Happy Fathers Day

Built to Spill: There’s Nothing Wrong With Love

Few albums have directly impacted my music preference like Built to Spill’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love. With the explosion and near peak of Napster at the turn of the century I joined the army reserve just after getting my feet wet. Until recently I kept all of the letters I received during those ten months away from home. During the last few weeks of basic training, I received a letter from a friend of mine who had found this amazing new band along with the lyrics to a song that reminded him of me. A song he said that I would love.

You get the car I’ll get the night off
You’ll get the chance to take the world apart
and figure out how it works.
Don’t let me know what you find out.
I need a car you need a guide who needs a map?
If I don’t die or worse I’m gonna need a nap.
At best I’ll be asleep when you get back.

I wanna see it when you find out what comets, stars, and moons are all about.
I wanna see there faces turn to backs of heads and slowly get smaller.
I wanna see it now. I wanna see it now.

I want specifics on the general idea.
I want to think what I should know.
What should I do here, why’d you show?

I wanna see movies of my dreams.
I wanna see movies of my dreams.
I wanna see movies of my dreams.
I wanna see movies of my dreams.

For a while there Twin Falls was my favorite song off the album. With lyrics like “beneath a parachute I saw her without shoes.” I fell in love with Doug Martsch’s writing style, later hearing that he never wrote his lyrics and took submissions from his friends and people he knew. “Twin Falls isn’t even one of the good songs!” My best friend’s girl friend protested one night as we drove the streets of Windsor Ontario. “And their other albums are all way better!” I didn’t care, I still loved the album’s nostalgic child hood references. “That Brontosaurus must have stood a thousand miles high.”

For years, Built to Spill had been the foundation of electric guitar inspiration leading to most of the songs on my first album. Long after we left Michigan Built to Spill poured from my car speakers stemming from one album or the other, escorting us in Virginia and across Southern California. Prior to pour departure my friends, one in particular used to criticizing me for my taste in this new indie music as they would so sarcastically say. “What’s with you and these 7 inches and vinyl?” He asked one night amidst a night of drinking Whisky Sours and inappropriate sexual innuendos. Perhaps I just grew up too fast for that group. “What are the guys in Built to Spill going to do once they’re old and no one wants to hear their music any more?” I was asked once as if I was trying to be talked out of it. “Dude, there like in their forties.” I replied. I really have no idea how old Doug Martsch is, but needless to say I’ve met with or talked to those guys less than a handful of times over the years. Since then my kids have come to love Built to Spill as much as I do, singing along with it every time.

Hum: You’d Prefer an Astronaut

Hum was the first band that I felt really had the ability to rip my soul from my chest. I bought the album the winter of 8th or 9th grade after hearing their single Stars play on Detroit radio’s 89X. You’d Prefer An Astronaut became one of the most quintessential albums of my youth. It seemed that all of my friends simultaneously picked them up too. There was a guy that ran in our circle of friends who cyclically turned from drugs to Jesus all the while wooing the girls with his guitar, bringing tears to their eyes as he sang “I thought you’d be there holding daisies you’d always wait for me.”

Instantly I knew that I had to play guitar. Though I didn’t get my first electric guitar until after graduation I took advantage of plugging the floor models into a Boss Distortion and MXR Phase 90 pedal and disseminating drop d guitar riffs. I consistently listened to this album every day for four years. My own lyrics poorly imitated Matt’s with dreamy references to radar, circuitry, blue lights, and radio frequencies.

Even now as I look at the album cover there is something comforting about the two shades of green and that zebra staring back at me. My first Graphic Arts project my senior year, I replicated the very cover for a sketch pad. My instructors tried to talk me out suggesting I wait until I develop the skills to reproduce the zebra on the light board. Far from a printer’s perfect I went ahead with the task and I got an A.

I eventually learned to play every song on the album my favorite being I Hate It Too. I used to sit on my suburban porch during the summer strumming out the rhythm on my ovation guitar, pounding the base of my palm below the sound hole to simulate the heavy drums. I played it so much apparently that one day when I was pissed at something or someone I was strumming at nearly twice the speed and my dad came out to smoke a cigaret commented about half way through, “That’s not how fast that goes.”
“Huh?” I said sort of snapping out if it, “No I guess not.”
I started over this time playing a bit slower. When it came to the part when the distortion was to kick in I broke my low E string as I strummed too hard trying to buzz the strings.

Suicide Machine reminds me of the squealing tired I always seemed to hear in the distance behind the sound of automatic sprinklers on warm spring nights around midnight. My bedroom window faced Fort Street and I could smell the Detroit River less than a mile away. The airport beacon from Gross Ile municipal in the distance alternated white and green on clear nights as I played the forty-five minutes this album had to offer over and over again laying on my floor staring up into my ceiling fan.