Ok, so I know this is supposed to be a “Seattle Music Blog”, but there has been little in the way of Seattle music today, so I guess I’m going to go back in time a little bit.

You know how there’s those records that just can’t get away from you? They might have been something you burned back in ’02 at your friends house, or something you bought the DAY it came out and HAD to have it but NEVER really listened to it a year after you bought it. For me, today’s record came to me in a very roundabout way.

As a youth, I had this brilliant scheme planned where I would head over to our local library, look for/order CD’s that I wanted to listen to/looked like they might be sweet, and then take them home and burn them onto my computer. Pretty smart, huh? 14 year-old me felt like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas until I ordered about 15 CD’s and went on vacation for 2 weeks without returning them, then I essentially paid the price of all of them in late fees. Karma’s a b*tch, right?

One library caper in particular, must have been around 2003-4, I stumbled upon this CD that looked so “artsy” that I had to at least grab it and figure out what it was. It was American Football’s self-titled 1999 release. This post-rock/emo outfit is associated with other  acts like Joan of Arc, Tiger’s Jaw, Cap’n Jazz, etc… 14 year old me didn’t know what to think. I though Emo was Hawthorne Heights and Taking Back Sunday, not laid back math-rock with trumpets! It was the same summer, however, that I got a real knowledge of what emo could be I discovered Sunny Day Real Estate that summer too. 

Thus started the spiral into Emo. That summer and the subsequent years up until about 2006-7 I was engulfed in the likes of SDRE, Brand New, TBS, etc. and just this one American Football record.  they had an EP too, but the self-titled record just kept hanging around. I wasn’t going to be able to see a show of theirs, but this record just hung around  until one day I just didn’t hear it anymore. It wasn’t on a mix, the CD no longer in my car, the files on a burned up computer at my parents house.

But lo, last year for some reason it just popped back into my head. I looked it up on Spotify and by the time I hit play, I was right back in 2005. Its funny how you never forget how a record goes when it means a lot to you. I’ve got a relationship with this record. We’ve got a history. It’s not a collection of 9 tracks to me, its one track. That sounds silly, but it’s true. If you haven’t listened to it before, check it out. It’s just one of those.