“Feel to Believe” – Beth Orton
(Words/music: Beth Orton, appears on Central Reservation, Arista Records 1999)

Today’s post goes out in tribute to Freaky Trigger’s 10th Anniversary.  I offer the shout out at the beginning of the post for two reasons.  First, I hold FT’s Tom Ewing in high regard and consider him one of my favorite writers and critics today.  His Poptimist columns for Pitchfork are among my favorite pieces of criticism and always make me look back at my own taste as a consumer of culture.  Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank Tom for linking to me, as I’m sure there’s a considerable amount of you who would not be reading me otherwise.  (Also, I hope Tom isn’t bothered by having a Beth Orton song “dedicated” to him!)  Additionally, as part of FT’s retrospective, Tom linked to his first entry – a “mission statement” of sorts that certainly dovetails with my own philosophy as a critic and still applies a decade later.  This is fortuitous because I’ve been planning on using tomorrow’s Some Songs Considered post to write about my philosophy of music (at least in how it applies to this blog).  Reading Tom’s first post and then thinking of a song that served as important to my taste in 1999 (I was 16 in ’99, for the record) gives me the opportunity to give a bit of a preview to tomorrow’s post.

Today, I consider my taste fairly broad; I’m not as versed in the “poptimist” label as I should be, but I imagine that I would have more in common with them than not.  The first two axioms in his “Triggerism” post – “there’s a stunning amount of worthwhile music out there” and “music isn’t confined by time or genre” – are statements I couldn’t have put better myself.  Even looking at the (somewhat odd) collection of songs so far this past month and realizing that this is only scratching the surface of my music collection reinforces my broad tastes.  I find that in different eras and different musical movements, there are worthwhile songs and worthless songs, and that the best songs transcend genre, era, and circumstances. 

Still, I haven’t always felt this way.

When I first got into music (relatively late, for I didn’t listen to music until the summer before my freshman year of high school), I was a strict rockist – it could be the angry alternative rock of the late 90s or the crushing classic rock of the 70s, but if it wasn’t played with guitars, I wanted no part of it.  This meant marginalizing a lot of wonderful music that I’m still catching up on.  To a degree, I think this is a natural evolution of taste – once we find something that speaks to us (whether it really resonates with us or we just want it to because it’s what we have access to – that’s an entirely separate debate) we take it and run with it.  Throw in the uncertainty of teenage years and many of us look for anything we can identify with (or, alternately, define ourselves by) while everything else is in flux.  For me, it took until sometime in college (and going through the punk rock rabbit hole) before I could start to embrace things outside of my “expertise.”

That’s not to say there weren’t a few cracks into my rock and roll armor.  Somehow, in 1999, Beth Orton’s Central Reservation album found me.  It was probably hearing the kind of guitar driven single “Stolen Car” on 120 Minutes that led me to the album, but the rest of her songs run the gamut from jazzy ballads to naked confessional folk to hazy, spaced-out electronic pieces.  It certainly was not like the Foo Fighters (one of my favorite bands at the time), but I loved it.  I used to listen to this album on repeat all the time when I wanted to hear something different (because one man can only listen to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged so many times).  Could I resolve it with the other louder records?  Well, maybe with something like R.E.M., but at least R.E.M. had their “rock” moments (I also, quite accidentally and only in retrospect, found that this album brought me much more interaction with girls.  Unfortunately, I was too awkward and clueless to capitalize on that).  Still, it became part of my taste; Central Reservation proudly sat in my CD wallet with my Led Zeppelin and Rancid CDs, and I proudly defended it when my fellow rockist friends asked me why I owned something so “wussy” (an issue I ran into when I wrote music reviews for my high school paper and included a couple of less popular “pop” albums that I thought the high school audience at large would enjoy in 2001).

So, what exactly was it about this album that spoke to me.  Well, thinking back, I know I was drawn in by Beth Orton’s unique voice, and the whole thing didn’t quite sound like any singer-songwriter I knew at the time (again, I was fairly sheltered – the internet was in its infancy and most of my knowledge of anything that wasn’t on the radio came from reading magazines and books).  Above all, I’d like to think that it was the power of these well-written, well-performed songs that transcended genre.  Today, “Feel to Believe” stands out to me as one of the less ordained songs.  There are no late ‘90s electronic flourishes or strings or jazz brushes on snare drums to adorn the song – just Orton and her guitar.  It’s the kind of simplicity that seems like the kind of thing I could pull off only to realize that it takes a tremendous amount of talent to sound that effortless.  Listening to it again today, I’m taken by a moment about halfway through the song when Orton’s voice distorts slightly during the phrase, “each have got their own limit.”  Like on the last Kanye West album, it’s distortion as a signifier of emotional expression; however, while Kanye turned to technology to achieve these moments of distorted catharsis, Orton’s is a product of (what appears to be) technological limits as the microphone can’t contain the full weight of her voice.  It’s a fitting moment on Central Reservation, an album that uses a lot of late ‘90s technological aid well, that the most emotionally powerful moment comes as a result of a technological hiccup.

So tonight I’m raising my coffee to Freaky Trigger, wishing it another decade of success while wishing that I knew about it ten years ago when I needed to realize that there’s a lot more to music than three chords and some distortion.

More on Beth Orton: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm