And, as happened last year, my thoughts turn to Iceland.
In the north Atlantic, on a jagged and beautiful rock, there's not much daylight these days. Midnight sun is just a memory and the amount of daylight has been leaking away as the calendar marches on. It's a strange, magical place filled with history, sagas passed down by word of mouth for generations, and a deep appreciation for the hidden world.
It's easy to feel like the darkness is closing in and can never end. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)
Ancient people knew about this and knew how important it was to celebrate the turning point. So they'd gather on Winter Solstice to feast and celebrate the return of the light. Sure, things don't get better overnight (tomorrow there will be about 10 seconds more sunlight in Iceland than today), but starting right now there will be more and more sun each day. Slowly the light will push back on the darkness, and the richness of life in all its beauty gradually comes back into view. In glorious technicolor.
So, as tempting as it is to luxuriate in the ambient darkness this time of year, things are turning around. Starting today.
So get in touch with your inner druid. Listen and you'll hear a new song starting, the tempo increasing, and the light returning. And, because this is Winter Solstice, the best way to celebrate may be to get up and dance.
And, yeah -- as amazing as it might seem, both these videos are from the same band.
More than 30 years on, Blondie's got nothing to prove.
And I'm sure few people would blame them if they were doing oldies tours at state fairs and Indian casinos.
Certainly no one expects a former punk band fronted by a woman who'll be eligible for Medicare next year to deliver anything cool, powerful and rocking.
So when I read on Vinyl Goldmine that they were offering a free download of "We Three Kings," my expectations couldn't be lower.
But the song is like a dose of power-pop heaven. And the video, shot at the edge of the woods after the leaves turned, is low-budget retro cool (Debbie still looks great in a black leather jacket and drummer Clem Burke's hair has magically gotten darker over the years).
A snowstorm on the weekend? No need to wake up early and listen to the radio for school closure information, hoping my school would be on the list. (Do people even do that anymore? Or do they just go on the school's website for that information?)
But with my so-called adult perspective, I'll just send out a wish for all my friends on the East Coast to stay safe and warm -- even with that extra foot or two of snow.
And also (because ultimately everything we know comes from pop songs), I've learned from Camera Obscura's cover of Jim Reeve's "The Blizzard" that if you're planning on traveling today by pony you might want to make other plans:
Like far too many events in life, this all started with a visit from Elvis.
Costello, not Presley.
He came to me about a month ago in a dream.
"You need to reclaim your name," he said, playing up his English accent and enunciating like he was in the Royal Shakespeare Company. I asked what he meant and if he saw the irony since he got rid of his own name more than 30 years ago.
And he looked at me and said "I'm sorry. That message wasn't for you. Can you pass it on to her, the one with the cow?" And before I could ask him when he was finally going to get around to recording an album of duets with Joe Jackson, he was gone.
I woke up confused (which is not so unusual) and uncertain about how to relay the message (which is much more unusual). Plus, who the hell was the "one with the cow"? And how would I find her? (Link for Gmail subscribers).
Years and years ago, we had tickets to see Jane Siberry (whom I wrote about here). She was doing two shows and both were sold out. The second show, our show, was supposed to start at 10:30. By 9:45, the sidewalk outside was packed. By ten there was a huge line stretching several blocks. But the early show hadn't gotten out yet. So we waited.
And waited.
People finally trickled out around 11:20.
This seemed like a bad sign. Our show would start more than an hour late. And she'd be tired. She'd want to sleep. She'd be travelling the next day. We'd picked the wrong show -- surely she'd cut the second show short.
I'd seen Jane Siberry years earlier when she had a full band and nearly all her songs were based around synth washes. But this was different. Her, a guitarist, and a piano player.
She came on a little before midnight.
And performed for more than two hours. It was amazing. Magical. Mesmerizing.
Her voice soared, swooped, and bounced around that wonderful back room that had seen so many amazing concerts over the years.
And she was funny. She joked and told stories. She sang an unreleased song that started with her boyfriend leaving, matured into a sobbing list of reasons she couldn't live without him, then morphed into a litany of complaints about him that built to a crescendo of vitriol, culminating in him returning home, saying he'd just gone out for smokes. Like many Jane Siberry songs, it was part music and part performance art -- weird, wonderful, and unique. (The song later appeared on a k.d. lang album, but I've never heard a recording of Jane Siberry singing it.)
The show was one of those rare moments when everything flowed, everything clicked, and everyone left energized and rejuvenated by the power of music.
Years later, I found out they'd recorded that show. There were plans to release it as a live album. But the executives who championed her at her record label left and the new guys weren't interested. Years later, she tried to get them to let her release the live album herself, but they claimed they had the rights to it and wouldn't let her. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)
I started thinking more and more about that concert recently. How my expectations were so high (and then much lower when it started late) and how amazing it is when a performer exceeds your high expectations with humor and a quirky grace.
And a few days ago, I got an email from Jane Siberry, known for the past several years as Issa. She was reclaiming her name and going back to performing as Jane Siberry.
