Recently I bought an iPod (well, I acquired an iPod, but I still haven't paid for it). Having an iPod isn't all that cool unless you have things to hear with it (its design has austere charms of its own, but you can only sit and stare at your new technogeegaw for so long before you start to feel sort of pathetic), so I've put together some playlists for it.

I don't know how normal people deal with their MP3 players. I don't have a very firm grasp on how normal people deal with music at all. Normal people don't have to spend a couple hours a week refiling CDs that they've listened to, I imagine. To me, the iPod is a way to create a mixtape that's about a thousand minutes long a side. Jesus. That's a lot of space to fill.

As in many areas of my life, I've been forced to fall back upon Swans.

Most fanatics nurture, deep in their hearts, one or two glowing embers that make up the darkly glowing heart of their obsessions. With some people it's free-market capitalism or the love of a good woman. For me the ember is the stark morning after a party my senior year of high school. A friend of mine, John, had thrown a great party at his house the night before, and I'd stayed up all night talking about politics and relationships in the dark with friends. If I drank, I'd have been hung over, but instead I was really, really tired.

However, I'd agreed to drive my brother and his friends to the nickel arcade that day, so I had to drag my fatigued ass out the door and drive them down to Beaverton to play Street Fighter II. I was way too groggy to even think about trying to deal with video games, so I settled for going to Taco Bell and then spending some time at the Tower Records across the street.

If I were to articulate exactly how I came to acquire the musical tastes I have today, we'd be here all day, into the night, and much of the next week. Someday I'll write a book about it, probably. But somewhere along the line I picked up the idea that Swans were interesting and important, and when I saw a cheap CD in the Swans section, I grabbed it. Like most things from Swans, it arrested the attention, with SWANS printed in large yellow letters across the cover, and in smaller, but similarly stark capitals beneath, FEEL GOOD NOW.

My brother and his friends were likely to be at the arcade for at least a few more hours, and I was dying for sleep, so I drove home and crawled into bed, pausing long enough to put the Swans CD on the stereo. As I lay there, so tired that I couldn't really sleep, I began to realize that maybe I'd made a mistake. The combined effects of lack of sleep and whatever it was that was sludgily oozing out of the speakers was powerful enough a combination to induce nausea. It was loud and ugly, and it sure sounded like the lead singer was exhorting me to do something horrible to myself. It wasn't fast and aggressive, like most of the industrial music I'd been listening to up until that point, it was slow and implacable. It was a live audience recording, and they'd kept the in-between song banter, which featured snippets of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson songs, along with the lead singer belligerently arguing with audience members. There was, however, some weird kind of beauty in the urgent, desperate way that the songs were put together, and it seemed to me even then that its brutality had a point that was lacking from some of the other dark music I was listening to at the time.

I'm sure my friends of the time would much rather I'd never discovered Swans, because for several months thereafter, whenever I drove anywhere, I had a tape that had FEEL GOOD NOW on one side and (Swans side project) skin's THE WORLD OF SKIN on the other. The more I listened to it, the more I heard, and I've never quite been able to lose the part of me that thinks that if I like something enough, my friends will like it too. Now I'm an urban hipster / dork living in a big city with lots of other urban hipsters / dorks, so the odds are better than even that our music tastes will be more or less congruent, but at the time, it was asking an awful lot of people who were mostly into REM and U2.

I've had a long and fruitful relationship with the music of Swans and their two most central members, Jarboe and Michael Gira, since. I have a lot more to say about them then I'm going to try to fit in right now. Their music has helped me make sense of a lot of otherwise nonsensical events in my life, and overall their music has had a healing effect on me. Somewhere in the last ten years, Swans burst apart, and the members went their different ways. Gira has been the most prolific, and in fact he ended up starting his own record label, Young God Records. The playlist on my little iPod is called 'young god'.

Most of the music on Young God Records features that same elusive sense of healing through the transfiguration of pain. It lives, for the most part, in the contemplative space that exists after you've gone through a powerful emotional experience -- either ecstacy or agony, since it's afterwards, it doesn't much matter. The songs don't toy with your emotions, nor are they inert. They engage you, but only if you engage with them first. Songs follow their own leads, progressing organically and incrementally rather than being subjected to an imposed structure -- or at least this is how it most often feels. It conjures up a world where you can survive just about anything if you're strong enough to be honest about your suffering, and aren't going to cop out by claiming that your having suffered somehow makes you a better human being. It tends to make these claims on a grand scale, the musical equivalent of the vast spaces of the Rocky Mountain states, after a thunderstorm has swept through and the wind still has a sharp edge to it.

I'm not that epic a guy, or at least I don't think that epically. I worry less about destroying my soul and abasing myself before a stony and uncaring God (and I drink a WHOLE lot less than Michael Gira, apparently) and more about staying in touch with my friends, carving out a niche for myself where I can make interesting things, and trying to keep my shit from falling apart. Well, and dealing with the fact that someday I'm going to have to die, just like everybody else -- and it's only because we're dealing with Swans and Young God here that I even have to mention such an obvious detail. But when I write songs, I want to bring some small fragment of that clarity and rigor to what I say, to discuss emotions without sentiment. If I can ever come up with lines like "When silence falls / And light remains / And time is born / Beneath the sun / I'll hide your name / Inside a word / And paint your eyes / With false perception" (Blood Promise) I'll be a very happy little doomed soul indeed.