So this is 2024, huh

A belated happy new year...

Yes, I know it’s January 14th and I’m late to the party. But as my son only went back to college yesterday I’ve been able to hold myself in a kind of festive stasis, hanging out with him and Paula, popping down to LA for a weekend to visit with some of our best pals, and generally holding the reality of the world at bay.

Now I guess that’s over, and it’s time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. I’d apologize for the lack of posts recently but the blogging sub-genre of apologizing for not blogging enough is already a big enough pile without me adding to it: I post when I have something to say, and not otherwise, and hope that’s okay with you guys.

Words in general are sluggish in coming to me right now. Partly I think that’s down to change in my working conditions. When novel-writing was all I did, I generally had one idea and a deadline. I used to bitch and moan about it (as Paula will testify) but it got things done. Eventually. Right now I have a ton of ideas and no deadline, and the television industry seems to be having a slow-motion emotional breakdown. So I bitch and wail about that instead. Whatever. It’ll get done. Eventually. Or not. And the planet will continue to turn.

So in the meantime I’m going to share a bunch of music you might like.

Olivia Rodrigo

I am all over Rodrigo’s new album at the moment, having been alerted to it by my son, semi-dependable source of new music (though if I never hear Cardi B’s voice again it’ll be too soon: there’s a limit to how much you need to know about someone else’s pussy). Rodrigo comes on all disposable pop-moppet until you actually listen to the words… like the final couple of lines in All-American Bitch:

She’s not afraid to be fun and dumb, though on point… Bad Idea, Right?

… but then you land up on something like Pretty Isn’t Pretty, which deals with the issue of physical self-image in a far more resonant way than most of the other people out there, who leverage the topic in what often feels an exploitative way…

David Bowie

Y’all know who Bowie is. This is just to steer your attention to a great documentary on HBO/Max — whose rebranding is going about as well as Twitter/X’s — about Bowie’s last five years, with an in-depth look at the process of his last two albums. It’s called (unsurprisingly) Bowie: The Last Five Years, and is absolutely worth a watch. What a loss that guy was, and remains. I still remember hearing the news and thinking “What? Bowie’s dead? How… how can that even be a thing?”

(I’ve just noticed that I typed “who Bowie is” above, not was)

When mooching around YouTube to re-listen to some of the tracks from those albums the next day, I came across this. I’m always wary of people covering Bowie (because, why would you?) but this version of Life on Mars by Gail Anne Dorsey (Bowie’s preferred bassist for the last two decades of his career) is pretty fabulous.

What a voice, what a presence.

Blue October

Also on the music doc trail, we came across Get Back Up last year, about Justin Furstenfeld, frontman of Blue October. Not a band I’d really clocked in the past, and they haven’t suddenly moved into my top five of all time or anything.

The doc was quietly inspirational, however, unflinching on addiction, mental health, and the urge to create. It also introduced me to this song, which I love for its unusual message, and have played to death since and still:

There’s also a powerful acoustic version. I played the original to Nate (my son) in the car the other day, and he liked it, and immediately pointed me to a Olivia Rodrigo song from her last album, on slightly similar lines…

… and we agreed that in a way they were kinda the same song: just you have to be in your yearning 20s to write Happier, but in your forties — having had your heart broken half a dozen times, and broken a few yourself — to stand a chance of coming up with I Hope You’re Happy.

The Stones

Yes, them again. But only to briefly say that in terms of lyrics, last night I realized one of the reasons I like them is because of how noir a lot of the words are. I mean:

I met a gin-soaked, bar-room queen in Memphis
She tried to take me upstairs for a ride
She had to heave me right across her shoulder
'Cause I just can't seem to drink you off my mind.

That’s the start of a pulp novel, right there in the first line.

Love Hangover

For about thirty years, Paula and I have had a “Clean-up Mix” — a playlist we put on when everybody’s left the party and we lurch drunkenly around the kitchen clearing up the mess, so we don’t have to face it with hangovers the next morning. Diana Ross’s Love Hangover has been on it for a very long time. I am the uncoolest man in the world when it comes to dancing — actually banned from doing so in a number of European countries, on aesthetic grounds — but even I will move about a bit to this song, after it kicks off two and a half minutes in.

I’m only mentioning it because I recently discovered this bewildering video: the 1970s were truly another country, and they did things differently there. Enjoy.

As a sidebar, that song always reminds me of how one of my favorite Bach preludes lifts off halfway through… here by itself from Gould…

… and here (starts at 8:37) as part of a stunning performance of the whole of the WTC II by Evelyne Crochet, who’s my go-to for Bach piano.

Finally…

The Blue October documentary is about a guy who came so very close to fucking it all up, permanently, but got gently hauled back from the brink by family, friends, and his band… and so, if you’re a soppy old fool like me, this joyful, post-recovery, live version — in which he’s joined on stage by family and his daughters — may end you.

Happy new year, everybody. It’s all there to play for.

Let’s do this.