Stephen Mejias

Christian <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/041607listening/">recommended…; a great new band to me: <a href="http://www.thebesnardlakes.com/">The Besnard Lakes</a>. Listening to them reminds me of Brian Wilson and Pink Floyd and My Morning Jacket. There are shiny falsettos, dream sequences, and reverb-drenched solos. It's music that I want to share with my girlfriend. A Google search then led me to the band's record label, <a href="http://www.jagjaguwar.com/">Jagjaguwar</a&gt;. There, I found a happy surprise: entire albums &#151; freely flowing streams of music &#151; not only from The Besnard Lakes, but also from a couple of other interesting bands, <a href="http://www.odawastheband.com/Odawas/Main.html">Odawas</a&gt; and <a href="http://www.alexdeliverymusic.com/">Alex Delivery</a>.

After a week of rain and bad news, here comes the sun. I woke this morning, singing it.

I discovered Erik Satie while in college. The music seemed perfectly fit for such strange and brightly-colored cartoon mornings, rainy afternoons, very sad and lonely drunken nights. Perfectly fit for a dude who felt out of time with himself, a mishmash of incomplete angles and ideas, a dance party, a moonlit walk along a muddy trail, a stranger, a desperate fuck.

Walking to the office on this sloppy Monday morning, through April's cold rain, with a mind full of dreams and promises of warmer, brighter things, I got the feeling that it might as well be last Friday all over again. What the hell?

I'm looking forward to the new Bill Callahan album, <i>Woke On A Whaleheart</i>, not only because I have this aching feeling that it's going to be a beautiful piece of work, one that I can relate to and fall in love with, but also because I think it's going to offer excellent sound quality, and I just can't wait to hear it on the hi-fi. This is interesting to me because I never looked forward to an album for its sound quality before. Even when reading our own <i>Stereophile</i> record reviews, I've paid little attention to the number of stars placed besides the "Sonics" heading, except to make sure they're the right size and font.

I would like to be at home right now, sitting on the orange couch, listening to the hi-fi. Because Bill Callahan has been on my mind, I think I would choose to listen to Smog's <i>A River Ain't Too Much To Love</i>, an album that soothes me, that makes me feel good.