deserve a mention - it’s a hard enough endeavour sometimes for those of us born in the 90s, but if you were in a band that existed in 1976, the current musical landscape must be a pretty soul-destroying place to exist. Actually scrap that. If you were alive at a time when art seemingly meant something or was worth anything, now must be a horrible place to live. “I’m blogging like Jesus/ I tweet like a pope/site traffic heavy/ I’m YouTubing hope” 

 HF Totally agree Kai. Today is a fucking terrible time to be alive if you're interested in anything related to the notion of 'art'. It's all been rehashed and overdone. It's everywhere to be seen and no longer has a sacred place. It's been abused and overused for petulant causes. Everyone's a fucking artist and that's killed the concept. Can't believe how much this reminds me of Jets to Brazil, why!? I suppose we can forget about the present if we stick to Wire's back catalogue.

Circumspect

KWL A product of extensive periods of down-time on their part, which saw the members working on other projects - Colin Newman’s Githead in particular is worth a mention - 2008’s Object 47, so called because it’s the 47th Object in their back catalogue - is a really great record and a hidden gem in Wire’s back catalogue for me. Dispensing with the distortion and the abrasion, Wire made a record of sparse, infectious guitar-based songs that you can really lose yourself in, and this is one of the songs in which I have most frequently lost myself. A slow circular guitar arpeggio, laid-back drums and lush vocals result in an almost Manchester-esque slow disco pills-thrills-and-bellyache vibe - this is Wire at their most hypnotic and enjoyable. 

 HF Slowcore Wire! Yeah this is one of my favourites from this list. Having time away from something can let you come back to it without as much creative control or care, and refreshing your image of what the thing is in the first place. Step away, come back more naturally. This is softer, but it's still as weird as anything else they made in the last 20 years. Pretty banging video too, mind. It feels like you're in one of those dreams where you try and run but you got sandbags on your feet. But in this one, it's Drew Barrymore from Donny Darko and she's apathetic as fuck.

Bad Worn Thing

KWL Their first album properly “back” after a period of sporadic activity through the 2000s, Red Barked Tree is the sound of a band of fifty-somethings consistently at peace with the idea of re-defining what their band IS, without at any point ever stepping on the toes of their older selves. Another album highlight (with acoustic guitars) Adapt, sums it up pretty nicely. "Go east / Go north / Go south / Go west / Leave mouths open / With your best / Adapt to change / Stay unimpressed”. Bad Worn Thing finds the band both tapping into 2000s alternative music and subjecting it totally to their musical and lyrical interpretations. An upbeat, undeniably British-feeling slice of sauntering pop, one that makes me feel like I’m taking an afternoon walk through a British urban landscape to the shop on the first sunny day in weeks - all while giving a pretty caustic account of Britain’s ongoing relationship with its past and by implication, it’s future. “Follow me, no explanation/ the future sold the chancellor paces/ the growing pains associated with a past that no-one faces.”

 HF This feels so much more British than much of what we've had from them on this list so far. This is Britpop Wire. Dam right they sound like they're back, they have something new to say, they're older and more jaded, but they still have something to say. I love the 'overcrowded nature of things' repetition. Like they've come back to this messy DIY music thing and it's a fucking full house. So you gotta build your own. Mind you, I'd say Wire have always lived in the garage.

Used To

KWL Another huge cut from Chairs Missing - and a perfect example of what critic Simon Reynolds called Wire’s “strange clockwork geometry” - a blissful piece of post-punk psychedelia and definitely one of the climaxes of a record that enjoys an embarrassment of rich, blissed out moments. I would definitely cite Wire’s work in this period as proof of the utter compatibility of the experimental, expansive, forward thinking music of the 60s and 70s and the abrasiveness and brevity of punk. Indeed, it sounds like bullshit now, but the same A+R man who signed Pink Floyd and the Sex Pistols was responsible for EMI’s acquisition of the band while they were still in their infancy. For me, basically everything that made the years 1976-1979 so exciting and vital in the history of unpopular music is represented in this album, whether it be this, the Beatles-on-glue vibes of ‘I am the Fly’ or the aggressive minimalism of ‘Being Sucked in Again’, the album just gives and gives and gives. An absolute classic.

