A surprise, belated sequel to their last collaboration, 2005’s In The Reins EP and something of a career-reviver for both bands. Predominantly acoustic, it finds Beam and Burns/Covertino on the same wavelength even as their differences are readily apparent. The former’s folk songs and the latter’s jazzier and structural experiments (like the three-song suite on the second half) end up melding into a consistent, at times shimmering whole. Reserved and reflective but not aimless or necessarily laid back, its sturdy presence seems to serenely reverberate right out of one’s speakers (or earbuds as the case may be.)
6. Michael Kiwanuka, “Kiwanuka”
Working again with Love & Hate producer Danger Mouse, I feared an inferior follow-up; fortunately, Kiwanuka again subverts expectations by going further baroque (seven-minute-long “Hard To Say Goodbye”) while also moving closer to a song-suite approach, with one track nearly bleeding into the next like ’70s Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder. And yet, he remains a singular talent—retro-influenced, for sure (“Piano Joint (This Kind of Love)” sounds like 1974 in all the best ways), but his sensibility and lyricism both feel present and firmly of the moment. Like # 9 on this year’s top ten, it requires patience, but it’s also easier to get lost in.
5. Lana Del Rey, “Norman Fucking Rockwell!”
As I hoped for last year when it was announced, her fifth album ended up her first great one. It’s still a bit too long (I would’ve preferred 10 or 12 instead of 14 tracks) but by stripping down her velvet noir to the bare essentials, she allows her ever-sharpened songcraft to be heard and deeply felt. “Mariners Apartment Complex” is still tremendous, but the title track (with its lovely Fiona Apple-isms), “The Greatest” and “Fuck It I Love You” aren’t too far behind, and I even appreciate the lengthy, wonky “Venice Bitch” in this context. Sure has come a long way since that infamous SNL performance.
Comparisons to fellow Millennial Aussie Lesbian punk-pop singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett are inevitable, but Lahey’s second LP doubles down on the pop half of that equation while making space for everything from acoustic balladry to a fist-pumping Clarence Clemmons-like sax solo. She’s not weary of being loud (note the wall of shoegaze-y guitars on “Am I Doing It Right?”) or viscerally punk (“Misery Guts”); still, it’s her way with a hook that translates into power-pop bliss, especially on the jaunty “Isabella” or the letter-perfect anthem “Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself” (aka the one with that sax solo.)
9. Raphael Saadiq, “Jimmy Lee”
Definitely not a safe follow-up to 2011’s exquisite Stone Rollin’, Saadiq’s long-gestating concept album about his deceased brother who struggled with drug addiction is all over the place. The abrupt transitions are akin to changing channels, switching between his beloved neo-soul, hip-hop, electro new wave, psychedelia and even preacher-led gospel. A jarring listen for sure, but one that’s also by design. Perhaps such density needs a period longer than a year to gestate. For now, I return most often to the lush, urgent “This World Is Drunk”, while remaining invested enough in the rest to wanna figure it all out.
8. Dream Syndicate, “These Times”
This 80s Paisley Underground band’s second reunion effort benefits from no longer having to live up to the sky-high expectations 2017’s How Did I Find Myself Here? generally met. Looser, more relaxed but still assured, it’s a solid, concise LP not unlike many of leader Steve Wynn’s prime ’90s solo efforts, not to mention those three underrated band follow-ups to 1982’s revered The Days Of Wine and Roses. While no one will ever mistake these guys for innovators, their themes here are of the moment, while the melodies, particularly on “Bullet Holes”, “Still Here Now” and “Recovery Mode” sound suitably timeless.
Save a few coveted sips of my dad’s beer and the occasional glass of wine doled out on Thanksgiving or Christmas, I did not consume much alcohol as a teenager. I didn’t exactly hang out with a drinking crowd at school; in fact, I sincerely believed getting drunk led to nothing but getting sick. At 17, I witnessed one whole side of my extended family get plastered at a relative’s 50th birthday party held at a local tavern. I was fascinated and more than a little amused by this mass-inebriation—at one point, my much older cousin Denise (she babysat me often in my youth) stood before me next to the bar, sloshed and repeatedly uttering, “I love you Christopher” in a zonked but still empathetic voice—but I had little desire to participate in it.
Still, my first act of alcohol transgression occurred not long thereafter. One afternoon, out of immense frustration at my parents for some injustice I can no longer recall, I stormed down to our basement where we kept an old fridge almost exclusively packed with beverages. Beyond twelve ounce cans of caffeine-free Diet Pepsi and assorted fruity flavors of Jolly Good and Graf’s soda (both regional generic brands) sat tall amber glass bottles of my dad’s beloved Michelob. I reached for one before realizing I had nothing nearby to open it with. I then spotted two lonely aluminum cans of Miller Lite sitting at the back of the shelf, which my parents must have purchased for guests (or perhaps a guest had brought them to us.) I hastily grabbed one, locked myself in an adjacent junk room, sat down amongst mildewy cardboard boxes packed with elementary school homework and art projects and, yearning to rebel and defy, began to chug.
As I mentioned, it wasn’t my first taste of the stuff, but I could sense my face twisting into shock at the relative sourness of so much beer at once. I kept swallowing it down, convincing myself it tasted great! I was practically an adult, after all! Of course, it was actually pathetic—I couldn’t even finish the whole can. I didn’t know where to dispose of it: my mom was too close by, just up the stairs, in the kitchen on the other side of the hallway door. My dad, meanwhile, was out mowing the lawn, so I couldn’t walk right past him back to the alley to drop the can into the big blue recycling bin near the garage. Besides, where would I dump the remaining brew I could not bear to finish?
I ended up just leaving it in the junk room, hidden behind the dust-coated, lower partitioned shelf of a round wooden table that once sat in our living room. Neither of my parents ever frequented the aptly-named junk room, which primarily housed my childhood detritus. This plan worked—later that week, when no one else was home, I poured the now-warm liquid left in the can down the kitchen sink, crushed the can by stomping on it and discarded it in that recycling bin, strategically placing it underneath an empty container of Grape Hi-C. I had pushed the desire to clandestinely drink a beer entirely out of my system (at least until I was legally old enough to do so.)
Two
Six months before turning 21, I got no-holds-barred, shitfaced drunk for the first time. I had come back from a late summer road trip from Milwaukee to Minneapolis with two friends, John and Joe. We had driven up there to visit Sara, another high school friend who was attending the University of Minnesota. It had been a somewhat contentious few days, getting caught in a violent rainstorm on the way up, having difficulty finding Sara’s apartment (mixing up the city’s numbered streets and avenues) and just generally getting sick of each other’s company after having spent so much time together in close quarters.
The trip’s best part was when Sara got into a fight with her boyfriend, giving the three of us, along with Sara’s laid-back, Beatles-loving roommate Dea (we quickly bonded over a mutual affection for Abbey Road) an excuse to get out of their shoebox apartment. None of us were of legal drinking age or possessed fake IDs, so we walked over to Joe’s tan Nissan, parked blocks away in a public lot and drank equal parts Captain Morgan’s Rum and Coca-Cola out of a Thermos. After roughly the equivalent of two cocktails, we all felt much, much better. Collectively sucking the Thermos dry, we stayed up late into the night, stumbling all over the massive and seemingly never ending U of M campus.
