Remain in Light
Talking Heads; "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)"; Amazon
Remain in Light
In college, I had a friend who gave away most of his possessions to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. He had a large box of CDs that he marked as ‘up for grabs’ in our shared house. I grabbed quite a few of them since we had overlapping music taste. One of them was Franz Ferdinand’s debut, with a scratch on “Dark of the Matinee” that produced a chirp like something from Oval’s 94 Diskont—an experimental music group that collaborated with Björk, somewhere between ambient and dance music. That chirp became part of the track for me, an accidental imperfection that I came to love.
For a time, this was one of four CDs in my father’s van’s five-disc CD changer, the other being “Remain In Light”, the third being the second disc of a 2CD Kraftwerk live set that I purchased from a library book sale, followed—of course—by “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts”, a Christmas gift when it was reissued.
My dad was a collector—as a numismatist, he had a predilection towards shiny things, metal things: audio equipment, records and CDs, and especially old cars. Throughout my life he has bought and scrapped junkers, driving them—as he puts it—“to the moon and back”, attempting to log hundreds of thousands of miles before the tires get balder than him, the transmission drops out, the doors stop closing. They all had their own quirks and elements of disrepair; one van was so old it had a sapling growing in one of the places where the door met the body.
There hasn’t been a tree grown in each van, but “Remain In Light” has played through the speakers of every one—it’s the lone commonality, from cassette adapter with a CD walkman, to the current five disc affair, I’ve heard it coming out of every system. If recording engineers have their reference record to check how music sounds on a new sound system in a different environment, this is mine. My dad’s busted-up van, waiting at the light by the dead mall, listening to “Once In A Lifetime” until I can visit Goodwill for some digging.
The ritual is thus: I listen to that song over and over as I run errands for my parents, and the CDs stays in the changer until my dad sells his car for scrap. Then the discs are pulled out and placed in the next one. Like a hermit crab changing shells.
Like the slightly-skipping disc above, Talking Heads is equally about finding that “perfect imperfection”. So much of their music is based around a looped groove, which could have been layered in a sampler but wasn’t—the musicians just played together on the same small phrases, transitioning between them, giving time for their own personalities and foibles to shine through, just like my dad’s cars—humanity in the mechanical.
Verdict: Keep
Do you notice imperfections in songs that have become part of their identity for you? Those rough edges might be harder to find in today’s polished musical landscape, but they’re out there, waiting to be amplified.