Atlantic

Still no comic, sorry. I haven't been feeling very funny/have been drinking too much to remember what happened to me.

I've been listening to a bunch of music that I listened to back in '99-'01. It keeps popping up on my favorite music archive and I can't seem to help myself. For the last three days, it's been the Rainer Maria EP Atlantic. This album was written on the eve of the band's move from my hometown to NYC.
I love the three songs on the record, especially "There Will Be No Night," which has a rhythmic, driving movement that makes me sway everytime I hear it. It sounds like waves; actually the whole EP is water-themed.
However ... as much as I love the album, I've always sort of resented it as a symbol of the band's abandonment of Madison. They began to tell people in interviews that they were FROM New York, which upset me, a fan since their first shows and awkward, clashing early records, before Caitlin learned to sing and play well. Madison supported them for five years or more and they were too concerned with seeming cool to acknowledge it. In fact, I never listened to any of their releases written after their move.
But listening to the record now, I've realized that they didn't hate Madison, I'd just never really listened to the lyrics of "Soul Singer." I knew the song was about the city: "I'm leaving the lakes behind/where the sweetest soul singer came to die." Otis Redding's plane crashed into one of Madison's five lakes, killing him, in 1967.
And now, eight or nine years later, I finally heard this line: "In place of/This place I love/To pieces."

I'm not really in any place to judge their decisions to move; I've spent a fair amount of the last several years bitching about Madison, the cloyingly liberal college town capital of Wisconsin. I've hated Madison from afar, and I've been mad at Kyle and Caitlin and Bill the whole time since they moved. Me and my double standards.
Anyway, the point is, I think I'm finally getting over these grudges, against my hometown and Rainer Maria. I'm mellowing out, finally.