In the light of day, visiting the Mall of America and slumming around student ghetto Dinkytown didn’t carry the same otherworldly appeal, so the three of us headed back to Milwaukee a little early. Upon our arrival that night, John proposed we stay over at his house, as his parents and younger sister were all out of town and we’d have the place to ourselves. Furthermore, he claimed we could partake of *all* the alcohol in the house, as his parents had supposedly “stopped drinking” and certainly weren’t going to ever touch all this leftover booze. Why, it’d just go to waste! Obviously, it sounded too good to be true but as a naive young adult, I thought, “Well, if John says it’s okay to drink his parent’s stash, then it must be all right!” It’s also likely the rarity of FREE BOOZE clouded my judgement a bit.
We kicked off the evening sipping Captain’s and Cokes while watching Pump Up The Volume, the first of three videos we had rented from the neighborhood Blockbuster. After running out of rum, we switched to Jack Daniels for a bit before downing shots of a sickeningly sweet, strawberry-flavored malt beverage called Tequila Rose. Popping Killing Zoe into the VCR, I could barely follow along with this grim, violent thriller, but it didn’t matter because the three of us were so pleasantly bombed. We’d take frequent breaks from the movie, standing around the kitchen table, John incessantly pouring the thick, pink, mucus-like liquid into three shot glasses. We’d raise them up and toast to ourselves, to our friendship, and to liquor itself!
Killing Zoe having ended, John brought out a half-chilled champagne bottle he had secretly stuck in the back of the fridge earlier. We were about to pop the cork right there in the kitchen until Joe raised his hand and, in a brief moment of clarity, suggested we’d better do it outside in the backyard so that it wouldn’t hit anything important (including ourselves.) We happily shambled outside and, with a faded yellow dishtowel in hand, John aimed the bottle towards the neighbor’s yard. On the count of a three, a large POP! and our drunken cheers filled the 2:00 AM air, the cork flying off over a chain-linked fence into oblivion, never to be seen again.
We began our third movie, the surreal, hyperactive comic book adaptation Tank Girl, which was entirely fitting ’cause by then, we were all pretty tanked. The three of us sat next to each other on the living room floor, Lori Petty and a pre-fame Naomi Watts in front of us, an overstuffed couch at our backs, and passed the champagne bottle back and forth rather than pouring it into glasses. We came up with a game we thought to be ingenuous: each time a character in the movie drank something, we’d each have to take a swig out of the bottle ourselves. After four or five swigs a piece, this rapidly devolved into “Each time any character does anything, we all have to take a drink.” I don’t remember if we finished the bottle, but I do believe that all three of us passed out before the closing credits.
The next morning, we all had severe hangovers, but amazingly, no one had gotten physically sick. John never mentioned if he ever got into trouble for raiding his parents’ liquor cabinet, and I never thought to ask him about it. However, later that day, still considerably hungover, my mom and I were in the car on the way to the supermarket when we passed a ginormous billboard for Tequila Rose, of all things. “What’s wrong with you?,” mom asked as I audibly groaned at sight of the ad. I couldn’t tell if she knew what I had been up to the night before; I just glumly replied, “Nothing; I have a headache.”
Three
That I was able to feel so (temporarily) good without puking my brains out held a certain appeal; also, I could easily handle a headache. Throughout my remaining college years, I drank like this only a handful of times. I never really set out to get bombed; it’d usually happen whenever booze was available, like the house party my roommates had the weekend before the start of senior year—they insisted on purchasing a keg of Busch Light, and since I was paying for 25% of it, I figured why not partake. It was putrid stuff, only a fraction better than Milwaukee’s Best (aka “The Beast”) but as with most alcohol (particularly the cheapest stuff), it really wasn’t all that bad after the sixth or seventh plastic cup of it.
This sort of thing would happen maybe twice a year, and I was proud of being fully able to hold my booze. I kept this (no matter how dubious) streak going until after I moved to Boston for grad school. My first year there on the last weekend in March, temperatures suddenly spiked into the low ’80s—surreal for sure, made even more so since apparently there had been a freak April Fool’s Day blizzard the year before. One of my classmates threw a party at her place, a sprawling complex near Brookline Village. Until that point, Winter had stubbornly lingered as it tends to do in New England. I’d spent far too much time holed up in either my Allston bedroom or BU’s Mugar Library and I was ready to let off some steam, wanting to embrace this sudden good fortune of Summer-like weather without a care of any potential consequences.
My fatal flaw was not necessarily in how much I drank, but in what I all consumed. In the song “Tubthumping” an unlikely hit that previous fall by the Anarchist Britpop collective Chumbawumba, there’s a part where a chipper male vocalist tauntingly half sings/half raps,
“He drinks a Whiskey drink, he drinks a Vodka drink
He drinks a Lager drink, he drinks a Cider drink!”
This is more or less what I did that night, perhaps substituting rum for the whiskey. Also, you know that old saying, “Liquor before beer, never fear; beer before liquor, never sicker”? Well, at that point, tragically, I had not. I may have begun with a Woodchuck hard cider as we all hung out in the courtyard, taking advantage of the comfortable temperatures. After some neighbors complained about the noise, we moved inside where I may have moved on to my beloved Captain’s and Coke, or maybe a Cape Codder (vodka with cranberry juice to you non New-Englanders) or even a glass of cheap red wine.
I can’t remember the exact sequence of events, but somewhere deep into the night, in the middle of a crowded living room surrounded by fellow partygoers, I suddenly began vomiting all over myself onto the floor, hopefully not onto other people (although the odds were likely not in my favor.) Some shadowy figures quickly guided me into the bathroom, where for what felt like hours, I continued unceremoniously emitting everything I had consumed over the past few hours into the toilet, occasionally pausing to rest my head against the cool, white ceramic tank.
The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the passenger seat of a film production student’s big black minivan, holding a large black trash bag in front of me, giving the driver directions on how to get back to my apartment. Pulling up to my place, I thanked him profusely and stumbled into the building, waking up my roommate Miles (who used the living room as his bedroom, turning a two-bedroom unit into three) and flopping down on my mattress, which, further disorienting me, was right on my bedroom’s floor—I had disassembled my bed frame earlier in the week to make room for some classmates to come over and watch a movie. I passed out almost instantly, my gas permeable hard contact lenses still in my eyes.
I woke up the next afternoon with a hangover worse than the one at John’s house three years before. My left contact was still in my eye; the right one had fallen out and seemingly vanished into thin air. I eventually pulled myself together and in the still unseasonably warm weather, rode my bike down to the Esplanade. I sat on a bench overlooking the Charles River for an hour or so, feeling disheveled and ashamed. Turns out, my actions from the night before did have consequences, and I’d have to face them. I’d later call up the party’s host, leaving a message on her answering machine, sheepishly apologizing for puking all over her apartment. That Monday at school, when I passed a classmate in the hall who had also attended the party, he immediately shunned his face from mine rather than return my friendly greeting, as if he could no longer associate with me, the Drunken, Vomiting Pariah in public.
