Stream of Consciousness

I'll admit it: lately, I have been terrible about keeping up on music. Please excuse this sin; the fact of the matter is I'm here to learn Spanish (whether or not that's obvious), and so I've pretty much been listening to the one Pereza album I own on repeat since arriving in Pamplona. It's Animales, in case you were wondering-- I heard Princesas one night in a bar a few years ago and decided to download the CD so I had something in Spanish to listen to. But I digress.

Originally, I intended this post to be about a band that's hot right now on my college campus, so I decided to head over to the website for Cat's Cradle, a well known venue for alternative acts in my college town in the States. One act caught my eye for two reasons, the first being that I'm bummed I won't be in Chapel Hill to see them perform. The other is that they are indirectly related to a band Ines mentioned in her last post (I'll explain why in a minute!). Anyway, the band is called Built to Spill; they were big in the 90s and are still well known and respected on the lo-fi scene. They are touring now because they have an album coming out in October.

In Ines's last post she mentioned The Ataris, which was without a doubt my favorite band when I was in 8th grade and 13-14 years old. My musical taste has evolved considerably since then, but I still remember most of the words to the songs I used to listen to-- including one called "Song for a Mix Tape". One of the verses goes, "...it had all my favorite songs. There was Jawbreaker and Armchair Martian, Built to Spill and The Descendents; yeah I even put one of ours on it". The introduction of the song is a clip from The Descendents "Silly Girl", and a line of the song is inspired by (or directly copied from, depending on how you choose to look at it) from Jawbreaker's "Jinx Removing". Jawbreaker, now defunct, is one of my favorite bands. They're generally considered "punk" depending on who you talk to, so if you're looking for something a little harder than The Ataris I highly recommend them.

Anyway, I guess the main point of this post was how interesting I find the way bands are related to one another and influence one another, especially bands as diverse as The Ataris, Jawbreaker, and Built to Spill. Just to tie it back to my original intent-- a band students on my campus are listening to-- here's a video I found on YouTube that someone made for one of my favorite Built to Spill songs, "Car". Enjoy!