 HF Very pleased we went back to this to close. Absolutely loving the post-punk psychedelia tag on this baby. Again, everything you say above that I hear in this record is their observant nature as a band to look back at the twenty years before them and incorporate what's important, what's wrong, what's right and the relationship of all that against their own stronghold. It reinforces their importance and their place in all of this. Not everyone, hardly anyone, has the ability to be the originator of something whilst being so observant (the latter being one of the most troubling things for humankind) at the same time. A perfect place to end with Wire: it repeats, it talks, it stays with you for a moment and then it's gone. Thanks Kai.

 Silver Jews

Harry Fanshawe Like many of us, my summer last year was consumed by the release of David Berman's new album under the 'Purple Mountains' moniker and then his sudden death. I'm sure many of us also went back through his entire catalogue once we'd exhausted our ears of his latest and last offering. Silver Jews have always been a standout band for me, usually sitting with things like Leonard Cohen or the Velvet Underground in my poor attempts at genre categorising. 

What's always stood out to me in this way, making it something I've struggled to place with more contemporary artists, is the looseness in the music and the corresponding looseness in its lines between music and prose. Like Leonard or Lou, SJ have a truly unique way of delivering and intertwining music and meaning. Where the new Purple Mountains record is much more polished in its production, my fondness for the old Silver Jews records has always been like that of an old, familiar room; their rusty structures and broken floorboards bring with them more character and heart than any solid new build could and, given last summer’s events, it now holds a very special place in my heart.

KWL I remembered having heard about David Berman’s suicide because many of my most misanthropic and refined friends had been especially despondent about it - it seems I missed the boat on that particular opportunity to be saddened by the loss of a great artist, so having this opportunity to go back and be able posthumously introduced to him has been a strange experience - cool that Harry and I have these different perspectives on his work and death…like reading a sentence with a full stop at the end, or something.

 Albermarle Station

HF A tender country offering inhabited by old ghosts, broken bridges and ivy covered screens. This song always reminded me of travel, of the lingering memories from recent events in recent places bouncing around the mind after an experience somewhere with people. All whilst anticipating the next destination. There's a train station near my parents’ house and as a teenager I used to travel from it a lot to see friends. That place hasn't changed at all in the 15 years since, and the rare occasions I go there now just bring back all of it; all the old ghosts while I sit and wait near the ivy covered screens and the rickety old bridge.Travel is a time that allows for rumination and retreat, and that can be savoured in all of its broken glory. 

KWL A surprising first listen - I’m not sure exactly what I expected, maybe something a bit glossier and more upbeat, but this is great - ramshackle, melodic and with lyrics that will take a million listens. It sort of reminds me of Red House Painters but with wit, self-deprecation and genuine insight in place of abrasiveness and machismo. Berman is a prepossessing and fascinating figure in light of his suicide, I should imagine before just as much and also considering the esteem in which a lot of people held and hold him. Maybe you led me there but this song definitely feels like they have a foot in the past, in those old, deserted spaces you pass through on the way somewhere.

 New Orleans

 HF From that slightly out of tune guitar at the start to the doubled up lazy groans about the trouble in the stairs; to me this song is the dusty corner of an old house, the gold in the cellar, and it's not the house you think it is. Keeping up with a nostalgic line of thinking, this track captures the 'otherness' of the past, the distance it eventually takes, even when it can be so well set in stone by old artefacts and rooms. It beholds the length of reflective nights and the depth of their texture. Trapped inside the song where the night's are so long, we count sheep to find soothing sleep. An early banger from Berman.

 KWL This is also great - there’s something hugely admirable about a song being able to be this rickety and cobbled-together-sounding while still being so evocative. It’s like, they could probably have recorded it without the out of key guitar lines or the drums losing the beat, but they didn’t - and there’s beauty in the imperfection. The song has that ‘On The Beach’ feeling of the end of a long, drunken night, when the ash-tray is full and the kitchen needs tidying before bed. But you’ll do it in the morning.

Tennessee

 HF Clearly a trend is setting in here: the slowest country SJ numbers titled by places. Aside from the obviously amazing play on the title word in the chorus, this love song has some of the best one-liners as far as I'm concerned. Here's one: 'Punk rock died when the first kid said "Punk's not dead, punk's not dead”'. Here's my favourite: 'We're off to the land of hot middle-aged women'. Is this an optimistic look to a future with a spouse? As far as I care to know, the whole song is. Punk may be dead but love isn’t.

