Delving into the animal kingdom, a certain Bear (Lexi from UC Berkeley) reminded us of Sea Wolf’s (You’re a Wolf) great track-analogy song, Middle Distance Runner.

Check it below.  Other ideas?

Sea Wolf–Middle Distance Runner

[audio:https://www.thelefortreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Sea-Wolf-Middle-Distance-Runner1.mp3|titles=Sea Wolf – Middle Distance Runner]

It’s that time in Cali and around the globe.  Track and field season is now full-on.

We are hopeless fans of this sport.  The track-monkey first clambered onto our backs in the mid-60s when we sat in a Kansas stadium and watched Jim Ryun run astounding mile races that broke world records in the process.  He was the King of Kick.  Ever since then, when Spring comes around it’s track time for us.

The actual participants in the sport these days are undoubtedly tilting to rap, punk, techno or reggae while training, but we occasionally stumble upon songs that remind us of this sport and move us in more subtle ways.

Such is the case with Gemma Hayes’ great, languorous song, Ran For Miles, which you can listen to below and view a video of after.  Hayes is a talented Irish singer/songwriter who has released three stellar records over the last decade.  Though not a driving, upbeat song you might immediately associate with the sport, the message of perseverance and self-realization in Ran For Miles is nonetheless appropriate and inspirational.

Listen in and let us know if you have more songs you would recommend for a Track AND Field  Mixtape.  And though Belle & Sebastian’s song, The Stars of Track and Field, contains some nice couplets (“You liberated, a boy I never rated, and now he’s throwing discus, for Liverpool and Widnes,” and “You only did it so that you could wear, your terry underwear, and feel the city air, run past your body”), it’s not exactly the best representation of the sport, so we’ll pass on it for the Mixtape.  But please pass along any others you might suggest.

We love the sensibilities in the following stanzas of Ran For Miles:

“Well I got myself a new day
And I got myself a second chance
So I headed to the bus stop
And the sun, the sun was warm on my back

Today I ran for miles
Just to see what I was made of

Today I ran for all that was mine

Well I got myself a song inside
And I got myself some full blown daylight
Wanna tell you just how hard it’s been
Trying to talk myself out of jumping

Today I ran for miles
Just to see what I was made of

Today I ran for all that was mine, yeah”

Gemma Hayes–Ran For Miles

[audio:https://www.thelefortreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/08-Ran-For-Miles.mp3|titles=08 Ran For Miles]

We have written repeatedly about the great up-and-coming Portland band Hosannas and their inventive songs and delivery (listing them in our top albums, songs and  concerts of 2010) and interviewed Brandon Laws of the band last year by e-mail.  And, courtesy of Club Mercy, Hosannas are returning to Muddy Waters on Monday on their way to SXSW.  The Independent’s Aly Comingore gives a well-done intro/reminder on Hosannas that you can read here.

Hosannas have recently completed a new E.P. (entitled “Thug Life Nicole”) produced by John Askew as a follow-on to their phenomenal Askew-produced record, “Together” released last fall.  We anxiously await the release of the new E.P. and the Muddy Waters show on Monday.

With respect to “Together,” we had to shake this epoch’s ever-devolving descent into synapses-lapses and let this record slowly ADD up for us.  And after many listens, we can tell you that your patience and attentiveness will eventually be rewarded with the love of deep music.  On first listen, a few of the tracks (When We Were Young in particular) are such shameless hussies that they will immediately grab you by the feet and hips and get you moving.   But the remainder of the tracks will play it more coolly with a longer courtship, sending you chocolates and flowers (maybe even a haiku or two) before they propose a more-meaningful, longer-term relationship.  Such has been the case with many of our most valued records (amongst many, all of Radiohead’s post-“Bends” recordings fall into this category, and more recently, Grizzly Bear’s “Veckatimest,” took time to sink in).

Amongst our favorites is Open Your Doors, which opens with Satie-like piano notes that also echo Debussy’s “Preludes.”  And then the direct, haiku-like lyrics and the Laws brothers’ harmonies are added.  And then the glorious horns enter.  And finally Pinback-like guitar work is added to the mix.  A beauty, with lyrics set forth below.

