Raging Dad

Listening to music while I am at home in the Raging House is a critical element of me maintaining my sanity. Raging Mom and I have always been lovers of film, theater, museums, etc., but after having children, I lost touch with a lot of the pastimes that used to keep my mind sharp and churning. Unable to go to the movies, as was my pre-children pastime of choice, I had to find new ways to satisfy this part of my brain. Discovering new music became a powerful outlet for me.

The advantage of listening to music is that it can be done while hanging out with the children. Or, as Raging Mom likes to say, it can be done while ignoring the children. Pshaw. I have most of my music in my iTunes Library and stream it wirelessly to my stereo, pretty much from the moment I get home from work to the time the kids go to bed. I’m the kind of person who picks up a new album and listens to it constantly for a few weeks until I know the record in and out.

The kids, who are now used to having music playing all the time when Raging Dad is home, either don’t care or actually get into the music. Raging Mom thinks that I use it to drown out the noise of the kids, but I don’t think that is true (though it does help). The music helps me to focus. By the time I get home from work, the kids are usually tired and Raging Cranky. I hate having the television on unless we are specifically watching a program. Listening to the music demands attention, but it neither needs constant nor undivided attention, which it will never get as long as the Raging Kids are awake.

John Darnielle, The Mountain Goats

When Connie was born I was intensely into The Mountain Goats, constantly listening to their many albums and an insane number of live recordings, studying the nuances of each performance and searching for the most obscure setlists. I cannot more strongly recommend a band than I do The Mountain Goats, and have been delighted to find that other daddy and mommy bloggers out there are listening to the eccentric and hyper-literate ramblings of John Darnielle’s brilliant mind.

I also began to dig deeper into jazz and old school blues than I had listened to in the past, and came to be a huge fan of late-1950s and early 1960s jazz (Coltrane, Miles Davis), Robert Johnson, Billy Holiday and even 1930s-40s vocal groups like The Ink Spots and The Mills Brothers. There is so much great American music out there to discover!

Greatest American songwriter?

Previously, I had considered myself a fan of everything but country and rap. However, I was just listening to the wrong country and rap. I began to discover Patsy Cline, Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash and old school Emmy Lou Harris. Perhaps my greatest discovery was my love for Willie Nelson, particularly everything released between about 1972 and 1979. Amazing stuff, like Shotgun Willie, Phases and Stages, The Redheaded Stranger, Stardust and To Lefty From Willie. Go pick these records up if you haven’t listened to them. Unlike records from today, these albums were amazing and they were brief; you’ll find no fat on any of them. Rather than going on for 60-plus minutes with no focus, artists like Willie Nelson used to know how to put together a 30-40 minute record that was consistent and well-paced. Of course, the LP format prevented them from going much longer than this, and the CD format is conducive to mission creep. But still, it is in many ways a lost art.

When it comes to rap, there are some amazing artists out there who were and are making some very political and powerful statements with rap and hip hop. Public Enemy, De La Soul, Run-DMC are examples of early rap that I recommend. More recent hip hop that is brilliant includes Talib Kweli, Mos Def (and their project together, Black Star–part of the socially conscious Native Tongues movement) and The Roots; these are all essential artists to check out if you are going to explore hip hop for the first time.

Talib Kweli and Mos Def

Why do I find music so important? I grew up around it, with a singer/songwriter for a father, and Raging Mom and I were both singers during high school and college. I find myself drawn to music that has a lot of emotion and passion in it. Take The Mountain Goats for example: A lot of their stuff is about simple people who are living tragic lives. His songs are the musical equivalent of the characters in Hal Hartley films, and their appeal to me is similar. It is not as though my life is about to fall apart in the ways that Darnielle’s characters are in his dramatic tales. But there is something so powerful, so desperate going on in his songs that I cannot help but become consumed by the stories. Listening to one of their records is like watching a film that draws you into the story and leaves you exhausted and devastated like no other recording I have come across.

For me, there is magic in using music to escape from reality. It reminds me that there are beautiful things going on in the world, outside of my insulated life (padded cell?). Music recharges my batteries, and has become my all-purpose, all-the-time drug of choice.

Song of the day: “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod?” by The Mountain Goats.