As I was driving home tonight, Jason Bentley (of KCRW’s Metropolis) was on the radio. I was having a nice time driving down the 10 freeway (no traffic, finally) back towards USC. Jason’s awesome voice filtered through the speakers as he listed off the tracks that had recently played, did a station promo, and let the song underneath continue on for the next few minutes. It sounded familiar — but I couldn’t put my finger on it. As LA came into view, the piece took a rather dramatic turn and opened up into a vast landscape of musical hills and canyons, and it hit me — Ulrich Schnauss. Brand new Ulrich Schnauss at that. The music was beautiful, with the same quality of liefelijk — the Dutch word for “child-like innocence” (imagine girls in dresses dancing in fields of daisies under a warm sun) — that Schnauss is so known for.
It made me smile. Really hard. Like, a lot. And then the weirdest thing happened. I started laughing, and then I was smiling and laughing and suddenly I was crying, too. I was entering the exit lane for Western/Normandie (one of LA’s finest merges) and I could barely see because there were tears in the way. It was beautiful, beautiful music, with such strong connections to my emotions; after all, the last time I heard a brand new Ulrich Schnauss song was back in 2005, when I was seeing him live at the Knitting Factory, and things changed a lot.
So here I am bawling like a baby in the driver’s seat of my car, listening to this awesome music, and terrorizing the off-ramp with my wonderful driving (oh crap, what gear am I in? what gear do I need to be in?). I was thinking about Rigo and meeting Ulrich and having him sign my “A Strangely Isolated Place” cd… and it made me intensely happy. Later on, I called in to master control to find out the release date of the album — JUNE!
I can’t wait that long for another trip down memory lane.