However, I’d come to learn that what I did wasn’t so unusual or especially shameful. Within a few days, the shunning classmate returned my hello again as if nothing ever happened. I’d see others get shitfaced drunk in public all the time and chuckle to myself but also understand this is simply a Thing That Happens—obviously not good if it happens all the time, mind you, but I no longer needed to fear it: I literally partied ’til I puked, and I had survived. Of course, that wasn’t my last time ever getting shitfaced drunk; admittedly, it wasn’t even the last time I ever puked in public. Still, these days, like most responsible, non-alcoholic adults, I prefer the drowsy buzz of a well-crafted cocktail or two over drinking just to get drunk. Although I wince a little whenever I think back to that time I was the life (and death) of a party, I’m mostly thankful I had that experience. It was a foolish act, for sure, but also strangely liberating, all at once throwing caution to the wind, even if I ended up also being gloriously three sheets to it.
Every summer, my family vacationed in Minocqua, Wisconsin. A five-hour drive from our home in Milwaukee, we didn’t even have to leave the state! Throughout the ’80s into the early ’90s, my parents and I would pack up our aging navy blue Mercury Monarch on a designated Saturday morning either right before or not long after the Fourth of July and head straight for Route 41 North. Following a carefully planned trajectory of state and county highways, we’d bypass smaller metropolises like Fond Du Lac, Oshkosh and Wausau until leafy trees gave way to endless rows of towering pines. The expressway would abruptly end, turning into a two-lane blacktop and by mid-afternoon, we were finally “Up North!” (as I first learned to call it at age seven.)
For years, we also didn’t have to pay for lodging. Actually, we initially made the trip only because of an invitation from longtime friends of my parents. Another couple with two sons near my age, they had relatives who owned a small cabin that they’d let family and friends use throughout the year. A modern, compact, one-story, two-bedroom rectangle of a house, it had a deck that overlooked some woods leading down to a small lake. To reach the cabin, one had to turn onto a little road off the highway whose intersection was flanked by a small, decades-old shop with a green sign plainly labeled BAIT. It was our tradition to stop there and pick up a week’s worth of worms wriggling around in a Styrofoam container of soil and other various fishing supplies before taking the narrow, winding road two miles up through the woods up to our long-awaited destination.
The seven of us would spend a week huddled in this cozy space, the three boys taking one bedroom and the two sets of parents alternating between the other bedroom and a camper van parked outside. From Saturday to Saturday, we fished, suntanned, swam, hiked and passed the time playing endless rounds of Uno and other card and board games. We also made runs into town to play rounds of miniature golf, pick up supplies at the Save More Supermarket and walk along Minocqua’s charming main street, which was strewn with taverns and tchotchke shoppes, but also places that sold books, toys, ice cream and fudge.
By the time us three boys reached our teens, the little cabin began feeling a tad cramped. My parents decided time had come for the three of us to rent our own place for the week. My fifteen-year-old self pictured we’d find another, near-identical version of the place we had stayed at all these years, or better yet, a rustic but charming, spacious house like the one in the movie The Great Outdoors. I imagined all the amenities and luxuries of a Best Western or a Holiday Inn, transported to a beautiful spot on a quiet, picturesque, crystal-clear lake.
We ended up renting a cottage at the Lazy L Campground and Resort. Upon hearing its name for the first time, I wasn’t too keen on the campground part—I had slept outdoors in a tent many times as a Boy Scout and knew very well neither my mom nor dad would be up for doing so for an entire week—but the word resort held some promise. Presumably, in addition to an eat-in-kitchen and two bedrooms, we’d have a patio and our own yard, plus proximity to and views of Squirrel Lake (which was more than five times the size of the lake we usually stayed at.)
The road to Lazy L from the highway was much longer and narrower than the one by the BAIT shop. It seemed to go on indefinitely, each curve burrowing deeper into an endless woods and further away from civilization. After what felt like fifteen, possibly thirty minutes, we finally saw an old wooden sign with two giant L’s painted on it, not far off from the ones Laverne DeFazio embroidered on all her outfits.
We turned onto a dirt driveway, passing through yet more woods until reaching a partial clearing. A small, clapboard building served as an office, and there were four other cottages plus a larger house situated further back in the woods. To the left were signs pointing towards the campground. Ahead of us, partially hidden through some tall trees sat Squirrel Lake, so immense one had to squint to make out the other side.
Marcel, the establishment’s owner, exited the office and greeted us with a warm “Howdy!” Balding, flannel clad and pushing sixty, he ambled over to us and shook my father’s hand. He then led us over to what would be our home for the next seven nights. Our two-bedroom cabin, called the Edgewater, wasn’t much smaller than what we were used to, but it was far more rustic, probably built when my parents were little kids, possibly earlier than that. Although it was clean and didn’t smell like mildew, my spirit sank as I gazed upon the kitchen/living room. Most of the furniture, while in reasonably good shape, was a few decades old, from a tan couch with an exposed wooden frame to a white electric stove so narrow one couldn’t even fit a Thanksgiving turkey in it. I wasn’t yet at an age where I could appreciate now-trendy vintage items such as the pristine, 1950s red-and-white Formica kitchen table; at 15, I just found it dated and depressing.
Sensing my disappointment, my mom said to me, “You know, Chris, it’s not like we’re staying at a fancy, modern hotel; this place is perfectly fine. And it’s just for one week!” I let out an exaggerated sigh like any good snotty teen and slouched off to my new bedroom. I sprawled across the full-sized bed where I noticeably sensed a layer of squishy plastic under the pale green linen sheets. I turned up my Sony Walkman, seeking out whatever local top 40 station I could find.
Over the course of that week, I grew to tolerate our cottage at the Lazy L to the point where I actually kind of enjoyed it. We had planned our trip for the same week as our friends/former roomies, and we spent most evenings at each other’s places, partaking in all the fun stuff we did in years past. By week’s end, my dad told Marcel we’d probably return next summer. While part of me secretly hoped we’d look for a new place to stay, I decided I’d be open to more time on Squirrel Lake.
Sure enough, exactly fifty-one Saturdays later, we were back at the Lazy L, checking into the Edgewater for another week. This time, my father wanted to rent a motorboat—why, we’d be able to do our own fishing and exploring without always having to go across town to our friends (once again at their usual place.)
Marcel was happy to oblige. “Now Bob, I have this boat here that I’m gonna let you rent,” he said. “The motor is a little too powerful and complicated for the older couple staying at the cottage next to yours, but I bet you can handle it.”
I’m not sure what inspired Marcel’s confidence in my father apart from his relative youth. I’d seen him work a boat motor before; it didn’t appear too difficult a thing to do—just pull the rip cord and steer in the direction you wanted to go. How hard could that be?
Now that we had our own vessel for the week, my parents took it out fishing nearly every morning, while I joined them in the afternoons and evenings for rides around the lake. In general, it was another pleasant, tranquil Minocqua vacation—a brief but necessary respite from urban life and the daily grind. I’d begun my own first part-time job that summer, scooping ice cream at a Baskin-Robbins, so this rest and relaxation seemed sweeter than it had back when I was an unemployed youth. The Lazy L definitely lived up to its name.
The last night of the week, our friends came over for a Friday Fish Fry, a tradition most sacred in predominantly Catholic regions, but particularly in Wisconsin. We delved into our coolers full of fresh fish from the week that we had caught and filleted, breading and frying up somewhere between a dozen or two on that little but resilient white stove, saving the rest to bring back home. Once there, they’d take up room in the freezer indefinitely, allowing us to replicate the experience the best we could on a few cherished occasions during the rest of the year.
After dinner, our friends headed back to their place—no more fishing that evening for any of us, as we were all driving back to Milwaukee early the next morning. As their white SUV pulled away from the Lazy L, we still had about two hours of sunlight left.