 KWL I always knew you had a type, Harry. Another piece of rickety out of tune folk-country storytelling that somehow plays with superficiality and reaches into the darkest depths at the same time. A bit of cutesy word-play and a really lovely key change in the middle of the song - this is actually going really well, isn’t it. I’m guessing the lady singing is Berman’s wife, just because the whole atmosphere just feels very close and personable - listening to these songs of Berman being in love and happy and stuff is startling in this current context. A great song.

Sleeping is the Only Love

 HF What's that? Another love song? Maybe! As blurred as it seems deliberately to be about loving someone and how incredible a good night's sleep is. As someone who troubles with sleep, I can agree that there are times when I would crawl over broken glass and hot coals to make it to sleep. I also love the reflection from that onto the peace had with a good functioning relationship with someone you love. Sleep and love intertwined.

 KWL All these love songs have taken on a very strange overtone, now. This one has somewhere in it a snapshot of Berman and his wife settling down to the quiet life in Nashville - it’s all pretty beautiful, and it’s very impressive to go about making so intricate a love song about something as banal as sleep. I think there’s a snapshot here of the kind of intimacy that goes beyond the sexual - where somehow sleeping next to someone is the most intimate thing of all - the rolling over, the arms going to sleep, the waking up, the bad breath. The real deal.

 Punks in the Beerlight

 HF A song for the addicts! After a hot summers day, what better than the transcendence found in the cooling of a beautiful summers night? How could you make that even better? I guess you could smoke the gel off a fentanyl patch? This song is for a long summer night where you can go and run away into the night with a friend, find the nicest, deadest park around and watch that sun go down. And what comes after we exhaust our routes for escape? Let's not kid ourselves. It gets really really bad. Gotta love that 80s glam section after the first chorus too.

 KWL Ok, so I feel I need to state here that Harry’s article has sent me down a deep rabbit hole of SJ/David Berman appreciation. It’s strange to find him here, at this point and I just wonder what it would have been like to have been like “I hope David Berman’s doing okay” at random intervals in life. This is easily the most conventionally beautiful song on the list so far and somehow it examines some of the darkest corners of the human experience. It reminds me of the beauty of being in love - all other markers fade into unimportance, rendering the rich paupers and the poor rich beyond dreams, together; a beautiful juxtaposition, part love song, part junkie memoir.

 Advice to the Graduate

 HF 'Your third drink will lead you astray.' Let's follow on from the last theme. 'So you've got no friends and you wander through the night. And now you watch the sunrise through a rifle-sight'. This song speaks for itself.

 KWL This song seems to be quite strongly advocating the “school of life” diploma - that when you finish all the arbitrary self-building, that there’s a big wide world to step out into that’s all misery and addiction and what’s your deep critical analysis of Edgar Rice Burroughs going to do for you then? It sounds so slack, a borderline The Shaggs influence - Berman said that all of his favourite singers couldn’t sing, and it doesn’t sound like he or his backing band was much better. A genuine advert for keeping the musicians out of music…

K-Hole

 HF I've never understood the appeal of a K-Hole, I suppose that DB doesn't either, since he compares it to the feeling of being left alone. Though he does still reserve his fondness for booze as a trustworthy fallback during tough times. Perhaps that's it; it can go too far. I love the string arrangements in this song, it feels outback and rural, the lyrics appeal to that sense of dusty distance too.

 KWL I have a real soft spot in my heart for when the music of a song seems to run in tandem with its lyrical content, and I must say lots of the instrumental here feels like an out of body hallucination of a country song - large swathes of the song feel like Alice in Wonderland or that first Pink Floyd record that sounds like a Kaleidoscopic Circus.  

Dallas

 HF You know the way a city can change completely in character when night hits. When all the blazing sunlight lifts and leaves you with the purity of a place. It's like a deep breath of fresh air after a heavy day, you can feel your spirits lift as the weight peels away. This is a great, simple example of DB, highlighted best in the last lines: 'Poor as a mouse every morning, rich as a cat every night, Some kind of strange magic happens, when the city turns on her lights’.

