The fantasy is, obviously, far from reach at this point, but listening to Gaucho keeps the fire alive; a daydream to keep me occupied at work, an escape from the harsh reality of post-academia (a stock’s-up-stock’s-down wasteland of non-jobs and non-careers).

Much like the lifestyle it hearkens back to though, Gaucho‘s tone is actually depressing when you get to the heart of it. On the surface, it’s a smooth, rhythmic romp through the annals of LA’s high society (a scandalous affair with two exotic women in “Babylon Sisters,” a tag-along tale of a basketball star and his cocaine dealer in “Glamour Profession,” for example), but the further you navigate through the slick guitar diddies, the more-machine-than-man grooves, and the pulsing wave of electric pianos and synthesizers, the more it becomes apparent that there’s something kind of sad at play here.

You revisit the world of expensive company and expensive drugs and suddenly those exotic women are high-priced escorts, that basketball star a junkie, and his dealer a delusional sociopath who assumes clients as friends.

I’m well aware of the cost: the loss of youth among the youthful and the dark side of drug-dependency, but I can’t help feeling a little intrigued. This is how my idea of LA has always been, even before the Dan factored into the equation. The ever-present anticipation that something big could happen at any moment, whether that be fulfilling the long-forgotten theory that California would someday drift off into the Pacific, or running into a childhood idol who just-so-happened to be interested in helping you make it to the “big time.”

There’s something about Steely Dan’s LA that beckons me, but it’s about as close to reality as me going to Japan and learning the language. So I’ll keep it in storage somewhere, for the head-conversations I’ll have when I’m at work.

I feel a certain rootlessness these days, and I think it stems from moving at a pivotal period in my life. When I moved back to Chicago, I lost my way back to familiarity, back to home. That first Winter I spent away from Texas was hard. My high school friends had come back home from college and I was stuck in a cramped apartment out in Lakeview, trying to reconnect with them via Facebook, dodging questions about when I’d visit.

I did end up visiting, and it was nice for a time, but there was a wall. I didn’t live there anymore and my friends had all stayed close, running around in packs in that old familiar way. I had known before I got off the plane that I had changed, but it wasn’t until I’d seen everyone that I actually felt it.

And I tried to be this magnificently transformed city boy, an artist, a sophisticated thinker. I wanted to show them all that I had broken the shell that constrained me, that I was fulfilling my high school ambitions.

But the truth was that the city had swallowed me whole. I needed a place to feel grounded, to feel safe, to recharge. A place that I could retreat to, where people that knew me before the change existed. I thought Texas might be that place. My old stomping grounds. A life before worry.

It wasn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because of the change? Because I’d grown apart from them? A constant reminder that, in a way, I had turned my back on the city I grew up in. Not that I’d ever been much of a fan of the town when I was living there. In fact, all I wanted to do was get out. Irony I guess. Maybe a little too Alanis for my liking.

That place I’m looking for, though, it exists. I’ve felt it. I feel it through song. Three tracks off of Dillard & Clark’s Through the Morning, Through the Night (the title track, “So Sad,” and “Polly”) take me there. The harmonies are what do it. And the choruses. I’m transported back to my bedroom on Travis Court, overlooking our pool at night, the reflections from the water bouncing off my ceiling. I’m driving down Peytonville Avenue with the top down, on my way home from school. I’m sitting outside the Starbuck’s in Town Square with a few friends just before closing. I’m at the AMC, seeing Anchorman with Sarah, holding hands for the first time, our palms sweaty, dare we disturb them.

Country ballads like these, they have hooks that actually get you. I could go on and on about how I don’t hear that anymore, but I’d be beating a dead horse.

I’ll spend my whole life trying to write a song as good as “Polly,” because I’ve been trying to find that place for so long, and that longing always creeps up on me over the holidays. Because I’m not there yet. I haven’t found it. Maybe I never will. But that’s what the music’s for, to help me forget and to help me remember.

“Through the Morning, Through the Night”

“So Sad”

“Polly”

I see people I knew (or knew of) from high school getting married, having kids, etc. They’re building something. There’s a sense of belonging, togetherness, moving towards something.

I don’t know what I’m doing. And I’ve been putting off when exactly I’m going to figure that out. I go through the motions. I work, I numb my head with the Internet or video games, I try to finish music I’ve started but I’m still incapacitated from aforementioned mind-numbers. And I continue this cycle even though I know it’s inhibiting. Why? Because I want to be somewhere else. I want to forget that like many, I’m going to be in a tough spot soon. With no sort of career path in sight and the six-month grace period on my student loans coming to an end, I can’t help but want to escape, to cleanse myself and start anew.

