Cassettes Won't Listen

Cassettes Won’t Listen: “Paper Float”

from Small-Time Machine (Cassettes Won’t Listen)

stubborn yesterhaze//Out March 11

(orig. pub. early March 2008)

  A foggy day, but you can tell it’s a day. Which starts with a half-minute or so of strong, buzzy keyboard notes, almost like a harpsichord—settling in, but then: “The mix is lit (or slipped), the fire’s gone, we lost her in the broken storm, how shallow can we get? When every regret costs us a thousand bets!”  That’s how Cassettes Won’t Listen’s first single, “Cutting Balloons,” begins, beyond the irony of its title-- like we’re gonna linger in the present tense awhile, in the process, oh yes, instead of blowing up in your face like that, soon as the blade’s applied. But, as you can see from the lyric, things are in fact moving right along, right through the Big Bang of creation, with practical-minded, self-aware exhortations to mop the damage and keep doin’ the aftermath. Mr. Cassettes (that is, singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist-producer Jason Drake) urges his colleague to remember that “she” is the source of inspiration as well as frustration. He’s here to remind, and point out that, “She don’t understand, she’s like music, gets to you, and we knew! That it’s all the way, she wants to take a ride outta you…” or is it “take the ride”? Either way, really; he can see both sides: his buddy’s lost his ride, his momentum, his inspiration, but she wants to get out of him (out of being his “ride,” indeed--she wants to be free!) But Cassettes Won’t Listen says unto them both, “There’s so much left to do.” Says it to you too, but who’s gonna listen? For instance, you don’t exist---not the immediate “you” in the song, anyway. Cassettes Won’t Listen is talking to himself when he talks to his “colleague,” because CWL is a one-man band.

  Nevertheless, there’s a sense of expansiveness, of release in “Cutting Balloons,” which was recorded in 2004, after “not picking up a mic in years,” like it says on http://www.cassetteswontlisten.com. But Drake also says that he took the name Cassettes Won’t Listen after finding that, no matter what could be tapped and released in the writing and recording of a song, the tape was like “ a bad therapist, who only repeats your problems.” Well, cassettes can’t listen to themselves, anyway, so he mailed the track to a few friends; then it quickly turned up on blogs, even the radio, and so the first Cassettes Won’t Listen EP, Nobody’s Moving, came out in October of 2005, about a year after “Cutting Balloons” started the ball rolling. Studio-rat CWL was even lured into performing live, ricocheting from guitar to keyboards to drums to turntables; he also called on other performers to join in (as guests).

   Cassettes Won’t Listen was further fortified by what he found in some the songs he was then asked to remix; you can check a dozen of them here: http://cassetteswontlisten.com/cwlremixes The CWL method of remixing is to strip a song down to its vocal (without listening to the original version much at all). The challenge is connect , to really listen and hear the singer’s (and writer’s and remixer’s) sense of the song inside the voice, the song inside the song, and to bring it out, by making something new. It’s a way of finding more of his own voice—especially apt is Midlake’s “Young Bride,”whom the narrator sees “moving like an old woman,” strangely bringing winter.

  Which is the underlying theme in Cassettes Won’t Listen’s own EPs  See, it’s not just cassettes that won’t listen, it’s really time, time just keeps rolling along, like tape, like music on tape, preserved and contained, ‘til something goes wrong (Drake also says that a cassettes are people who “get played” because they don’t listen, don’t take warning signs to heart).   On a set of covers, One Alternative (available as a free download on the CWL site), CWL rolls and tumbles through the chutes and ladders of Pavement’s excitable, boyish “Cut Your Hair,” followed by the horny jade of Butter 08’s “Butter Of 69,” then wakes up in the boo-hoo boo-dwah of Liz Phair’s “Fuck And Run,” of all things;  he then repents of such self-pitying delusions with every slice of Sebadoh’s  “The Freed Pig”. The better to take self-pity to a self-wake: “Now you will be free, with no sick people tugging at your sleeve, your big bed has more room to move—a glory I will never know.” So what better conflicted inspirational message to end with, than a revelatory resurrection of Blind Melon’s “Change.” RIP Shannon Hoon…CWL’s voice can’t fly as high as that junkie angel’s, but his crusty-to-pillowy, tape-y sounds will surround and carry him through all eventualities, as usual, on his March 2008 EP, Small-Time Machine.

  “Wish we all, could freeze, and explode, “ he chirps, like the Beach Boys on their Christmas album; he seems nice and nasty (nicety), recalling the pragmatic popological aspect of “Cutting Balloons.” No doubt it’s occurred to him that “Freeze And Explode, “ like several of his older tracks, would probably look really cool on video. Cassettes Won’t Listen’s expertly crinkled imagery of sound and vision twine around the hoodie-wearing implication that the “control” he sometimes sings about regaining (someday), so as not to be passive like a cassette, is really based on timing, on listening carefully, and playing your part in and on that “Large Radio.”

  The same thing that keeps you in there keeps you rolling (can’t have no dead air on the radio, you know), and so our featured track “Paper Float,” doesn’t sound too freaked out about the ongoing (gradual) process of sinking: “We barely had time to set it right,” but they did, and the “they” sounds real enough,because (though they’re reedy, overdubbed harmonies) they sound steadfast enough, and warm enough, despite some shivering (”Up all night to watch the paper sink, will the captain put down his last drink”), because they  try to stay active enough: “Our arms together we try to row, singing whoah!  Oh, oh, oh, oh! Crack a smile and let each other know…you know I know…” And sometimes that’s enough, even though “I only see you smile.” Some kind of code, h’mm; better watch those folks. But it’s clear enough that the good and the bad, the glad and the sad are still together; the tape hasn’t broken yet (everything’s getting transferred) .