 KWL The lyrics to this really grabbed me too - but not so much in respect of the city at night, but the string of non-sequiturs that pepper the song, something that DB is obviously really great at - painting those little pictures. There’s the bit about his shrink’s former NFL career, the eroticism of CPR, “our record just went aluminium” - all absolutely amazing. I’ve heard hundreds of songs about hundreds of places, but they never came as unique or as vivid as this.

 I Remember Me

 HF Another example of being a sucker for the whimsical. 'I remember you and I remember me': through the years you can lose the old parts of yourself. When you're in a relationship these losses double, and when you look back in your 'now' state to the person you were right back at the beginning, and the person they were, it makes you appreciate the whimsical and the romantic because they are so short-lived and random. Even though you change through those years, that change enables each quirk and trait that you might look back on and miss. So soak it up while it's there lest you regret its disappearance. In this story, the characters end up apart, but whether or not you do, know that even if you are still together, parts of you can always remain apart.

 KWL This is the best song on the list, for me - absolutely gorgeous and very very moving indeed. Somehow, Berman manages to sum up in his songs and in his writing that life is a huge collection of these tiny tiny moments, and maybe if we looked more closely at the tiny moments, the enormousness of life might not seem so terrifying. A sort of temporal looking after the pennies, so to speak. This one screams “don’t wait for the perfect moment, it’s now”. 

How to Rent a Room

 HF A great ender for this list. 'I want to wander through the night as a figure in the distance even to my own eye'. 'No I don't really want to die. I only want to die in your eyes'. If only…

 KWL Further research into the life of DB has directed me towards the fact that his father represents the worst of the worst of the American Republican corporate lobbying parasite - against environmental protections, the minimum wage, health warnings on tobacco, labour rights and trade regulations, to name just a few, and whose son Berman seemed ashamed to be. I just looked through the lyrics to this and they genuinely seem to be a letter to his dad, who he called “a despicable man … [a] human molestor … an exploiter … a scoundrel” saying “I’d rather be dead than your son.” 

 Thanks for this Harry, it’s been a real pleasure and a great introduction to a fascinating man and his band. May he rest in peace.

For the full playlist, click here

[underachievers-please-try-harder]

Interview // Gwenno

I interviewed Gwenno Saunders for 7digital.

Having won the Welsh Music Prize for your debut, the reception must have surpassed your expectations?

Oh yeah, that was a massive shock. I’ve been making music for a really long time in different guises and me and my husband [Rhys Edwards] moved back to Wales and just got stuck in with what was going on Cardiff and across Wales musically. And I was rediscovering a lot of things that I grew up with. So the motivation for making [Y Dydd Olaf] was just making something that didn’t already exist.

That’s a real advantage of working in Welsh and Cornish – when you have a language that fewer people use you’ve got to make your own entertainment, and so your motivation for creating things is because they don’t exist. It’s a really natural, DIY approach to making music in general; you’re having to create content because it’s not there. And so, the fact that the album was taken up by Heavenly Recordings was such a massive added bonus. So when I was thinking about the second album I tried to remember all those motivations so I would make the right decisions. I was creating purely for myself. I’ve always wanted to make a Cornish record and so the first album gave us an opportunity to do that.

The final song on Y Dydd Olaf was in Cornish so this album does feel like a natural continuation.

Yeah, it was almost a deliberate thing. It hit home, like, “Oh god, that’s what I’ve got to do.” As far as inspirations like that – where you’re compelled to do something – it’s quite scary because obviously on paper it doesn’t look like the most naturally popular option. Because if someone’s willing to put your record out, I’m sure you can feel pressured to release something that you think the most amount of people would like. But then you’re probably imagining people that aren’t there so you might as well just concentrate on doing something that’s exciting to you.

Can you tell us about your relationship with the Cornish language?

My dad was brought up in Cornwall, so we spoke Cornish to my dad and Welsh to my mum. So when I actually went to Cornwall to visit my dad’s friends, they would all be Cornish speakers so I actually thought a lot more people spoke Cornish than did. I had a son in the period after my first album and started speaking Cornish to him, so I really just started taking ownership over something that I’d been given that was a bit of an anomaly and something that I hadn’t been fully able to explore geographically. I wanted to form my own narrative in the language, like, “Oh well here’s how I express myself through Cornish.” And also I was getting excited by meeting a lot more Cornish speakers, independently of my family.