Cynical folks will say she probably had trouble getting bookings as Issa and changing her name back was a financial consideration.
Some will wonder what's in a name (enunciating clearly like they're in the Royal Shakespeare Company).
But I know the truth. Elvis must have finally found a way to get through to her after all.
But we were suburban kids. So that really meant sliding through the occasional stop sign, having a couple of beers, driving slightly above the speed limit, and misquoting Nietzshe (hey, it was a college town).
We thought we were bad-ass. But we were wrong.
Except for Caroline. She was bad-ass. A little too bad-ass.
And she was gorgeous. So gorgeous that every guy I knew wanted her.
Especially me.
Until those two and a half seconds.
At a party. Upstairs, looking for the bathroom.
And I turned a corner and saw Caroline, dressed in only bra and panties. And she saw me and smiled.
And I saw the needle still in her arm. Wiggling as she turned. "You want some?" she asked. "It's really, really great."
Looking from the needle to her glazed eyes, I backed out and downstairs.
Then and there I knew I didn't want to be bad-ass; I just wanted to watch bad-ass movies and listen to bad-ass music.
For years after, I'd get calls every few months that started with "Did you hear about Caroline?" Her exploits became legendary over the years. We lived vicariously through her as we stayed safe and warm.
Then, one day:
"Did you hear about Caroline?"
"What was it this time?"
"They found her."
"Was she..."
"Yeah."
"Shit."
"Yeah. She was bad-ass to the end."
After we hung up, I put on the goth-punk remake produced by Todd Rundgren (who also plays the moody synth part), blowing the dust off the vinyl and plunking the needle into the groove.
There were two and a half seconds of clicks and pops before the song started. A glazed-eyed tribute to a bad-ass suburban girl. It was less than she deserved, but all I had to give.
Over the past 12 months, I've been thrilled to hear from more than a few of the musicians I've written about (both old heroes and new discoveries) whose songs have inspired me. But special thanks go out to all of you -- the regular readers and the ones who show up from odd corners of the world via Google (and stay to check out the blog).
And for everyone, in weren't there a year ago (or didn't look all the way back in the archives), here's a rerun of the very first Clicks and Pops post: ============================== [Originally posted Saturday, December 13, 2008]
I spent too much of my youth in used record stores.
See, I grew up in a small town with three colleges (and two more a few miles away). There were great used record stores there – one in the back of a head shop on Main Street (specializing in selling foreign cut-outs), one next to a stationary store (whose owner was busted for selling pot – I know, in a college town? Shocking!), and another one that sold hundreds of cheap bootlegs whose “covers” were cheap mimeographs of bad band photos.
And I was patient – I’d thumb through the stacks, always looking for something specific, but always open to what I might find – especially if the price was low. And the price was almost always low, because there were always lots of college students selling their records to the used record stores. Plus, I wasn’t a collector.
That’s important. Collectors care about more about the label and the idea of the record than they care about what’s on the record.
This is what collectors do:
For me, it was always about the music.
And while I own a few records that actually are valuable, their real value for me is what’s on them.
To be honest, when I was younger, I was more like Jack Black’s character here:
(I like to think I'm more tolerant now. So if you wanted to listen to "I Just Called To Say I Love You," I wouldn't say anything mean about you -- but I would leave the room.)
And while I own a few records that actually are valuable, their real value for me is what’s on them.
So this blog is mostly about music (and often about vinyl). Because it’s the music that matters.
In physics, there's a moment called the "singularity" where matter takes on infinite density and zero volume. For all intents and purposes, time (by any normal means of measuring it) stands still. Similarly, a mechanical similarity occurs when there is literally no way of predicting subsequent behavior.
A split second after the singularity, a course is established, time has (a little bit of) meaning, and you can make predictions. But in that moment of singularity, everything and nothing are simultaneously possible.
I think it's the same thing for broken hearts. Time stops. Everything is jammed together. Nothing can be predicted. And nothing takes up any more space.
A split-second later, emotions rush off in a million different directions, fleeing from the heartbreak as fast as the laws of physics will allow (and then maybe just a little bit faster).
We don't have language to describe this process -- and we barely have terms to describe the healing and recovery from a broken heart. The words all shimmer and fade against the page and the cliches of a thousand past heartbreaks dance before our eyes.
Like dysfunctional families, all heartbreaks are alike. But all are totally different.
And maybe that's the real reason humans invented music millions of years ago. If we're the only animals who get our hearts broken, then it makes sense that we'd be the only ones to need songs to swoop in and fill the empty spaces in our hearts.
The song fuses with the heartbreak, merging in our memories until we can't hear it without being reminded of the love, blown apart in that singularity of heartbreak.
No matter how many years go by, it can be hard to hear some songs without reliving that split second when everything blows apart forever. After a while, it's all but impossible to hear those songs objectively. They're forever linked with that singularity.
And, although it makes us all seem like cranky old people, it's hard to imagine songs from today having that same power of association. Like the man said, they don't write 'em like that anymore.
And, as happened last year, my thoughts turn to Iceland.
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