Thirty minutes seems like the perfect length, because it means I never have to be away from any individual song for longer than that. It's heartbreaking to imagine how many people won't hear any of them. The drummer couldn't mail out enough of these if he did nothing else. I never really know which of the albums that sustain me would have the same redemptive power for other people, but I do have guesses, and this is one of them. This is the way rock should have adapted to Americana, muting and compressing it and turning reserve into resolve, pulling desert skies into city basements, pouring ocean-beach solitude into crowded buses, lacing tendrils of starlit air around the beams of new office buildings, our country's fortitude flowing back into us.
Music is more profitable as division and distraction, but more valuable for community and focus.
Their parents, conversely, are too guarded to absorb this much sincerity, too self-conscious to remember that murky, allusive lyrics once seemed like a virtue, too busy congratulating themselves that they can still play air guitar to Melissa Etheridge, and naturally much too busy to write a check and mail it to Maine. But I imagine, for a moment, that you and I fall in between, that if we're here together, it can only be because we have clung successfully to our attention spans, and because we know that every interstice is a place in its own right. One day in our lives we realized music could be taken seriously, and one day, later, we will forget that again, but here we are during the days after and before, and maybe this could be an album for you, as for me, that hums the outline of why we care. Who , the second album by the British quartet Travis. We missed lots of streets, and if I'd had the patience to play the record again I might have learned something, but I didn't.