“I think one of the funniest things about obtaining vinyl is the sheer number of albums in my not-that-big collection that I have NEVER actually listened to!”
“You can wear out the B-side to Abbey Road or only ever play “More Than a Feeling” (the first song and lead single off Boston’s self-titled debut). You can own The Collected Broadcasts of Ugandan Dictator Idi Amin and not drop the needle on it for TEN YEARS only to find out that it is a parody album by a British comedian and pretty (totally) racist by 21st Century standards.
You get attached to things that come by at certain times in your life when you need them, sometimes when you didn’t even know it. The National’s Boxer is probably one of the most frequently played records in my collection, but it’s the one-two punch of “Pink Rabbits” and “Hard to Find” that close out 2013’s Trouble Will Find Me that brings me immediately back to a period of crying relentlessly in the shower at the mystifying and devastating beauty of those two songs.
Maybe it was the break up. I don’t think so, though, because songs also constantly take on new meaning as time moves on, for me anyway. We grow from younger to older and things that were once so simple gather complexity in our heads. That’s just the way it is, things will never be the same / Some things will never change.
What WILL change (sorry) is the direction here. When asked to speak about my first vinyl experience, I always come back to Robin Hood, the soundtrack to Disney’s version of the story of Robin Hood, narrated by the country singer-songwriter Roger Miller, to be exact. The flagship songs were all written and sung by Miller, and the effect has been lingering since I was probably three or so years old.
I was pretty obsessed with the movie as a young child, and I think it really resonated with my mom and dad as well, and they got a copy of the record. To this day, when my dad is fixing something in his workshop or doing yardwork or gardening, I’ll hear him whistle the main theme of the soundtrack, literally called “Whistle-Stop.” It’s honestly one of the catchiest songs I’ve ever heard, and it doesn’t even have any fucking words. It’s just Roger Miller with an acoustic guitar whistling, or making a fake mouth-trumpet sound riffing on the same theme, and in between verses he bonks the top of his guitar a couple of times to signal “Hey you. This is a real guy standing here off the top of this Disney movie all by himself, playing in place of an entire orchestra.” I think that’s a pretty raw idea.
Interestingly enough, a large portion of the plot concerns political music. During a celebration in Sherwood forest, the characters all party down together and sing a song that describes the main antagonist as “Prince John the Phony King of England” (a song written by Johnny Mercer, a man who wrote some tune called “Jeepers Creepers” and co-founded a little label called Capitol Records).
When Prince John hears it, he’s pissed, and responds by tripling their taxes and throwing pretty much everyone in town in jail. It’s a response to persecution of artistic expression that drives Robin and his pal Little John to relieve the Prince of all his money and free the prisoners. I’m sure I wasn’t totally registering the notion that music has the power to enact change in my jammies in the basement with my headphones, but it’s fun to think about.
There are other fantastic songs on the soundtrack, ones I think about or hum all the time. The most popular is probably the ever singable “Oo-de-Lally” by Miller, and a song that our band bonded over almost immediately “Not in Nottingham.” It goes over great at a campfire and people basically think you wrote it until you sing the word Nottingham and they’re like “ooooooooh yeah…….”
A final point, maybe slightly more about the film than the music: production fell so far behind because Disney took so long to select voice actors. The animators were forced to re-use and jumble together animation cells from previous movies including Snow White, The Jungle Book, and The Aristocats, in order to create different sequences for Robin Hood, especially scenes where lots of characters are dancing or moving around together. I’m not saying the artists working on this kids movie invented sampling or anything—but I’m pretty sure 89% of music being created today is made by using this exact same technique. Fun!”
—Dean Povinsky
Take The Light With You, the new full-length release from Wildlife is in stores now—on vinyl.
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PHOTO: NICK GREAVES
