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Sao Paulo August 2008

I’ve never been much on the vanguard of music. In fact, the music I’ve loved or love most in life has been from bands that were already broken apart or retired, or already into their third or fourth album, which means I could hardly ever say I “discovered” a new band; it mostly feels like they find me in a lonely dark corner where I’m the only idiot who hasn’t figured out how good someone sounds. Sure, I listened to “Creep” when it entered the charts, but I never bought a Radiohead album until OK Computer, and that was only because I saw the quirky video for “Paranoid Android” and loved the cartoon style. Yes, the cartoon, silly me.

Anyway, I’m mostly making up excuses for not listening to Zach Condon’s Beirut before this June. And maybe I wouldn’t even had listened to it, had it not been practically thrown in my face, so to speak. The first album being recorded somewhere around Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2005, and all this time I didn’t have a clue as to what I’d been missing. Better late than never, though, right? Since then I’ve tried to make up for it by listening to every album, EP, live performance and side-projects of this young prodigy that is Mr. Condon, and have develop a wild craving for getting my hands on ukuleles, trumpets and accordions (the last one being quite the challenge, I’ve been led to think). So far I’ve listened to it enough so that I can safely say it’s something that probably struck me for good, yet not enough so that I still long to listen to this or that song every day (and keep discovering new layers inside each of them).

This is, to me, the true power and meaning of art: having your life touched so gracefully and deeply that it molds what you are and what you long for; being inspired to do beautiful things and think beautiful thoughts, and hope to pass that ahead, so that one day, even if for a hugely reduced portion of the audience, you can create a similar effect.

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