• DOWNLOAD | NORMAN C. BRANNON ”Concession Stand” Demo, 2008

GPOYW: The I’m Also a Hack Musician Edition. This diptych, shot by John Mockus at a Texas is the Reason show at Maxwell’s, has always been one of my favorite photos of myself — if only because it doesn’t look like a chaotic rock show at all. We could have sounded like Sigur Rós and you’d never know it by looking at this.

I’m posting this photo for a few reasons today: Firstly because I’ve been thinking a lot about making music again lately — largely because I haven’t been doing much of it — and seeing a picture of myself playing guitar reminds me that, oh yeah, I do that. Secondly, because earlier this week I read an amazing quote by Doug Martsch from Built to Spill that would have caused me to spontaneously high-five the guy if we were within arm’s length of each other:

“If you send me into Guitar Center, I’d get laughed out of there,” he says. “I’m technically not a good guitar player at all. I never took lessons, I never practiced. All I did was grab onto a few ideas and played them with a lot of confidence. [Dinosaur Jr. and Neil Young] know their way around the neck, which I don’t. I just took their aggressiveness.”

This idea — that he plays badly confidently — is the driving force behind ever believing I could make music at all. I realize that there are people who think this is modest speech, but no, seriously! I know people who can “play guitar” and I’m not one of them.

At any rate, the third reason is because I wrote a whole mess of songs at one point in 2007 and 2008, and it occurred to me last night over a dinner conversation that only a handful of people have ever actually heard them. During the writing process, it seemed like I was working towards an album, but when I finished writing, I didn’t feel a compelling need to share. I wrote these songs to get my head right about something, and when I felt good again, I put the guitar down.

But this week’s been weird, and I’ve been feeling kind of sharey, so today I’ve decided to put one of these demos out there — if only to prove that this thing I made actually exists. If you like it, you can share it, too.

I remember thinking that “Concession Stand” was a breakthrough of sorts for this collection of songs — that its delivery felt authentically fragile, whatever that means — so here it is: What it sounds like when I’m left alone in a room with a guitar. It’s not perfect, but I like the mistakes.

 
• DOWNLOAD | AZURE RAY “Silver Sorrow” Drawing Down the Moon, 2010

Despite having lived with him for a little over sixteen years, I only have one memory of my father. It was late at night for a seven-year-old — something like 11:30, which is the time he came home from one of the three jobs he kept — and I insisted on staying up to greet him. As soon as I heard the key turn, I jumped off the couch and ran to the door, jumping up and down, most likely holding my breath so I didn’t just explode right there. He was only one step inside when I grabbed him, wrapping my little arms tightly around his torso.

“Daddy!”

The look my father gave me was indelibly filled with contempt.

“Get away from me, you piece of shit,” he said.

I went to see The Switch last week, and I wasn’t expecting to get so fucked up over a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston. In the movie, a young boy named Sebastian — born of artificial insemination to Aniston’s character — collects picture frames and decidedly keeps the stock photographs in them. He invents bizarre narratives for the people in these photos, and seems to believe that all of them are somehow related to his father, whom he has never met. The old man with the fishing rod is, for example, his grandfather; the jockish blond guy is his father’s brother. A picture of Sebastian’s actual father is noticeably absent, obviously, and this is presumably because he hopes to see him for real one day. In the meantime, these narratives fill the void.

It may sound strange coming from a person who technically grew up with a mother and father, but this scene resonated with me so strongly that I wanted to stand up and stop the movie so we could rewind it. Because I did that too. But instead of stock photography, I stared endlessly at magazine adverts. I asked parents of friends — more than once — if they would adopt me. I told friends that I was pretty sure I had been adopted, and that someday, my real parents would come and find me. To this end, I paid close attention to every very-special-episode of a television sitcom that ever dealt with adoption, and searched for hints as to how to make that day come faster.

When I turned sixteen — when I realized that day would never come — I decided to drop out of school and leave home. My mother locked herself in the bathroom, crying, but I knew it wasn’t because she was going to miss me as much as it was that she could never explain how this happened to the members of her church. After all, she did everything Jesus said to do, including and perhaps most fervently, strengthening her commitment to never ever spare the rod under any circumstance. Sometimes she took the rod out just for fun — or the belt, or the cookware, or the wooden clogs she wore in the summer. Whichever was closest. She fucking loved the power the Bible gave her.

If my father had any reaction to my departure at all, I might have remembered it, and then I’d have two memories of my father. But he didn’t seem to care either way.

I wasn’t born with the name Brannon. My birth name is out there — on the records I’ve made and in the magazines I used to write for — but it’s been so long now that a lot of people I know don’t realize I was ever called by anything else. Even my birth certificate is clear about who I am: NORMAN CHRISTOPHER BRANNON. I don’t respond to any other name.

