Sunday night after working at Hartford I checked out a pretty sweet apartment on Connecticut just a block east of Grand that Caitlin and I decided we’re taking. The place is currently inhabited by an old Greenville classmate and Lisa told me that she was moving out this month. It’s really great. 1 & 1/2 bedrooms, pretty decent size living and dining rooms, several closets all around, wood floors, central A/C, thermal windows, basement with laundry hook ups and plenty of storage, fenced in back yard with porch for BBQ’s and a place for my future dog Gary to frolic and poop. It hit every little thing on my new apartment short list. Needless to say, I’m stoked.

We should be moving in, God willing, over the weekend. The current resident, so I’ve heard, should be moved out by Friday. Once I get confirmation of this from either her or my new landlord I’ll need to be making arrangements for picking up the furniture still in Greenville with Avery in our old apartment (anyone with a big truck out there who’d let us borrow it/like to help?) I know Curtis is down, but we might need another big vehicle.

Monday Caitlin, Curtis, Avery and I moved most of our stuff from Greenville out to Josh’s place in St. Louis. We’re both pretty grateful to Josh for allowing us to crash at his apartment as well as have all of our stuff strewn about his entire place. We have quite a large amount of stuff, though I was surprised that it fit in so few storage containers. If we ever move across the country or anywhere that we have to move in one day we’re definitely selling and getting rid of much more stuff before that move must be made. Such a huge hassle. And I don’t like putting people out and forcing them into hard labor without being able to really compensate (though I did buy Avery and Curtis some Mi Ranchito. Which made us equal at least.) It’s good to have great friends like Avery, Curtis and Josh.

And another thing, Richard hates driving in the car on the highway. He constantly meows in a way that says how much he hates it. I can’t imagine taking him anywhere that would take more than an hour. Even an hour was too much. We’d probably have to drug him with cat nip. Or drugs.

Today I spent the day finish up odds and ends in Greenville, cleaning our old place and moving more stuff here. I was amazed at how many things I did in about 3 hours. Returned 5 books to 4 different places, got an oil change, paid a parking ticket, turned in my key and set up getting our deposit back, deposited some checks, cleaned and arranged the left over stuff and vacuumed the old apartment and had a brewskie to cool off near the end of the cleaning and still made it back to St. Louis before Caitlin finished her shift. I’m awesome.

Oh, I think I neglected to mention before that Caitlin now works for Starbucks Coffee Company with my old manager Jen. Before I got the job at Hartford I asked Jen is she had any openings for me, but she didn’t. A few weeks later she asked me if I still needed a job but it turned out I didn’t and she was willing to give one to Caitlin ’cause she knew she was still looking. So far she’s worked three shifts and is beginning to tolerate coffee. She used to take one gulp and get sick, now she’s “double-fisting” two different drinks at the same time as she so eloquently puts it. And she made me a quite tasty Iced Double Shot today. I’m proud of her. I can’t wait for the Starbucks perks to kick back in too. Mostly the weekly 1lbs coffee or 1 box tea mark out!

Anyone have any cool fourth of July plans? I’m hoping to BBQ somewhere around lunch time and into the afternoon then go down to the river for the free Sonic Youth show. What are ya’ll doing?

Today was a productive day.

Caitlin and I both had some cavities filled at a local dentist in Greenville. I had three, two on the bottom and one in between my top two front teeth while Caitlin had just one small cavity filled. My mouth was numb for like 4 hours after they did the work. It was ridiculous. My chin felt huge. Like a superhero chin or something while my tongue made me unable to properly pronounce words with consonants at their beginnings. Especially s’s and ch’s. Caitlin kept making fun of me and had a few choice words for her. Let me tell you, they didn’t have any consonants at the front.

While my mouth was de-numbifying we looked at four separate apartments around Tower Grove. One on Wyoming, Morgan Ford, Arsenal and Magnolia. All of them had their pluses and minuses and so far the best is the one on Wyoming. It’s about 4 blocks from Hartford Coffee Co. and also about 4 blocks from South Grand. It will only be two blocks from where Josh lives too, which is definitely a plus.

