He Poos Clouds

[blandine]

Hello! Just found this forum today.

I've been a big, big fan of Owen's music for a long time now. I'm Brazilian, finishing my major in Music Composition, and I do videogame soundtracks (and old regular soundtracks every so often). The very first album I ever bought in my entire life was He Poos Clouds and it also happens to be my favorite album ever.

Most of my post here was motivated by the fact that I saw Owen saying He Poos Clouds was his least favorite album. Did I really see this?

Every so often I also go into a classical composition spree and last time I did it (Fall 2009 in the North Hemisphere) I composed seven string quartets in a row. Happens that He Poos Clouds, as my favorite album ever and being ripe with quartet goodness, was my biggest inspiration. Now I'm feeling like Schoenberg's students when he said a lot of good music would still be composed in C major.

Does anybody else have a mega high opinion of He Poos?

[vestenet]

He Poos Clouds was my first exposure to Owen, not to mention the fact that the album arrived at a fairly transitory part of my life, so it definitely holds one of the dearest places in my music collection. I do not think I am exaggerating in saying that I spent a week listening to nothing but that record. Even now, I still love it. The concluding crescendo in "The Arctic Circle" continues to give me goosebumps, I cannot help but tap along every time to "Song Song Song," and "The Pooka Sings" is fragility, undiminished and beautiful. So yeah, my opinion of He Poos Clouds is very mega high.

And may I welcome you to the Friendliest Forum on the Internet (TM)! You certainly will not find a lack of other composers here (but I most definitely am not one). Video game soundtracks are some of my favorite things, and, in fact, it was a search relating to Final Fantasy music that led me to He Poos Clouds in the first place!

[Deleted]

I was kinda dissapointed with HPC, not for its quality but just because of my own expectations.

The rushed recording/release HAGH combined with the high energy/still screaming live performances left a lot of guessing as to which way Owen would go next.

In the end I feel a lot of what attracted me to final fantasy in the first place was missing or at least less present in the recordings. It must be a hard thing to translate though.

Basicly everyone told him to stop yelling and he listened. boooo maybe i'll understand when i'm older..

[jules]

HPC is a brilliant and lets not forget, awarding win album

I always describe it as being darker than the more pop HGH. If I was tied up and tortured I'd said HPC was my favourite of the two, but it would be a close run thing.

[ragamuffin]

He Poos Clouds was my first exposure to Owen, not to mention the fact that the album arrived at a fairly transitory part of my life, so it definitely holds one of the dearest places in my music collection. [2]

That is, it was one of the first albums I really fell in love with at the time I decided to get into music, two or so years ago. So I have all these memories finding this music that didn't sound like anything I had ever heard before, and He Poos Clouds is one of my favorites of all of them. I don't listen to it so often nowadays, but when I do, it seldom fails to send shivers down my spine at some point.

In my opinion though, Heartland is Owen's best album yet, but only for its consistensy.

By the way, I thought Has a Good Home was Owen's least favorite? I think read him saying he didn't like that album anymore, in an interview where he talked about remixing it. But I might be wrong.

[emilypoulain]

yeah ragamuffin, i've read owen say has a good home was his least favorite, and that he poos clouds is an album he was proud of but didn't necessarily think it was completely deserving of the polaris prize.

i fink, at least.

but i think in general, an album is a COMPLETELY different beast to the listener and the composer. The album, for us represents a discovery, or a significant time in our lives that has somehow become peripherally related to the music through shared place and time. However to the composer, the album is much more of a technical and self-internalized piece. Owen saw the album through all of its stages and struggles, and he began with visions of its outcomes and I'm sure faced hardships in achieving them. But nevertheless, it's out there to be listened to and enjoyed, so enjoy it as you will!

[blandine]

Compositionally speaking, He Poos Clouds is very strong. It has had so much influence on me that I find myself hoping he will some day revisit that hand in writing. I assume I don't care as much for the performance (yelling etc.) as for the composition per se. I think the "cocaine" shout scared most of my friends as in this is bizarre music and I'm not listening to it. I also never listened to a single record as much as I listened to this.

I dare to say Has a Good Home shares a bit of He Poos Clouds' spirit and is the closest to He Poos I have ever found in Owen's opus. I also agree that it is brighter, though I don't find He Poos dark at all. Then again, those are very cultural concepts.

