Jan

24

Feel like a freight train comin’…

Filed Under Babbling, Music 

Funny. I don’t feel like I’m turning 25 in a week.

Seriously. My birthday is next Thursday and it hardly feels like it should be this soon. That’s the funny thing with my birthday each and every year as I get older: it becomes less and less of a deal for me. Its just another day out of the year. I mean, seriously, if folks want to celebrate me and being on this planet for another year? Call me up any day of the week and do so, not one damn day out of the year. Show me that love and respect each and every day and not just because its the day that I crowned from my mother’s womb.

I’ve been feeling my right hand itch, and I’m trying to keep a notepad nearby. I’m also deciding to listen to a lot more country and other lyrically intensive music. Seriously. Folks don’t give country the credit it deserves. All too often its laughed at, scorned, or just kicked to the curb. I think the truth of the matter is, when you find a good country artist or a good lyricist in general, there’s something to study there. For me, I put Big & Rich, Montgomery Gentry, Keith Urban, Alabama, and Radney Foster into that category. And if you look at a lot of this “country” you can see that there’s a lot of blues and rock right in the mix there too.

And let’s look at something that’s little considered and you’ll keep hearing me say it right up and through this next year: music doesn’t need to be complex. It needs to be comforting at some sub-etheral level. Sure, the complex stuff can be comforting at that level, but look at some of the classic tracks out there that make us feel good, it’s a simple hook on the chorus that we sing along to and that everyone knows. I mean, “Livin’ On A Prayer,” “Don’t Stop Believing,” and “Jack ‘n’ Diane” ? Simple as heck choruses that it doesn’t matter the words of the verses, you’re singing along. I can’t count how many times my old roommate Nathan and I would be heading here or there and blasting one of these in the car.

And if you don’t sing along, I’m sorry for you.

See, songs like this are the simple joy to our lives. Songs like “Rock and Roll All Nite (Party Every Day),” “Rock & Roll,” and “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll” that the second you hear that riff or that intro that you find yourself singing along and turning the radio up louder: not just because the titles have the banal message of the music, but because it moves us. We have that urge because the lyrics are so familiar. They feel right. They’re what we grew up on and with. They’ve just got that… feel.

Its something that takes you on the inside and the second it hits you, you know its there. Even if it’s not your life, you know what its like. You’re in the scene. It’s a living music video in your mind that no matter what words or images you try to find, you have none. It exists because its everything you need and could ask for in that simple nugget just under four minutes that just is right. Decades of people try to put it into words, but no matter what words you look for, there really are none. When its right and its there and everything just works: it just does.

And now? I don’t hear that arena rock. That anthem. That one hook that just wins everything over. Occasionally you get it, but with the esoteric nature of song titles nowadays that are so far away from what the song seems to be about, well, its hard to remember what’s what from time to time. I can tell you the names of half of the songs on Brand New’s albums from time to time, just because of how much I’ve listened to it, but ask me what my favorite song is from Mayday Parade’s album, and I’d be struggling to tell you their names. Conversely, ask me from what I’ve heard from Seven Mary Three’s new album (samples can be heard here), and I can tell you via song name alone because of how the lyrics and the names fit together.

I’m not really going anywhere in particular with this. For me, I guess its just that everyone tries to do something different, but I don’t hear that hook anymore. I’m looking for that hook. And I’m trying to write the best one I can that flows as smoothly as some of those great stories I linked above.

I can only hope to find it in me.

I mean heck, I’m only at my quarter life crisis. I’ve got a good amount of time left, right?

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    About The Site


    Thanks for stopping by, folks! My name is Adam J. Cohen, and I'm a guitarist/songwriter in Champaign, IL, recently relocated from Orlando, FL where I'm a UCF grad. Here, you'll find vignettes on my life, setlists from open mics and reviews, and whatever else crosses my mind. Enjoy!