Joel Mathis

My mother would have turned 70 years old today. Spending the evening listening to one of her old albums.

A few years ago, when we were leaving Philadelphia to return to Lawrence, I did something that still hurts today: I gave away almost the entirety of my CD collection, which I'd spent decades building. There was a rational reason for this -- we had very limited room in the "cube" that was going on the moving truck, and had to make a lot of snap decisions about what had to go and what we'd keep.  I've spent the last couple of years buying albums I'd already bought 15 or 20 years ago, that I've missed. This week, I got a package in the mail from eBay: REM's "Automatic for the People." I'm listening to it now. It remains beautiful and dirgelike, in the best way. Event the peppier songs, like "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" can't dent the overall effect of the album, which puts me in an almost-meditative state. The killer track on the album, though, is "Everybody Hurts" -- a universal anthem if ever there was one. The vi

 I'd never heard this song before this weekend. Now I love it.

 One of my favorite songs ever.

  It's kind of embarrassing to admit now, but my first extended exposure to New Orleans-style brass band music came ... via a bunch of white guys from Madison, Wisconsin. During my early days in Lawrence, I made friends with a guy named Joe -- a little older than I was, a lot more hip, and fun to hang around. One evening after work we went and got dinner, then walked around Massachusetts Street looking for something to do. We walked by the Jazzhaus, saw a group called the "Youngblood Brass Band" was playing, and decided why not? The cover charge was something like $3 -- maybe a little more, but not vastly more. These were the aforementioned white guys from Madison, Wisconsin. The tuba player was particularly talented, using his giant horn to spin out turntable-style sounds while the snare drummer doubled as the band's MC. And what can I say? I'd heard brass band music before -- I'd gotten to see the Dirty Dozen brass band play maybe three songs a few years bef

I'm going to make this an occasional series , I think, about whatever album I happen to be listening to when the mood strikes. I can't really write about music -- it's like dancing about math -- but I can describe how music intersected with my life and made me feel, so that's what I'll do. It's my blog! Would love to hear your own experiences with the artists I mention. 

  I never quite made my life match up to getting the full Sharon Jones experience. My friend Josh Powers told me about her back in the mid-aughts, had been to a couple of her shows in Lawrence, Kansas and said they were amazing. I found my to to one of her albums and could not believe her albums had been made during this century. When the time came that she visited Lawrence again, my wife and I got tickets. But Jo was pregnant, battling pretty severe morning sickness that lasted all day long. We made an attempt to go to and enjoy the show -- I remember Jones was wearing a skimpy dress, and worked the stage hard, shimmying and shaking all over the stage, and even then I knew I'd never have that much energy again -- but Jo was miserably ill, so we left after a half-dozen songs or so. I remember being cranky that Amy Winehouse got famous using Jones' backup band. There was one other opportunity to listen to Sharon Jones for me. It was Philly, 2011, and we were broke and barely emp

I first really encountered Lou Reed in high school, about the time he released the "New York" album. A friend -- a Spanish exchange student -- lent me the cassette tape, so I took home and listened on my miniature boom box (known at the time, somewhat egregiously, as a "ghetto blaster" because we didn't quite realize how racist that was) and decided the album wasn't really for me. But Reed's use of the term "Statue of Bigotry" in the song "Dirty Boulevard" stuck in my head for years after. (Actually, I didn't know it at the time, but my FIRST first encounter with Reed was the Honda scooter commercial in 1985 that used "Walk on the Wild Side," which is a really weird song for a commercial.)  I gave Lou a second chance in the late 1990s, thanks to the BMG music club -- and discovered I really loved his 70s stuff . (For music snobs of a certain age, "best of" compilations are thought of as belonging to the newbs

The first album I was ever intimate with was U2's "Rattle and Hum." By intimate, I don't mean "liked" or "loved." What I mean is this: The cassette tape was a constant presence in my stereo for the better part of a year in the late 1980s. I played it in the car, I played it in my room, I played it over and over and over again, singing along with — emulating — Bono's wails and snarls over and over again so much that even now, 30 years later, I can still perform much of the album if it suddenly appears on a sound system within earshot. Like Bono, I no longer hit the high notes quite so effortlessly, and the Gospel version of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" resonates now, in my forties, in ways it didn't when I was a teenager. But still. It may seem odd that "Rattle and Hum" inspired this passion in me; it was U2's prior album, "The Joshua Tree," that launched the band into the pan

Walking in my neighborhood, after dark. It's not lit as well as my old Philadelphia city block — I probably need to buy reflective shoes or something. The app on my phone tells me I have 2,000 steps to go to make my daily goal, so I keep walking, keep walking, keep walking past my house and my path occasionally lit by the occasional street lamp. Holst's "Venus: Bringer of Peace" is on my headphones. Above, through breaks in the clouds, I can see a star or two — the benefit of reduced light pollution. The darkness and the music go together; I feel like I'm creating or experiencing my own private segment of Walt Disney's "Fantasia" as I move through the neighborhood. For a moment, the real world and the digital world playing in my head merge. Everything flows. And then the music ends.