I’m not entirely sold on it yet, so we called another three places and we have a friend whose friend is moving out of her place next month that sounds promising. It’s a 4 family building and she has one whole half to her at, apparently, a reasonable price on Connecticut, which sounds really great. Anything under $600 for having a two story place really no matter how small is a great price for St. Louis where a lot of the landlords are more accurately slum lords.

We’re hoping to find a place this week, since we’re supposed to be out of this place by July 1st, which is Wednesday. Pray for us as we’re looking for a place, and let us know if you’d like to help us move our stuff out there this week/end…

After the apartment searching we met up with Lisa and Josh for pizza and drinks at Blackthorne Pub on Wyoming. Such delicious deep dish pizza they serve. So much food though. Tons and tons of cheese. We had a pretty good time. After pizza and sitting around there for about an hour after eating we walked to the gelato place on Grand and had a small serving of Italian gelato. It was pretty tasty. It’s not too sugary like most ice cream but at the same time I don’t think I would eat it all that often for that very reason. If I’m going to have an ice cream like food I might as well go all out, right?

We had a good time. We’re both pretty excited about being in St. Louis all the time, and being able to be around our friends more often (as well as not having to make the hour long drive out there and back each time we go. THAT we’ll be very thankful for.)

Listen to “Dark Night of the Soul” by Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and David Lynch. It’s pretty good.

Tonight Caitlin and I joined my friends and bandmates Rob and Matt at a pizza bar called Telanya’s on Hampton and I-40 in St. Louis. It’s an interesting place. There are mirrors covering all the walls and the ceiling which leads one to believe it has not always been a pizza bar but was once perhaps a place where individuals did some dancing and other such, um, things… Also saw Away We Go again at the Tivoli. Such a good movie. Caitlin and I both hope it gets a national release soon though it has not been getting very good press. I don’t really understand why. Last, I found a great blog. It’s found here: http://www.nakedpastor.com/

Night.

Spent some of the evening tonight making some minor updates to the blog. You’ll notice a few splashes of blue and yellow here and there. Mostly in the category, tags and comment boxes. I’d like to implement some more yellow but have yet to find a graceful way to slip it in. Oh, and if anyone is familiar enough with jQuery I’d love a bit of help making my blogroll categories show/hide clickable on that right sidebar. Give me a shout.

So as many of you know, I am officially on the job hunt.

Two Tuesdays ago was my last day in the office as an Admissions Counselor at Greenville College. It’s been both refreshing and odd not having to get up early and go into work any longer. I no longer have to spend an hour and a half getting clean, eating breakfast and ironing clothes each and every morning. It’s great. I’ve been hanging out with Caitlin and Richard (our cat) every day for the past week and a half.

The door has been opened for Caitlin and I to make a change and we had been wanting to get out of Greenville for quite some time. We’re moving to St. Louis at some point this month and we both have been doing quite a bit of searching on Craigslist, Simply Hired, Idealist, Career Builder and Monster for jobs in St. Louis. We’ve both applied to about 3 or 4 each so far and we’re optimistic. We feel that this is the right step for us and are very excited.

This time around I’m really hoping I’ll have a few more options in the type of job I’ll take. The past week I’ve been very selective in which jobs I apply to, especially as there are more fake job postings on Craigslist than there seem to be real. I’d really like to work in some sort of creative aspect and actually found one posting that I seem pretty qualified for. *fingers crossed* So if you know or hear of any jobs you think I would like or be good at, let me know? You’re so sweet.

I was so excited about my musical discovery in the Deftones that I couldn’t keep it to myself. I told all my musically inclined friends including a dude I met online through, of all things, P.O.D.’s message board. His name was Mike, and he had a P.O.D. fanpage that he made on AOL’s hometown servers (Wow, AOL. When my family first got the internet I believe it was AOL 3.0 with a 14.4k dial-up modem. And I complain about my 700Kbps DSL.) His site was called “Warriors Online” and I helped him out a lot with P.O.D., Project 86 and Blindside guitar tabs. I digress.

