Hangovers, Waterfalls and Waits

I spent today cowering in shady nooks, trying to give a hangover of Terminator-esque doggedness the slip. It didn't work; they can smell your sweat. Anyhow, it's quite the art to make music for people who actually would rather not hear any noise at all. Try and dissolve that pore-clogging ethanol with shuddering bass and you'll be left a withered husk . So the other, sedate, option is to go ambient. Embrace your inner Californian and visualise a babbling brook or the such-like. There we go, floating away from that slobbery pillow and mouth like dry, bristley camel hair to the smooth moss of the Lake District... Check out The Big Lebowski scene in the Dude's bath, that's whale noises he's listening too. Enough said.

Creeks and Waterfalls

On the other hand, some feather-duster light electro, like Futurecop!, whose wanton synth can induce comfortable anti-gravity in a crumpled body. One of the few bands that can make music you want to dance all night to, pissed into the ladies toilet, and then still like listening to when you wake up...

Futurecop - Nasa.mp3

Or go with a beautiful voice, making sure to skirt any hints of depression - you've got enough to face, nightmarish things like a half-eaten, browning apple - as the pitfalls of wallowing in Keatsian melancholy all day, musing on nightingales and Fanny, are deep and insecapable. I chose Beirut "Postcards from Italy", as ukeleles are really soothing, also the rising climax saw me don my regal, if damp, bathrobe and shuffle around like an aged. Result.

Beirut - PostcardsFromItaly.mp3

If you know you're never going to leave the womb of your hangover, slip on Tom Waits and do some morose, sailor-like, alcoholic miming. "The keeper of a bad liver and a broken heart" gave an interesting interview in 2006 recalling some troubles he had as a boy, a form of super-acute hearing- "It was a frightening thing. I mean, I thought I was mentally ill, that maybe I was retarded. I'd put my hand on a sheet like this [rubbing his shirt] and it'd sound like sandpaper. Or a plane going by." - that's not retarded, sounds like Waits was actually born hungover.

A sobering thought for sore heads.

Tom Waits - All the World is Green