“I will move somewhere the ocean’s never seen
Where weeds just make their place
Where my best friends exist only on-screen
Where my love all fits in frames”

Enter Dawes’ “Peace in the Valley.” “When My Time Comes” is more relevant to the whole self-discovery/self-betterment thing, but “Peace…” is a perfect end to the night. I imagine this as a late night song, the kind you put on as you’re sobering up with the realization that the debauchery-filled evening you just had didn’t gain you anything. You realize that you’re still the same person, that you haven’t changed.

There’s a point during a night of drinking–right before I start slurring words or getting the yawns–that I feel optimistic. It’s a false sense of revelation, no doubt, but in that instant I am grinning like a fool and I actually believe that I can alter my life’s design. Of course hours pass and I wind up back at my apartment, or crashing on a friend’s couch and that air is stale. I start to remember my limits. I get introspective. I get nostalgic. I pull up Facebook and browse status updates. I send add requests to forgotten friends. I’m looking for that connection then. I’m hoping somebody’s out there that just had the same experience or knows that feeling. Someone that I can catch up with after all these years. They haven’t forgotten about me.

You can hear “Peace in the Valley” here.

Why is John Mayer so good at writing pop music? I’d say he’s a better guitar player than songwriter, but you rarely see that on his records.

Mayer’s crew has his demographic pinned. Battle Studies is business as usual. He’s going to dominate Adult Contemporary radio again with “Half of My Heart” and even bring in the youngins if only for the fact that Taylor Swift makes an appearance (though you only hear her towards the end, when she’s not doing harmonies).

I can’t deny the song’s “catchiness,” but you have to wonder if Mayer takes this seriously, or has he just found the formula that will keep his die-hard fans around?

Mayer’s always been a mystery to me. I was crazy about Room For Squares when it came out, mainly just for “Neon,” which I’ll admit I still dig. And seeing him live has always been mesmerizing. But I don’t understand. Has he just been exploiting the system all this time? Is he putting this bubblegum nonsense out with one eye open, letting the select few know that he is “in on it,” or is this really who he is: A Stevie Ray Vaughn protegé who will waste his God-given talent on mediocre, formulaic pop albums?

I won’t disagree that disco may very well have been the downfall of pop music, where instruments were once played with feeling by people steeped in decades of musical appreciation, only to be replaced by machines spitting out stale beats and synthesized sounds that are now, years later, commonly described as cheesy.

But if the rhythm section is hot and the harmonies are right, I can get down. And Ubiquity’s LA-based soul collective Orgone gets it right. I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve been listening to “Dialed Up” and “Prism Break” nonstop since I first stumbled upon them yesterday at work as I was laying tile down.

For some reason, these two songs bring back the world I imagine after listening to Norah Jones’ “Chasing Pirates,” a world where music still plays a significant role in people’s lives–a futuristic place led by free-thinkers and unbiased news broadcasts, where pop music dodged the 80s and 90s, and has become an evolved marriage of funk, rhythm & blues, jazz, and soul music. I imagine the soundtrack would be in the same vein as Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly if it had been recorded during Aja.

I’m talking about this mythical genre, this hybrid of foot-stomping jams as if it doesn’t exist. But the answer is screaming out at me, waving its hands trying to attract my attention. The genre did exist, albeit briefly, but has since died in what people these days call “R&B” or “Urban” music. It died because it was too good, because things so great just can’t last. It’s like the girl of your dreams telling you that she loves you as she’s boarding a plane that will take her halfway across the world and out of your life forever. You have that one moment and then it’s gone.

I’ll stop being vague here. The answer is simple. It started in 1979 with Off the Wall and ended in 1981 with Thriller. Say what you want about the later albums, but these two…these were the ones that built the pedestal for which I hold my vision of pop music. Thriller happened because the planets were aligned. You had a seasoned producer/arranger who had done everything from jazz to soul to big band; a rising and ambitious showman who had singing chops and was willing to test the limits of pop music; and a killer band of session musicians, who would later go on to be known as Toto.

I wasn’t crazy about the Love is Hell cover art, but seriously? They couldn’t come up with anything better than the exaggerated, over-used semi-cursive type face?

