Today I accidentally saw the word “challengers” and just had to listen to that New Pornographers track:
My friend Beth was talking about it last night at bible group and about how much she liked it.
“I like it so much, I don’t even want to listen to it.”
I honestly can’t figure out what she means by that but there’s something to it. I know what feeling she’s getting. It’s that feeling that you can’t describe and since you can’t, you don’t even want to have to bother with it. Or, maybe you’d rather the feeling be something tangible that you can hold and squeeze like a cute puppy as opposed to something that can’t ever be fully scratched.*
There are songs I listen to like that where it just gets in your soul and turns you into a wax sculpture. You completely lose focus on whatever you are doing, including listening to the song and that empty, yet completely fulfilling feeling just floats in the exact middle of your chest. You know, that exact moment where someone starts to give you a shoulder rub and you lose all sense of awareness.
After listening to that track, I decided to make a playlist of songs that give me that similar feeling from The New Pornographers. I’ve done this a thousand times before (I don’t know why I don’t just save the playlist) and every time I do it, I always end up adding Sufjan songs as well. Sufjan is my go-to guy for midsection feelings.
This made me think about what to call the list since I can’t verbally describe the “style” of music I’m looking for. I want to figure it out so I can quickly add more artists whenever I decide to remake this playlist. And now that I think about it, I can probably get some Ben Folds on there, as well as Midlake.
Here are the characteristics I’m looking for:
- slow to mid-tempo
- atmosphere (there has to be reverb, echo or orchestration of some kind)
- either a soft, breathy voice (Sufjan) or a pretty voice that can get LOUD (Neko Case)
- the drums can be anything but I really like a driving beat (My Rights Verses Yours) or maybe even non-existent
- banjos tend to work well, especially a lush recording of them, but they are not required
- piano almost always works
- a french horn? you’re killing me
Of course, those aren’t requirements, just a couple of things I’ve noticed in the songs I’m putting on this list.
If you read those characteristics, it seems as if I’m just saying that I’m a fan of adult contemporary music, which I guess I happen to be (depending on the era). And, I have to admit, my favorite artists are making music that is very similar in sound, specifically Ben Folds as he gets older and older - and, if you want, Vampire Weekend has that whole Graceland thing going on, and I’ve become a big fan of their’s over the past month.
I guess I’m trying to coin the phrase Indie Adult-Contemporary. In doing a search on the term, I’m far from the first person to come up with the phrase (a Pitchfork writer being at the top of the Google list), but I definitely want to get it going so that when people describe new music to me they can just use the IA-C genre tag to make it easy.
Here are some artists that I would argue fall in that category (not entire the catalogs of these artists, mind you):
- Ben Folds
- The New Pornographers
- Midlake
- The Shins
- Field Music
- Sufjan Stevens
- Ben Kweller
- Badly Drawn Boy
And the list goes on… Please join with me in incorporating this term into your daily routine.
*although, I would argue that there is no amount of squeezing that will ever fulfill your appetite for cute puppies (as would Todd Glass)