One night on AOL Instant Messenger I was talking to Mike about the Deftones and he asked me if I had ever heard of Zao before. I said I hadn’t and was curious why he brought it up. He told me that he read an interview with Deftones guitarist Stephen Carpenter who was asked who his influences were for Around the Fur and he mentioned Zao (and specifically the band’s third full-length Where Blood and Fire Bring Rest but I didn’t know that at the time.) So I checked out their record label’s website and read a little about the band and I was intrigued by the biography and some of their pictures, but what sealed the deal was the endorsement by the Deftones. So the next time I was at my local Heaven & Earth I picked up the only copy of the only record by the band in the store, Liberate Te Ex Inferis.

Liberate… (which is latin for “Save Yourself From Hell”) was MUCH more extreme than any music I had ever heard before. I was literally shocked during it’s first spin on my stereo. I sat in my room with the linear notes in front of me and I did my best to follow the lyrics with the tortured screams of vocalist Dan Weyandt. His scream, to my virgin to such music ears, sounded like a guy being slowly stabbed to death while gargling boiling hot & black as midnight on a moonless night coffee. The guitars were equally as dark, but I had never heard such aggressive music with such tempo extremes. From the slow, brooding intro that builds in dynamics and intensity but maintains it’s steady, as if marching to the gallows, tempo, to “Autopsy” with it’s punk beat and double-time guitar strumming, the record was all over the metal map and I really didn’t know what to call it. I had no contextually placement for this in the history of metal and hardcore and their varies permutations that I simply called it “scary music.” In fact, it took quite a few listens before I even “kind of” liked it.

Luckily for me, though I know many who would disagree with that sentiment, the record grew on me. Both musically, and lyrically. I figured out how to play the songs, as well as a new heavier version of “dropped D” where you tun down EVERY string a whole ‘nother step. I called it “dropped C tuning.” It opened up whole new worlds of alternative “dropped” tunings. Zao also lead me to several of their Solidstate Records label mates which we all of the same caliber of extreme metal. Embodyment, Extol, and Living Sacrifice among every other band on their label. I was hooked. Zao quickly became one of my favorite bands.

On top of being a gateway band, their album’s artwork had a Dante’s Inferno theme (though, apparently this was done by the label without the band’s permission. The record is actually based on the film Event Horizon, and the ship in the film’s 5 levels. There are samples from EH throughout the record which adds to its chilling nature.) I was immediately intrigued, and actually picked up Inferno and read it through as a high school sophomore. The dark and dramatic visuals in the book I felt paralleled the record very nicely, I began to image thematic elements in my own music and poetry. Overall, it was a very inspirational and, *gasp*, life-changing album.

I’m sure most of you have never listened to Zao before, and probably won’t like it. But you should share your experience where one band introduced you to an entire record label or how they opened your mind to a whole genre of music you hadn’t heard of before. Hit the comments below.

Zao at Last.fm
“Skin Like Winter” and “Savannah” on Youtube

It’s difficult for me to pick the next record. The paths of the next two bands that have changed my life are intertwined. I remember when I started listening to P.O.D., Project 86, Blindside I had also started listening to “alternative” and “modern rock” radio stations in my room and in my car. The days of Matchbox 20, Sarah McLachlan and the Wallflowers on the alternative stations, and the advent of numetal on the “modern rock” stations: Limp Bizkit and Korn and all their terrible derivative followers.

I can’t say that I was completely immune to all of those band’s terribleness unfortunately. At one point, my parents gave a gander to my cds and were actually kind of shocked, and thought I was being wrongly influenced by their lyrical content and overall messages. In my own defense, at the time I think my parents forgot what it feels like to be a teenager but in retrospect I’m glad they threw away most of that garbage music. Because a lot of it really was garbage (Like Taproot. Yuck!)

