Dog Latin's 'Eureka Moments' Playlist

voted yazoo

Might start jotting a few thoughts down about certain songs on the playlist.

LAURIE ANDERSON - O SUPERMAN
This is the first song on the list, and the first song I added to the list. It was also the song I was googling when I first stumbled on ILM c2001. My dad bought the record on 7" when it came out, helping it get to number 2 in the UK charts in 1981 when I was less than a year old. He had to buy it again when apparently I crawled on it and broke the first copy. It's the first song I ever remember hearing, and today it still sounds amniotic and comforting. It would take me years to realise just what a strange piece of music it really is - no beats, just a repetitive 'AH AH AH'; over 8 minutes long; possibly one of the weirdest top 5 singles of all time. I like to think it made a lasting impression on my music taste. Even today I'm a sucker for minimalism, repetition and robotic voices.

I'm impressed by the level of specific recall you have regarding songs. I like to think I have pretty decent recall of my past, but the songs all blur for me. When I was a teenager I listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin. That's about all I can tell you. These "Eureka" moments have become commonplace for me, happen about every week or so. They're an important part of what keeps me alive from day to day.

i voted for o superman. thanks for the comments, it may be a strange song in the world of pop but within laurie anderson's oeuvre it is quite pop.

xp to rushomancy

In a similar way to that Camus quote about art, 'a man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those ... his heart first opened', I think a big part of being a music fan involves hunting down these 'eureka moments', and trying to recapture those times when music really hit you hard. It's like a drug addict chasing a high. As I get older, these moments might happen just as frequently as ever, but their impact is lessened. I hear music I really like every week, but it's harder and harder to come by something that clicks just right; that sounds truly remarkable to me. I'll never hear dub reggae for the first time, or have my mind opened up by Smiley Smile, or get taken away by a piece of electronic music on the dancefloor in quite the same way as the first time. Still, I'm always chasing, and in many ways I'm irrationally worried that I'll never get to hear every piece of music that sounds amazing to my ears.

One of these big moments, the most memorable 'bolt from the blue'; and indeed maybe the first real 'Now this is amazing - this is MY music' revelations came about age 14 / 15 one Sunday night. I'd been having a long bout of trouble with bullying at school and I was not looking to going back on Monday morning. I'd picked up the Boo Radleys' 'Giant Steps' on cassette from the secondhand section of my local indie shop that afternoon. I'd heard the 'Wake Up!' album and enjoyed that, but nothing could have prepared me for this.

I remember lying on my bed feeling absolutely miserable, and this music just pouring into my ears. Not just indie-pop or Britpop, but all sorts of sounds. I'd never heard ambient or dub reggae or free jazz or shoegaze before, and I was only peripherally aware of the Beatles' brand of psychedelia, but here it was, all laid out for me on this one album with all the tracks segueing into each other, and I dunno... Martin Carr always wrote these very personal lyrics about being in your 20s, but they spoke to me on a level that was different from Blur or Oasis or REM or Nirvana or whoever else I'd been used to listening to.

It was like having my head rearranged. It was a primer for all sorts of other things I'd come round to enjoying later, from Lee 'Scratch' Perry to the Cocteau Twins to My Bloody Valentine to Aphex Twin to the Zombies etc. etc, and best of all, no one else I knew wanted anything to do with it because they associated this band with breakfast radio, so they were safely my own.

Lazarus is still one of my all time favourite songs and Giant Steps my gun-to-the-head favourite album. It's not perfect - even Martin Carr has admitted that. But to me, it is perfection itself.

Voted for The Beatles! I'm Only Sleeping is such a deceptively complex little ditty, with some great bon mots.

yeah, it's not their best song, or even my favourite. but it felt like the right Beatles pick for some reason. It's the quintessence of Revolver, the Beatles' psychedelic era and 60s psychedelia itself. Love the backwards production, the classic Lennon introspection and the sound 'non-work' ethic that spoke to me a lot as a lazy sixth-former.

dl, your experience with 'O Superman' sounds very similar to my own with the Beach Boys' Love You. Some of the earliest grown-up music in my life and had no perspective on how strange it was until much, much later.

rushomancy, if I can generalize from our respective experiences, it would seem that Zep immersion is a rite of passage for Hoosier teens.

i can imagine Love You being really appealing to kids though :-) lots of songs about cars and planes and rollerskating

"Eureka moments" vs. plain old "favorite songs" is a cool concept. I tried doing the same thing years ago on a C-90 mixtape, but many of my influential prog, jazz, and world music tracks were too long to fit.

