Dispatches for Luna & Max (#07)

 

  • “I’m thinking of ways I can get out of things/Just like always.”
  • I found a scratched-to-shit mix CD from probably 2010 with the name of this song sharpied on it. I think it was one of a series of discs I made for Ally during her lengthy LA commutes at the time. A fitting title for a collection of songs for daydreaming in traffic (the rest of the disc was real hit or miss, but included this cover song, which I’d forgotten about…and no, we didn’t name one of our children after the band Luna).
  • I loved the audacity of a mid-‘90s shoegaze band naming their album–Giant Steps–after one of the inarguably best jazz albums of all time. It’s most widely seen as a similar move to naming your album after a Beatles’ classic. But I usually think of this too.
  • The cacophonous build-up/breakdown at the end of this song. The apocalyptic, kitchen-sink sink approach. It’s a micro-genre in and of itself. I imagine the ending of “All You Need is Love” was probably the first time I heard it as a rhetorical move in a pop song (the self-referential refrain from “She Loves You” that fades out was also likely the first post-modern pop moment in my upbringing too, come to think of it). The piano that overtakes the second half of this Dan Deacon song is probably the most blissed-out version of this for me – I regularly come back to this song (and album) and plan to write about it in a future dispatch.
  • The sloshing of woodwinds and feedback and cymbals that bring this track to a close, rising and falling like a tide never at rest.
  • The Boo Radleys as a pluralized name always reminded me of the silliness of the band in Airheads calling themselves the Lone Rangers.

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