Sunday Morning Music

Before you start reading, fire up this link in another window or tab and start playing my current playlist.

K finally remembered to bring home her electric kettle so I could take it to school and make tea for myself during my planning period at school. Everyone who knows me very well is aware of my obsession with craft beer, but one of my lesser obsessions is tea. I don’t take it to the heights that I do with beer. I don’t know the intricacies and subtleties of the plant and the drink derived from it, but I do know my white from my green and my oolong from my pu-ehr. The puh-er kind of taste like what it sounds like. I wouldn’t bother with it, if I were you. I haven’t actually consumed tea that came from a bag in years with the exception of the occasional glass of sweet tea at a restaurant when I get a wild hair and don’t just order water with my meal. I’ve got air-tight tins and oxygen blocking bags of different types of teas (my favorites are a silver needle and tie-guan-yin oolong) along with a few varieties of honey. I pretty much only use the honey for tea. In case you’re wondering, my favorite honey for tea is Sourwood. Tupelo is an excellent backup and I’ve got a huckleberry honey right now that’s a nice, fruitier alternate.

But this post isn’t about tea. This post is about music. As I was drinking my warm tea with a spoonful of honey, I logged in to Last.fm and set the station to bands like Iron and Wine. Sam Beam (who more or less is Iron and Wine) is a wonderful musician and I got into him at a perfect time when I was just starting to give more relaxing tunes their due. I have to give Ryan all the credit for this, however, like I have to with a lot of my post-high school music taste development. Ryan was planning on going to an Iron and Wine concert in Atlanta and was looking for someone to keep him company, and, like I have on multiple occasions until I left the Rome area, I gladly took him up on the offer. I’d never heard of the band until this point and Ryan played a couple of tracks while we were driving around one day. I dug it. It wasn’t my usual cup o’ tea, but it was really interestingly composed and the lyrics were sublime at times. We went to the show and despite technical difficulties with some of the instruments, we were both bowled over. I’ve been a huge fan ever since.

Giving Iron and Wine a chance really broadened my spectrum. Until then, my mildest love was Built to Spill, which is pretty much classic alternative rock. Not exactly stuff to make out to. That was fine being as I was never the romancing type (the first time I cooked for K early in our relationship in college, I used the Schindler’s List soundtrack for the background music because it was the prettiest music I had at the time). But gradually I’ve kind of drifted more and more to the mellower end of the spectrum. I still don’t take to the maudlin and cheese of top 40 or adult contemporary, but I really go for the more interesting artists on the fringes that combine a unique sound with mellow mood.

I call this Sunday Morning Music. I admit I stole it from someone else who was suggesting a cd that is now a staple of my mellow moods, but it fits. It doesn’t just happen on Sundays, of course, butit’s music that seems to encapsulate that feeling of sitting around on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee or hot tea when you have nothing to do or are at least cool with not getting around to your list any time soon. The TV’s off. The stereo is on and you’re temporarily happy with life. I used to call this mood the joyful melancholy when I was in high school. I liked the poetic feel of the phrase and seeming oxymoron it created, but it really is an apt descriptor. Happy seems to hollow. Calm leaves out the joy of the moment, and joy is too hyper too effectively describe the mood. The melancholy comes in to mellow out the joy and helps communicate the proximity this mood has to depression. Not, that wailing and gnashing of teeth type of depression, but the just feeling a bit blue variety. They’ve got a lot in common in the behavior and even the feel of the mood. It’s just the topic of thought that changes, really.

It’s music like Iron and Wine and the other bands performing in a similar vein that seems to resonate best with the vibrations of the brain and soul in these moments and the music can take you further into that beautiful melancholy of a Sunday morning.