Anyway. I was into heavier stuff. It may not have all been good, but whatever. I was young. Around that time I saw the action blockbuster of the 90s, my current all-time favorite movie of the genre, in the theaters The Matrix. You remember it. You saw it a couple times. You might even own it. Big deal movie. A LOT of action movies copied some of it’s innovations, most notably it’s “stop time” effect where the camera would spin around it’s subject while time was suspended and seemingly frozen.

Well, there were commercials all over TV about the movie and its soundtrack, and there was a clip of a song called “My Own Summer (Shove It)” by a band called Deftones. I had heard the song on the radio, and had even “taped it” off the radio, but I hadn’t heard it with singer Chino’s scream! The radio edit version took out the elongated screams from the cd version of the chorus which is how it sounded in the commercial for the Matrix soundtrack. I was blown away by the power in his voice. I wanted the cd so bad, and my best friend Josh and I had to convince my Mom that it would be alright (despite the alluring image of the woman in a bikini on the cover, woah woah.)

Despite such odds, we overcame and Around the Fur by the Deftones was mine and I studied the record with intensity. I loved everything about it. From Chino Moreno’s incredible melodies, interestingly poetic lyrics and banshee scream to Stephen Carpenter’s dropped D heaviness I was set. Deftones were a more melodic band than the rap/metal I had been listening too, and much fuller and heavier sounding than Blindside. Chino’s melodies were much more fun to sing too, and I found myself copying his singing and lyrical style for awhile in my own songwriting.

Through Stephen Carpenter’s melodic yet heavy guitar style I learned how to create chords using dropped D. This I didn’t fully discover on Around the Fur but on another Deftones record that will make an appearance in this list, but I learned how to use moving octaves within chords to create melodic development without losing any aggression. It can be heard most prominently on “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” which became my favorite song for some time, and the song captures the feeling of being 16.

Deftones opened new doors for me musically. Not only could I enjoy music that was heavy, but it could be melodic too, which explains a little bit about 18 and 19 year old me. Around the time I was listening to Around the Fur I heard about this metalcore band on Solidstate whom Stephen Carpenter himself listed as a pretty big influence on him during the creation of ATF. That little band is next.

Video for “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)”
Video for “My Own Summer (Shove It)
Audio of “Headup” (Also Youtube, though not a music video)

I found today’s song review, first of hopefully many, on NPR’s SXSW mix page. The page allows you to stream over a hundred artists that played SXSW last week, and download some of the songs. Actually, quite a few of them. About 30 or so, but who’s counting, right? One of the songs I downloaded is by an artist called Passion Pit and the song is called “Sleepyhead.”

The song starts off ah la Jay Z’s black album minus Jay’s Mom’s monologue. A strong four/four beat with samples, keys, hand claps, and even the omnipresent, chipmunk-sounding female vocal. Excluding Alvin, the song is completely vocal-less for the :45 second intro (almost 1/3 of the song!), but when the vocals do come in I was completely surprised: the singer sounds more like the dude from the Shins than Kanye (or T Pain, but I think he’s a guilty pleasure of mine.)

Is this a mash-up I have never heard before? Indie Rock and Hip Hop? While it makes perfect sense for the modern white boy to comodify modern black culture, I would expect it to be more like Eminem or Andy Samberg, not Hipster Runoff MC’ing an uptown NYC club.

