Digging In The Dirt With A Shovel

This quote from an interview with Tom Clancy in this week’s Time Magazine strikes me as sort of depressing:

I don’t recommend writing as a form of employment, because it’s such miserable work. That’s how you tell a rookie: if they actually think the writing’s fun. I guess it is for the first one or two, but after that it just becomes miserable work, like digging in the dirt with a shovel. But it’s something you have to do. You can’t not do it.

I feel bad for the guy – obviously, writing isn’t a simple and easy thing, it takes a lot of effort and discipline. Still, judging by the guy’s output and his comments, I just start to wonder if he ever considered trying out different genres and writing styles. I can imagine writing several Tom Clancy books could be a very soul-draining experience – why didn’t he ever try to do something other than a Tom Clancy ™ book? It seems to me that though there is a small bit of universal truth in that quote, I think that Clancy is responsible for his misery far more than writing itself is.

You Don’t Feel Taken And You Don’t Feel Abused

I downloaded a copy of the new Spoon LP Kill The Moonlight last night – actually it’s a ‘rough mix’, which might account for why so much of it sounds so raw and natural, but also a little jarring and strange. My most immediate impression from listening to the record is that it’s even more minimal and skeletal than Girls Can Tell. The songs all come down to a basic rhythm, Britt Daniel’s Kurt Cobain-does-Motown voice, and some interesting bits of texture. Keyboards dominate the record, the guitars mostly are there to carry rhythm, and the drums and percussion are far less prominent than on Girls Can Tell. The way the drums were recorded on Girls Can Tell might be some of the best sounding recordings of percussion that I’ve ever heard. I have no idea what they did, but why more bands don’t record that way is beyond me. This record shares the natural, clean, musicians-playing-in-a-room sound, but occasionally veers off into a peculiar effect like the odd tremolo sound halfway through “Small Stakes”, or the distant mellotron strings on “Back To The Life”.

It’s a bit too early to pick favorites right now, but “Small Stakes”, a song doomed to hundreds of reviews which will compare it to Suicide, seems to be the early favorite for me. I can say this – part of the appeal of Girls Can Tell for me is that 6 of its 11 songs sounded like they really should have been massive radio hits in a perfect world. This record doesn’t really have any songs that sound like singles to me, which isn’t a good or bad thing. It’s just a difference.

(For those curious about which songs from Girls Can Tell I think should’ve been big radio hits, here are my picks: “Everything Hits At Once”, “Lines In The Suit”, “Anything You Want”, “Take The Fifth”, “The Fitted Shirt”, and “10:20 AM”.)