“Hey, let’s take one last ride around the lake,” my dad buoyantly suggests.
This idea of “one last ride around the lake” is romantic and idyllic: What better way to cap off the best time of the year in the upper Midwest—a week blessed by ample sun, piercing blue skies and perfectly comfortable temperatures?
My parents and I approach our pier which is splattered with dried-up shit from all of the ducks that had taken up residency there at intervals throughout the week. Incidentally, we’d grow fond of this waterfowl, repeatedly spotting them via our kitchen window—going so far as to name one “Crazy Louie” for his tendency to stubbornly isolate himself from the rest of the flock. I see a pale orange sun reflecting on the crystalline lake ahead of us. The gleaming white metal of our small, rented motorboat also catches my eye. We wave hello to the elderly couple fishing off the next pier—they’re the ones Marcel perceived as too weak to handle our boat’s supposedly robust motor.
We enter the small craft one by one. First, my mom, who sits in the middle. I warn her, somewhat snarkily, not to fall off her seat as she had done on our last ride. Then, it’s my turn to get in. I sit in front (or the bow) as my dad takes the stern in back to work the motor.
Once everyone’s settled, sitting on overstuffed blue life-preserver cushions, I untie the rope connecting us to the pier. We row away for a bit, the stern pointing away from the shore. As my dad tries starting the motor, nothing happens. After a few more attempts, still nothing. My upbeat mood takes a turn: Is the motor broken? Are we out of gas?
Fortunately, after another attempt, a loud, raucous WHIR-R-R-L-LLL appears and we’re moving. Hooray! I’m ready to enjoy the scenery and maybe even see a few perch or some turtles pop their heads up above the deep, voluminous fresh water surrounding us.
The objects one views in a boat backing away from the shore are supposed to get smaller, not larger. It takes a few seconds for this to sink in. When I become fully aware of our situation, I shout out, “Dad, we’re going the wrong way!”
Over the motor’s immense roar, I can barely make out him saying, “I can’t find the gear, I can’t get it into gear!”
My mom sits still as if in a state of suspended animation, quiet but perplexed, unable to do much of anything. She cautiously questions, “Bob…?”
Speed. We are picking up on it as we head perilously closer to shore. I don’t look back at my dad or question why he can’t change direction. I just look ahead at the other boats we could potentially hit.
The words, “I can’t get it into gear!” echo in my head. We’re getting perilously closer to the neighboring pier. All at once, I feel as if I’m in a fever dream, or watching myself on TV—this can’t really be happening! How could we be going the wrong way?
I shout, “WHAT are you DOING?”
The next few seconds are a blur. I close my eyes. Someone (maybe it was me?) barks out, “We’re headed right straight for the…”
THOINK!
A loud crashing sound both heard and felt. I might’ve let out a “WHOAH!” right before we made impact, but I’ve blocked most of those few seconds out. I recall opening my eyes, noticing that our boat had stopped and was somehow halfway up the neighbor’s pier and halfway in the lake. Although I’m on the tippy-top, I’ve somehow managed to hold on to my seat. My mother has fallen off hers (despite my warning!); my dad’s at the bottom, his shoes drenched in water that has infiltrated the stern.
The elderly couple stands before us, speechless, staring open-mouthed. Once my shock subsides, I start to laugh, queasily. My mom later recalls that as we were on a collision course with the pier, she kept thinking of an old Woody Woodpecker cartoon that had a boat literally tearing through a wooden pier as if it were a buzz saw.
Miraculously, the vehicle’s still in one piece. I hop onto the pier and pull my mom, then my dad out of the boat. We slide it back into the water—apart from a few noticeable scratches around and under the bow, the boat’s perfectly fine. Marcel, thank god, is nowhere to be seen.
After all this, most people would just walk away and call it a night, but not my father. He was determined to get that last ride in, dammit. We all got back into the boat, he started up the motor and this time, we made it out onto the lake successfully. Still, my mom and I held on extra tight to our seat cushions, barely speaking a word to each other. As much as we wanted to enjoy this “one last ride around the lake”, the recent memory of having unceremoniously gone up a pier couldn’t help but dampen our moods.
We left for home early the next morning, never to return to the Lazy L, embarrassed to face Marcel again after scratching up his boat. I’d return to Minocqua the next summer on my own, staying with our friends for a few days, but my parents and I never set foot there together again. I began feeling too old, too much of an adult to spend a weeklong vacation with them. I’ve thought about going back to Minocqua again as an adult out of nostalgia for a place I once knew, but fear I’d only set myself up for disappointment. I prefer to simply remember and cherish all the fun I had there in my youth—my parents and I literally going up a pier in a motorboat remains a one-of-a-kind experience I could never, ever hope to replicate or surpass.
The summer I turned sixteen, my parents informed me I was to get a part-time job. No longer could I spend all my days watching three-hour blocks of I Love Lucy reruns or setting off on rambling, endless bike rides all over town. Time had come for me to make a living, or at least earn some spending money beyond a weekly chore allowance (and the very occasional babysitting gig.)
Luckily, I had plenty of entry-level employment options within walking distance from home. I could stock shelves at Sav-U supermarket or Payless Shoes Source, bus tables at B&B Lounge, expose myself to a variety of chemicals at Wolf’s Dry Cleaners—there was even a fish market I could work at, although it emitted an odor one could smell from up to a block away.
Such potential first jobs barely crossed my mind, however, for I was fortunate enough to live close to both a frozen custard stand (for the unfamiliar, frozen custard is richer, fattier ice cream freakishly more popular in Milwaukee than most other cities) and a Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors. The former, named General Custard’s (“Food Good Enough to Make a Stand For!”) was a block closer, but also a burger joint. Not wanting to return home reeking of grilled onions and meat every night, I gravitated towards the Baskin-Robbins, which had been in its long, narrow storefront location since before I was born. In addition to loving the stuff (oh how I would anticipate what each Flavor of the Month would be when I was a tyke!), scooping ice cream was also something I knew I could probably do, even with my total lack of experience.
The last week of May, I walked the two-and-a-half blocks over there to ask if they were hiring. Stan, the ancient, white-haired man behind the counter whom I’d later find out had owned and operated the franchise for over 25 years, handed me an application. I could have filled it out at one of the three tables (all of them encrusted with traces of sugar, butter and cone) to the right of the gleaming display freezers stacked with nearly forty different three-gallon ice cream tubs; instead, I took it home, completed it very carefully and brought it back the next day. Stan was still there, tallying up the afternoon’s sales, printing an almost comically long receipt from the cash register. He browsed over the application, and asked when I’d like to work my first shift. I told him I’d be out of school next week. “Come in Wednesday at 3:00 PM,” he responded in a guttural smoker’s rasp I’d soon know very well.
I had done it! I was going to scoop ice cream and furthermore, make money doing so! How cool was that? Apart from my folks, I told no one else of my summer plans; I didn’t want to jinx my good fortune. Of course, being a newbie to the workforce, I had no clue what to expect, but I didn’t care—I found a job right near my house, and I suspected I’d be able to eat a lot of free ice cream there too.
That following Wednesday, I made sure I arrived at the shop minutes before 3:00. As I opened the door, Stan looked up from behind the counter and regarded me as if I was merely another customer, asking, “Whadda you want?”