I confess I am a bit shunned by intimacy in music - were the lyrics in clear Portuguese I wonder how comfortable I'd be listening to him. To put it clearly, on the beginning I just realized he was singing something about video games and that the lyrics were rich. I usually can't figure out the lyrics in a song unless I pay a lot of attention to them and forget about everything else - which is pretty hard if you consider the musical riches out and about.

And may I welcome you to the Friendliest Forum on the Internet (TM)! You certainly will not find a lack of other composers here (but I most definitely am not one). Video game soundtracks are some of my favorite things, and, in fact, it was a search relating to Final Fantasy music that led me to He Poos Clouds in the first place!

Thanks! Same think happened to me - back in the days Pandora worked in Brazil, I typed Final Fantasy and he asked me back: "Did you mean the artist 'Final Fantasy'?". He Poos Clouds began to play afterward. I was instantly raging about it.

[Deleted]

I fully support the idea of Owen remixing old albums in Portuguese

[blandine]

I fully support the idea of Owen remixing old albums in Portuguese

That'd be quite the surprise. Portuguese actually sounds very good, but I've never seen a foreigner come even close to speak it naturally. It's a difficult language.

By the way, I thought Has a Good Home was Owen's least favorite? I think read him saying he didn't like that album anymore, in an interview where he talked about remixing it. But I might be wrong.

I think I actually misread it. I wonder why he thought He Poos Clouds wasn't worthy of the prize. Anyone knows what it competed against?

[emilypoulain]

i sort of stated that wrong- i'm not saying that he thought it was unworthy, it's just that in the interview that i'm recalling, he spoke about it as if it was more of a fluke win- something that was more due to politics and making a statement about independent musicians than really a testament to the album itself.

[Ren]

It was actually on this very board:

Jul 8, 2010 19:15:24 GMT -5 Owen from Final Fantasy said:

Thanks for the props, guys.
... On the other hand, in 2006, I felt as if "He Poos Clouds" was one of the weakest albums of the ten and I chalked up its win to a streak of stick-it-to-the-majors perversion in the jury. With "Heartland", though, I feel differently, I feel holds its own and I appreciate that it made the shortlist and in such fine company....

There's also an interview with Radio Free Canuckistan (which is a really good blog you should add to your RSSes) where he says:

...I’m really drawn to things that are unattainable. The whole concept behind He Poos Clouds—making a record that is just string quartet doesn’t make any sense, and in fact I failed because I had to add all these other things. And the whole record was a failure because when you make an album and you don’t compress anything, it doesn’t fit into people’s iTunes collection. If you consider that a failure.

I don't think that's a failure at all.

[blandine]

I know how a composer feels when things don't go the expected way, but it feels so strange to know Owen kind of rejects this album that is (at least for me) a musical gem. I think emilypoulain is right - to him it must mean a completely different thing. It happens sometimes to me and my composition: people will like the most unexpected stuff.

[An Amateur]

I know it's his record and he can say whatever the hell he wants about it, but I feel like that attitude is a little unfair to all the other people who worked on it.

[Alyssa!]

Talking just in concepts for a sec: to be honest the concepts used in He Poos Clouds are pretty one-dimensional to me: The D&D schools of magic were a nice form, but besides the elements of fantasy and control, it didn't deeply reflect the album's music or lyrics; and the form of a string quartet lent only the rhythm of a common instrumentation and a bit of excitement from where he pushed at its boundaries. I've heard it said somewhere (here?) that it could be considered to be a musing on how atheists handle death, or on how limited Owen is as a poet, but nothing binds together as fluidly as, say, Heartland.

But Heartland! There was some interview where Owen rejected the idea that Heartland was a concept album: "it's the opposite." The complexities of the relationship between Lewis and Owen spawn out so many wildly cool ideas that find home in the songs, but it's also just some songs; didn't he say that narrative order wasn't as important to him as musical order and flow? The concept is given its place, used efficiently, and then takes the backseat.

Concepts are just one way of looking at music, but I see Owen as both a musician and a poet, and most poetry needs some consciousness of forms and unified concepts to be effective. In that light it doesn't surprise me that Owen would be so concept-conscious in his works, and it's something important to look at, in addition to just the music.

[Owen from Final Fantasy]

Fascinating discussion!

I don't want to get too deep into this, but no, I don't hate any of my records. I prefer the sound of failure to the sound of success... not because I'm contrarian, I just don't want my music collection to sound like Little Miss Perfect all the time