Matt,

You are too kind. Writing about music is hard, though, you’re right, and the weird thing is, it’s not quite clear why that might be so. It might have something to do with describing something in a medium other than its own. So, it’s easier for us to write stuff about words because there’s some kind of correspondence, but to write about stuff that you hear or that you look at requires some kind of attempt at approximation that takes one out of one’s natural element. Or something. Who the hell knows.

It took me a long time to warm up to Calla. I saw them twice live, both times in support of another band, and hated them both times. I found them gloomy and dull and wondered why so many people showed up early to see them. But then I would keep hearing their songs here and there, and I would find myself saying, “What’s this?” Whenever someone said, “Oh, it’s Calla,” my reaction would usually be dismissive, something like, “That’s the band I hated live.” And I never investigated further. But eventually I had to admit that I kind of liked them, until the point came when I really liked them, and then I sort of loved them and wished I’d known how much I would like them when I’d first seen them live, because I would have appreciated them more.

This sounds like an analogue for developing an affection for a person, either as a friend or as something more. Plenty of times we can meet people and not really like them much at first, and eventually and much to our surprise, we’re hanging out all the time. It’s also symptomatic of how very much information that we have to process these days that if we don’t like something right off, then we don’t give it the time to develop. I remember buying Elvis Costello albums when they first came out and knowing that I wouldn’t like them or understand them for at least a couple of weeks, but the thrill was in wondering at what point the light would come on and the words would suddenly be joined with the music in revelatory ways. And it always happened, sure enough.

Finally, and sorry for the ridiculously long post (I’d email this to you ordinarily, but my email is broken for some reason), Pitchfork never paid me a penny, even though that would have been nice.

Guess who can’t sleep.

I agree—writing music reviews is a bitch. I do reviews on my site, and I also am the music editor for blogcritics.org (a non-paying gig as well–feel your pain Rod). So I am definitely one of those that Matt mentions ho rants away on a blog.

I think sometimes people feel like they have to write in a Pitchfork style—where it seems like you’d need a thesaurus or a Master in Creative Writing to even understand what their talking about.

Matt,

I completely agree with you. Writing reviews is one of the things I struggle with most on our site. For me, it’s difficult to express exactly WHY I enjoy a particular album without sounding either cliched or downright silly. I just know what I like when I hear it, but you can’t exactly put that in a review.

I think Elvis Costello said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” I think that pretty much sums it up.

By the way, I thought your original Calla review was great. All you needed to do was mention The Jesus and Mary Chain, and I’m gonna check out the Calla album!

I guess that I felt that my major problem was that I wanted to put names to the notes and tones I was hearing — what certain kinds of guitar tones sounded like versus others, for instance, or what kind of music genre a song seemed influenced by — but found myself literally without the vocabulary to say what I wanted to say.

I suppose that the best training for that is to read more music reviews.

What’s odd is that I don’t have any problem at all describing visual media such as films, television, or photographs. Why is that?

I figure that it has something to do with the fact that I’ve been trained, through grad school, to write about narrative, and narrative is often easier to see and analyze in a movie than a song. And right now, at least, I’m responding to the music, rather than the lyrics, of this album.

That’s funny - just before I visited Tattered Coat, I watched a Calla video at work. I was editing what someone else wrote about it, and they said Calla used ’spaghetti western’ guitar riffs. Maybe that’s because the video was in the desert …