Lose Tunes Track 07

Cover for the new novel, which will be out soon

The LOSE has been busy as hell here in May, working on the novel and then turning it over to my crack editing staff. Semie, Caitlin and Jesse will no doubt make me sound like I know what I am doing. Thanks to them all in advance.

More LOSE coming soon, once I get this novel done and out the door. Novels really do take on lives all their own, and come to dominate your own when you write them. And it's hard to let go of them after working on them for so long (in this case, since last July). But soon the novel and I will have to see other people – the novel will get to meet some new readers and I will reintroduce myself to the Official Fiancée of IN PLAY LOSE, who has been supportive and interminably patient throughout.

I thought we could use some music. Tonight's Lose Tunes is brought to you by Wild Turkey 101, which Shirley was kind enough to bring to the party tonight. (The LOSE is turning 40-mumble-mumble tomorrow, which is both alarming and kind of awesome.) We have tonight one of my favourite bands in the world, a 7-piece from New Zealand called Fat Freddy's Drop that plays some of the funkiest, snappiest, most awesome music in the world – part funk, part ska, part reggae, part DJ. I toot their horn whenever I get the chance, and this song – the title track from their most recent record – is a song that I just love to listen to when I'm working. I listened to a good amount of FFD while working on this novel, in fact. To go along with the purple bird on the book cover, here is a blackbird.

Lose Tunes Track 06

The reason for the crickets here in this corner of the internet is that I've been busy as hell with several work projects. And when I'm not slaving away at the salt mines, I'm hard at work on the novel. I've vowed that I'm going to get this novel done by the end of March, no matter what.

I've always been a terrible procrastinator, a person who has never functioned well without deadlines. It's part of why journalism was a suitable career, in fact. Most journalists I know only function well several minutes before they have to turn something in. Procrastination is not inherently a bad thing, mind you – for some, it takes that pressure to actually focus. Give me two hours and it will be done and near perfect. Give me two weeks and I'll make some token effort at first, lose interest, promptly blow it off for 13 days and 22 hours and do it in two hours, anyway. Juste un peu d'amour has dragged on since July, which is when I first started writing it, and if I don't give myself a target date to aspire to, the thing won't get written. Once I get this done, I have some other ideas that I am promptly ready to unleash.

Anyway, I'm also drinking some scotch right now and I think I could use some music. Track 06 on the Lose Tunes is a song called Aurora Gone from the Texas band Midlake, a cerebral sextet who write beautifully lush and thought-provoking songs. Their newest record was an interesting (mis)adventure in the creative process – they spent two years working on a record and found themselves going nowhere, at which point the lead singer/songwriter left the band, and the rest of the members then junked what they were working on and started anew, writing and recording a new record in six months. This reminds me of my own processes – I spent 10 YEARS developing the ideas and characters for a novel and then junked it and started writing this one instead. After 10 years, I was sick of the characters. And the story was too heavy – it was sort of like going to dinner and ordering a 5-course prix fixe when all you really wanted was a caesar salad and an iced tea.

This is a nice version, scaled back and recorded live at KEXP in Seattle. And yeah, this bit of indie prog rock is a bit of a change-up from the funked out Track 05. But I like contrasts and conflicts. Without contrast and conflict, nothing is fundamentally interesting to me. It's why I am so interested in losing, after all – the emotions when one fails are much more complicated than when one succeeds.

Lose Tunes Track 05

Today's edition of Lose Tunes is brought to you by Martin's V.V.O. scotch. I would link to the distillery's website if the distillery actually still existed. It's been out of business for decades. The Official Liquor Distributor of IN PLAY LOSE found a case of this stuff in his basement – I'm serious, he did – and this usquebae is actually pretty nice. It does wonders to ease my screwed up neck and back, which I am going to have my chiropractor declare war on here in 30 minutes or so. Christ, it hurts. All I have to say to everyone reading this is DON'T GET OLD, because getting old sucks.

