The Wire - Wire Radio Volume 2

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Wire Radio Volume 2

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Written by staff

Wednesday, 09 November 2005

22 songs from 22 bands. Easy numbers to remember.

What does it take to make a song? A couple hours to record it, a few more to write it, maybe. How much time does it take to get a band together? To rehearse, to learn each other�s strengths and weaknesses, to develop communication without words? Losing members, finding new ones, experimenting; how many shows at how many bars? How many nights of driving, loading and unloading equipment, of playing for a handful of people in the middle of nowhere? How many days of coffee-powered misery at day jobs when you got no sleep the night before? Years of that, surely.

How many years does it take to learn an instrument?

How long does it take to make a musician, then? How much disappointment and loneliness, how much joy and dreaming, how many heartbreakingly beautiful falls, how many perfectly long summers?

Within these 22 songs on this slim silver disc are 80-plus musicians; if we imagine an average age of 27, then the music reproduced here represents the fruition of more than 2,000 years of human experience; these are the sounds of an artistic process some two millennia in mass.

We�re trying to match that with some numbers of our own. We have made 15,000 CDs to give away free: one free in every copy of The Wire this week, plus free CDs to be distributed all across the state in Jam Magazine, from Conway to Concord and Keene, to Salem and Nashua, Littleton and Laconia.

Because the music deserves to be heard. We have listened to every new CD we could lay our hands on, not just from the Seacoast but from all across New Hampshire, and from that we have selected these few tracks that really caught our hearts. There are so many more, so many beautiful songs out there being strummed and thrashed and jammed, but these were the ones that spoke to us.

Most people understand that the arts need the support of the public, but that doesn�t seem to extend to bar bands and club acts. They�re left to fend for themselves, playing for scraps while they dream of getting signed and whisked up into the music industry machine to make a million bucks.

But that�s a shoddy dream, because the odds are so long and the industry so badly bent. The music being played at the club down the street or recorded on 100 CD-Rs or broadcast on a low-power community radio station is often as finely wrought as anything that makes the top 40. You don�t hear this music, the music made by your friends and neighbors, on corporate radio or MTV, but that�s not because the work lacks quality. It just lacks distribution.

This is our effort to help with that, to take the music that is all around us and bring it back to the people.

Don�t stop here, though. Check out the band Web sites, listen to their songs online, buy their CDs right from them or from one of the handy services that have sprung up, then go to a show and shake their hands and tell them how glad you are that they�re there.

Contributors
Wire Radio Vol. 2 and these liner notes were compiled with the help of Jon Nolan, Chris Greiner and the following writers, many of whom are musicians themselves: Steve Brennan; Larry Clow; Chris Dahlen; Keith Demanche; Nate Groth; Matt Junkin; John Roche; and Dave Surette. Without them, our music scene would be silent indeed.

Check out the track listing below, and follow the links to our liner notes

1. "Sometimes I Feel Like" - The Texas Governor, from "The Experiment"