#365songs (82 / 365)

Following up on yesterday's entry, a story-song triptych from the album of ambitious and loosely connected story-songs that got me into that kinda shit. Blueberry Boat is another one of those albums that I think of as pivotal in the development in my musical taste, though I don't listen to it that much anymore. I don't listen to it anymore because (a) it's honestly a lot and (b) I honestly pretty much memorized the whole goddamn thing.

This is another album that, when I heard it, I was like "oh, you can just do that?" Mostly this feeling was about mashing together several unrelated songs into one cool long one. But it was also about stuff like whatever's going on in the first of those mashed-together songs in "Chief Inspector Blancheflower." It's like, a synth set to play random notes? Not even random in a specific key. Fully random notes. You can just do that? (I do have this part memorized even though it's random notes.) And then later a different synth comes in, also playing random notes but in a different register, and at a slightly different tempo. You can just fucking do that? How is this a song? Why do I like it?

Well, at about three minutes in, that's for sure a song. Suddenly. Man, I wish I could listen to this song again for the first time again. And then, like, the fifth time again. Because that's about when you start asking questions like: is the kid in the first section really the inspector in the second section? What does the third section with the fratricide have to do with this, is the inspector inspecting them? Did this guy seriously kill his brother for dating his ex? Speaking of which, this song also has a moment I love. I don't even want to spoil it. It's the first thing Michael says.

Anyway, if you've listened to this song five times, the next thing you know is that you're looking up detailed exegeses trying to stitch together the entirety of Blueberry Boat into a single semi-coherent story. At least, that's what happens if you're me in like 2006 and the number of times you've listened to Blueberry Boat is more like in the high double digits. I'm up past my bedtime writing this, can you tell?