Look at OKC launches new music column, Headphonetics

Plug in and listen deeply as Matt Carney expounds on music to mull over
BY MATT CARNEY For The Oklahoman Published: June 20, 2012

Side One. Intro. Side A. Track one. Overture. I guess that last one's phased out since Phil Spector started recording “little symphonies for kids” on multitracks.

In other words, first things first! My name's Matt, and I'm honored to be here writing this column for you. I'm just as sad as you are that Nathan Poppe's Live Nathan column reached its end, but if you know Poppe like I do then you're sleeping well. Aside from becoming Andrew W.K.'s intern, his lifelong mission's been to champion Oklahoma music, and that'll continue on in video form with his enormously popular video series, The VDub Sessions (I'll never forget helping Poppe run sound for a performance by Brooklyn dudes Milagres when a car drove right past us on the one-way Gray St. in Norman. Consummate professionals, they didn't bat an eye ‘til they finished the song.)

Once upon a time Poppe and I were 14-year-olds snickering over Tenacious D lyrics in the back row of our high school debate class. Seven years and a performance by The Kills at Austin City Limits later we summer-interned in The Oklahoman's features department. There George Lang encouraged our budding enthusiasm for reporting on the arts, both locally produced and imported from elsewhere. We're both indebted to him for that (and for giving us access to loads of shows in The Oke's name), and I'm delighted he entrusted me with this space in his publication — which I've dubbed Headphonetics— to mull music over.

Lang gave me a few weeks to ponder what I could do with the column. I knew I couldn't duplicate the heroic effort Popped focused into the local scene, as listening to music's always been a more personal act for me; hence the headphones. My words make more sense in a Word document than when they're coming out my mouth. I need time and distance to sort through them — and my thoughts and feelings, by extension.

So here with this column I'm going to pose a different question I stumble across every two weeks and try my best to answer it with 400 or so words. In doing so, I hope to articulate the feelings people experience when they invest so deeply in a work of recorded art that they actually grow to love them like they're another person.

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