I think Shakira’s time has passed. What was the hit? “Hips Don’t Lie” or something like that? How long ago was it?

It’s been too long since hips started speaking truth again. I think the novelty has worn off. Am I out of touch? The whole latin-infused-cliched-innuendo pop thing comes in waves. It won’t go away completely, but I get the impression that it’s a flavor-of-the-month ordeal.

She Wolf? Really? She’s all about the women, all about being a feminist, yet her image is solely based on sex appeal? Not to mention her last English album was titled Oral Fixation, Vol. 2.

It reminds me of the Rolling Stone’s Sasha Grey story–a piece about a porn star who portrays a high class escort in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience. She says she does porn to send a message to women, to inspire liberation. How many women are getting that message?

The album isn’t bad and the concept behind it certainly screams “potential,” but there were just too many missteps, too many moments where I was left wanting more, as if the whole thing were thrown together half-heartedly, something to squeeze in between other projects, and perhaps something to try and revive Scarlett Johansson’s short-lived singing career.

My biggest complaint is that the chemistry between Yorn and Johansson (who are supposed to portray a couple going through a, you know…break up) is virtually nonexistent. In fact, they hadn’t really known each other before the album was put together, and it comes across that way on the duets. That might have to do with the amount of processing they used all over Scarlett’s voice–oftentimes she sounds detached, void of any emotional connection with Yorn’s. These people were supposed to have been in love, right?

Maybe I’m being too anal about it. I haven’t really heard any of Pete Yorn’s music before, and I have to admit that one of the main reasons I bought Break Up was because, during my Lost in Translation-is-the-best-movie-ever phase, I had a thing for Scarlett.

Okay, I’ll dish. It wasn’t really a thing. More like an affair. We had a long distance relationship, her in LA, me in TX. We talked on AOL Instant Messenger. I had to end it because I found out that she was really just a 40-year-old man in Indiana. Screen names can be so deceiving!

I was going to end it there, but that just reminded me of a time during the AIM boom where I was approached online by a certain Mandy Moore. Imagine this:

I’m sitting in the family’s study (the upper-middle class version of the “computer room,” or “room where one displays their large collection of impressive books that they’ll never read”), chatting it up with middle school and high school hotties (I’m in 7th grade), occasionally hitting up some bros to see if they want to hang out or go to the mall or something. And then it happens.

That box pops up with a chime. Will I accept a message from (insert “Mandy Moore’s” screen name)? Duh! She sounds hot.

(the following is all obviously paraphrased, because I didn’t start saving my internet convos until high school)

MMoore: Hi there. What’s your name?

NetJedi81 (ballin’ right?): Sean. U?

MMoore: I’m Mandy Moore. Are you a fan of my music?

NetJedi81: I havent really heard it?

MMoore: Oh, well I’m only interested in talking to my fans. Have a nice day.

Can you believe it? Mandy Moore messaged me. She must have read my buddy info, saw the deep and emotionally sensitive Ataris lyric, and thought that I was worth talking to.

Of course, I’ve tried to catch up with her, sending her messages on Myspace and Facebook, but I’m getting no response. I’m just trying to tell her that I AM a fan of her music now and would very much like to resume our conversation that we started way back when.

And now I’ve got “Candy” stuck in my head. I’m waiting for you (I’m waiting). I’m missing you like Candayyeyeah. Now you do too.

My favorite scene? In the studio towards the end, when Guy jams with Del Paxton (I hope I’m not ruining it, but if you, Constant Reader, haven’t seen this movie…well, you probably wouldn’t be reading this little blog because the universe where you live that doesn’t include That Thing You Do! is a universe where I do not and will not exist). That scene helped shape my desire to create music, to contribute something creative and artistic to this world even if only a few people heard it.

Guy loved music. That’s why he was the main character. The good guy. The one that could do no wrong. Jimmy, as Mr. White (Tom Hanks) said, was the talent. He didn’t appreciate music as much as Guy, because he had that natural ability to write a great song and yeah, it went to his head. Who wouldn’t want to be engaged to a gal like Liv Tyler, or at least a gal that was played by Liv Tyler? Seriously. Todd Rundgren was her legal guardian for Something/Anything?‘s sake!

I can’t say that any aspect of this film is bad. The theme song, written by the great Mike Viola (who produced Mandy Moore’s Amanda Leigh) and Adam Schlesinger (of Fountains of Wayne fame), is a course in classic pop songwriting. Never mind Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” “That Thing You Do!” has stood the test of time.

