The Body is a Party You Want on the Moon
The February, 2023 Music Round-Up
If you haven’t read one of these from me before, here’s a brief user’s guide: these are tracks that are (often, not always) new to me, but not necessarily new. They’re a snapshot of my favorite listening during the past three months. A fan’s notes. Stuff to share.
Hope at least something here sends you off to hunt and listen and purchase, because all these artists deserve your ears.
Again, I really have moved away from social media, so I’d be so grateful if you could pass this post or any information in it you think might be useful to people who would like receiving it. Also, (civil) comments and thoughts always welcome.
The Body is a Party You Want on the Moon: The February, 2023 Music Round-Up
The world is so hard. Life is so good.
The opening notes of this—on an ikembe, I think, which here sounds like a badly bent steel drum recorded with a mic way too close to the pan—are the feel of this quarter’s playlist in one measure. Bruised, woozy, not just resilient but vibrant. In translation, one of the lyrics suggests “Go slowly”, but the feel is more bounce highly.
Kottarashky & the Rain Dogs—Zaide
Kottarashky & the Rain Dogs—Dogs Out
From Sofia, Bulgaria, a raucous street-groove whipped up by producer Nikola Gruev. As with Montparnasse Musique, there’s an intensity in this music that’s way too fierce to be comforting, but when Asya Andonova’s voice pours out of it like a wild east wind, all I want to do is throw my arms out and let it fly me. Surmata Harry opens “Dogs Out” with “Fuck you very much”, but by the time he hits “Who let the dogs out/who let the cats in” and that accordion starts fluttering all over the groove, I’m grinning every time. Carefully.
A miniaturist of the highest order, Pink Pantheress boils all the pleasures of the three-minute single down under two, and loses literally nothing. The chords on “Pain” are lifted from Satie—the Gymnopédies, those perfect petits fours of sweet sadness from which so much good so-called adult pop and all Wong Kar-Wai films sprang. The lyrics go “It’s a shame that we weren’t the same at all,” and then “La-la-la-la-la.”
“Break it Off” just wants to “hear you say/’I like you’”.
My favorite fado tricksters doing what they do, doing happy-sad with a wide-open grin Satie would have hidden and Wong Kar-Wai would never allow. In this one, the singer falls for a suitor’s (undeniably poetic) come-on—“He says the body is not a fault/but instead a party you want on the moon”—not because she gets fooled or overwhelmed, but because, as the chorus goes—“there’s a lot to be said about this body thing”. There are trombones. Also tubas.
Carsie Blanton—Money in the Bank
If the brass is out and the party’s started, might as well dial up another Carsie. This one’s pretty straight-up joyful, but like most of my favorite tracks from her (and almost every happy-adjacent song on this list), it gets home on that note of yearning, of exposed need. She wants a one-night stand, he gives her a different sort of kiss, and now, “I don’t mind losing if it’s you who won”.
For me, this lifelong devotee of the Guy Clark workbench school of songwriting—every line and chord planed, honed, fussed over, joined, got true—sometimes produces tracks so smoothed and clean that they lose their distinctive edges and textured surfaces. They achieve well-made-ness, and so become songs I appreciate but barely remember, rarely sing. This one, though, glides along so effortlessly, the moves from chorus to bridge to verse so seamless and correct that all the parts become one part, the rhymes sometimes sparkly but mostly just right, the vocal worn and easy but never laconic (this was Clark’s great trick, I think. One of ‘em). This gets it all.
Another expert craftsman, so facile as both songwriter and sound sculptor that his songs, whether with Everything But the Girl or on his own, can blur into each other like buildings out a rainy elevated train window. But he’s canny enough to strip back when he comes up with a hook as sharp as the one on this chorus, and he lets the piano chords jab and the melody dance around and away from and back toward us. This is an unsettled track, for sure—“My folks were just people with their own shit/And God knows there was enough of it”—but it’s unsettledness recollected in tranquility. These are summer ghosts, and they’re going to come. But that doesn’t mean they mean you harm.
Another not-so-sad cut about a relationship the singer neither regrets nor misses, this one seethes more with determination than pride. Lilly’s dad was another workbench-school devotee but a ferocious singer, and so his music sometimes feels more like a cage for him than a platform (although, “Have a Little Faith in Me”, my God). Here, everything meshes perfectly. This is music by and for those way too in love with music and moments (even painful ones) to regret too hard or hone too long. The chorus goes, “Don’t you hate when people say/’It is what it is’”. I guess I probably do, but I know I love singing and stomping along while Lilly damns them.
I’m trying to remember who it was, twenty years or so ago, who told me that one’s fifties were the golden decade. Did they mean the colonoscopies, maybe? The layered anxieties for kids, parents, country, planet? Entrenched grudges, absent friends? The sense of bemused futility and helplessness? Of one’s moment that one wasn’t sure one had or didn’t recognize passing? The certainty that one has reached the second half (hey, damn right I’m optimistic, fuck you, I almost typed, “second third”)? And all that is only if you’ve been seriously, almost obscenely lucky.