How big is the community of Cornish speakers?

They say there are between 500 and 1000 fluent speakers and then there are 1000 or more that can understand phrases and have basic conversations. But it’s constantly growing and I love that about it. I’ve realised that I get excited about exploring the points of view that are less known or less familiar in general. You know, there’s this language that people don’t even know exists, and I’ve lived my life in this language fully. How brilliant is that? It’s worth celebrating, because the fact it exists at all is incredible, you know?

In terms of the structure of the Cornish language, does it allow nuance of expression that you couldn’t replicate in other languages?

Oh completely. Also, the Cornish language had a real renaissance at the end of the 19th and early 20th century. There was an artist called Robert Morton Nance, and he really started getting [the language] going, because up until that point people were looking at the language as something just to be documented. And the botanist Edward Lluyd too – a lot of people documented the language and phrases that were still hanging around. But then there was this conscious effort in the early 20th century, reflecting a lot of the Celtic revival that was happening in general. And obviously that came from Art Noveau and the Arts and Crafts movement of the period, because of this mass industrialisation.

So anyway, a lot of the phrases and the words were from miracle plays that were written pre-Reformation, which really excited me because there’s a strong medieval element to the language that I speak, even though I’m using it in the context of the modern world. It was exciting thinking of all the people that were speaking Cornish in the 13th century.

What are the challenges of communicating in a language that so few people speak?

I personally felt particularly fortunate, because in my creative relationship with Rhys I’ve obviously dictated what the album is sonically to an extent, but he has produced the album and engineered it, and Rhys conjures up and creates a sonic landscape. It’s a really exciting way of communicating because you’re just creating a world that you can get lost in, and so it becomes about the music. My motivating factors aren’t really that important to the listener because it’s all there to be interpreted. I think there’s something quite nice about not understanding the lyrics because people can just get lost in it. It becomes more subconscious rather than something where you’re really listening out for a word or whatever.

Were there any reference points for the record?

Yeah, well we’d been listening to Bo Hansson, this Swedish 70s prog artist, and to Alan Stivell, who’s a Breton artist. He’s a harpist, and a bit more new-agey. And Clannad. And Brenda Wootton was a massive influence as well. But a lot of these were things that I’d been brought up with and that I’d rejected, by just being a teenager going, “Right, I’m going to find something really synthetic and horrible just to react against the organic, folky, rustic feeling of music.” So it was about coming back round and really connecting with that music.

I wasn’t brought up on Anglo-American popular culture at all. Like, extremely not. I wasn’t allowed to watch English television – which was stupid – so I had no idea about English bands for a long time. And I definitely rejected that when I was younger, but now I quite like that because it’s a different narrative, and another expression of living in Britain.

The album title Le Kov translates from the Cornish as “the place of memory”. What’s the story behind that?

Well, it’s an oddity really that I’m a Cornish speaker and I live in Wales, even though historically there are strong connections between Welsh and Cornish. They come from the same strain of Celtic languages. I’ve always been brought up in cities or lived in cities, so my experience of Cornish was quite different to if I’d lived in Cornwall, which is quite a rural place. So I was then thinking about how to contextualise it.

I started reading about Lyonesse, which is just past St Michael’s Mount, off the west coast of Cornwall. There’s a legend that there was a land there where King Arthur lived, and then it sunk under the sea. And then there was another story that on the north coast of Cornwall there was this city called Langarrow which was a state that got drowned because it was too debauched. So there are a series of stories of sunken cities within the Celtic world. And I was like, “Brilliant, my city! That’s where I live!”

I wanted to imagine this place where it was a utopia where everyone spoke Cornish; a place where this record could exist because it didn’t exist in the real world because my experiences of Cornish were an oddity. I was reading Situationist texts that imagined a city where people didn’t have to work anymore and it would just be a place for pleasure. That’s what Le Kov is: it’s a city that’s accepting of everyone just existing and being happy.

My last record was very dystopian and I wanted to react to that. So instead of imagining a future which is awful – which we’re kind-of living in right now – maybe there’s room to imagine somewhere really warming and beautiful and loving, which is actually my own experiences of the Cornish community. Hence why there are songs about cheese on the album. (Laughs) There are highs and lows obviously, but I just wanted to have a sense of celebration as well.

