Newly up at THE2NDHAND is my second contribution to their Mixtape series: a story entitled “Western Bridges”, which draws its inspiration from The Spinanes‘ “Winter on Ice”.

Said song comes from their album Strand, which I genuinely do cite as one of the more life-changing records I’ve ever heard. I picked up Strand at the tail end of my freshman year of college, around the time I saw the band in question play a show at the Westbeth Theater in the West Village along with Versus and Elliott Smith. Smith had lent backing vocals to a number of songs on Strand, and he joined Rebecca Gates and Scott Plouf onstage over the course of the night. The show as a whole — particularly the Spinanes — helped to convince me that you didn’t have to play raging hardcore to be all-consumingly intense.

Later on, I’d read writers I admire testify to their fondness for the band; I’d interview Rebecca Gates*, and I’d hear the esteemed SB hold forth on the spot-on drumming to be heard on Strand. I’d see Gates play a number of solo sets, some heartbreakingly good. But still — and not all that surprisingly — that first experience seeing them, slow-building and shifting and mysterious and full-bore intense still hangs in my memory, twelve years later.

*-one of these days, I really need to post the interviews from the last few issues of the zine I edited from 1996 to 2001. There are some — that one in particular — that I wouldn’t mind seeing online, and while the earlier issues do serve as a kind of object lesson in learning how to conduct an interview, I’m pretty fond of a lot of what I did in those later issues. Plus, it would give me a place to post all of the interviews from the never-completed Eventide no.7. Oh yes.