Caught off guard, I hesitated, “Uhh, it’s me. Chris… your new employee?”
“Ach! Come on back,” he grumbled. I followed him behind the counter and into a rear room partially concealed from the public via two swinging half-doors not dissimilar from those separating the kitchen and dining room in my Aunt Judy’s suburban ranch home, only these were painted the color of Pepto Bismo. Beyond them sat shelves haphazardly stacked with all the crap Stan never threw away: piles of old promotional banners, faded flavor labels, assorted paper and plastic goods like napkins and straws and a somewhat tarnished array of ice cream cake decorations, from frostings and sprinkles to a rainbow of sugars. Along one wall sat a couple of upright and top-opening white freezers populated with brand-new ice cream tubs waiting to take the place of those sitting in the display cases out front after their depletion.
Stan handed me a polo shirt the same color as the swinging doors and an outsized thick plastic binder that was the Baskin-Robbins employee handbook. He ordered me to put the shirt on, sit down at the desk next to the cake decorations and read the book. He then returned to the front of the store to wait on customers, tally up sales and whatever else it was he did all day. I dutifully sat there, scanning the handbook cover-to-cover, learning everything one could possibly know about scooping ice cream and exhibiting good customer service.
At least thirty minutes passed before Stan came back through the swinging doors and bellowed, “What, are you sleeping?” He gestured me to follow him out front, where he showed me how to use the ice cream scooper, craft such delicacies as a fudge brownie sundae or a banana split, run the cash register and use a waffle iron and a spherical wooden tool that formed the freshly made waffles into cones.
Within an hour, one of my co-workers arrived, also named Chris and also Stan’s grandson. Two years older than me, this other Chris had worked there for some time; as Stan left to go home for dinner (he also lived in the neighborhood), his grandson would continue my training. The other Chris was fun because he was a smartass and a co-conspirator. That first evening, when it came time to get ready for closing, he showed me the bathroom in the back where I’d prepare the mop to clean the store’s tiled floors. Next to a rusting sink and a mirror desperately in need of a streak of Windex was a slightly cracked sign from the Milwaukee Health Department: in funky, early ‘70s-style lettering, it said “Wash Your Hands,” the words actually rendered within the shape of a hand. Directly underneath it, a plastic shelf held a yellowed, dusty bar of soap.
“You know, the soap’s older than that sign,” the other Chris remarked. I nearly believed him.
In those hours when it was just us two Chris’s at work, we had a blast—especially in the colder months as up to an hour would often pass by without a single customer. We’d hang out in the back room, rummaging through piles of old stuff such as a poster for “Monte Carlo Stripe” (a flavor inspired by the long-forgotten 1977 flick Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo), making note of such peculiar stock as a cardboard box of Maple Nut topping stamped with a then-six-year-old expiration date. Whenever the front door opened, the other Chris would suddenly snap to attention and proclaim, “INCOMING!” (a M*A*S*H reference), our cue to emerge from the back room and actually do some work.
I certainly enjoyed working with him far more than my other co-workers, two guys both my age. Frank, who wasn’t much for conversation, had started working there only weeks earlier but never failed to lord this sort of dubiously-won authority over me. When not telling me what to do, he sat next to the rear counter, doodling in a well-worn spiral notebook. Joe, on the other hand, might’ve been less friendly than the other Chris, but I appreciated his droll demeanor. A regular customer who lived three doors down would come in at least once a week and always order the same thing: two scoops of chocolate chip topped with hot fudge. During one of his visits, Joe said to me, quietly and pointedly, “I’ll take care of Monty Clift over there.” At the time, I had no idea who that was; in retrospect, Joe’s assessment of this handsome, if somewhat creepy guy was spot-on.
Joe could be a co-conspirator as well. Once, we were in the store alone together when an obscenely large, hairy, yellow-brownish rat emerged from under the rear counter. I quickly ran into the back and grabbed a broom, but before I could return to the front, we suddenly had customers (INCOMING!) whom thankfully did not see the rat behind the display cases. Joe quickly put his hands up in a “NO! NO!” sort-of-way at me to prevent the customers from witnessing me running out with a broom in hand (was I planning on sweeping the rat away?) Luckily, the vermin soon disappeared back under the counter and we never saw it again.
I can only imagine what one of our customers would’ve done upon seeing a rodent in the store, for many of them were nuttier than the massive plastic container of macadamias we had for a special Hawaiian-themed sundae. Baskin-Robbins was where I learned the actual cardinal rule of working in retail or food service: contrary to popular belief, the customer is hardly ever right, but it’s polite and often expected to let them think they are. The mother and daughter who sample a dozen different flavors and then leave without buying anything? The middle-aged man who asks for a scoop of “Blue Chocolate Chip” (meaning our most popular flavor Mint Chocolate Chip, of course) two minutes before closing on a Saturday night, the floors all mopped and chairs upside down on the table tops? The wispy young couple whom, upon inquiring how long we’ll have Bubblegum ice cream and, after being told just for the next two months, whining, “For the wholeyear???” All of ‘em wrong to various degrees, but not yelled at, turned away or (openly) made fun of by me and my fellow scoopers.
A few customers made this exceedingly difficult. I’m thinking of the clueless woman who asked me, “Is this your first day?” as I stood there, the only employee at the store, my right hand bleeding profusely from a mishap with our nefarious cake-cutter as I could not help but betray my impatience with her ninety-nine questions about the display freezer full of prepackaged ice cream quarts and pints. Even better was the lady to whom I accidentally served a scoop of Fudge Brownie when she had asked for Chocolate Almond (they looked almost identical.) Whereas you or I would likely just say, ‘Hey idiot, this is the wrong flavor,” she took a seat at a table, ate her ice cream cone and spat out all of the brownie pieces into a napkin. She then left this napkin full of masticated food bits on top of the counter right under my nose and said, “I don’t remember these being in Chocolate Almond,” and left. I believe I was literally speechless for the first time in my young life.
I suspect Stan had seen it all. I didn’t know much about his past, although the other Chris once disclosed he had worked as an ambulance driver (!) before he bought the franchise. Stan was a constant presence, opening and closing the store every day and night, usually handing off the reins to his young male scoopers for hours in between. His equally ancient wife Adeline would occasionally come in to help decorate ice cream cakes. She was quiet but nice enough, her most distinguishing feature being her two-toned hair (as my mother described it), probably due to a messy dye job. Although he was a crotchety old fart, Stan knew what he was doing as a manager—he would have had to, given that he’d been running this franchise and presumably turning a profit for nearly three decades.
Still, Stan had his own share of quirks. Every night, he’d prepare a sink full of soapy water to prep rags for wiping down all the counters and tables. The water was always SCALDING HOT, as I discovered the first time I stuck my hand in it. In time, I’d come to prep it exactly that way, with the other Chris once reaching in for a rag and exclaiming, “Hey, that’s STAN hot!” He also loved contemporary country music (he was of the age where you’d expect him to be more into big-band oldies or polkas) and regularly used such dated colloquialisms as “darn-tootin’” and “cotton-pickin’”.
Stan once even ended up on the 5:00 news: that first Christmas Eve I worked there, I was home in my bedroom when my mom called out, “Hey Chris, your boss is on TV!” Running over to the living room, I learned from our television that some guy had taken a massive cement truck for a joyride and ended up crashing into Stan’s garage, mere blocks away from my own house. Adeline showed up at the store days later, a few yellowed bruises on her face. “I guess you heard we had a dramatic holiday this year!” she remarked with folksy understatement of the sort one often encounters in the Upper Midwest.