Passion Pit’s “Sleepyhead” reeks of MGMT to me (as if I’m an expert) but its up-tempo, happy club feel betrays its forlorn lyrics about destruction, isolation and the lack of understanding the other, even if they only happen to occupy the same dance floor. Wait a minute, does this remind you of classic white boy pain? Overly emotionalized lyrics about not understanding the girl on the other side of the room? Hmm, sounds like postmodern wire framed emo to me. Still rocks though… even if you’re dancing to this one by yourself. 5/5

Download it Passion Pit “Sleepyhead”

Proceeding from dc Talk we have a few stops to make before we get to the next band and album in question. dc Talk was the first “modern rock” band I ever really liked. And while, at first, they rocked harder than I was comfortable with, my ears eventually adjusted and the songs that rocked the most became my favorites. I became attracted to other Forefront acts that “rocked harder” than dc Talk, including most prominently Skillet’s first self-titled album and Hey You I Love Your Soul and Grammatrain’s Flying.

This led to the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore year of high school. There was this girl I kind of liked who attended a different church than I did, and they did a youth group thing every Friday evening of the summer and since it didn’t conflict with my home church’s schedule, I went with her. I happened to meet another kid there name Jared, or Steven, or something, it doesn’t really matter. “Jared” and I palled around a bit, and at the very end of the first Friday night service, he put a cd on the church’s sound system for me hear. That cd was P.O.D.’s Warriors EP. My mind was blown.

P.O.D. - Warriors EP (1998, Tooth & Nail)

The Warriors EP was a short 7-song EP that served as P.O.D.’s pre-production demos before their Atlantic debut album The Fundamental Elements of Southtown. Atlantic licensed the songs to Tooth & Nail Records and they put it out. Inside the linear notes there was a graphic of a “hand-written” letter by P.O.D.’s lead singer Sonny Sandoval explaining that they wanted to give a little morsel of “new” music to their loyal fans, the “Warriors,” so they released this little EP to tide them over til their Atlantic LP’s debut (there was actually only Southtown, and three instrumental tracks that were new, the other three were old P.O.D. classics re-recorded.)

The Warriors EP begins with sounds that were all-together foreign to my ears. Each track’s intro and outro has the scratchy sound of a turntable! “Wow, what a cool idea!” I thought at my young age. The first track was a slow waltz featuring, of all things, an accordion (!) before the first “real” track. That track was an early demo version of what would become P.O.D.’s first big hit, “Southtown.” While I had heard plenty of “rap/rock” on the radio with the success of Limp Bizkit and all of its clones and utterly terrible numetal cousins, P.O.D. was the darkest sounding rock I had ever heard.

About half way through the song the band surprised me by putting a halt to the song’s intensity by bringing the dynamic level of the song way, way down. They subtly build it back up until they explode into the very first “breakdown” I had ever heard (it’s still one of my favorites.) Sonny’s screaming out of “It Ain’t Got To Be Like This” conveys both the emotion of how it feels to live racially oppressed as well as the reality that in America this oppression shouldn’t exist. I had never been confronted with such socio/politcal ideas in music before but the lyrics weren’t what blew my mind the most. It was the breakdown that did it.

The idea of the “breakdown” has been the second most life changing musical idea. The rhythmic motion and low sounding chords with a repeated, screamed line utterly changed the way I wrote songs and thought about the construction of lyrical ideas and emotion. Gone was the verse/chorus (2x) bridge chorus etc. song format. Well, not completely. A lot of the songs I wrote at that time still followed a VCVCBC format, but with a “breakdown” rather than a bridge.

The second thing that P.O.D. did for me, and that is to say it’s the most musically life changing thing to happen to me ever, is to introduce the Dropped D tuning.

Now I found out later that P.O.D.’s guitarist didn’t actually use dropped D tuning, but actually played in what I call “D Standard tuning.” Or, in other words, P.O.D.’s guitarist down-tuned every string of his guitar one whole step so a strummed “E” chord by finger position is actually vibrating at a “D” chord wave length. This doesn’t matter really. I learned how to play P.O.D.’s songs in dropped D and started writing my own songs with the tuning. Now I exclusively use the tuning.

P.O.D. was a “gateway” band for me. They bridged the gap from the Christian rock and hard rock that had been my favs to the hardcore and metalcore I love now. P.O.D. made the “hardcore scream” bearable to my ears. They introduced me to Blindside and Project 86, two other “rap/rock” ish bands I enjoyed so much in high school. P.O.D. also introduced me to a few online friends who were interested in other Christian extreme music acts some of which I will talk about later on this blog.

