Greg Weeks
This weekend Dylan showed me the Adidas Adicolor animation for "Pink", which is really great. Adidas commissioned 6 animators to create shorts inspired by 7 colors: pink, white, black, blue, green, red, and yellow. So far I believe white is the only other one that is completed. These animations are supposed to promote Adidas's Adicolor sneakers, which are basically white sneakers you get to color with markers! Whoopie! The novelty! I like that so many mainstream companies have been looking to animation lately, because I think, and I'm sure you will agree, the advertising market can always use a quality boost, and the Pink animation is great, but it sure as heck doesn't make me want to buy sneakers I can color on. (and if i did, I'm pretty sure I'd get some white sneakers at Payless for $10 and a couple of sharpies rather than shell out the $75 clams for the name brand.) (Note: The image you see at the right is some sort of delux set that does not represent the dopey marker set I'm talking about. I just think this image is ridiculous and this set isn't even for sale yet but if it ever is it will probably cost about a swillion dollars and boy I find it obnoxious.)
Anyway! I digress. This post isn't supposed to be sneakers. It's about a musician, and his name is Greg Weeks. Learn it. Love it.
Greg Weeks did the song called "Made" on the "Pink" (there's that link again! Go watch it!) animation. It's haunting. It's pretty. It made me buy his two albums on iTunes immediately (and I can't remember the last time I was so impatient to listen to an artist that I would sooner pay for it than download it...eh, he deserves my money anyway.) The first album I aquired was Awake Like Sleep (2001). The sound of a harmonium and the hums of ancient keyboards paired with his delicately fingerpicked guitar are enough to make me think of an eerie old abandoned church on a foreboding day or graveyard up on a hill with an angry sea crashing against the cliff. It sounds alien, but baroque. It sounds like 60's art rock, yet like old timey folk. It's at one moment comfortably bare, and at the next heavily melodically fourished. And above all of this is his voice. What I love about this album the most is the way his voice, not overworked, but simple and seemingly without effort, blends in with the ever changing instrumentation. It's not about his voice. He is accompanying the music, and not the other way around. And because of this, his inconspicuous mournful tenor is all the more heartbreaking.
His newer album Blood is Trouble (2005), has a similar feeling, but I find a little more mainstream. It is a little less unearthly and a little more melancholy. His vocals are bolder and the lyrics, for the most part, are about the limitations of our physical and spiritual bodies. Now, this might be a long shot, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this inspiration comes from his own personal affliction. He suffers from debilitating tendonitis and carpel tunnel inflammations that make playing his many an instrument agonizing. I can't help but wonder if this gives the music something extra, if somewhere inside the listener can sense that the strum of every chord is pained. His voice and his guitar seem to breathe together.
You may also know Greg Weeks from 2004's debut with his acid-folk group Espers, who I am also a fan of. Espers is equally haunting, although for me a bit lacking in the antiquated sound makes Week's solo stuff so unique.
Awake Like Sleep has been playing on repeat pretty much since I got it.