As the lowest on the store’s totem pole, I must have worked those first ten or fifteen Saturday nights in a row before I finally asked Stan if I could have the next one off. He gave it to me, but he also occasionally gave me a rough time. More than once, he pulled me aside and said, “Y’know, I’ve had people ask me, ‘Why doesn’t that young man of yours ever smile?’”, insinuating I was the sullenest of his four teenaged scoopers. The accusation always maddened me because I suspected it was the dour Frank they were talking about, but I wasn’t comfortable shifting the blame over to him, which would be akin to tattling. It bugged me, but I learned to put it aside. Initially, the job’s benefits far outweighed any of these frustrations: free ice cream, for sure, but also a lot of autonomy—particularly on winter weeknights, when I’d be the only person at the store. I’d sit in the back, do my homework, and occasionally watch a 13” black-and-white TV while my mom would swing by with TV dinners and fast-food takeout, since my usual shift would go from 4:00 to 10:00 PM, not allowing me to leave for a meal break.
However, little things began gnawing away at me. The other Chris left for a stint in the Army (INCOMING!) and Stan never replaced him, resulting in more work for all, but also additional shifts spent in close quarters with no one to talk to but Frank. I remained the new guy more than eighteen months after I started; I was also getting paid less than minimum wage, which I was too green and meek to do anything about. When I once asked the other Chris how come we were paid so low, he said, “Oh, that’s because the job is agricultural,” some hot garbage I could never confirm or deny given this was the age before Wikipedia (or the Internet, even.)
As the next summer came and went and I entered my senior year of high school, I grew to loathe those six-hour weeknight shifts, the measly pay, the same three co-workers in different permutations, the waffle cone maker that never failed to burn my fingers, the endless parade of customers asking to taste this flavor and that flavor on the little pink sampling spoons we had in abundance. I had particular contempt for the plastic cutout of a giant, grinning anthropomorphic pink spoon hanging over the doorway to the back of the store—Baskin-Robbins’ half-baked idea of an unnamed cartoon mascot (Spoony? Scoopy?) I’d look up at it and think, “What are you so happy about?” and picture it accidentally falling off the wall, hitting Frank in the head.
The final straw came in January. One otherwise unremarkable evening when I was in the back searching for a new tub of Jamoca Almond Fudge, I heard a sudden THUMP. Looking out, I saw that Stan had accidentally dropped an opened, full tub of Cookies N’ Cream face down on the floor behind the counter. He proceeded to pick it up and place it back in the display case without so much as wiping any residue from the exposed surface. Once again, I was speechless. When he wasn’t looking, I examined the tub for hints of dirt or crumbs or other floor particles but couldn’t detect any (of course, Cookies N’ Cream can conceivably mask such stuff.)
That night, I decided I’d give Stan my two-week notice. I didn’t want to work there anymore and the Cookies N’ Cream fiasco was only part of it. I had four months left of high school and was just beginning to open myself up to the world. Over the past year, I’d discovered how much fun it was to hang out with friends and have a social life instead of watching TV every night. The idea of spending most of my evenings and weekends sequestered in a half-dead ice cream parlor for four bucks an hour was none too appealing; I estimated I wouldn’t be giving up much in terms of spending money. I’d worked my first real job, but it was time to move on and enjoy my newfound social life—I could always look for another job come summer.
When I told Stan of my plans, he didn’t say anything, just a near-quiet harrumph as he continued refilling the hot fudge dispenser. My last day ended up being the last day of January with just Stan and myself at the store. We had no tearful goodbyes or any goodbyes at all, period—after mopping the floor and wiping down the counters and tables, I hung up my pink polo shirt for the last time, and walked out into the chilly air, taking the five-minute route back home I had walked hundreds of times over the past two years.
Exactly two weeks later, whizzing past the store with a buddy on our way to the movies (see, I was socializing!), he remarked, “Hey, this morning in church, they said that the ice cream guy died.” Upon hearing this, I’d like to think I turned as bright white as the painted exterior of my mother’s Grand Am that I was driving.
“WHAT?!”, I responded, “You mean STAN?!!”
“Yeah, you know… the ice cream guy!,” he replied, not knowing I’d worked for the man until very recently. Somehow I managed to maintain control of the car, not pulling off to the side of the road as we headed to the Skyway Cinema to see Groundhog Day. The next morning, I phoned St. Helen’s rectory and the secretary confirmed that Stan’s funeral was scheduled for noon that day. I didn’t ask about the cause of death and never found out, too embarrassed to call up the store, much less inquire in person. I assumed it was something like a heart attack or a stroke—the man was in his late ’70s, after all. Even though I rationally knew I didn’t cause Stan’s death by quitting, I couldn’t help but feel incredibly guilty at the unfortunate timing.
I happened to have off from school that day, President’s Day. My mom and I talked about attending the funeral but I decided I’d rather not have to face Stan’s family or my ex-co-workers. She said to me, “Can you imagine if that big pink spoon hanging over the doorway had shown up at church? He’d probably wave and say, ‘Bye, Stan! I’ll miss ya!’” I could always count on her to lighten the mood.
Stan’s family kept the franchise running for a few more years; it was a pizzeria after that for some time. It currently houses a tortilleria, or tortilla factory, reflecting the steady influx of Latinx people over the past two decades into this formerly overwhelmingly white neighborhood. That summer after finishing high school, I worked the first of a series of entry-level retail jobs that paid marginally better than Stan did, but I never liked any of them as much. I now know I left Baskin-Robbins a little hastily—I could’ve easily stuck it out for another six or seven months before beginning college (I commuted downtown to Marquette University that first year, so I could’ve stayed even longer.) Still, I acquired my first taste of what it was like to have a job. As with that infamous mother-and-daughter duo who tried a dozen different flavors without buying a single thing, I just had to sample other jobs and find out what type of work I was and wasn’t suited for; in the latter category, that was my next job, a first (and to date, last) foray into real food service, bussing tables at a chain buffet joint.
Stan was far from the best boss I ever had, but with decades of work experience behind me now, I can at least appreciate what the ice cream man accomplished. Yes, his franchise was part of a massive international chain, but by the time I arrived there, Stan’s constant, long-term presence had turned it into something more like a neighborhood institution. On those rare occasions when I get a scoop at a Baskin-Robbins (there aren’t too many in New England, where I now live), I always tip my pink plastic spoon to him.
Before I take a hiatus from blogging for the rest of the summer, here are my ten favorite movies and albums midway through this year, in alphabetical order.
MOVIES:
Apollo 11
Ash Is Purest White
End of The Century
Gloria Bell
Hail, Satan?
Her Smell
In Fabric
Museum Town
The Souvenir
Sword of Trust
ALBUMS:
Alex Lahey, The Best of Luck Club
Andrew Bird, My Finest Work Yet
Calexico and Iron & Wine, Years To Burn
Charly Bliss, Young Enough
The Dream Syndicate, These Times
Holy Ghost!, Work
Hot Chip, A Bath Full Of Ecstasy
The Mountain Goats, In League With Dragons
Robert Forster, Inferno
Weyes Blood, Titanic Rising
A few of my 100 favorite albums are currently in this crate.
