Something of a continuation of my grower/dormanter discussion from last autumn ... I've been rediscovering Flying Saucer Attack's "New Lands", and somehow this record sound more messed up and otherworldly to me than it ever did before. When I listened to it for the first time in a good two years, I was puzzled -- it sounded nothing like how I remembered it. There were no recognizable melodies, just hazy slabs of guitar fuzz and Dave Pierce's half-asleep vocals floating by once in a while. It was more lo-fi than I remembered it, filled with atonal squalls and raw, abstract, vaguely formed song ideas. Sure, I love that sort of stuff now, but that's the tolerance built up from years of worshipping the lo-fi and lovely, the Megos and the Tony Conrads, and the "ambient" mixes with three input layered into head-pounding sleet with distortion on top. So how was I able to digest "New Lands" in 1997 (#9 on my Top 10 list for the year)?

We need a new name for this. It's kind of the opposite of a grower. It's a record that you start out liking, but grow to like in a completely different way while losing all recollection of what you used to like about it in the first place. A delayer? An echoer? A returner? A ...

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I'm listening to Mojave 3's "Pictures" right now. A friend once asked for wedding song suggestions, so I lent him "Ask Me Tomorrow" and suggested "Pictures" in particular. He didn't use it, so one might assume that I could still use it for myself one day.

But I live by the principle of "never tell anyone your wedding song". Ideas this important should be protected, and not just because such things backfired for George on Seinfeld and Monica on Friends (with baby names). Therefore, since "Pictures" candidacy as a wedding song has been exposed to the world, I can no longer use it.

I haven't told anybody what it is, and I'm not going to until the reception plans are well in motion, deposits down, rooms booked, signatures on the catering forms, etc. I thought I was as good as hitched with my last gf, and the topic of wedding songs did come up, and I thought about telling her, but I stayed true to my principle and I didn't. "Then I'm not telling you mine", she said, which was A-OK with me at the time. But you just never know, because now we're broken up, but my secret remains safe with me, so all is good.