"Sandy Sheets"
Dave Hause
from Blood Harmony
2021
Speaking of blog column eulogies, the regular feature that we should absolutely stick an elephant tranquilizer into the neck of is The Albums That Matter. Remember that one? The premise, at least at the beginning, was to attempt to write about every album on my iPod in alphabetical order. I have a tough time reading those blog posts. This is because they were mostly written between 2017 and 2019ish, which is beyond the limits of my "only blog posts written in the last five years are good" rule.
It's one of those important-not-good moments; The Albums That Matter is really important to me because it basically jump-started my music blogging hobby back when I really needed a dumb hobby. I was temporarily sober and so-far childless and spending a lot of nights alone on the couch (Pam was working nights) and I needed something to do. I rediscovered blogging. The Albums That Matter was there.
It's bad writing, but that's to be expected at the beginning, right? Saying that my early blog posts are bad is like saying that a high school basketball team is bad because they only hit 40% of their free throws. It's expected! They are still learning! There might be potential in there yet! I appreciated having a place to practice the art of blogging. Again, not saying that I'm good at it now, but I've improved a little bit. You can see the improvement if you look at some of those old The Albums That Matter entries and compare them to anything I write today. You can also see improvement if you watch me type, and how easy it is now to sit down and bang out some bullshit, whereas it was so fucking strenuous to type 400 words about an album back in the day.
Because I'm a nostalgic piece of a shit, especially when it comes to blogging, I've thought about resurrecting The Albums That Matter plenty of times over the years. There has been a grand total of five entries in the column since the start of 2021, so obviously that idea never really seems to stick. The truth of the matter is that I don't really need this column anymore. There are more than enough spaces on this blog for me to write about albums, if I choose to do so. There's really no need to be tied down to the alphabetical list of albums that I already own. That's too restrictive. It's detrimental to my journey on how to be a good writer, at this point.
If I were to write the next The Albums That Matter column entry, it would have been about Blood Harmony, the 2021 album from Dave Hause, as that is next alphabetically after Blonde on Blonde (not including Blondie, which was already covered in a different blog column, and Bon Iver's Blood Bank, since TATM didn't cover EPs). I guess at some point in the past couple years, I had written down a few notes about what this particularly blog post would entail. I'm at the point where I don't really need to know what a blog post is about before I start to write it; sometimes I find my way as I'm writing through it. So without actually writing the Blood Harmony blog post, I don't actually know what it would look like.
But I was going to start with this idea that Hause is a descendant of Bruce Springsteen, that his music is rock troubadour shit, made for the working class, heartland rock on the near side of the fence to folk music. I would probably talk about how Gaslight Anthem does similar things in our near-modern times, but that Dave Hause puts a Philly spin on it. It feels more homegrown to me, because he grew up in the same home city as me. That's special.
I would of course have done the obligatory walk around the block with Hause, written about where I discovered him (at Nate's house, where Gilson played Bury Me in Philly), how that album grew exponentially for me that year, how it's still probably my favorite "Philly" album of all time (or maybe in a tie with Kids in Philly by Marah), how it soundtracked my middle child's first moments, how my middle child is thus far my most "Philly" child.
And then I would've written about Blood Harmony and how it softens some of that sound, how this is Philly on the outskirts, gentle and pastoral in some ways, which says to me a couple things, but mainly that Hause is experiencing fatherhood of his own and also is experiencing the 2020s wave of indie-country-Americana trends in real time.
I would've probably wrapped it up by talking about how I didn't even bother with Hause's latest record, 2024's Versus, possibly because this album and 2023's Drive It like It's Stolen feel like they are rapidly moving away from the Philly-centric poignancy that Hause maybe even accidentally discovered on Bury Me in Philly, that maybe this has more to do with me living on the outskirts of the city now too, and losing touch with what made my time closer to Philly's heart so special. It could also just be that Hause is kowtowing to the middle, writing radio rock by sanding down his edges. The blog post proper would end with a mention of the fact that Hause is putting together a local music festival in Manayunk soon, or did recently, and how XPN talks about this guy all the time still, and how I'm not questioning Hause's bonafides, but instead might question my own. Like maybe I'm the problem here.
Stray observations would talk about Hause's backing band, the Mermaids, and how there is a NW Philly bar called the Mermaid, with me questioning whether there is a connection there, and me not having any answers, because the one time we tried to go to the Mermaid, it was closed, despite the hours posted on its website. I'd also point out "Gary," and maybe get PoYB Contributor Gary to listen to it and tell me what he thinks. The "song to listen to" would of course be "Sandy Sheets," which I have attached to the top of the actual blog post that you are reading right now.
Those are all the notes I had for Blood Harmony. I imagine that if I were to actually put together a The Albums That Matter post about this album, there would be a little more research. But I don't think that's necessary anymore. I'm running head-down into the future, devouring as many new (to me) albums as I can, making very little time in my life to do deep dives into random-ass albums that I already own. Maybe that's too my detriment. I don't know. On most days, I just think that writing is fun, and I don't want to do anything that doesn't seem fun. If The Albums That Matter stopped being fun, then it's probably time for me to shut it down.
R.I.P. to the O.G. PoYB blog column. I'll pour one out for you by finally deleting this Dave Hause notes from my blog notepad on my phone.
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