Why did I write one hundred essays on my favorite albums, in chronological order from Revolver to Record? When I began this project five years and one month ago, I saw it as a constructive way to write more extensively about music, and also as an opportunity to get used to working on longer pieces in general. I figured I could complete a thousand-word essay a week and get to the finish line within a little over two years.
And I more or less kept up the pace until I got to album number 6, Abbey Road—a record I had far more than a thousand words to write about. Once I reached the ‘90s in my timeline, I encountered many albums that, due to when I first heard them or what presence they’ve continually maintained in my life, required far more time and attention to assess than I initially expected, to the point that at the two-year mark, I was only halfway through the entire project.
Now that I’ve finally completed it, I feel a sense of having accomplished something, but what, beyond finishing what I set out to do? I’ve left a record of my taste in music as it stands over this half-decade (go back to my 2004 list to see how it has shifted); I’ve also continually drawn connections between albums from nearly every notch on this half-century-plus timeline up to the final entry (thank you, Tracey Thorn, for injecting into your own Record a song title from Songs of Leonard Cohen!)
Throughout, I kept revising the initial list I came up with in 2014. My original end point was Random Access Memories, an ideal choice given its fixation on channeling past sounds into contemporary and possible future ones. However, it ended up at #94, which allowed me to include six more titles released after it. What happened to the six older albums I left off? Apart from the Mekons’ OOOH! (Out Of Our Heads) (I still wonder why I nixed that one; was it too similar to Sleater-Kinney’s contemporaneous One Beat?), I honestly can’t recall what they were (my original list is sadly lost to time.) I occasionally replaced one album with another from the same artist: Dig Me Out and All Hands On The Bad One were candidates instead of One Beat at various points, and I kept going back and forth between Scarlet’s Walk and Boys For Pele for Tori Amos before deciding I had more to say about the latter (mostly because it’s nuts.)
Still, as I made my way through 100 Albums, it gradually dawned on me that this project had a certain flaw: By writing only about records that I loved, I was in danger of lapsing into hagiography. Truthfully, I’ve always felt more comfortable dissecting art I was drawn to than stuff I found repulsive or that simply left me cold—I’m a fan/geek more than a critic where music’s concerned (film criticism, on the other hand, I have a graduate degree in.) While it was often fun reviewing records on a weekly basis for a website back in 2003-04, a majority of them were so awful, when I left that gig, I was elated to go back to focusing on albums I genuinely liked.
The other difficult aspect of writing essays about your 100 favorite albums is that before long, you are inevitably prone to repeating yourself: How many different ways can you say something is good and make a sound critical argument as to why others should listen to it? I’ve tried my best to confront this challenge and write criticism that comes from an honest point-of-view. I haven’t gone back and re-read every last entry in this project, but I can single out ten that I think are, at the very least (to quote Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-n-Furter in Rocky Horror Picture Show), pretty groovaay:
It helps that every one of these ten would probably make a top 25 if I had to rank the entire list*, but another common thread runs through them: they are among my most personal essays here. I repeatedly found myself enjoying the writing process more when I was able to lead off or build a piece around a reminiscence or an anecdote directly related to an album, one that could help flesh out or even unlock what meaning this particular piece of art had for me.
I can firmly say there will never be a likeminded follow-up to 100 Albums: No 100 Films, 100 Books, 100 TV shows, etc. Putting aside the danger and difficulty that comes with only writing about beloved art, I’ve gradually discovered throughout this project that I have other, more important things to write about (even if I now regret not including Cosmic Thing by The B-52’s or anything by Steely Dan, among other artists.) Haunted Jukebox will continue, but its primary focus will no longer be music. Oh, there will be mixes (annual and otherwise), year-end lists and likely a decade-end album list in early 2020, but I’m ready to move on from criticism into more personal terrain. Thanks to anyone following and/or invested in this project.
* In 100 Albums: An Introduction, I said I’d do this upon the project’s completion, but since rankings of all-time lists are so prone to fluctuation, I’m leaving it up to each reader’s perception as to what my favorite, favorite albums are.
(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #100 – released March 2, 2018)
Track listing: Queen / Air / Guitar / Smoke / Sister / Go / Babies / Face / Dancefloor
After Amplified Heart gave Everything But The Girl a crossover hit with Todd Terry’s remix of “Missing”, this duo of Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, then more than a decade into their career, soldiered on for two more albums of electronic dance music inspired by this late-breaking success before essentially disbanding in 2000—I purposely use that term, for the longtime couple stopped being a band but remained together in every other sense. Thorn, who had given birth to twins two years before, later revealed in her memoir Bedsit Disco Queen that she was simply ready to stop recording and performing to raise a family. She and Watt would have another child in 2001 and eventually, officially marry in 2008, over a quarter century after they met at Hull University.
Fortunately for her fans, Thorn didn’t stay retired from music (though she never returned to live performance.) Surfacing in 2007 with a solo effort, Out Of The Woods, she retained the sound of those later EBTG albums but on a more intimate scale. Directly addressing her time away from the spotlight on such tunes as “Nowhere Near” and “Raise The Roof”, Thorn crafted a modern, electro-update of singer-songwriter chestnuts like Tapestry and Blue. Her next album, 2010’s Love And Its Opposite, displayed a wider array of textures with a far more somber tone. She later called it her “mid-life album”—a keen assessment given songs like the uncharacteristically peppy “Hormones” (“Yours are just kicking in / Mine are just checking out,” she tells her daughters) and the stirring, chamber-pop ballad “Oh! The Divorces.”
In the past decade, she’s continued building an unconventional solo career: writing multiple books and a newspaper column, appearing on duets with such indie-centric artists as Jens Lekman and John Grant, recording a Christmas album here and a movie soundtrack there and just being a generally delightful presence on Twitter. When commencing work on Record, her first studio album of new songs in eight years, she tweeted something along the lines of, “Well, it’s time for me to make another album,” her casual frankness disarming as ever. And while I thought very highly of Love And Its Opposite when it came out and came around to thinking Out Of The Woods was even better than that some five or six years after its release, at present, I’m confident that Record is really Thorn’s most essential album since Amplified Heart.
“NINE FEMINIST BANGERS” reads the sticker on Record’s cover and one could not sum up its appeal more succinctly. Once again working with producer Ewan Pearson (having helmed the majority of her output since Out of The Woods), Thorn keeps to a limited but effective palette: synths, drum machines, some guitar and on one track (“Smoke”), a string arrangement. The blunt, one-word song titles perfectly fit their tunes’ musical and lyrical directness. Like Home Counties, Record was mostly conceived in a post-Brexit, Trump-ridden world and it subtly (and occasionally not-so-subtly) reflects such times from a distinct perspective—ever approachable and candid, Record is Thorn’s ongoing monologue of who and where she is now.
In that sense, opener “Queen” is an ideal statement of purpose. A sonic analogue to Saint Etienne’s 2012 single “Tonight”, it finds a woman considering herself in midlife over ringing, swooshing synths and a clarion, yearning chorus: “Am I queen / a magisterial has-been?,” she ponders, or perhaps “A star / Propping up the backstage bar?” They are questions specific to her life as a singer and public figure, but she shifts from the potentially autobiographical to the firmly universal by concluding, “And will I ever find love / or am I still waiting?”
