Todd Swift on Simple Minds

 

Simple Minds were the band that moved me most as a teenager. I remember discovering them in 1982 or so— albums like Sister Feelings Call, Sons and Fascination, and then their masterpiece, New Gold Dream, seemed to reflect, for me, what it was to be young at a golden time. Their early work— before the commercial success of the second half of the 80s, post Don’t You (Forget About Me), their number one American hit— was both strident and exalted, purposeful and transcendent— in other words, very Scottish Protestant (half my roots).

Songs like 70 Cities as Love Brings the Fall, Wonderful In Young Life, Careful In Career, The American, and of course Love Song were, to me, the epitome of poetry— shimmering, cosmopolitan, political, anti-empire, and yet sexy— Jim Kerr’s voice flaunted a kind of arch-dandyism. I still think their work from twenty to twenty-five years ago matches and sometimes betters the work of U2 from that time, and, with Echo & the Bunnymen, The Cure, and a few others, are the great New Wavers (you could add Depeche Mode and Duran Duran and Tears For Fears). Simple Minds were crypto-Christians, at a time when I enjoyed reading German theology in translation (Letters From Prison being my favorite), and I somehow managed to convince myself that they were singing just for me. This was when the spring came like thunder and ice cracked just like that and suddenly it wasn’t colder than Siberia, so all life was good and strange and hard then.

From a 2005 interview with Todd Swift on Art Recess 2

Everything Reminds Me Of Her

The bizarre journey of discovery towards the summer 2026 re-release of What Needs No Myth in Eratio I've already told elsewhere. The journey starts at Personal Mythologies II at KWH in 2003. Elliott Smith's life ended in 2003. Elliott Smith was a singer-songwriter from the Pacific-Northwest who lit up the Nineties into the early Aughts with a series of highly melodic, if melancholy, records. Everything Remind Me of Her, from Figure 8 from 2000, hits a note not far from Alex and Third/Sister Lovers. Musically detailed enough to satisfy purists, Elliott Smith was big enough to be a sizable cult star by the time of his 2003 suicide. Over twenty-three years, the records he made seem to be lost in the shuffle. All the records from the early Aughts- remember Conor Oberst? Jack White? Stephen Merritt?- have that quality now. The point of bringing up Elliott Smith is to do a Time Warp back to 2003, and announce that yes, like it or not, the Bush administration were just as hated as the Trump administration is now. Bush was NOT okay with everybody. The Elliott Smith records were heard by Mary and Abby and everyone in my circle. They, especially Figure 8, do a wash over my memories of Logan Square at the time, and color them. So, when we got home from KWH on September 20, 2003, this is a record we might've put on. And mourned, also, that the difference between the mythology of what the rock biz is supposed to be and what the rock biz actually is, is what killed Elliott Smith. The records themselves needed no myth. The music was there, and still is. 

Badlands

Big statements are a big deal. It's something I just said, in Poets and Prophecy. Or, rather, I said it on September 20, 2003, and it's just seeing the light of day now. But that's part of the point. It's big to understand what time means around culture, and to understand that real culture takes real time to see the light of day. And Poets and Prophecy seeing the light of day made me think about rock, and what the moments are in rock that have in-built real bigness, real largesse. I often do say that Springsteen is my favorite lyricist in rock music, for the simple reason that, for my money, he's the best at making the Big Statements that will hold up the best over long periods of time, starting from the East Coast. Badlands is a case in point. I'm not going to say too much about where America is in 2026. Except to say that it's an awfully strange time, ensconced in a strange decade. Badlands is strange, too, because the lyrics express stern resolve, but the music expresses triumphant release. The narrator is getting something big off his chest, that has needed saying for a long time. He doesn't mince words; he gets directly to the point swiftly. Where we find ourself is in the big terrain in which an individual looks at the whole of human life and earth and lays down his own set of laws. Here's how things are. Not, of course, what we want things to be. And all the steely resolve is just about telling the truth, being real. Sounds simple, but it's not. That's one reason to put some chips down on Badlands to last a long time. The other is that the sound of triumphant release, of truth springing forward, never gets old. Time will tell us. 

Love Reign O'er Me

Because it took me a number of years to piece together what became Frequencies, it was a slow build-up to understand that, in Frequencies, I might have something extraordinary. The night, in the summer of 2005, was hot and black as ink, indeed. So much was to come from what happened that night, in so many directions, some straightforward, some bizarre, that I thought only The Who in full flight could do it justice. The Who, who emerge, over a long period of time, for many of us, as the undisputed champions of rock. You play this kind of music, you don't beat The Who. So much of what seems big in popular culture is just regional in the end. Understand the map, understand The Who. And back to New Hampshire, and a piece at least partially steeped in sex and sexuality, which The Who tend not to be. Just as there is no critique which can do justice to the transcendental sturm und drang of Roger Daltrey at Live Aid, how many ways the different crescendos which built up both Mary and I as individuals in the world can hardly be counted. In the end, all of it will only matter to people who care about writing and books. The Who do, indeed, reach more people. It's also arguable that if you don't know Parts of a Story, you cannot understand this story, either. But the most special reason to pimp out a Who Live Aid video, is just to say, as I do not often say, that here's something I've done that really is itself, special, and deserves special regard. The sweat of lovers. It was dramatic that this happened, and if Frequencies doesn't announce itself in a dramatic, Who-crescendo sort of way, then I did something wrong. The ricochet inheres— 1985 to 2005, then unevenly up to 2026. The sense of the uneven there is blessed. Something a priori built into the universe, and art at its best. And rock. 

Ardent EP re-pub

That our Philly scene was no stranger to Brett Anderson and the London Suede— that's one subtext of the Matt Stevenson-created Ardent cover. Mary was in on that too, without knowing it. So, here 'tis— the re-pubbed seven-song Ardent EP, un-stunted rock from the bowels of South Philadelphia. Shake off the jinx, let in the minx.

Bullett
El Goodo
Brown Eyes Like His
Ardent
Fortis Green
Streetlakes
4 Elliott

Mix Upload: Third/Sister Lovers

Feel (I saw) remix: Eris Temple lore

In 2008, Natalie Weyes Blood performed at the Eris Temple, where I'd recorded Feel.