When I was like 18 I went to the Cheapo records in Uptown for the first time and I bought a bunch of records with my first paycheck from a really shit job I was working in a grocery store deli. I used to think that if I spent enough money on cool records eventually someday some people would give a shit. I did buy some cool records, but I sold them three years later to buy like fucking McDonald's or something and I just downloaded them if I wanted to hear them again.
Anyway I bought like the White Album (THE WHITE ALBUM. IT'S LIKE FORTY FUCKING DOLLARS. WHO HAS FORTY FUCKING DOLLARS TO SPEND ON THE WHITE ALBUM. SRSLY.) and a couple of Neu! records and a couple of Can records and a Wilco album and some other stuff that I don't really want to tell you that I paid money for like The Soft Bulletin because holy shit that's a boring record. Anyway the point of this is that I bought Myra Lee by Cat Power and Insignificance by Jim O'Rourke and I had never heard either one of them before and I basically spent the next three years of my life trying to be them.
It is really fucking hard to try to be Cat Power, especially if you are basically just a stocky misguided indie kid with a scratchy voice (HOLLER BACK SADDLE CREEK RECORDS) and a crappy guitar. It was a really collossally dumb thing for me to one day decide to try to be Cat Power because no matter how hard I worked I was never going to be Cat Power. I couldn't even be Jason Molina or Will Oldham. Those people have something, like some kind of weird cigarette smoke aura that burns around them whenever they get near a microphone. All of their records sound like recordings of normal people slowed down to half speed and filtered through the broadcasting system of the saddest circle of hell. You can't learn that shit. You either have it, or you don't. I didn't have it.
I spent a long time trying to have it. I spent hours in my room writing sad songs at 90bpm about trains and lonely places and tweaking the EQ on my guitar tracks endlessly trying to figure out how to make the reverb sound like a drowning unicorn like it does on Moon Pix or Didn't It Rain or trying to figure out which range I had to remove to make acoustic guitars sound like they're about to break like on Palace records. Nothing fucking worked. At best people would say I sounded like Bright Eyes or something but I didn't want to be like Bright Eyes. I wanted to sound 20 years older than I actually am like all the cool folk people I listened to. Instead of what I actually was: A completely clueless kid with a guitar trying to be something he wasn't. A total poser.
One night in '05 I wrote and recorded a song that doesn't really have a name and is posted here under the name "Lindbergh Terminal" that is basically the last thing I did before I moved on. It is the closest I probably got to having the thing that I don't have because it's probably the least I ever cared about having it. After that I basically admitted that the whole folk thing basically started because I thought some girls I'd met that liked it were really pretty and I wanted to impress them. It got out of control and by the time 2006 arrived I had pretty much stopped the whole thing entirely.
I stopped staying inside all the time and started dancing and met some cool people and started a band and I'm a lot better at it I think and you can hear that HERE.
