Hey dudes- thanks for tuning in for this week’s edition of “What’s On Megan’s Desk?” Each week we dive deeper and deeper into the abyss of despair and weirdly labeled canned foods that is Interim Music Editor Megan Seling’s desk, and we grab onto something and hold tight while we pedal towards the light at the end of the tunnel.

Good lord, it’s a heavy experience. It’s like a Scottish Funeral Dirge combined with pure eau de Richard Simmons.

Anyhow, what did we grab?

A CD by local band Vanilla!

I love when a band looks at all of its members’ skin tones and picks a band name based on that.

I have a really structured way of looking through a new album, and that involves looking at the liner notes as I am listening to the first song. I am usually looking for pretty pictures. In this album, there aren’t really many of those. There are a lot of words instead. Every song’s lyrics are printed, along with the full names of everyone who played on every track, even if they are members of the standard band. Then there are the thank-yous, and then there is the unexpected bit-the “Song Notes”.

In “Song Notes” the supposed creative genius behind this album gives a paragraph long synopsis about what each song is supposed to be about. Some of them are dumb:

Pure nonsense about a malicious bird. I based the title on the cover of an old record I saw aimed at teaching parakeets the fundamentals of proper human speech. The image of that record is only a Google search away.

Some are dumber:

New Year’s Day, 2000 was supposed to be something spectacular. The banks were to fail, the computers[sic] systems were set to collapse, and all of the end-of-the-century millenial fears were supposed to materialize. Instead, it was a quiet morning in Tacoma, WA, and as I sat in my little sun room running through chord progressions.[sic] I recalled a poem by Thomas Hardy about the change of the last century…

There is an idea in perfomance that you never want the audience to know too much- if they know how you cut the woman in half, the romance is ruined. This idea is very much alive and well in song lyrics. I really would not like to know the incredibly mundane middle class circumstances under which you write your music, Vanilla.

I have seen Song Notes in one other set of liner notes–The Best Of Leonard Cohen. They were interesting there because Leonard Cohen was having sex with Marianne Faithfull and living in the Chelsea Hotel and shooting up heroin and also his music is way better than anything Vanilla or most anyone will ever be able to pull off. But generally, please do not tell me about your imaginary backtalking bird.

Also- the music was pretty boring lounge-type pop with lots of weird samples.

Thanks for tuning in to this week’s edition of “What’s On Megan’s Desk!”