“There’ve been days in your life
that you’d give anything to feel alright
Oh to be dead, weightless and light

Hold on to this.
It ‘s easy now, you’ve already fallen

Open your doors, open your doors
And open your heart, open your heart

Now I am sure
Our future here requires you endure
I have always been inspired by your never-ceasing fire

Don’t let it go, don’t let it go.
And open your heart, open your heart.

Hosannas–Open Your Doors

[audio:https://www.thelefortreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/08-Open-Your-Doors.mp3|titles=08 Open Your Doors]

Other highlights from “Together” are Hello Moon, John Pilgrim, Multi-Chamber American Future and the phenomenal The People I Know. The latter song is so great that the band put out a compendium of remixes by great mixologists that you can download for free at http://www.hosannasmusic.com/.  A few of our favorite mixes are set forth below.  Come on down and check out Hosannas on Monday night at Muddy Waters.

Hosannas–The People I Know (Copy Mix)

[audio:https://www.thelefortreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/6.-The-People-I-Know-Copy.mp3|titles=6. The People I Know (Copy)]

Hosannas–The People I Know (Christopher Francis Mix)

[audio:https://www.thelefortreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/4.-The-People-I-Know-Christopher-Francis.mp3|titles=4. The People I Know ( Christopher Francis)]

Hosannas–The People I Know (Ocean Age Mix)

[audio:https://www.thelefortreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/1.-The-People-I-Know-Ocean-Age.mp3|titles=1. The People I Know (Ocean Age)]

We wrote about the great Tom Waits and provided a great number of  Tom Waits videos a while back here.

He is a national treasure and one of our finest lyricists.  Below (in bold at the bottom) are his words of wisdom for our times from his song, Get Behind the Mule, off of “Mule Variations.”  Always keep a sapphire in your minds.

“Molly be damned smote Jimmy the Harp
With a horrid little pistol and a lariat
She’s goin to the bottom
And she’s goin down the drain
Said she wasn’t big enough to carry it

She got to get behind the Mule
In the morning and plow
She got to get behind the Mule
In the morning and plow
She got to get behind the Mule
In the morning and plow
She got to get behind the Mule
In the morning and plow

Choppity chop goes the axe in the woods
You gotta meet me by the fall down tree
Shovel of dirt upon a coffin lid
And I know they’ll come lookin for me boys
And I know they’ll come a-lookin for me

Got to get behind the Mule
In the morning and plow
Got to get behind the Mule
In the morning and plow
Got to get behind the Mule
In the morning and plow
Got to get behind the Mule
In the morning and plow

Big Jack Earl was 8’1
He stood in the road and he cried
He couldn’t make her love him
Couldn’t make her stay
But tell the good Lord that he tried
(Chorus)

Dusty trail from Atchison to Placerville
On the wreck of the Weaverville stage
Beaula fired on Beatty for a lemonade
I was stirring my brandy with a nail boys
Stirring my brandy with a nail

(Chorus)

Well the rampaging sons of the widow James
Jack the cutter and the pock marked kid
Had to stand naked at the bottom
Of the cross
And tell the good lord what they did
Tell the good lord what they did

(Chorus)

Punctuated birds on the power line
In a Studebaker with the Birdie Joe Joaks
I’m diggin all the way to China
With a silver spoon
While the hangman fumbles with the noose, boys
The hangman fumbles with the noose

(Chorus)

Pin your ear to the wisdom post
Pin your eye to the line
Never let the weeds get higher
Than the garden
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Always keep a diamond in your mind

Got to get behind the Mule
In the morning and plow”

We are huge fans of this Noah and this Whale. Their last album, “The First Days of Spring,” was one of the highlights of 2009, if not the entire decade. A conceptual masterpiece. Their new album, “Last Night on Earth,” will be released on March 15th in the U.S. In the meantime, to stream the whole album, go here, scroll down and click on the green arrow on the “cassette tape” player.

Below are two cool videos of their new single, L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.. The first is of the band in studio recording the song and the second is the official video for the single.

L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N. (Live from RAK Studios) from charlie fink on Vimeo.

L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N. from charlie fink on Vimeo.

