phishing for compliments

So in reading Count's post below and riding shamelessly on the small-scale Renaissance of the blog, I've been made to think again.

What was it about being young teenagers and feeling all this angst? Why so typical of that particular age when everything was ennui and ennui was the colour grey, the people we loved, the thoughts we thought and all the things we had never done but dismissed anyway?

I remember writing in my journal when I was 14, 15, 16 (again, how typical) about all the things I hated, raging on and on until I actually became so exhausted that I veered into apathy once more and left the page-long sentence unfinished. But seriously, why the hell do we do things like this?

Anne Frank.

One of the few teenagers who managed to steer clear of angst angst and my god, more angst.

But then again, she did have more important things on her mind.

To prevent this blog from becoming some sort of emotional tampon (I'd be amused to know if we all blogged about meaningful shiz around about the time we each had PMS), I'll leave you all with an interview with Phoenix about how they come up with lyrics to their songs. (sorry, lost the link so let's just pretend it's from some music magazine)

In your song “Rome,” you describe a city that was once beautiful but is now decaying. As the song progresses, we realize it mirrors a relationship. How intentional are these things?

TM: You have all of these ideas that are very different and you want to put them together, but you need to find some sort of glue that holds them together. So something that we really enjoy is to delete almost everything in between. All the things that make [the narrative make] sense. That’s something that’s impossible to do in French, because every word carries the weight of time and space. But in English, you can erase what’s in between, so it makes it easier. I guess maybe Hank Williams—Laurent gave me a book of Hank Williams lyrics for my 18th birthday—and I just loved how simple it is and how every word is independent so you can just mess with the whole thing. Suddenly, your “heart can be filled with tears” and so on…

His lyrics are very distilled.

TM: That’s something that is impossible to do in French. Because if you just said “My heart is filled with tears,” it would be, “My heart would have been filled with tears that I cried before…”

Maybe my favorite moment when we make a record is when you have a verse and you like the melody a lot, and you have the words for it, and you have too many verses. This rarely happens to us; I wish it happened more. You know when you hear a Bob Dylan song and he goes on forever and he has so many verses that are amazing—it doesn’t fit our music. It’s almost like helium in a gas tank or something where things are free and spread in a very dense environment. You have a lot of lines to put down but you have to make decisions. There are only going to be two or three verses so I have to use this or I can’t use that. And that’s why it’s very important that there are the four of us because I can’t decide on my own. You need input, you need to know which one will be the most like a trademark, or which one is the most unusual. And then, the repetition in every verse is very playful. Once you have the main structure it becomes this big playground where you come back to places. Whether it’s ideas that are the same or it’s just a place that is the same, when you come back to them [in the song] it takes you to a different place. I think my favorite is probably the beginning of the second verse. I don’t know why.

CM: We love the beginning of the second verse. It’s our favorite moment.

TM: ‘Cause it’s the moment where there is no impact. It’s the moment where you’re naked. It’s the most melancholic moment. You don’t have to claim anything. You’re really a friend to the person who is listening. And you can just say the most heartbreaking thing.

[d.read]