Give it another go, Dan. I'd love to see others attempt this. And now in the age of streaming services it's easier than ever.

I neglected my work for a little bit in an attempt to make an ad hoc list of my own but ultimately abandoned it when I realized it was like a step-by-step instruction manual for assembling a melancholy motherfucker through the power of music. BRB, booking a therapy session.

it's best not to rush these things or you end up cramming it with songs that are all one-mood (i.e. the mood you're in when you compile it). adding just a few songs a day (and maybe plucking a few out now and again) is prob the best bet.

rushomancy, if I can generalize from our respective experiences, it would seem that Zep immersion is a rite of passage for Hoosier teens.

― My Lunch Is Older Than Your Lunch (Old Lunch)

i lived in new jersey then :)

It seems I have made an ass out of u and me.

there's definitely a "chasing the dragon" element to my listening. the high of hearing something new and great for the first time. but music isn't a drug for me, not really. yeah, we all acclimate, but it's not the music for me, it's anything, anything good we get used to and start taking for granted.

my library is big enough now that i can still be surprised by it. i put it on random and as good as my memory for music is i'll hear something i genuinely don't know, old-time guitar pickers like the Blue Boys or a '70s synth wizard or any of a thousand other things. the element of surprise is still there. and when it's not, the feelings music i love evokes in me are reinforced by repeated listens. i put it on random and "fossil fuel sam" by orifice, a song i've been listening to for twenty years now, comes on and something still kicks in. yeah, i say, that's IT, and IT is goddamn everywhere, every kind of music, painstaking artists and sloppy drunks, you put on a song and there's that electricity, and even if everything else i've ever believed was a lie that isn't.

i don't remember everything, but i do remember what it was like hearing "black dog" for the first time, right down to the stereo alignment tones at the beginning that i thought were part of the song, and that experience repeats itself on a regular basis for me.

i don't believe it'll ever stop. i used to worry that i wouldn't get to hear all the songs that were that great, that express uncontainable joy, but by now i realize i won't. there's no system or path, whatever it is can't be classified or defined- not beyond just plain "music". it's goddamn everywhere, and all i've done in the past 25 years is train myself to hear it. there are no "perfect albums" to me. not even any "perfect songs". my favorite song is whatever i'm listening to right now.

maybe that makes me weird or maybe that makes me crazy, but these days it's the only thing that seems to make sense.

This is a lovely idea dog latin. I'm struck by the eureka moment - it seems like a very honest gesture, an invitation into your life with music.

One thing that I've experienced with some music is the transition through repeated listening from the unfamiliar to the familiar, and how it's nigh impossible to get back the emotions felt and thoughts thought when the music was unfamiliar.

I felt this most when a

I have a list like this of my epiphany tracks, which I put down on paper 3 or 4 years ago. I should type it up.

I'd definitely like to see/hear that JnJ. one of my stipulations when making the list was 'has this stayed with me?', 'would I happily listen to it again today?'

plenty of tunes here were 'growers'. they didn't all just hit me the first time I heard them, although many of them did.

in the case of the grower I tend to find that I can be absolutely repulsed by something but one day I'll give it another go and find that the exact factors that put me off are what I suddenly find intriguing about it. Pere Ubu are a case in point. Think I've recounted a few times here about how I picked up Dub Housing out of a CD cut-out bin while trying to get into reggae as a student.

I was so taken aback by the noise and David Thomas's yelping that I nearly threw it in the bin. But something kept me going back to it and these days when I play in my band, I count him as a direct influence on my vocal style. I now think Dub Housing is a unique and really special work of art and it bends my mind each time I hear it.

(sorry there's something up with my phone - when I try to do long posts the text obscures the submit button :-(

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Try to a quick switching of browser windows, dl. Just click onto another one, and then click back. That usually helps for me.

cheers DAM

kind of overwhelmed by the clear winner here. it's the one I voted for too -- the track that kicked off the idea of doing this play list in the first place.
cheers for letting me share this with you ILM. I might poll the rest of the tracks later on..