In case you missed his commentary below, savvy Seattleite and music omnivore, Bob Bryan, passed along the video below of the great New Orleans trumpeter, Christian Scott, and band covering Thom Yorke’s Eraser.  And for good measure, Bryan tossed in a video of Yorke’s Atoms of Peace band in New York where Scott joined Flea and crew on the same song (check our report of the best concert of 2010 by Atoms of Peace at the Santa Barbara Bowl here).  Keep those jazzed Radiohead covers coming.

And at the bottom we toss on Christian Scott and band (including great Dejohnette-esque drummer, Jamire Williams) on Scott’s heartrending, I Died In Love (as Scott explains at the beginning, a tribute to a fellow New Orleans gent who was gunned down while walking with his new bride).

All you Radiohead fans (yes, I’m looking in a mirror–the life of a blogger)–check out and give due respect to this rendition of Exit Music (for a film) by jazz pianist, Brad Mehldau.  Too damn good.  It takes flight at 2:30.

And while on the jazz covers of Radiohead, check out the cover of No Surprises as done by Yaron Herman and cohorts below Mehldau.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_4fiMIxO2E&feature=player_embedded#at=161

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBnpdwtrhuE

THIS is what we are talking about.  Jejune Stars from the new “The People’s Key” record, rendered with the usual full-tilt intensity that is Bright Eyes (and Conor Oberst in particular).  All you Bright Eyes haters need not bother–you just don’t get it.  A pity for you.

Mid-way through you can hear strong echoes of Paul Simon’s song, Kodachrome. They give us those greens of summer….  So Mama don’t take my Bright Eyes away.

We just finished the thoroughly engaging novel, Skippy Dies, by Irish author, Paul Murray.  Skippy Dies was nominated for the 2010 Booker Prize and a National Book Critics Circle award in Fiction, and was prevalent on many “Top Books of 2010” lists.  And for you cinemistas, we understand that the book is to be adapted for the big screen by none other than Neil Jordan.

No Spoilage Alert: We won’t be giving anything away by telling you that Skippy, the main character in this fine novel, in fact perishes early in this book.  By page 5 in fact.  After this skeletal opening segment, Murray goes back in time to flesh out the body of the story and provide the circumstances that lead to the passing of the innocent, sweet Skippy—a 14-year-old student at a venerable Catholic boys’ prep school in Dublin.  In time we are introduced to Skippy’s adolescent prep school chums and nemeses, his young and old teachers, his girlpop-loving love-interest, the schools’ callous administration (there’s a shocker), and the neurotic parents of these teenagers.  We also learn of the unexpectedly viral consequences of Skippy’s death, get a feel for contemporary Irish life and history, and learn a great deal about the theoretical intertwining of science (quantum physics, string theory, etc.) and metaphysics.  Murray has delivered a very ambitious and dense coming-of-age novel that is at times hilarious and at other times harrowing and heartbreaking.

In short, it’s life writ large.

You can read a well-done review by Dan Kois in the New York Times here.

Paul Murray has said this to say about the book elsewhere:

“I started writing Skippy Dies in 2002. The book is set in a school in South Dublin in Ireland. It revolves around a group of fourteen-year-old boys, Skippy being the hero, or the antihero, who falls for Lori, a (dangerously) beautiful girl from the convent school next door. In the opening scene, he dies during a doughnut-eating race with his roommate, Ruprecht, and writes Lori’s name on the floor in strawberry syrup; the book then tracks back to discover how his death came about.

Writing about teenagers was liberating in many ways, because their emotional lives are so dramatic and so unconcealed. They could plausibly say or do almost anything; you could really push things to the limit. I worked hard to capture the intensity of feeling you experience as a teenager – the sense of connection you can feel for your friends, to the point of turning into each other, the sense of adoration you can have for a girl or a boy you hardly know, the loneliness and confusion and despair you can feel for no reason at all.”

One of the most touching passages of the novel (excerpted below) involves music (another shocker).  Four of Skippy’s friends are called upon to play as a quartet in the prep school’s 140th anniversary celebration.  These friends decide to use their playing of Pachelbel’s Canon in D in homage to Skippy and for purposes greater than the school’s anniversary.

