My elder brother, Rhett (1972-2005), was a musical prodigy who explored and experimented with music from pre-school until his untimely death from blood clots in his lungs at the ridiculously young age of 32. I grew up in his musical shadow and I constantly wonder what songs he would be making today if he was still here to make them.
I will be first to admit that although I loved my brother fiercely, I did not always understand him or where he was going with his music. For almost 20 years he and I formed the core of the experimental art-rock band The Lavone (which rhymes with “the phone” not “the fawn” in case you are wondering) and in that time we recorded 16 albums worth of lo-fi indie weirdo music that, it nothing else, amused the two of us immensely. Rhett and I often worked in a sort of alone/together process. We would independently write songs, sometimes more fully formed than others, and we would bring them to each other for completion and elucidation. I would usually take a guitar, figure out a few chords, write some lyrics, and bring the idea to Rhett who would fill in the drums and the rest of the production. Rhett usually worked in a more, shall we say, oblique way. Rhett would have the whole song in his head and would come to me and attempt, in vain, to get me to hear it too. He would play one or two chords, usually chords involving more fingers than it seemed he ought to have, and he would hum or sing a line or two, and then he would paint a verbal picture of the rest of what he was hearing and I would smile and nod and wait for the core of the recording to appear from one of his solo sessions on 4-track. Then he would play me the fleshed-out version and say “See!” and I would be completely incapable of connecting the thing I was hearing with the two chords I had heard a week previous but I would always be astonished.
Sadly for Rhett, he spent most of his musical life trying to stuff 48-track musical ideas into 4-track recording technology. Many of his recordings sound muddled and muffled, not because he intended them to, but because he had to bounce down so many tracks onto so many generations of tape in order to fit all the parts in his head on to the recording. He only spent the last 6 years of his life with access to modern digital audio workstation technologies and some of what he did with that freedom still gives me chills and I am one of the few people (perhaps the only one) who can hear his earlier recordings on tape while simultaneously hearing his full-color vision in my mind because, well, I was on the inside of his process.
It was recently suggested to me that I should create a curated playlist with commentary for the world and the idea appealed to me (although this is clearly not what Scott had in mind) so I have set myself the challenge of putting together 7 songs that highlight, for me, the things that made my brother’s music so powerful and influential in my life. Why 7? I don’t know. Seemed like a good choice for an arbitrary number. Are these his best songs? I don’t know. But they are songs that I have returned to over and over and over again for many many years.
