When death hits you harder than you expect

Music legend Steve Albini died this week at age 61, and I didn't realize how much it affected me until it happened.

This is about Steve Albini, but it could be about someone else to you.

Albini, an influential musician and recording engineer who worked on several iconic and loud projects over many decades but particularly the 1980s and 1990s, died this week of a heart attack at age 61.

When I first came across the news a few days ago, it registered but didn’t immediately hit. It was the middle of a workday, and it was just one of the countless things I had scrolled past while researching something else.

I returned to the news story of his death later in the day, and then found myself in the path of a few other tributes over the next 48 hours. Absorbing the totality of it all, pondering his relatively young age, learning more about him and thinking of how his influence had been both a steady and recurring bassline spanning eras of my life, I couldn’t shake the peculiar feeling of a death hitting me harder than I could have imagined.

---

Nirvana remains today one of my favorite bands. For a while, I had a hard time articulating why, of the two major albums they made before Kurt Cobain’s death, I preferred the follow-up In Utero to the breakthrough Nevermind.

For a while I suspected it was just some sort of countercultural/hipster sensibility insisting that the less popular, lighter-selling offering was superior (even though I loved both).

But as time went on, I realized that it was more about the sound and sensibility — a direct product of the influence of Albini, who engineered (he detested the term “produced”) In Utero but not Nevermind.

While Nevermind was about as polished and produced as grunge can be, In Utero was loose and raw in many spots. It sounded more authentic and intimate, which is a hard thing to try to do unless that is exactly your ethos.

It was for Albini, a point hammered home in countless tributes in recent days but perhaps no more so than in the long letter he wrote to the band prior to recording In Utero, which Nirvana released this week on its official social media channels. A small slice of it:

I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you.

To me, this is no more evident than on “Milk It,” a later track on In Utero that simply wouldn’t have worked on Nevermind.

---

In the summer of 1996, I had very little money and even less of a plan. I was back in my hometown of Grand Forks, N.D., after my sophomore year at the University of Minnesota.

The previous summer I had busted my butt working two jobs — pizza delivery and waiter at a pancake house — for 50-60 hours a week to save money for the next schoolyear.

I knew I needed to work again that second summer home, but I also knew I wasn’t going to repeat the previous year. My best friend, who was living in Grand Forks but was set to transfer to the U of M in the fall of 1996, was in the same situation.

We ended up working a ridiculous mish-mash of odd jobs together that summer. Through a temp agency, we worked in a factory that coated bicycle parts with some foul-smelling chemicals. We tried to get people to sign a petition getting term limits for elected officials on the North Dakota ballot. We helped do demolition on a project at Target.

And for four days, before we quit on Friday morning and went to breakfast instead — the only job I’ve ever flat-out ghosted — we worked as telemarketers trying to get people to change their long-distance phone company.

There were days that the temp agency had nothing for us. Sometimes on those days, one or both of us struggled to get out of the spare room in my mom’s basement where we were crashing. I vividly remember once that we needed to go to the bank, but we just couldn’t get there before 5 p.m. even though neither of us worked that day.

We made impromptu trips to Winnipeg — the closest major city to Grand Forks — and browsed local record shops in Grand Forks.

I believe it was my friend who came across a flyer in one of those shops for a two band all-ages show in Fargo: Six Finger Satellite and Shellac. I knew next to nothing about either one, but it was decided that we needed to go.

In my memory, the show took place in the afternoon. That seems strange, but it was 1996. Things were strange. Shellac — one of many bands Albini was in during his life, and certainly the one with the most longevity — blew the doors off of the place.

Specific memories are fuzzy 28 years later, but I do believe that show was a perfect symbol of that summer. It was a time of wandering and wondering, a period more than half a lifetime ago when I had far more time than money.

I’m sure Albini could appreciate that. He said this about the Chicago music scene that played such a pivotal role in his musical evolution:

The community that I joined when I came to Chicago enabled me to continue on with a life in music. I didn’t do this by myself. I did this as a participant in a scene, in a community, in a culture, and when I see somebody extracting from that rather than participating in it as a peer, it makes me think less of that person.

---

I saw Shellac one other time in concert, a sweaty show at the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis probably 15 years ago. It was loud and amazing, again — and memorable in particular because of the unsettling nature of opening act Brick Layer Cake, a solo project of Shellac drummer Todd Trainer.

Shellac’s music wasn’t exactly a constant in my life, but I have several of their CDs somewhere in the basement. Every year or two, I go through a phase where I am compelled to listen to their music constantly and loudly.

The last one was just a couple of months ago, and another one is due next week. Shellac’s first release in a decade is set to come out May 17, another sad reminder of a life that’s over too soon.

For more than 30 years, Albini has been there in the background of my life, making everything he touched better.

In reading more about him after his passing, it became clear that he was imperfect but also that he was everything we should aspire to be in our art:

Unsparing, uncompromised, 100% committed all of the time.

That posture will put you in conflict with people and is a hard way to live sometimes, but Albini was authentic in a way that is both memorable and increasingly rare.

When I listen to Shellac, one song I never skip is “Crow.” The steady burn and crunch of the drums and guitar — making the payoff of the progression later in the song even greater — always gives me energy and changes my perspective.

I gave it another spin this weekend, and the lyrics hit just as hard.

Time flies, as a crow flies, in a straight line
Through you, not around you
Your life is only that with which, time has its way with you.

Note: I posted my first Substack “chat” during the week, asking anyone who wanted to participate to tell me a little about one book that has “changed your life.” If you want to head over there and add to the conversation, you can do so at this link.