My drawings used to depend on trees when I started sketching.
If I started drawing, say, a table leg and the line was at an angle, distorting the perspective, I'd sometimes turn that table leg into a small tree. It works surprisingly well and I ran a website for a while called What a Tree-t!, and it featured drawings I'd made with trees placed in drawings in awkward locations yet they did not distort perspective. I loved that site but when my drawing skill improved, the trees disappeared.
As I've drawn more music cards, small flying creatures like birds and bats have become conceptually equivalent to trees.
There's no good reason that, for example, there's a bird on Vampire Weekend's Father of the Bride, or a bat on Stephen Malkmus' Traditional Techniques other than I like birds and bats. Other than I wasn't sure what else to draw. And I generally like birds and bats.
The thing I like most about the Vamprie Weekend album are the associations I have with it are around Christmas 2019, when we visited my wife's family and listened to this album, especially the first few songs, while driving along the snowy streets between her parents' and her brother's homes. I remember it with Christmas lights, plastic snowmen and a trip to an outlet mall, where I stocked up on black jeans at a Levi's store and I overheard a couple of the men in their 20s who worked there spoke.
"What are you listening to now?" one said.
"I love Vampire Weekend," the other said. "I guess that means I'm old."
"Yeah," one said, then walked off, towards the store's storage area.
"What do you mean?" I said to the one who was still nearby. "I listen to Vampire Weekend a lot, especially on this visit."
"Yeah, I used to listen to a lot more punky songs," he said. "And hip-hop. Vampire Weekend is different. Also, you and I like the same music. I'm old and so therefore as it is, you're old."
"But by that logic, if a three-year-old sings a song and they really like it and their grandparent likes it and I do, too, does that make the child old?" I said.
"Yes," he said. "We're all old, more or less, just moving closer and closer, one step at a time or one pair of jeans at a time to eternity."
"But doesn't that mean that any music, in one way or another, old?" I said. "If my grandmother likes, say 100 Gecs, does that mean all of the teenagers who like them are old, too? Also, do you have any of these jeans in black?"
They didn't have the jeans in black. The conversation sort of tailed off after that, and we were both left unsure of what makes music old or the people who listen to it old or not. In any case, Father of the Bride and Traditional Techniques are excellent albums.
