Travis — The Man Who: an obi-strip line, and the Nigel Godrich sound

Even if we're gone, the music remains here…

That line is printed on the obi strip — the paper sash wrapping the Japanese release — of an album I own. Travis's second album, The Man Who, released in 1999.

The band that wrote that line is, fortunately, still very much around and still putting out new music. But the line stands. The album lives in me, and I'm sure it lives in plenty of other listeners' memory too.

For the first proper entry in the “From the Shelf” series, I picked this one without hesitation.

How I first met Travis

The first Travis song I consciously listened to was "Turn".

I came across the music video without any context, watched it through, and then started it again from the beginning right away.

A music video where I genuinely cannot tell whether there's a concept or not — that very British thing. And yet, once you've seen it, the imagery doesn't leave you.

The song itself has one of those melodies that pulls something tight in your chest every time the chorus comes back around to "Turn, turn, turn." The album is full of moments like that.

The gap between the songs and the videos

Listening to The Man Who, you start to notice a temperature difference between the music — lyrical, direct, beautifully serious — and the videos, which keep nudging you toward a small smile.

The songs are introspective; the album is the color of a slightly overcast English afternoon. The videos, though, are loose, even playful. British bands often hold this distance between earnestness and humor, and it's exactly the place I keep coming back to.

The sound Nigel Godrich brought in

This is also the album that made me start paying attention to who actually shapes the sound.

The reason was a single producer: Nigel Godrich, the British producer best known for everything Radiohead has done from OK Computer onward.

Travis's first album was a more straight-ahead, slightly rough-edged rock record. With The Man Who, you suddenly hear acoustic guitars sitting at exactly the right distance from a quietly ambient backdrop. The textures shift and breathe. Fran Healy's vocal performance changes too — less projecting, more whispering, but somehow landing deeper than before.

Honestly, I think Nigel Godrich brought this band to life. He drew out the fragility Travis already had, and that's where the air of The Man Who comes from.

After this album, I started always reading the credits in CD booklets. Who produced it, who engineered it, who mixed it — that became part of how I listen, and the habit started right here.

A listening tip: "As You Are" through "Why Does It Always Rain on Me?"

I'm going to skip the track-by-track approach and just leave one suggestion:

Listen straight through from track 3, "As You Are," to track 7, "Why Does It Always Rain on Me?" No skipping. That stretch holds everything that was good about the era when albums were sequenced as a flow — something shuffle play will never give you.

The songs that come after, and the ones that come after those, all sit where they sit for a reason. Once "Slide Show" closes it out, fifty minutes will have passed and you'll wonder where they went.

Back to the obi strip

To close, the line on the obi again:

Even if we're gone, the music remains here…

The band hasn't gone — they're still working, still releasing albums. But you can feel why they put that line on a record from 1999.

The CD as an object will eventually break, or get given away, or be left behind. But music stays with the people who heard it.

The version of me from twenty-some years ago, the one who first played The Man Who, still lives inside the version of me typing this. And the present me, putting it on again, picks up something I didn't notice the first time.

That's enough, I think, to say the album has “remained.”

Pick another one off the shelf

See Travis — The Man Who on Amazon (JP)

That's the first proper entry. Next disc — undecided. I'll open the closet, see what catches my eye, and bring another one out.

Until then, if you find yourself listening to The Man Who again, that would make me happy.