Prompt: "A song that's perfect for sitting on the back porch with a cold beverage on a warm summer night"
Selected by Joe
"I Am Yours"
Tedeschi Trucks Band with Trey Anastasio
Layla Revisited (Live at LOCKN'), 2021
Music critic Steve Hyden has a bit on Twitter where he's come up with a "new genre" called "back patio music" and he'll occasionally tweet a picture of the physical CD that he is putting into his CD player to listen to on his patio, and the joke has evolved to the point where he just tweets the words "patio hall of fame" with the picture and you know what he means and you know what the album is generally going to sound like—not the genre, because "patio music" encompasses many genres, but more so the vibe, the feeling you get when you listen to it, good music to chill with. You know the vibe I'm talking about, because you saw the prompt, and you picked that kind of music for your song choice today. This prompt was designed around this vibe, and it was inspired by Steve Hyden's stupid Twitter bit. My ability to explain the bit tells me that I'm getting too sucked into Twitter again, and that I need to back away. What I did for the choice of song for this prompt was that I went to Steve Hyden's Twitter page, and scrolled down until I saw the most recent "patio hall of fame" tweet, which took a surprisingly long time because most of his tweets are understandably about the Bruce Springsteen book that was just released a few weeks ago, a book about Born in the U.S.A. that I will definitely read at some point but most likely only whenever the Philadelphia Free Library system gets a copy of it. The most recent "patio hall of fame" tweet was a picture of Coldplay's album Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, which is probably a decent album based on my mild fondness for the two big singles from that album, but seemed like an outlier in terms of what we're going for in terms of "patio music," and so I disqualified it. The next tweet was of a live album by the Tedeschi Trucks Band featuring the dude from Phish doing an album-length cover of the Derek and the Dominos (a.k.a. Eric Clapton and friends) album featuring "Layla" with a title that is longer than that and that I'm going to not type out, despite the fact that I like the song and I like the album and I like my niece who is named after it, mostly because Eric Clapton is an anti-vaxxer, and this is the only way I know how to stick it to him, through minor petulance. I chose a song from this live album (TTB are 100% a WXPN band, and I've specifically downloaded songs from this band for my XPN-listener father for his iPod, back in the days when I wasn't the only living person on earth still using an iPod), and I chose mostly at random, though "I Am Yours" is a good song, and hits the vibes we are going for here. It's approved. Sorry, I'm just really trying to gather all my spare thoughts here into one paragraph, before we get to the meat of this fucker. Here's what I'm leading up to. Here is the main thesis of the blog post that I am currently (on my time) writing and you are currently (on your time) reading:
I asked Steve Hyden to participate in Yearlong Song Challenge, and he ignored my email.
I know logically that it wouldn't make sense for a professional music critic to go anywhere near a dumb Blogspot blog in the year 2024. I get that. And maybe I came on a little strong. You know how I get when I'm writing, and when I'm writing emails specifically. I try my hardest to cut the word cut down but I'm not a good editor of my own shit. Is there a world in which a tweet reply that read "yo dude, do a song challenge with us" would have a better chance at garnering a response than the 1000-word explanation about the challenge and the blog and music and the universe that I sent to him after proofreading three times? I guess so. I'm also fully aware that sometimes people don't want to do their jobs on their off-hours. Maybe asking Steve Hyden to write for PoYB was as rude as asking your doctor uncle to look at a welt on your ankle at a family pool party. I'm self-aware. I know it looked stupid. Describing it in frantic length to you now is part of the joke. But, like, a simple no would've sufficed, ya know? That's all. I don't ever expect to be taken seriously as a music critic myself because to be taken seriously I would need to act the part and play by those rules, and I never have and never will until someone says they are going to pay me for it. But I occasionally like to pretend. It was nice to pretend when Josh stopped by. There were other music critics that I've emailed and they all ignored those emails, Steve Hyden wasn't the only one. He was just the first. It doesn't make me like their words any less (though it does make me love Josh Terry's words even more). But it does kind of break the illusion that I've constructed for myself, just a little bit. Hyden is too busy with the precious alchemy of turning a love of music into an essay about that music into a paycheck, no time to check out the hoi polloi and what they're up to, no time to let the schlubby non-writer pretend that the words that he's putting on the digital page are going to mean something or anything beyond the fact that there was a period in that non-writer's life when his real job allowed for him to dick around on some fucking blog for a while. It's like, oh yeah, what I'm doing is stupid and pointless, thanks for the reminder. This is getting weirdly close to the core of my biggest insecurities, I didn't mean to do this, not here, but the fingers are moving across the keyboard outside of my control. But the idea of "music to chill on the back porch to" is all a façade, right? Like, we're all just out there trying to fucking survive out there, and sometimes it feels like the music is the only thing holding back total collapse, and we're all then expected to just pretend that we can sit on the back porch for hours at a time with our feet up and just chill and listen to music and get lost in the "calmness" and "relaxation" that life hands to us? Why do some people get to actually believe that? Why am I not one of those people? What is wrong with me? Why didn't he respond to my email? Doesn't he remember Joe from Philadelphia?