This is what P.O.D. did for me, what did they do for you?

“Breathe Babylon” from the Warriors EP found on Youtube

The first entry. 15 album that have changed my life. Before I begin I feel like a distinction needs to be made between between the list I am writing and other “top albums” lists like all-time favorites, or the ubiquitous “desert island” lists. An all-time favorite records list is obvious, it’s a collection of the records you adore the most for whatever reason you adore them. It’s a very personal and individualized list, but not necessarily auto-biographical.

Desert island lists, while similar to all-time favorites and for some may be one and the same, is different in that whatever albums you select will be the only albums you will listen to for the rest of your life. I may have two Radiohead or Converge records in my all time favorite albums list, but I might want to have two completely different albums than to have two that are so similar. Maybe I want to bring What’s Going On? by Marvin Gaye, because it’s less weird trying to, you know, get it on to some smooth R&B than it is to songs titled “Paranoid Android,” or “You Fail Me.” This list is also, by and large, not auto-biographical.

15 albums that have changed your life, this is THE auto-biographical list. For me, this list will include albums I would never consider taking to a desert island, as well as albums that I would not consider for my all-time favorite list, but it will illustrate who am I musically and the records that made me that way. This first album selection represents my early life, and should probably be the most embarrassing if I didn’t secretly, and apparently not so secretly, love it so much:

dc Talk - Jesus Freak (Forefront, 1995)

I grew up listening to Billy Joel and Beach Boys cassette tapes mostly as well as the Christian music we had like Twila Paris and Amy Grant. Oh, we’d often listen to the Classic Rock radio station whenever my family would go driving anywhere in our family van. I always enjoyed listening to music, and had all the lyrics memorized to Joel’s Glass Houses and River of Dreams but I can’t say I was a music fan; I wasn’t hooked. At least not until we bought our first cd player.

The first cd my Mom bought was Michael W. Smith’s I’ll Lead You Home which I really liked, and would listen to on repeat. But I remember one afternoon in the winter of ‘95 heading over to my cousins house to “play.” Chris and I didn’t “hang out” at that point, you know. After dinner Chris wanted to play me a tape a friend of his made for him and it was then and there I was confronted with sounds completely foreign to my ears. I was intrigued and confused (and wasn’t sure if I liked it or not) but I was hooked. It was dc Talk. And it was their new album, Jesus Freak.

After hearing Chris’s tape, I went out to our local Heaven & Earth in Hampton, VA and bought my very first cd. The very first of a long line of cds (I had bought/collected several tapes, but JF was my first CD.) I have probably listened to this record hundreds of times. I poured over the linear notes and the lyrics. I had my then guitar teacher figure out and teach me how to play its songs. dc Talk became my first favorite band. I bought all their previous albums, and the two that followed, and I still hold out hope that they’ll reunite for a new album and tour.

The record itself, upon revisit, is quintessential CCM. Multiple bizarre combination’s of musical styles included Nirvana-ripped grunge, classic rock, pop, rap and that strange, can’t-quite-put-my-finger-on-it essence that separates CCM from its secular counterpart. Though there are several musically great songs that stand apart from the CCM norm including “Colored People” and “Between You and Me” and lyrically mature “What If I Stumble?”

dc Talk’s Jesus Freak paved my musical way for several other CCM “rock” albums including Jars of Clay’s self-titled release (which basically led me to Greenville and basically EVERYTHING else in my life,) Newsboys’ Take Me to Your Leader and Audio Adrenaline’s Bloom. I slowly bought most of Forefront Records’ releases since Jesus Freak and they eventually led to the second of the 15 albums that changed my life. That record will be described tomorrow. Wave your freak flag in the comments.

Several tracks from Jesus Freak are found on dc Talk’s MySpace