Burning On The Smith Westerns, by Rosicky Jones

Back in the day I would burn a CD, toss it in the whip, and be cake for a couple of days.  The CD burning was the final piece of the puzzle – it meant that the music deserved the burn.  Pre-burn, I’d vet the tracks determining their compatibility with my ears and my car’s sound system.  The time I spent vetting and burning required me to pay proper attention to the album, give it a fair opportunity to woo me, and not just eject it at the slightest bit of TuPac detachment I’d felt.  Putting the CD in before I shifted gears meant that in a couple of days’ time I would have an album’s worth of lyrics in my head.  My mood did not govern my driving music; instead my driving music governed my mood.

The White Stripe’s album Elephant reminds me of my torrid affair with Kami.  By sheer coincidence I had burnt the album right before we hooked up.  And I used to listen to it on my way to her place, on my way from her place, when I hung up on her for being a bitch, when I snuck off after she fell asleep so I could catch a nap in my bed, when I contemplated canning her, and when I finally did can her – even though she held my John Mayer CD hostage.  That album still elicits Kami nostalgia.  There were times when I wanted to pop in some Pac or even that John Mayer CD, but I owed it to the vetting and burning process to stay the course with Jack and Meg White.

Then I copped an iPod, swapped Limewire for Megaupload, and life changed.  I had no reason to burn a CD and thus no self-imposed mandate to devote the proper attention to an album.  Now I read a Paul Shirley column and rip his top ten albums in an afternoon.  I downloaded the complete Keane anthology even though I only liked one song.  I have yet to listen to one Girl Talk track, even though my iPod tells me I own three of his albums; shit, I didn’t know Girl Talk was a one-guy band until I Googled the band’s name to see if “Girl Talk” was one word or two.

The loss of my vetting process hindered my chances to fall in love with new music.

Nowadays I hop in the whip, throw the iPod on shuffle, and drive – even though the iPod is ruining music for me.  For some reason Steve Jobs keeps “randomly” choosing Drake, The Rolling Stones, and Shakira over and over and over.  Forty-percent of the time I could care less because my voyages last, at most, two to three nasally Shakira songs. Twenty-percent of the time I end up finger-banging the “next-track” button on the Pod and shuffle my way through 200 songs without ever actually listening to a one.  But then there is this glorious other twenty-percent when I’m in the midst of a long roadie and my music is causing my ears to cauliflower in an attempt to rid themselves of Shakira and Drake.  At this point, I am forced to pull over and devise a solution to my road-trip torpor.  This is the time when I throw myself into something new… either I discover that I shouldn’t have downloaded that Band of Skulls album, or I find out how lucky I was to accidentally download the album Dye it Blonde by The Smith Westerns.

*If you were calculating along at home, then you noticed an unaccounted ten-percent – well that is when I throw Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell on repeat and sing it at the top of my lungs while cruising through D-Town’s ghettos as the gangstas throw baffled looks my way.

I was in the final third of a crappy six-hour roadie back to Michigan when I stumbled upon The Smith Westerns.  The only fucking reason I chose to listen to them was because of how epic their album art is – further proving that you should judge a book by its cover.  I started listening to the album as I prayed to Dakota Fanning that the album wouldn’t be a schizophrenic hodgepodge of noise like the Band of Skulls album was. I was ecstatic with my selection – the album is everything AT&T isn’t, the album is a post-sex cigarette, the album was like watching Saved by the Bell before work on a Friday.  Do you remember when MGMT was not composed of two douchey holier-than-thou fart-knockers? Ok, take that version of MGMT and mate it with one of Oasis’ decent albums, then throw in a dash of Paul McCartney’s band Wings, shake vigorously, and you have Dye it Blonde.

The album played as the sun set and by my third time around I had the lyrics down and the cruise on 65.  It was a tad bit serendipitous that I chose an album that would represent my 2011 spring just as Michigan was thawing out of its latest ice age. The only negative is that the album stirred in me a need for a drink so severe that I was forced to lick the tops of the empty beer cans littering the floor in my Blazer just to satiate my thirst.  The album reminded me of the scenes in Mad Men when Don Draper is driving around that highway in California; you know the one; it’s the stupid oceanside highway that every scene in every movie is filmed on? Every time I watch one of those scenes I am overtaken with the desire to pick up a sexy flapper equipped with a quellazaire and daddy issues just to speed around town until a gust of wind steals the scarf off her head.  This album is what I hope is playing when that fitting gust of wind strikes.

I’m glad I don’t have to try and ‘fix’ scratched CDs by licking them and buffing them smooth on my jeans anymore.  I’m glad that I can carry around thousands of albums without the assistance of a CD case.  But I’m really glad that no matter how burnt out on music I become, I can always discover burn worthy albums like Dye it Blonde.

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