Summer Hymns - "Mr. Brewer (Cackle, Cackle)"

The Aquarium Drunkard's recent post on the new Summer Hymns record got me thinking about my favorite track of theirs, the ostensible subject of this entry and available below. The fact that I so strongly associate the band with a particular song got me thinking about something else.

I've always divided people who listen to music into two groups: "album people" and "singles people." To me, the former group always seemed to be the more evolved of the two, so naturally it was the one I associated myself with. The advent of the MP3 era (and, more specifically, MP3 blogging) has changed everything. I find myself with a music library full of individual tracks by bands I may never hear a long-player from. Some in the music industry would point to this and say "see, told you so, MP3s are evil." But the fact is, I'm buying more music today than I have at any other point in my life (much of this is attributable to the convenience and immediate gratification eMusic provides.)

So it just so happens that I'm also in the early stages of organizing my CD/record collection. I am notoriously messy, so it's going to take awhile. In putting my fingers and eyes on these albums I haven't listened to in years, I'm finding that I am not so much nostalgic for the experience of revisiting the album in toto as I am scanning the track list for those songs that really meant something to me, the ones I associate with very specific people, places, times and feelings. And I'm realizing that maybe I never really was an "album person" at all.

I've been passively looking for a focus for this little blog, so I'm going to try an experiment. For the foreseeable future, I'm going to focus on the songs that have really 'taken' with me over the last 10 or 15 years. Hopefully it will a) help me get my shit organized is a shorter period of time and b) provide some sort of public service, introducing folks to stuff they might have missed for whatever reason or (as in the case of Justin's Summer Hymns post) remind someone of something that's Very Good but has been unconsidered for awhile.

My goal is to post at least a song a day. I plan on writing something about what each song means to me. I might mix in some other random stuff. Maybe it won't suck.

(No commentary on this one; too many words already, and I think it speaks for itself.)

MP3: Summer Hymns ~ Mr. Brewer (Cackle, Cackle)
[from 2000's Voice Brother And Sister LP]
Buy: [eMusic] [Amazon]