Lose Tunes are not all morose and miserable songs by any stretch. Sometimes you just need a good beat that you can dance to. And it's good that I am drinking scotch, because Track 05 on the Lose Tunes is from Scottish DJ Lex Blackmore, aka Blue Boy. This song vamps on samples from a 1969 song called Woman in a Ghetto by Marlena Shaw, the chorus being a line referring to black nannies raising white children during the era of American segregation. A fair amount of American music has been based on the idea of taking shitty subject matter and making it sound groovy nonetheless, the idea being that art and expression can trump one's troubles and defeat oppressors in their own small ways. I think this DJ track is in keeping with that spirit.

This song is funky as hell.

Lose Tunes Track 04

This edition of the Lose Tunes is brought to you by the bottle of Ridge 2006 Grenache that we had at the office on Friday afternoon. Yes, we drink wine in the office on Fridays and you do not. Sucks to be you.

Today we are featuring the best thing from Cincinnati since Ken Griffey Jr. and Skyline Chili. Away from the stage, the members of The National are some of the funniest, most engaging, most congenial musicians out there. But this song pretty much wrecked me the first time I heard it, both because of the innate beauty of the song and the greater, pervasive sense of sadness and loss. It is a crusher. And it would not crush so much if it were not such a beautiful song.

Lose Tunes, Track 03

Our edition of Lose Tunes today is brought to you by The Kraken, a rum made in that bastion of sun, palms, swashbuckling and rum-running ... Indiana. Good stuff though, a rum as black as your soul with a nice vanilla overtone as well. Drinking this stuff is making it easier for me to get through all of this work I am doing tonight.

This tune is a natural choice for the Lose Tunes, simply because of the name. This is a Danish electronica band named When Saints Go Machine and the song is Fail Forever. It would likely be on this playlist in spite of the name, since the song pretty much hops:

And here is a bonus remix track version of the Saints by Chilean DJ Nicholas Jaar, which is pretty remarkable:

Lose Tunes, Track 02

Today's edition of Lose Tunes is brought to you by Pow-Wow Botanical Rye, not because they are paying for it but because I am drinking some while writing this entry. (The crack Sales & Marketing staff here at IPL World HQ needs to get busy selling some advertisements.) This is the most weirdly interesting bottle of usquebae that I think I've ever had. Once you get over the fact that it doesn't take your ordinary usque, you just sort of settle in for a nice, easy ride. You can get really hammered on it if you're not careful, because it's so mellow.

Track 02 on the Lose Tunes soundtrack comes from a band from that bastion of rock'n'roll mayhem that is Provo, Utah. This band is called The Moth & The Flame and I was pretty much hooked by the drive of the bass riff the first time I heard this song. And the screaming out of the word "Sorry!" at the end of the song pretty much destined it to be added to the soundtrack of IN PLAY LOSE, "Sorry" being the generic, almost automatic first response to a great many acts of failure in this lifetime.

This band's new EP is a great record, with lots of sound sculptures and a good amount of ambient terror. You should check it out. And as for this video, is there any greater example of ambient terror than life in the 1950s?

Lose Tunes

The LOSE is going to diversify the portfolio here in 2014. Since IN PLAY LOSE is my personal corner office here in cyberspace, I figure that I should actually move in and make myself at home – which means I definitely need to have some music playing. Yes, IN PLAY LOSE does, in fact, have a soundtrack which lives on my laptop, and which I'm usually playing as I composing these long essays which I post. It's rare when there isn't music playing, in fact. Usually I'm streaming KCRW out of Santa Monica, which is the greatest radio station on the planet. Or I'm listening to a playlist, such as the one I call Lose Tunes.

So every now and then (most likely on Fridays, when I'm usually drunk), I am going to add some musical selections to the blog from the Lose Tunes. My tastes are pretty eclectic. I listen to just about every style of music and tend to go in phases – right now I am in something of a techno/electronica phase for reasons I cannot fathom.

And this song is maybe as close to a theme song for this blog as presently exists. It's assembled by a guy from Wales who now lives in that sleepy little Welsh fishing village named New York. And the video is apropos to this blog as well, as it's culled from one of the best films about out-and-out, dimwitted, self-destructive, self-inflicted defeat which has been made in recent memory, Spike Lee's 25th Hour.

Fear not, we'll resume our regular programming here in the next few days. There is always more time for LOSE. As we say at the San Francisco scrabble club, once you've found a bad play, always take the time to look for a worse one.