TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME g o o s e d r o p s m d' s e x p e r i m e n t a l b e a t s
duration: 1 min 40 sec
Here is another of my experiments with acoustic piano, drum machine, and post-production delay. Like my last goose drop this one was done on a lark, on my porch with the window open (as if that actually helps in this sweltering Chicago heat-wave). This porch also is where Hannah and I have put our daughter's toy box, so the offical name is the PlayRoom, where daddy, mommy, and baby get giggly with our intuitions.
I've been involved with baseball from sometime since 1980 or so. I've played at the earliest level of tee-ball all the way through very fast pitch community leagues in Milwaukee. I quit playing baseball after my freshman year of high school because football, and the quarterback position, excited me more. But I've been a fan, mostly casual, to this day. I still remember the first Major League ball my Dad caught for me, at a Milwaukee Brewers game. Likewise my two visits each to Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, the old Comiskey Park, and Busch Stadium are all very fond memories, all for different reasons (which is part of the magic of baseball's best moments - how, like music, it amplifies everything else going on). I can still name many of the starting lineup for the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers team, that lost the World Series to St. Louis in a heartbreaking change of momentum.
The thing about baseball is that it is a game of incremental victories. You can't get too excited or frustrated about a single at-bat, a fielding gem or error, a win or loss, or even a slump or winning streak. There are 162 games over a long hot summer. It arrives with the coming of spring and departs with the turned leaves that fall off trees. The game is essentially unchanged for over 100 years, and in baseball's best environments, cultures, and ballparks, the magnification of history is palpable. The funniest thing is that in being a baseball fan, you are watching the awesome talents of a bunch of sensorimotor freaks. You aren't supposed to be able to throw a ball 95 mph, or hit it with a bat over 400 feet, or be able to cover that much ground in the outfield for that spectacular diving catch. It is a child's game, promulgated by the child's imagination in all of us, performed by a bunch of mutants. And it is quintessentially American.
I still watch baseball with the same naive wonder as I did when I first began to notice. It is a game of slow unfoldment, of sudden momentum shifts, of anticipation that only sometimes delivers, and raw magic of impossiblily come true. It is the closest thing America has to a secular, civic-based religion. When you have that bag of peanuts in your hand, the shells cracklin' under your shoes on the grandstand pavement, loud-mouth know-it-alls criticizing every move by the home team's manager, a swing and a miss on a whizzing heater, the whack then roar of a home run out of the park, and then the heart-breaking ball four outside that walks in the winning run -- this is timelessness. Beautiful, everyday timelessness.
But enough words...Check it out...And then check out more of Matthew's NEW MUSIC.