Like Derek Senn. And he knows it.
This starts with the colonoscopy and goes straight down the list, with wit so rueful and sly it verges on joy (I mean, “...who’s gonna play me in my biopic/A handome heartthrob hottie?/Let’s get real and call Giamatti”). Grudges, fears, changes in diet and outlook, the challenges kids and family set you, devolving ideologies, it’s all here. And yet, somehow, the whole thing really does play like a party. Like a wave rising underneath you that you might as well surf. There are probably ten couplets worth quoting. But the one I come back to (as does Senn) could be mistaken for a throwaway, and goes, “Hey ho here we go/Do-si-do, it’s the big five-o”. I’m not sure I’ve found a line that so effectively nails the flavor of a specific point on the life-arc since “Hope I die before I get old”.
I’d forgotten this song. Can’t remember how it suddenly surfaced after fifteen years or so in my speakers. But it’s not just welcome at but perfect for this particular party. Russian-born Oaklander Angelina Moysov and her band of Bay Area indie pros face down mothers on the phone, “older and gray”, when it’s “too hot for tea” which they “drink anyway”, ‘cause “it’s a nice day”. Their smiles flash like switchblades. Ben Watt’s summer ghosts better steer clear. Or give it up and dance.
Raquel Tavares—Meu Amor De Longe
Archetypal fado happiness: the kind you have to dream and make. A bird calls, and port-voiced (I know, too obvious, too easy, but listen to it) Raquel decides she’ll “steal his tune/My love from far away has called/Blessed joy!” Those guitars and that melody bob on never-calm waters in what feels like wide open ocean, far from safety or land or the actual return of the lover this singer dreams of. And the sun’s out. And the song’s in the air. Blessed day.
There’s nothing in these lyrics—they’re Elliott Smith’s, come on—that provides any glimmer of sustainable happiness, or even recollected happiness. What makes this version fit on this list, at least for me, is the distinctively humble wonder Sean and Sara Watkins pour into making music together. They’ve been putting on their Family Hour show at Largo in L.A. for twenty years, now, and though it’s been at least five since I last saw it, I’m betting it has still avoided turning into a hipster showcase, despite the A-list guests who routinely hop onstage to join them. Stayed a (seriously elevated, expertly curated) campfire. Give a listen. Feel the glow.
I love words. They’re my life’s work. Sometimes—maybe because it isn’t my life’s work, but only maybe—I love music more. The roar and swell and swoop and rush of it. “Do you hear that sound?/The hurdle crashing down”?
I do now.
The two most disquieting songs on this list, not least because—much more so than in my previous experience of Chad Metheny’s work—they’re so approachable and hummable and warm. In the first, the narrator—older, we sense, with his beliefs and fight still in him but his life rich and full almost in spite of himself—has an interaction with two young Rojava (maybe) extremists (possibly) “on a training run”, and gets rattled by the ease of it all, the way “they see no distinction between a civilian and them”. They let him “crash at their house”, which is both comforting and terrifying. To him and us.
The second is full of “unexploded, inverted” stars, “everybody losing their minds”, a “hole in the beach” from an “arsenal” that “God built”. So the narrators find “another beach/three exits down”. Their “intentions are good”. They “hope that matters”. The chorus comes damn close to unironic gospel singalong.
Yes, the little details, when they come, are precise and affecting; this is, after all, the cornily named project of Damien Wilkins, a fine Kiwi fiction writer. But this sweet, sweet, melancholy little jangler about a pensioner reaching out across social media to someone who they last saw in grade school, weren’t quite friends with then, and may not be the right person anyway, gets lent a green-flash luster as the Facebook epoch passes. The hesitant contact itself—the do you remember, the are you actually—is haunting enough despite its familiarity. But then comes the second verse, and our glimpse of the seeker: “Every second Thursday/the nurse comes to my home/She tells me she’s no angel/Flaps her wings and she is gone”.
I admit it, I had doubts about her at first, mistook her gritty down-home isms for off-the-rack (although there was no question about her tunecraft, ever). I was wrong then, and I am a convert, now. This one’s wide-screen and multi-hued, its instantly memorable melody unfurling across a roiling organ bed, and it whirls and grabs and sticks. Subject is a troubled someone the singer misses badly. Someone who “got away” and needed to, and who’s “got a way of letting me down”. Meaning leaving her lonely, and a hole in the town.
The Cowboys—In the Midnight Hour
Hey, wait a second, where’d my party go?
Oh, here it is.
From Bloomington, Indiana, circa 1981.
Soulful, surprising covers. Just the way to wrap, I think. This one’s particularly apt as a wind-out, and Bill Withers’s words ring truer every day, yeah? All that shit (and not-shit) constantly pouring down, swirling around, using us and everything we’ve got. But “if it feels this good getting used...”
Keep that twinkle in your eye.