On Living with Music

(originally posted to Substack)

I meant to get this out a few days ago, but maybe I’ll settle into a bi-weekly routine as I get deeper into this thing. In any case, here’s our first paid subscriber post, something I’ll try and do mid-month, in between the regular stuff that I usually send out aroud the 1st.

As a first volley, there’s this tune we recently finished for a Sparklehorse tribute comp that should be out some time in 2026 – Cow, off Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot. It’s our first recording as a full quartet!

MP3 at the bottom of the post, but I wanted to write about the experience of living with this music for 27 years, and how that experience was shaped by physical media. It’s a winding path that brings to mind that funny dollar bill tracking project from the early 00’s, and it’s one of the types of musical experiences in life that I personally treasure the most.

1998, and My Eccentric Friend

In high school I had this friend, Josh Goldberg. I’ve since heard that he passed from contracting a gnarly infection while living as a monk deep in the mountains, outside the reach of modern medical care. To be honest, though, I can’t recall who it was that informed me. We hadn’t kept up in the intervening years, and our friend groups went their separate ways after our youth, so it’s difficult to verify. Such is the winding nature of memory. (Josh, if I’ve got it wrong and by some miraculous coincidence you’re reading this, thank you dude. Would love to say hey.)

In high school, long before monkhood, Josh was an eccentric dandy, even by the standards of my own industrial-goth-slash-hacker-kid high school group at the time. When I first met him in 9th grade, he had cornrows and a well-worn Sepultura shirt. Some months later, he fell deeply into the fashion of the late 90’s swing revival, and started showing up to school in zoot suits, his nü metal Petco-bought wallet chain now replaced by a thinner, fancier one. A new haircut unerneath the big hat with the feather, the walk with the snap, the whole nine, overnight. (And yes, it was as appropriative as the cornrows.)

Some months later still (and it must have been months, because the next year I would move and transfer to another school), he pivoted again to full candy raver. This was probably much more of a lifestyle change for him, as raves were really a scene, whereas swing and nü metal were more of a monocultural thing that was simply in the air. I was too much of a nerd-slash-rocker to hang at raves, but I would see him at school in, once again, full regalia: the bracelets, the neon, and of course, the JNCOs.

Josh and I were buds, the kind of friendship that can only be shared between loud and annoying young boys. Some time during his candy raver phase, he handed me a CD with no case – “Hey, do you want this? I’m not into it, but I think you shouldn’t throw CDs away, because someone else might like the music.”

Sure, I said. It was a copy of Vivadixie, my first encounter with Mark Linkous’ music.

Living with Music in Your Home

I played it once or twice, and it was fine, but kind of passed me by. I had no liner notes to contextualize the music, had never heard of the band, and search engines were not really a thing yet. It sat in my CD binders for some years, being played here and there. A strange, spare album of extremely close singing over guitars, static, feedback, broken toys, answering machine messages – punctuated by a few loud, driving rock tunes. It spoke the language of the day, but like any heartfelt expression of a whole person, it stood out as a weird anomaly. Lyrics like “sleeping with metal hands in a spirit ditch” and “scream across the lawn with fire in her hair, millionaires come tumbling down the stairs” quietly imprinted on me a sense of surreal, grotesque strangeness that I’ve come to search out in the arts ever since.

Over time, and with the repetition of seeing it in my collection, I put it on more, and grew to like it, the way I liked The Bends or Primitive Radio Gods or Throwing Copper. But in contrast to the polished and manicured feel of top 40 bands (no shade), Sparklehorse had this shuffling gait about it, like you were just hanging out with one person, relatively unmediated by industry. I came to love this album, and in return it shaped a corner of my artistic propensities.

These feelings, and the creative trajectory they wrought in me, would not have been possible if I had encountered this music in a streaming format, or if the music had not lived in my home, an object for which I had to find a place on a shelf. In a streaming format, it would not have been gifted to me, and I would probably have done what I do with much of the music I encounter now: listen passively while I do other stuff, semi-unconsciously categorize it, and go about my stupid little day waiting for something to catch my ear.

In place of that experience, I have memories of listening to Sparklehorse on road trips with friends along the California coast, of diving deeper into the catalog, of learning the tunes and trying to cop the lyrical writing style.

People who grow up with streaming will probably have some analogous experiences to this as they age, but it’s a format that definitely renders this kind of experience impossible – that of living and contending with the music.

A few More Signposts Along the Road

• 2010: A struggling depressive, Mark Linkous takes his own life, at age 47. As a struggling depressive myself at the time, I feel a lot of feelings about that, having bonded with the music deeply. Five years later, pitchfork publishes a very nice, lengthy article about him. There ought to be more of them.
• 2014: I take a small web gig for someone who worked on some of the Sparklehorse records – not so much a reminder for me that the records exist, more of a minor interaction that makes them somehow more real to me.
• 2019: At 36, after 15 years as a noise musician, I’m hard at work on a first album of songs, better late than never. Anura’s Deluge would come out a year later, after several months studying Mark’s lyrics and transmuting them into permission to write my own in a similar fashion.

Which Leads Us To…

Calley can confirm or deny but I think it went like this: One day Jackson wore a Sparklehorse tshirt to Star Card practice. “Yo, nice shirt!” said the fortysomething to the twentysomething. The four of us gushed about Mark’s tunes for a bit, and somewhere in the midst of it, Jake mentioned that he was putting together a Sparklehorse tribute compilation for his DIY label, and that Star Card should do a track. Um, duh.

At some point while working on this track, I made the faux pas of volunteering Receive to do a track too. Jake was gracefully amenable to it, and so we got to work on Cow. It came out pretty quickly:

I imagine there will be some more encounters with this music in my life, and that’s nice to consider. This cover is the quartet’s first attempt at seeing if we can actually work together in this context, a naive wobble toward the album we’re presently tackling. I find it very endearing in that way. Plus, great song.

Keeping the Pilot Light On

It is not a controversial opinion that Spotify are really bad people doing really bad things to the arts, and if you’re reading this, we’re probably on the same page there. I would add that streaming as a general format could be described the same way, and that the things we’ve gained (superficial access, scorecards, social currency) are far outweighed by the things we’ve lost (human experience, context, memory, dignity, a living).

While we wait for the years to have their way with these corporations, and for the next thing to come along, I don’t wish to yell at clouds (all the time), but I do wish to keep a certain pilot light lit with my oldhead stories, and document the uniquely profound effect that living with music can have on a life.

Anyway, thanks for reading all this.

-B