In my early teens I was a dedicated reader of a now-defunct website called absolutepunk.net. It was run by a guy named Jason Tate, and he was the first writer whose musical taste overlapped with mine in a significant way. Before absolutepunk, I'd learned where to find the writers who were at least closer to my taste in the major music magazines -- they were always writing for the beginnings and ends of issues. In all those "in brief" blurbs up front and the record reviews in back, I sensed kinship. Not in the long, fawning profiles of pop stars -- not that there's anything wrong with long, fawning profiles of pop stars, mind you -- it's just that when I stared into those I saw nothing of my own reflected back.
AbsolutePunk was pure mirror. He liked the same bands I liked and many more, and when I looked up those acts I didn't know I always found new music to love. Before long, I trusted Jason Tate implicitly and entirely and I read his website every day.
(Do you remember reading blogs every day? It was a habit I would carry with me from hero to hero. Jason Tate, David Rees, Josh Marshall, Gabe Delahaye. That habit has been broken for me now by the coagulation of the internet, and I'm worse off for it.)
One afternoon, Jason Tate posted about a documentary called I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART. He said that anybody who cared about being in a band or how music was made needed to see this film. Naturally, I sought it out immediately, despite never having heard of the band it featured: Wilco.
(Looking back, I have no idea how I found the documentary. Could it have possibly been at my local video rental store? I would have been in very early high school, and I don't think that even the mailed version of Netflix was yet a going concern. I might have ordered it, though I don't know that I ever owned a real copy. I can't summon the image of the object in my mind. There is a bootleg DVD in a sleeve somewhere that a friend later burned for me after we borrowed it from the Boston Public Library. I've been meaning to track it down.)
I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART documents the process of recording Wilco's 2001 album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The photographer Sam Jones shot it in grainy black and white, capturing the band's studio experimentation and intramember turmoil. Watching it was a transformative experience. It is not an exaggeration to say that it taught me to be creative. This is how I learned everything.
Experimentation as an end and not a means -- that's what Wilco (and Sam Jones) showed me, at a pivotal age. It became, in many ways, my creative guiding light for two decades now. When I create anything -- videos for my YouTube channel, music with my brother, even when writing for work -- I'm always drawing on the same flame. It was maybe always within me, but I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART poured gasoline on it, and showed it where else to spread.
I went out and bought the album right away, and played it for all of my friends, trying to articulate what I felt its sonic landscapes promised. I was in my first band at the time -- I remember showing it to our singer, George, while I was working at an ice cream stand. We sat on the coolers on a slow day and I pointed out the overlapping piano textures in the title track. At the time, the musicianship on display in YHF was so far beyond my reach that I couldn't imagine trying to imitate it directly. Instead, I found myself applying its spirit to video editing--somewhere that I'd already developed some skill. I wanted to visually represent those bursts of percussion and static and abrupt beauty I heard on YHF -- and got better and better at doing so over time.
I could now list the virtues of each track, the unexpected twists and turns, the lyrics that have played on loop in my head since I first heard them ("Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable...") but in the event that you're not familiar with this album, I'd rather you have an unguided experience. Go listen. It's 20 years old, and still sounds like it was recorded in the future.
Sam Jones's documentary is itself urgently worth seeking out and watching -- it's a lighting-in-a-bottle capture of the process of capturing lighting in a bottle. I wish I could know precisely what Jason Tate said to inspire me to seek it out in the first place, but the archives of AbsolutePunk.net seem to be inaccessible now. I can still almost picture the blog post -- the same way I can remember certain passages of books and lines from magazines that struck me so hard in the moment that they never left me.
I'm still so grateful to Jason Tate for pointing me in this direction -- putting me on the path I'm still on now, and will never leave.