You tackle Brexit on ‘Herdhya’. Obviously Brexit is something that Cornwall did overwhelmingly vote for despite the fact they stand to lose out economically. That’s an interesting juxtaposition, don’t you think?

So many factors were influential in why things turned out the way they did. A lot of it has to do with the existential crisis that the UK is going through anyway. Right now the UK is like that awful person at the party who’s not willing to deal with their own problems so they’re just getting really, really drunk and embarrassing instead. (Laughs)

Obviously, we’re all responsible for that, but I think there is an awesome opportunity creatively to have different conversations. I enjoy having creative conversations that don’t seem confrontational. I mean, I don’t have the ability to write a Brexit album, talking about how awful it is and the bureaucratic practicalities and the bad media and all of that. But I think there is quite an exciting opportunity to raise different points about why so many of us have influenced the negative outcome, and the motivation behind that.

I adore history and I think a lot of the right wing rhetoric is that England in the Middle Ages was just English, which obviously has never been the case because we’ve always been incredibly multicultural. So I just felt this was a way of expressing that creatively and celebrating Cornwall’s international-ness. And people aren’t taught their own local history in school, because there is this dominant narrative which is propaganda, tied to an empire that doesn’t exist anymore. For example, I didn’t even know Henry VIII was of Welsh descent through my teaching at school, which explains a lot to me about the way Welsh history panned out.

But with you addressing those ideas in Cornish, Le Kov never feels didactic.

Absolutely! And that’s the thing! Because having this conversation, that’s why I feel really lucky and excited to do what I do. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t put it into music. It really is about escapism as much as it is about confronting ideas. That’s what’s so amazing about music; it works on such a subconscious level that you get lost in it and it’s much more pleasant than having a conversation, almost.

[lifesgreatestfool]

Favorite Albums: 2017

10. Father John Misty: Pure Comedy

Grew on me a bit. There are enough good tracks to carry the album along although I still do think there’s a solid chunk of the album that is really underwhelming. Still haven’t decided if Leaving LA works or not. But the title track and Ballad of the Dying Man are some of the best songs all year. I do find myself returning to it more than I thought I would initially.

9.  Sampha: Process

Enjoyable most of the way through. Good mix of more reserved, emotional moments and catchier jams.  Not quite Frank Ocean’s Blonde but still a really solid album.

8.  Mac DeMarco: This Old Dog

Probably the most consistent project from Mac yet.  It doesn’t really have any major tracks that stand out as much as the best of Salad Days and 2.  But it also doesn’t really have a chunk of underwhelming tracks like I’ve always felt was the case on his previous records. 

7.  Dirty Projectors: Dirty Projectors

I feel like this album has gotten a lot of unwarranted flak. It pushes boundaries and it works more often than not (although I will concede there are some spots where it doesn’t really work).  5 of the album’s 9 songs are great, a couple other solid ones and only one or two major duds. 

6.  Alvvays: Antisocialites

This album, when played all the way through, is like how the band’s last album should have sounded if all of the tracks on that record were as good as Adult Diversion and Marry Me Archie. Really great songwriting.  Almost all of the melodies are pretty incredible.  

5.  Jesca Hoop: Memories Are Now

Really good stuff all the way through.  Just enough idiosyncratic charm to standout as an otherwise straightforward but compelling indie folk/rock record. A couple tracks which, though not bad, pale in comparison to the rest. But stunning moments like the falsetto climax on Pegasi more than make up for the occasional weaker moments. Themes of independence, appreciating the present, and anti-digitization run throughout this pretty great album that has flown under the radar.

4.  Sun Kil Moon: Common as Light and Love are Red Valleys of Blood

Again, I inevitably fell for Mark’s ridiculously meticulous story telling. This time we get oddly rhythmic, driving instrumentals which often do a 180 on the dime as each track unfurls around Mark’s hilarious and moving diatribes. I find Mark’s musings always provide the very necessary service of peeling our narrowed perceptions back and reminding us to get the fuck on with enjoying our lives while we can (mainly due to his well-intentioned insistence on berating us with countless “could be much, much worse” scenarios). There certainly is nobody else doing what Mark has done over the course of his last three records, divisive as he may be. Mark’s personality remains as wonderfully puzzling and alluring as ever.  His dark, no-holds-barred, profanity filled tirades often transition seamlessly into tender, tear-jerking moments of raw empathy right under our very noses. If you take the time to devote your full attention to this endearing monstrosity and leave your ego at the door, you might like what you find.  

