#the guitar at the beginning>>>>

[keysmashing-bees]

Returning to my starkid phase!!!

[hanighul]

Here’s Tommy also playing a guitar because why not hahah

[70sscifiart]

Groovy 1970 cover art by Wilson McLean for "Rock: From the Beginning," by Nik Cohn

[evilham06]

⋆⑅˚₊ *·˚⋆｡✵ ⋆⑅˚₊ *·˚⋆｡✵ ⋆⑅˚₊ *·˚⋆｡✵ ⋆⑅˚₊ *·˚⋆｡✵ ⋆⑅˚₊ *·˚⋆｡

⑅˚₊· ˚ headfirst for the halos is planet j1407b ⋆⑅˚₊

[chewyhanniebug]

happy anniversary to another one of the prettiest junhan looks (and whatever it did to the other members) ♡

fancams: [x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x] (also made gifs of jungjun not being able to hold hands like normal people here)

[incorrect-svt-quotes]

#175

Mingyu: *hears a bang*

Mingyu: *picks up Jihoon and Chan*

Mingyu: JUN HYUNG GRAB THE SMALL ONES FIRST THEIR TINY LEGS ARE USELESS

[kaddyssammlung]

[ohdorothea]

I am once again suggesting you listen to this cover of Guilty as Sin?

[girl-rudely-interrupted]

very messy silly cover that i fuck up in a bunch but idrc so you guys get to see it bc i dont want to post it anywhere else

uhhhh ignore the camera quality, this was recorded on my computer and i dimmed my lights so the camera wouldnt be able to pick up my face

Song is dried roses by big thief

[hanzajesthanza]

the witcher saga begins with dandelion being saved by yennefer and he tells her that he was wrong about her is indebted to her and that he will repay the debt to her in his songs, by making people know she is a good and fair lady . and later he also chronicles the journey of geralt’s company from brokilon to beauclair in his half a century of poetry, for posterity.

in the final act, the entirety of stygga castle is damnatio memoriae’d off of the face of the planet by the lodge of sorceresses who wished to write history in their favor, so the hanza’s graves (and… column) simply ceased to exist, it’s only a crater, dust, a nuclear blast site. even though it is the hanza whose questing alongside geralt made it possible for him to fulfill his (their) quest and whose sacrifices were in exchange for the return of ciri and yennefer to the proverbial realm of the living.

and furthermore, the battle of the bridge was not mentioned by any chronicles of history, and the old bridge itself, ruined from the battle, was replaced by a shiny new one.

and at rivia, yennefer’s presence was forgotten by all but one legend. but the majority of which said that triss stood alone on the “rivian hill” (… pile of refuse), and no one mentioned yennefer. even though she was the witcher’s eternal starcrossed lover and killed herself on top of his dead body hopelessly trying to ressurect him, and the two went off to avalon together.

but through the writing and song, “in the end,” dandelion made good on his promise to preserve their memory, and (alongside the folk stories) made sure people would remember them all as heroes… as families… a beautiful story…

even as monuments crumbled, and others tried to erase them.

[paigepithetics]

its all over folks (making the playlist for the odysseus hades fic)

[schnaf]

MONEY ON MY MIND

[damage-incorp0rated]

genuinely obsessed with and mesmerized by this footage in particular but i cannot find any full performance anywhere (i scoured every haldyn hotel performance i could. believe me) and it doesn't help that some guy in the comments said the footage is very rare ... this is unfortunate

this is like the only video i can find of it (on youtube at least i have yet to check any other sites)

this sure is peculiar

[stuckinsidemyheadtoomuch]

Added a little something to my guitar! (Yes it is a hidden biroace pride sticker) better quality pics + process below

But firstly, how would you guys feel if I started posting some guitar tutorials or covers here? Playing this thing has become such a big part of my life and I would love to actually share it with people!

Idk man, I might not. But maybe...

