“Hi, First Date. This is what I remember: two twin beds covered in my grandmother’s quilts, four windows opening out to the ghosts in the dark green Virginia forest, and a wooden crate of my parents’ vinyl one room away from my father’s decaying, prized, ancient Steinway upright.”
“My mother’s name was written before a last name I had never heard at the top of her records (Rickie Lee Jones, Carly Simon, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Nicolette Larson, Bonnie Raitt, JD Souther, Judy Collins)—it was how I found out she was married to another man before my father, whose own collection skipped most music written after 1910 save a pop culture tune in for the Boss (Rachmaninov, Mozart, Saint Saens).
We’d fold the laundry, sing, dance, cry, and fight alongside the record player and the piano. “Last Time I Saw Richard” on Joni Mitchell’s Blue vs. the one on Joni Mitchell’s Miles of Aisles. Musicals—Sound of Music, West Side Story, The Fantasticks. Old standards my grandmother sung. The Scott Joplin rags that my father played. Old time music—my mother’s bluegrass group met weekly, banjos, guitars, harmonies. My brother’s classical guitar playing “Snowflight.” On the radio, at school, there was Lauryn Hill. Dixie Chicks. Usher. Reba McEntire. Ashanti.
Fast forward: being too young to get into R movies, we snuck into The Royal Tenenbaums where Wes Anderson’s soundtrack gifted Nico, Mark Mothersbaugh, The Clash, The Velvet Underground, the Ramones, Elliott Smith, solo John Lennon. People make music that sounds like this?! Very exciting. Trip down 95 to the closest record store—Plan 9—CDs up top, vinyl in the basement, and enough Richmond scene kids to scare the backwoods redneck out of all of us into silence lest some negligent stray drawl betray our black shirts, safety pinned jean shorts, and Chuck Taylors. More discoveries there—Neutral Milk Hotel, Billie Holiday, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, T. Rex, Ella Fitzgerald. I broke up with a boy in part for listening to Green Day. Things were starting to take shape.
North Carolina captured me: I started playing in bands with Casey Toll (Mount Moriah, S. Woods) who very kindly in semi-earnest took me aside and gave me a mix CD of music and said, “I would have been cooler if I knew this music when I was your age.” Ha! He was right.
It was a fantastic gateway drug he slipped me—the Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs. Duke Ellington’s “Fleurette Africaine” with Charles Mingus and Max Roach. Will Oldham. Blonde Redhead. Songs: Ohia. Nina Simone’s “Wild is the Wind.” Silver Jews. Okkervil River’s “Black Sheep Boy.” Okkervil River is actually how I came to Big Star—they covered “O, Dana” on “Overboard & Down,” what I think may be an Australian exclusive EP.
Simultaneously, I lived in a house with five amazing girls—we sat up all night on the porch eating mulberry pie we fixed from the trees in our yard, drinking wine and singing, playing tuned down guitars. Gillian Welch. Neko Case. Dear Joni. Patty Griffin. Lucinda. Cat Power. Emmylou. At the end of Franklin Street sat the late great Chapel Hill version of Raleigh’s Schoolkids. I went there in between classes to buy Kozelek. Polvo. David Bazan. Bill Callahan.
And now, if you’re looking for good vinyl in Carrboro, NC, go to CD Alley, or All Day Records, or Vinyl Perk, or you can go down and visit the angel voiced Josh Moore at the Open Eye Cafe and after he makes you a latte, he just might let you borrow his copy of Jason Molina’s Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go.
Put it on at night. Open the windows. ‘Alone with the owls howling pain pain pain.'”
—Skylar Gudasz
Skylar Gudasz’s 7″ single “Car Song” b/w “Dream Lover” is available for purchase via her Bandcamp page. On vinyl.
Skylar Gudasz joins an illustrious list of musicians (below) for a performance of Big Star’s #1 Record and Third this Saturday (9/27) at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. Tickets for this very special evening are available here.
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