3.  Kendrick Lamar: DAMN.

A full discussion of the significance of DAMN in the context of Kendrick’s career could take pages to address. My shortened thoughts are that Kendrick’s approach here was exactly the right move. An attempt to push further along the path of To Pimp a Butterfly probably would have inevitably fell short. Rather than attempt to top his un-toppable past work, I have come to view DAMN as Kendrick stepping outside of his career trajectory altogether to deliver his most vulnerable, direct, and emotionally impactful album yet. The track list is spectacular. FEAR: the three-layered dissection of Kendrick’s crippling apprehensions from ages 7-27. DNA: because, well, the beat switch. FEEL, because the bars from “I feel heartless often” to the end of the track are maybe the best thing I’ve heard all year (chills every time Kenny screams “I CAN PUT A REGIME THAT FORMS A LOCH NESS).  XXX, which perfectly sums up the themes of aggression, confliction, and hypocrisy that run throughout the entire record. DAMN is Kendrick’s fuck you record and I’ll be...damned...if he doesn’t deserve it.

2.  Fleet Foxes: Crack-Up

They’re back! And lordy they still got it. The addition of Crack Up to Fleet Foxes’ discography now makes it even harder to pick a favorite of the band’s immaculate trio of albums. I’m so happy that I can say that honestly. The words often used to describe Crack-Up are mostly true. Dense, “proggy” (even though I hate that word), cryptic. Compared to their last two albums, Crack Up definitely requires the most unpacking. But after several listens the albums’ brilliance and beauty smacks you in the face. It’s an almost flawless track list. The opening three track run is perfection. Third of May is one of the band’s best efforts to date. Keep Time on Me finds success in its simplicity and emotional punch. The closing title track has grown on me tremendously. I Should See Memphis is gorgeous and a bit unnerving, but in a good way.

The album cover perfectly conveys what I take away from it. I envision Robin sailing through his 6-year stormy hiatus, challenging his past convictions and slashing through the conceptual mess that comes from, as Robin has stated in interviews, “the necessity of holding two opposing thoughts in one’s mind at once.” It looks like there may be more to come in the near future and I can only hope the band can somehow keep up this fantastic streak.

1.  Mount Eerie: A Crow Looked at Me

There is an unfortunately exclusive space that this album seems to occupy. The obvious reason is because it features Phil Elverum documenting, in detail, his grieving process after losing his wife to cancer shortly after the birth of their daughter. Crow is not the first album to address the death of a loved one. An album like Sufjan’s Carrie and Lowell comes to mind as a possible point of comparison. Yet, even that comparison doesn’t seem completely justified. Not to place one tragedy over another, but the manner in which Crow is presented is uniquely devastating. There is no time for hindsight and reflection, no big catharsis or grand takeaway. As Phil makes clear up front on opener “Real Death”, death is not for singing about or making into art. So that begs the question, why does this record even exist?

And after posing that question, the listener quickly arrives at the unfortunate answer. There is no real reason why the record exists, just like there is no real reason why Phil has to endure the loss of his wife. With Crow, there is nothing to do but listen to Phil, essentially in real time, as he weaves his way through the hollow, “dumb,” bottomless emptiness that comes with the territory he now tragically sits in. I listened to this album maybe twice when it first was released and did not return to it until very recently. The record is not really “enjoyable.” In fact, I’m hard pressed to find any adjective to describe the album, let alone why I view it as the best album of the year. It seems even stupid to mention it in a list of favorite albums. What I can say is that the album is uniquely important. If you can muster up the strength to give it your undivided attention, you essentially give yourself the opportunity to trace what it feels like to grieve. Inevitably, you will impress Phil’s experience upon your own life, and, whether or not it was the intended outcome, you will quickly learn to appreciate the hell out of every single moment you can possibly spend in the presence of the ones you love.