[extraordinaryhistories]

#31 - 'Love Yourself (1996 demo)' (Love Yourself single, 2019)

The 1996 demo of the song that would later become the stately, endlessly tasteful ‘Love Yourself’ is the earliest recording that we know to exist from Sufjan Stevens. Before Javelin, before ‘Mystery of Love’, before Carrie and Lowell, before ‘Impossible Soul’ and ‘All Delighted People’ and Illinois and ‘Romulus’, before even ‘Rake’ or ‘Happy Birthday’ or ‘Julia’, there was 1996’s ‘Love Yourself’, this chipped, scuffed, rain-beaten and wind-worn minute and sixteen seconds of pure, unmolested song. Welcome, everyone, to the ur-text of Sufjan’s catalogue. Make yourself at home.

If you’re ever hosting a Sufjan trivia night, here’s a fun question for you: excluding live performances and external remixes, which Sufjan Stevens song has the most released versions? Has to be ‘Chicago’, right? Original studio cut, of course, and then the acoustic, adult contemporary and ‘Multiple Personality’ versions on The Avalanche; coupled with the demo version released in 2016, that makes five. If you guessed ‘Chicago’, you’d be right, but only sort of. ‘Chicago’ is tied only with, of all songs, ‘Love Yourself’. Sufjan released three separate demos of ‘Love Yourself’, all developed before the finished song finally escaped his clutches in 2018: one recorded in 1996, one in 1999, and one in 2011(!), around the last leg of the Age of Adz tour. A fifth version, an instrumental reprise of the song on the official 7” single, rounds out the total. No Sufjan song has had such a prolonged gestational period as ‘Love Yourself’. He knew he had something of worth here, and spent over two decades trying – and, until 2018, failing – to make it work.

Most of his solutions to the ‘problem’ of ‘Love Yourself’ were electronic. Taken together, the various versions of ‘Love Yourself’ almost make for an excellent stylistic map of Sufjan’s career, from its earliest folky stages to its older, wizened, electronica-flecked apex (I say ‘almost’ because no versions have been released from his orchestral period in the mid-2000s, if any existed in the first place.) But before that apex could reached – before Sufjan found that most platonically perfect expression of ‘Love Yourself’ in 2018 – there was a college-aged kid, with a guitar and a tape recorder, covering the walls of his dorm room with cushions so his neighbours couldn’t hear him. To show this (no other word for it) insane development of musicianship and personality, Sufjan placed the song’s very first attempt right next to its very last attempt on the official single release. Perhaps the intent was to show continuity (of melody, of lyricism, of instinct), but the overall impression – charmingly, to be clear – is one of a cold, hard rip in time.

One cannot really overemphasise how archaeologically fascinating the existence of this version is. Sufjan, a long-suffering oboist in his youth, first began to learn guitar during his time at Hope College. He became good at it quite quickly, and by his final semester in 1998, Sufjan was ready to record an entire guitar-driven full length debut. 1996, though? The Sufjan of 1996 would have been in his second or third year at Hope and still a newcomer not just to acoustic guitar, but to songwriting, period. Given how much of this era remains unreleased, ‘Love Yourself (1996 Demo)’ is as close as we might ever get to hearing what Sufjan’s truest origins sound like. Every mighty tree was once a sapling; the 1996 four-track version of ‘Love Yourself’ is little more than a newly-sprouted seed. It may very well be one of the first songs he ever wrote.

The element of this version that betrays the most inexperience is the main guitar figure. Far from the busy electronics of later versions, the 1996 demo is centred on an endlessly-looping guitar vamp that breaks only for a small middle-eight. The perpetual swaying motion of the riff, with clearly audible slides up and down the guitar neck, feels harmonically neutral but rhythmically colourful and evocative of a waltz (one of the most significant differences between the initial and final versions of this song is the metre – 2018’s ‘Love Yourself’ is in a martial 4/4, whereas 1996’s ‘Love Yourself’ is in 6/8.) Considering that this riff was probably borne out of necessity – one imagines that a later take on this same arrangement would have included more chords – it is a surprisingly unique figure, one that effectively conveys warmth and soft golden light. Small guitar overdubs add texture, including one left-channel overdub at around fifteen seconds in that glides along with a genuinely pretty counterpoint. Do not confuse youthful simplicity with a bankrupt composition! It’s a song that could not have come from Sufjan at any other point in his life (quite like ‘Jamila’ in that sense.)

