Mogwai, Family Dancing and Aging Musical Tastes, by Mitch Hurst

In spring of 2001 I developed a ritual. On weekends when my wife, pregnant at the time, was traveling for work, I would sit on our terrace with a cigar and a glass of Knob Creek. The unobstructed skyline view of my adopted city of Chicago provided a more-than-suitable backdrop for pondering questions such as whether I’d be a decent father, or what it meant to bring a child into our highly connected, and at the same time, disconnected world.

The ritual would end with the playing of the same record as I fell asleep. I’d pop in Mogwai’s Rock Action and doze off round about halfway through “Secret Pint.” I consumed that record like none other, not just by the number of times I played it; I digested it, knew the twists and turns of every song, the high points of which lifted me like I’d not been lifted before.

Almost two decades prior, while I was in my early twenties, I joined that camp of independent music fanatics who got high off discovering the bands nobody else had heard of. A job that got me to the office at 3:00 a.m. allowed for hours of time spent with Richard Milne, at the time the overnight DJ on WXRT. Milne apparently had no restrictions on the records he could play [perhaps a benefit swapped for being assigned his particular shift].

The joy of hearing a new song from some unknown band from Wales or South Dakota was a sort of cultural high. The high was intensified when I tracked down the record and played it for all new ears at the next party, watching ears perk up in the room. I still remember the near riot at a party when I pumped “Go” by Tones on Tail through the stereo before it became all the rage at Neo and Medusa’s.

The obsession was furthered with the help of Columbia College Chicago Library’s subscriptions to NME and the Melody Maker, publications that would regularly ordain the next big thing after hearing homemade recordings of a band or witnessing a gig in grandma’s basement. On their pages I discovered Jesus and Mary Chain, Sugarcubes, the Factory and 4AD labels; the long list of bands and records that provide the soundtrack of my 20s and 30s.

Things change.

It was that spring and summer of 2001 – and Mogwai – that moved me away from indie rock. Progress, I guess; age, perhaps. I got lost, and remain so, in the orchestral pull of Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, Hammock, The American Dollar, Built to Spill, Sigur Ros. Eventually, nine-and-a-half minutes of sludge from Pelican would make the hair on my back stand up; Blur not so much.

Other interests remain relatively unchanged. I reread David Leavitt’s Family Dancing not long ago, a book that deeply affected me when I read it the first time. I was again moved, as if I was still on that couch in that old apartment wondering how a fundamentalist Christian kid was going to cope with newly discovered freedom and an evolving worldview.

I can’t really explain why the music that seduced me back then is mostly absent from my Recently Played in iTunes, replaced by stuff most of my friends and family consider unlistenable. Music gets in my bloodstream and stays. Perhaps dependent upon whatever cycle of life I happen to be enjoying or surviving. As the old song – one I never really much liked – goes, “That’s just the way it is.”

– Mitch Hurst

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BRUCE HORNSBY-THE WAY IT IS

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