As far as I know, my father doesn’t know that I had my name legally changed. It’s been so long since we spoke, I can’t even say whether or not he’s still alive. I think about this because his surname was the last vestige of connection between us, and I just as easily abandoned it as he did me. I can’t feel bad about that; in the only memory I have of my father, he called me a piece of shit. The old man with the fishing rod would have been happy to see me at the door that day. He would have said, “I love you, son,” before tucking me in, instead of sending me to bed crying.

It’s unfortunate, but there’s a point when these narratives stop working and nothing can fill the void except for that thing you know you’ve never had.

OK, really, I don’t see how anyone with that new Vanity Fair article about the Vampire Weekend cover model and a copy of Futura Bold on their laptop could resist. Also, Maura asked for it. I do these things so you don’t have to.

I need a haircut and a shave, but I’m about to start painting my bedroom and I felt compelled to post a quick GPOY — if only for the shirt, which I can probably only really wear out to a Kylie Minogue concert or something. My friend Scott found it at a thrift store a few years ago and brought it home for me as a gift. Really, you should have seen the grin on his face when he handed it over and I first read the text. This is what it means to really know someone.

lifeserial:

If you’ll allow me just a second: Today is a big day for me. That’s the cover of the book that I made with Ian Dingman. And, starting now, it is available for PRE-ORDER!

Matthew’s blog is one of my favorites, so I’m more than happy to reblog the announcement of his first book, To Slow Down The Time. I know how it feels, and it’s kind of a big deal.

I mean, I realize that I’m on Tumblr and that means I should be all like, “Hooray, Internet!” But for me, right now, I think this is more of a feeling of “Hooray, Stuff I Can Touch!” It’s important to regularly run the risk of moving into the region of tangibility, and I’ve always felt particularly affected by work that offers more than just an ethereal sense of a person’s existence. The fact that Matthew bound the hardcover edition of his book by hand says something about that idea, and it made me think about how my extensive history with DIY fanzine culture and independent record labels intersects with how I view this project: This book is the reification of author as artifact, and that’s valuable.

I am perpetually in awe of anyone who can integrate, in equal capacities, the potential to become a groundbreaking pop star — with an irrefutable talent as a songwriter and live performer — alongside a significant potential to become an equally fascinating Saturday morning cartoon character. I wish I was that kind of person. (via bloodfromaghost)

This week’s overall national album sales were the lowest ever in Soundscan history, with only 4.95 million records sold — period. That means that, since its release, AC/DC’s Back In Black has sold over four times as many copies as every other album ever recorded by every artist ever who sold an album in America last week. It also means that if this were to have happened ten years ago, when ‘N SYNC’s No Strings Attached debuted at number 1 with 2.4 million copies sold, every other album ever recorded by every artist ever would have only sold a cumulative 2.55 million copies between them.

But remember when home-taping was killing the record industry? Yeah, that was cute.

 
• DOWNLOAD | FLOPPY SOUNDS “Entertainment” (feat. Sarah Jones) Entertainment 12”, 1997

My boyfriend doesn’t understand why I watch reality television. “It’s stupid,” he says. And it is. But there’s no pretense that RuPaul’s Drag U is trying to be high-art. I know what I’m getting, and I assess it according to those standards.

Every now and again I need to turn off the news. In the last couple of weeks especially, I’ve realized that these programs make me miserable because it’s all false advertising. These are reality TV-level arguments applied in the public discourse, the arena of simpleton politicians who don’t want to be voted off the island. It’s all strategy and no substance — as if life were a season of the Real World/Road Rules Challenge and you were either on Wes’s side or Kenny’s side, but you had to make a choice.

It’s like how everyone on Top Chef this season unanimously decided that Alex couldn’t cook. He won challenges on the show, and he’s an executive chef in real life, so this can’t be true. But wishful thinking can act as a strategy: If Alex internalizes some of these insecurities, if we get him on the defensive, we can take him down. They did. It’s kind of like the ridiculous — and inexplicably successful — Republican whisper campaign that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Except, of course, that conservatives seem to be grooming America to become a theocratic Christian nation, while the dudes onTop Chef only want $100,000 furnished by Dial NutriSkin.

But even Puck got kicked off The Real World: San Francisco for wearing a swastika T-shirt and being aggressively homophobic. In the real real world, Dr. Laura can call gay people “biological errors” and say the N-word on the radio eleven times, but kicking her off the show is, according to Sarah Palin, a plot by “Constitutional obstructionists.”

So I’m about to watch this season’s finale of HGTV’s Design Star, and I’m OK with that. At least I know that even the most annoying contestant is guaranteed to go home at some point — which is more than I can say for the news. If they had a phone number I could call, like on American Idol, I’d vote all these people off.

GPOYW: The Oh Shit, I’m on Television Edition. At some point last year I agreed to shoot a string of pilot episodes co-hosting a magazine-styled television show called The Deal. This was, needless to say, weird. I’ve never been in front of a camera in this way before, and I was pretty much thrown into the deep end of the pool, but I suppose this is the life I’ve always asked for — one in which I’m consistently trying new things guaranteed to make me feel totally insecure about myself. So yeah, if that’s the goal, then: Mission accomplished!