Most of the other pieces that would later make up 2018’s ‘Love Yourself’ are here, albeit in a truncated form. The melodic refrain, although sung in a weedy register and modified slightly to fit the 6/8 metre, is nearly identical to future iterations. Its lyrics likewise have the same general thrust, except there are less of them, and they are more repetitive. ‘Love yourself / You are the one thing I needed’ was clearly perfect enough as a mission statement to carry through, unaltered, all the way to 2018. That right there is the main take-away; the rest is noise.

But ‘Love Yourself (1996 Demo)’ has one clear rhetorical difference to the final version. It is a subtle one, but it’s there, and there is an argument to be made that it gives this demo a lyrical edge. There is an urgency of message to the 1996 version that isn’t replicated elsewhere – more insistence, more of a genuine sense of concern and care. Fewer lyrics exist here, but the ones that do are direct and mantra-like: ‘Love yourself,’ ‘Hold yourself’, ‘Change yourself’, ‘Make a shelf’, and, finally, ‘Love myself.’ It is as if Sufjan is legitimising the main message through repetition of structure. He knows it’s a hard conceit to stomach, so he’ll keep saying it until the words begin to sound true. Sincerity through simplicity – with 1990s Sufjan, it’s the name of the game.

There are two moments in particular here that stand out as tangibly different to the final version. The first: ‘Change yourself / Love yourself.’ Obviously the change in question might just be the act of transmuting one’s self-hatred into self-care; richer ways to read the song’s middle eight exist, though. The notion that changing parts of the self is ultimately not possible, and if itis then it’s tantamount to conceding defeat, is a myth. There is something liberating in admitting that certain portions of the tapestry of your character – ego, arrogance, envy, self-consciousness – are not what you want to contain within you. Changing yourself can very well be a path to loving yourself (or, expressed differently, making yourself more loveable.) It’s a surprisingly mature and worldly conclusion for a young man like Sufjan to reach, and seeing it in this early version of ‘Love Yourself’ is a real pleasure. Its omission from the final cut is a tragedy.

The second big difference: the ending. ‘Love Yourself (1996 Demo)’ has a narrative structure that is simple, effective, and not present in the 2018 song. Future versions of ‘Love Yourself’ have their gaze directed entirely outward: this song is an anthem for you, the listener, and nobody else. The 1996 demo is the only rendition to turn that gaze inward, and it does so in the very last lines of the song: ‘Love myself / I am the one thing I needed’. I am a very big fan of this sentiment as the rhetorical climax of the song and am perplexed as to why Sufjan thought to remove it in future versions. The change of address is a classically strong, satisfying narrative moment; it gives the illusion of a defined narrator with their own hopes, fears and need for affirmation. Suddenly the sentiments in ‘Love Yourself’ feel less platitudinous, more personal. Irrespective of all that, ‘Love myself / I am the one thing I needed’ is just a good and true message. We can get so easily caught up in the desire to affirm others that we forget to affirm ourselves. If you believe in everybody’s fundamental goodness and then recuse yourself from that same belief, what’s the use in that? It can only start with you, remember.

There are a good number of Sufjan fans who prefer this tiny, embryonic seed of a ‘Love Yourself’ to the giant, assertive redwood that it would eventually become. I do not consider myself among that group, but I absolutely understand their argument. Every other version of ‘Love Yourself’ feels like a massive (and massively impersonal) rah-rah anthem. It fits the song, to be sure, but embiggening the sound naturally causes the little things to get lost – things like the hug of a good friend, say, or the pleasure of making a small, attainable goal. All those things are contained in ‘Love Yourself (1996 Demo)’, a thoroughly earnest vehicle for sentiments that speak less to the world and more to you. And if that’s what it takes to get the message through, this is the version for you.

Back in a time before Javelin, before ‘Mystery of Love’, before Carrie and Lowell, before ‘Impossible Soul’ and ‘All Delighted People’ and Illinois and ‘Romulus’, before even ‘Rake’ or ‘Happy Birthday’ or ‘Julia’, when the only Sufjan fans were his family and his friends and himself, the phrase ‘love yourself’ might not have meant more – but it certainly meant something different. Something smaller. Something just for you.