She will be loved
Friday, Aug. 02, 2002
The music that guides my life
I'm not sure how to put into words what XTC has meant to me. I've only been listening to them since the spring of 2001, yet they have taken over my life. I tend to be an obsessive person, I like having things to really focus on. I've been this way about bands and musicians before, but never to this extent.I've known of XTC for at least 10 years. I'd occasionally hear Dear God, Mayor of Simpleton, Senses Working Overtime, or The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead on an "alternative" radio station. I enjoyed these songs, but never bought any of their albums. Last spring, I was on Napster (shame on me!) trying to think of songs to download, Dear God came to mind and in doing a search for XTC, I decided to download all four of these songs. Something about Mayor of Simpleton was so catchy, it became a favorite mp3 and I listened to it all the time.
The first XTC album I bought was Upsy Daisy Assortment, one of their many greatest hits compilations. I was unfamiliar with the majority of the songs, so it took me a few listens to get into it. The first song to pull me in was Chalkhills and Children. So beautiful, so melodic, really unlike anything I heard before in pop music.
Thirsty for more, I went to Tower Records and bought Rag and Bone Buffet, the rare cuts and leftovers CD. It was $4.99, so I wasn't expecting too much from it. But it was fabulous, a perfect companion to Upsy Daisy. While Upsy Daisy contains their hits, outlining the reasons for their critical success (notice nothing is said about commercial success), Rag and Bone shows their personality, all their little quirks. Songs like Scissor Man, Ten Feet Tall, Heaven is Paved With Broken Glass, and The World is Full of Angry Young Men stuck to my brain.
So I started buying all their albums, I basically bought them all at once, and recording them to MD. <I bow to the god of minidisc> With MD, I was able to bring them all with me to work and pop them in and out at will. I can't say which is my favorite album, almost all have been at one point in time. Each one is a masterpiece. What do you do when you have all the albums? Start collecting b-sides, live tracks, bootlegs, demo tracks, etc. XTC is great band for obsessive fanatics, there are tons of little gems out there for the completist.
All this writing and I still haven't gotten into what the band means to me personally. It's so hard to explain. They're just so different from anything else I've listened to. I can't put their sound into words, there's a little bit of everything. And they make albums, not singles like most of today's bands. XTC hasn't been a touring band since 1982. This fact has hurt the band in that they aren't in the public eye. But it has helped the music. They don't have to worry about whether they can reproduce a song on stage, they just let their creativity run. The output is ear candy, depth and layers that suck me in, over and over. Looks don't hurt, Colin and Andy are very appealing men. Andy's appearance is comforting and unsettling at the same time, he looks like the bastard son of Sting and Charles Nelson Reilly (And that's a good thing!). I like Colin's quietness and reserved nature. I like that they're not a commercial success, they feel like my own little secret oasis from daily frustrations, my headphone world.
Watching/Hearing/Listening to: XTC/my own mix/Cynical Days
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