Side Note: By the way, do you know how many times we listened to “My Heart Will Go On” in Spanish in 5th grade? I don’t know! I don’t remember! Which means that it was more than once. That was back when I was living and breathing pop music on the radio. Kiss FM (106.1 ya’ll), Hot 100 (100.3, the more “urban” Kiss FM), you know what I’m talking about, Southlake, TX. I distinctly remember that Kiss FM was playing an alternate version of “My Heart Will Go On” with actual quotes from Titanic. The same thing happened with Bruce Springsteen’s “Secret Garden” when Jerry McGuire came out. And people ate it up! I’m making an assumption here, because I ate it up and I heard it all the time.

I think my first experiences with certain emotions came from Pop radio. Heartache (is that even an emotion?) was one of them. My Mom was driving me to hockey practice. What did my heart ache about? I don’t know. But “Genie in a Bottle” was making me long for someone. It wasn’t even someone. It was just some entity, some idea. This feeling of being caught up in an interaction with a girl that went beyond the scope of cootie resistance.

Pop music in the late 1990s had created this void inside me. The music was telling me “you have to find a girl and love on her and get her to love on you…and by love on, we mean awkwardly slow dance with her at the next middle school extracurricular socializing event.” All the while, I’m thinking “Okay, just as soon as I get frosted tips, start shopping at Structure, and try out for one of the four football teams.” So Pop music is the leading cause to coupling. Interesting.

Another emotion I first felt through Pop radio was Aggression. I think it came when “Forgot About Dre” hit the airwaves. It was 7th grade. And for some reason, the song resonated with me. It wasn’t about feeling a connection with the subject matter then. Did I have any idea what it felt like to be bombarded by younger rappers trying to upstage and replace me? No. It was more about feeling cool. My parents let me get the edited version of Chronic 2001 at Wal-Mart. I don’t know why. Maybe I made a fuss? Maybe they weren’t aware of the album’s content? What I do know is that I wanted to have sex/have slightly-more-than-platonic relations with as many attractive girls as possible at that age. And by knowing a song that Eminem rapped on, I’d be in the right direction.

Side, Side Note:I had to scratch my head for a minute about the continuity here. If Chronic 2001 would have actually come out in 2001, I would have been in 9th grade, well into my post-punk/ska phase. But alas, Dr. Dre’s masterpiece came out in 1999, putting me in 7th Grade with a lot to lose and a lot to gain, workin my way up the middle school food chain. See that? I came up with that rhyme just now.

Wow. That Thing You Do! to Chronic 2001. This single post covered just about everything you wanted to learn today/night.

Well, I’ve run out of steam here at Minutiae Music Land. As you can tell, this was a very stream-of-conscious post, but I plan on revisiting the topic of Pop radio in the 1990s because I think it was pretty integral to my growth as a humanitarian/man of the people/songwriter/regular dude just trying to bide his time.

And by the way, in all seriousness: Dawes’ North Hills is on constant playback here at the Great Pagoda of Fun(n). And also Cory Chisel & the Wandering Sons’ Death Won’t Send a Letter. Both are very nice albums that make me hopeful for the future. And I say this, because you, Constant Reader, are here to seek out my guiding light (read: my opinion on contemporary music).

I’ve only listened to this album once all the way through, but I’m hooked. And I hate it. I hate it because this is the sound I (we, the band) have strived for.

Amidst this giant throwback trend that’s sweeping the indie music nation right now, I’d say that Dawes takes the cake. Not only do the recordings and instrumentation stay true to that bygone era, but the songs themselves are really great too.

One thing I noticed about North Hills is that the arrangements are pretty straightforward, meaning that the underlying songs are front and center. I’ve noticed in a lot of these throwback bands that the production quality (arrangements, harmonies, etc.) is great and relatively spot on, but the songs are a bit lacking. Fleet Foxes and Midlake come to mind. I really enjoy each band’s music, but both have very few songs that I can connect with on an emotional level, if any at all.

My personal favorite thusfar is “If You Let Me Be Your Anchor.” The chorus and its harmonies are too good.

I was going to provide a link to Last.fm, because you can stream the albums there, but I’m at work and the network won’t allow me to visit the website, so I’ll leave it to you, Constant Reader, to use your presumed Google prowess to find it.