Excerpt from Skippy Dies:

“And the music, when it begins, sounds so beautiful. Pachelbel’s familiar melody, worn threadbare by endless TV commercials for cars, life assurance, luxury soap, by street-performers in black-tie, mugging for tourists in high summer, by any number of attempts to invoke the Old-World Elegance, accompanied by haughty waiters bearing trayfuls of tiny cubes of cheese – tonight it seems to its audience entirely new, to the point of an almost painful fragility.  What it is that makes it so imploring and so sweet, so disconcertingly (for the older members of the audience who have come tonight expecting merely to be pleasantly bored and now find themselves with lumps in their throats) personal? Something to do with the horn that large boy [Lefort–Skippy’s roommate and friend, Ruprecht] in the silver suit is playing, perhaps, a new-fangled instrument that looks like it must have been run over by a truck, but produces a sound that’s like nothing you’ve ever heard – a hoarse, forlorn sound that just makes you want to …

And then the voice comes in, and you can actually see a shiver run through the decorous crowd.  Because there is no singer on the stage, and given Pachelbel’s Canon does not have a vocal part, listeners could be forgiven for mistaking it for a ghost’s, some spirit of the hall roused by the music’s beauty and unable to resist joining in, especially as the voice – a girl’s – has an irresistibly haunting quality, spare, spectral, carved down to its bare bones…  But then one by one the audience members spot beneath the mike stand over to the right, ah, an ordinary mobile phone.  But who is she?  And what’s she singing? [Lefort–it’s in fact melancholy Lori, the love of Skippy’s life, singing a song by Bethani (a fictional singer we surmise representative of Britney Spears) from her room.]

You fizz me up like Diet Pepsi

You make me shake like epilepsy

You held my had all summer long

But summer’s over and you’re gone

Holy smokes – it’s Bethani!  A new murmur of excitement, as younger spectators crane their necks to hiss in the ears of parents, aunts, uncles – it’s  ‘3Wishes’, the song she wrote after she broke up with Nick from Four to the Floor, when there were all those pictures of her at her mum’s wearing skanky clothes and actually looking quite fat – some people said that was all just part of the publicity, but how could you think that if you listened to the words?

I miss the bus and the walk’s so long

I got split ends and my homework’s wrong

There’s a hole in my sneaker and gum on my seat

And the world don’t turn and my heart don’t beat

– which the girl who’s singing now fills with such longing, such loneliness, only amplified by the crackling of the phone, that even parents who viewed Bethani with suspicion or disapproval (often coloured, in the case of the dads, by a shameful fascination) find themselves swept up by its sentiments – sentiments that, separated from their r’n’b arrangement and grafted onto this melancholy spiraling music three hundred years old, reveal themselves as both heart-rending and also somehow comforting – because their sadness is a sadness everyone can recognize, a sadness that is binding and homelike.

And the sun don’t shine and the rain don’t rain

And the dogs don’t bark and the lights don’t change

And the night don’t fall and the birds don’t sing

And your door don’t open and my phone don’t ring

So that as the chorus comes around once more, you can hear young voices emerge from the darkness, singing along:

I wish you were beside me just so I could let you know

I wish you were beside me I would never let you go

If I had three wishes I would give away two,

Cos I only need one, cos I only want you

– so that for these few moments it actually seems that Ruprecht could be right, that everything, or at least the small corner of everything that is the Seabrook Sports Hall, is resonating to the same chord, the same feeling, the one that over a lifetime you learn a million ways to camouflage but never quite to banish – the feeling of living in a world of apartness, of distances you cannot overcome; it’s almost as if the strange out-of-nowhere voice is the universe itself, some hidden aspect that rises momentarily over the motorway-roar of space and time to console you, to remind you that although you can’t overcome the distances, you can still sing the song – out into the darkness, over the separating voids, towards a fleeting moment of harmony…”

In this passage, Murray has managed to perfectly capture and evince the transcendental magic of music and its potential for harmonizing effects on young and old alike (and together).  And Pachelbel, coupled with a Britney-like voiceover?  It’s the ultimate emotional mashup.  Heck, we just might have to go back and listen closer to some Britney.  Well played, Mr. Murray.  Well played.