My oldest daughter seriously asked me the other day—no joke, the timing couldn't have been better—why our house doesn't have a porch. I told her because we're not good enough for a porch, back or front. Not like that Steve Hyden, all high and mighty, with his back porch and his CD player and his ample free time.
I asked Steve Hyden to participate in Yearlong Song Challenge, and he ignored my email.
I know logically that it wouldn't make sense for a professional music critic to go anywhere near a dumb Blogspot blog in the year 2024. I get that. And maybe I came on a little strong. You know how I get when I'm writing, and when I'm writing emails specifically. I try my hardest to cut the word cut down but I'm not a good editor of my own shit. Is there a world in which a tweet reply that read "yo dude, do a song challenge with us" would have a better chance at garnering a response than the 1000-word explanation about the challenge and the blog and music and the universe that I sent to him after proofreading three times? I guess so. I'm also fully aware that sometimes people don't want to do their jobs on their off-hours. Maybe asking Steve Hyden to write for PoYB was as rude as asking your doctor uncle to look at a welt on your ankle at a family pool party. I'm self-aware. I know it looked stupid. Describing it in frantic length to you now is part of the joke. But, like, a simple no would've sufficed, ya know? That's all. I don't ever expect to be taken seriously as a music critic myself because to be taken seriously I would need to act the part and play by those rules, and I never have and never will until someone says they are going to pay me for it. But I occasionally like to pretend. It was nice to pretend when Josh stopped by. There were other music critics that I've emailed and they all ignored those emails, Steve Hyden wasn't the only one. He was just the first. It doesn't make me like their words any less (though it does make me love Josh Terry's words even more). But it does kind of break the illusion that I've constructed for myself, just a little bit. Hyden is too busy with the precious alchemy of turning a love of music into an essay about that music into a paycheck, no time to check out the hoi polloi and what they're up to, no time to let the schlubby non-writer pretend that the words that he's putting on the digital page are going to mean something or anything beyond the fact that there was a period in that non-writer's life when his real job allowed for him to dick around on some fucking blog for a while. It's like, oh yeah, what I'm doing is stupid and pointless, thanks for the reminder. This is getting weirdly close to the core of my biggest insecurities, I didn't mean to do this, not here, but the fingers are moving across the keyboard outside of my control. But the idea of "music to chill on the back porch to" is all a façade, right? Like, we're all just out there trying to fucking survive out there, and sometimes it feels like the music is the only thing holding back total collapse, and we're all then expected to just pretend that we can sit on the back porch for hours at a time with our feet up and just chill and listen to music and get lost in the "calmness" and "relaxation" that life hands to us? Why do some people get to actually believe that? Why am I not one of those people? What is wrong with me? Why didn't he respond to my email? Doesn't he remember Joe from Philadelphia?
My oldest daughter seriously asked me the other day—no joke, the timing couldn't have been better—why our house doesn't have a porch. I told her because we're not good enough for a porch, back or front. Not like that Steve Hyden, all high and mighty, with his back porch and his CD player and his ample free time.
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