Forget Your Northern Eyes

Rural Albert Advantage - Hometowns
My recent Canadian excursion got me re-listening to one of my favorite albums, The Rural Alberta Advantage's Hometowns. In truth, The RAA almost never leaves my queue, but being closer to the context in which they wrote this album urged me to give it a new close listen. When I think of Canadian indie rock, I think of this band more than any other. Sure, others like Broken Social Scene are infinitely bigger, but The RAA is distinctly Canadian in their lyrics, themes and imagery. You may not get the reference of "Frank, AB" or understand "purple lights at the Leg," but you get the basic feeling, and begin ot get what that might mean to hometown boys & girls.

I've also been hankering to do some music writing, because it's immediate and fun, but there haven't been any brand new releases that have spurred a lot of thoughts and deconstruction. There have been a lot that spurred thoughts in hindsight, but if I wasn't going to worry about timeliness any longer, maybe I should just go back to 2009 and talk about a favorite.

Hometowns is, centrally but not totally, about a change in location and a change in relationship. The bits and pieces of history are easy to gather: There is a guy, a girl, and a distance between them. The guy moves from far north of Edmonton to the bustling city of Toronto. What follows is relationship turbulence, the burden of disconnection from everything you've known, and the question of what to do when you're stranded.

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Decade in Decibels

Here we are! Look upon this new decade! The Tens are upon us, and all else is old! With that, here are the 10 albums from 2000 to 2009 that rocked my rocker, which in truth isn't all that notable, since I only started seriously listening to music in 2000 anyway. I mean, I was 12 years old. It's hard to develop any specific affinity for types of music before then.

Included is a handy, inaccurate metaphor that I haphazardly wrote up without a second thought. So if you're looking for an experience to correlate with listening to this hour of emotionally engaging music, maybe this add to your experience! Or maybe it will make no sense, and you will be weirded out, but then you look it up anyway because you have to know, that's just the type of person you are, always seeking, always curious.

I count a decade as '00 to '09, and save '10 through '19 for the next decade. I know years didn't start with zero, thus the first decade was 1 through 10. But 1970 was part of the 70's, not the 60's.

Whatever. List:

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