From there, Record finds Thorn looking back and taking stock of her past. “Air” gently bubbles with traces of an awkward adolescence and the gender politics that drove and very nearly defined it: “Didn’t understand the rules or how to play,” she notes, before rattling off a series of self-critiques: “Too tall / All wrong / Deep voice / Headstrong.” Meanwhile, the music’s mid-tempo R&B-inflected pop (the closest Thorn has emulated the sound of Idlewild in some time) and breezy backing vocals from Shura reinforce the chorus’ simple but persuasive main hook, “I need some air,” with the word “I” delicately stretched out to five syllables.
“Guitar”, propelled by pulsating synths with the titular instrument only first appearing in the second verse offers transcendence from this dilemma. Although Thorn credits a boyfriend with “arm(ing) her with three chords,” teaching her how to play, it turns out he “was only just a catalyst.” She looks back on the affair with self-deprecation and a little bemusement, name-dropping Leonard Cohen, then slyly quoting his song “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye” a few lines on (“Oh god, you couldn’t make it up,” she adds.) Still, she emphasizes her eventual self-triumph: “I couldn’t begin until I fell apart,” she admits before declaring, “Thank God I could sing and I had my guitar.”
“Smoke” goes back ever further, detailing her ancestral origin story in the guise of a modern folk ballad complete with a narrative structure and repeated phrases. Beginning with her Great-Grandparents, Thorn tells of how they moved into London (“to the rolling smoke”) and “had a son called James, who had a son called James” (“were there no other names?” she asks.) Two World Wars follow, and her mother “survived the Blitz / though she knew a girl, who knew a girl / who was blown to bits.” Thorn was born after her parents “fled the smoke,” escaping to the post-war suburbs where she herself would escape from come adulthood. Still, on the scintillating chorus, she sings, “London, you’re in my blood but I feel you going wrong.” As the song builds and sighs and marvelously changes keys at the bridge, Thorn’s history unfolds and blossoms, stretching on and outward like time itself.
“Sister” brings us back to the present with Corinne Bailey Rae’s brief, a capella vocal: it’s a beguiling intro to a minor-key anthem in the guise of an extended, eight-minute vamp sparkling with taut rhythm guitar licks, a mid-tempo beat groovy enough to dance to and an array of various synth filigrees (brought to the foreground in the mostly instrumental second half.) But don’t let the running time fool you—this is Thorn’s razor-sharp feminist manifesto and Record’s literal and thematic centerpiece. “Don’t mess with me, don’t hug my babies / I’ll come for you, you’ve bitten off more than you can chew” it starts before the singalong chorus where she states, “I am my mother / I am my mother now / I am my sister / and I fight like a girl.” Nothing cute, pensive or repentant here and that goes double on the bridge where she pointedly, cathartically asks, ‘Oh, what year is it? Still arguing the same shit. / What year is it? Same, same, same old shit.”
“Babies” is another anthem, far less angry but just as firm, offering no apologies for waiting to become a mother: “I didn’t want my babies until I wanted babies,” goes the chorus, following an opening verse that’s one of the most clever ever written about birth control, rhyming “you push a little tablet through the foil” with “better than a condom or a coil.” But the song is also an ode to what happens when you decide to have babies and when they grow up to be teenagers. “Go to sleep, it’s 3 AM / Where are you, it’s 3 AM / in a cab at 3 AM / Don’t wait up it’s 3 AM,” she rattles off as the music percolates with a joyous, assembly line sheen.
On either side of “Babies” sits Record’s two ballads. “Go” is addressed from a parent to a child leaving home for the first time. Over slow, lingering chords reminiscent of a George Michael lament (most notably “One More Try”), the generally low-voiced Thorn starts off singing in her highest register: “I resign myself to time and what’s no longer mine,” before her own grief gives way to tenderness and support as she tells her child, “Pack your bags and smile, it will only be a little while.” “Face”, in which Thorn scrolls through an ex’s social media page seems less immediate by default, although her self-effacing humor (“If I just keep refreshing, maybe you’ll disappear”) buoys what is a perceptive take on having perhaps too much access to too many people at your fingertips.
Record roars back to life on its exhilarating closer, “Dancefloor”. Like much of the album, it’s Thorn making sense of who and where she is now as a mother, sister, wife, singer, songwriter, musician, author, etc. She asks questions both philosophical (”Where did we begin?”) and searching (“Who’s just desperate for anything at all / anything at all like love?”) before proclaiming, “Oh but where I’d like to be / is on a dancefloor with some drinks inside of me,” hanging out with friends, turning it out together to such perennial bangers as Chic’s “Good Times” and Shannon’s “Let The Music Play”. The vibrant, fizzy, electro backdrop, complete with robotic voices repeatedly announcing, “ON A DANCEFLOOR!” reinforces all of this. When Thorn suddenly reveals, “Someone’s singing and I realize it’s me,” it’s a simple but immense, resounding epiphany—the kind one forever seeks but rarely finds in a pop song. How fitting that the last album in this project is not only called Record, but also recognizes how awesome it is that music has the power to shape and sustain a life.
Up next: 100 Albums concludes with an epilogue, or, my own looking back and taking stock.
(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #99 – released June 2, 2017)
Track listing: The Reunion / Something New / Magpie Eyes / Whyteleafe / Dive / Church Pew Furniture Restorer / Take It All In / Popmaster / Underneath The Apple Tree / Out Of My Mind / After Hebden / Breakneck Hill / Heather / Sports Report / Train Drivers In Eyeliner / Unopened Fan Mail / What Kind Of World / Sweet Arcadia / Angel Of Woodhatch
After the superlative song cycle Tales From Turnpike House, I couldn’t imagine what Saint Etienne would do next—apparently, neither could the band, at least not right away. Seven years passed before the release of their next album, Words and Music By Saint Etienne. Concerning the rituals and pleasures of pop music itself, the concept seemed ideal for a trio of self-avowed fans-turned-aspiring-popstars; in practice, it worked well enough, widely viewed as a comeback on both sides of the pond. It featured some of their very best singles (“Tonight”, “I’ve Got Your Music”) and, as usual with this group, exceptional album tracks that could’ve easily been singles as well (“Heading For The Fair”, “Last Days Of Disco”, “DJ” and the song this blog takes its name from.)
And yet… as a big fan myself, I found Words and Music not completely up to snuff with the four previous Saint Etienne albums I’ve covered here. For one thing, it has a substantial amount of, well, not filler, exactly, but lesser songs I rarely listen to in isolation (“Answer Song”, “Twenty Five Years”, actual throwaway “Record Doctor”); also, celebrating pop through the prism of London is more or less what this trio has always done, but by making it so explicit and upfront, they almost lessen what’s so singular and special about it. Again, for any band, Words and Music is a good album and for them a shrewd one to make after such a long absence, but it doesn’t add anything new to their catalog in the way, say, Tiger Bay or even Good Humor did.
Fast forward a few more years: there’s another band sabbatical during which Sarah Cracknell puts out a second solo album, Red Kite (solid singer-songwriter folk, and worlds away from the dance-pop of her earlier effort Lipslide) while Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs continue curating compilations of subterranean gems from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. When the trio commence work on new material in mid-2016, the world in is flux. Brexit has passed and Trumpism clouds the air. Their new songs aren’t especially angry (how inconceivable to think of an incensed Saint Etienne!) but these developments (especially the hitting-closer-to-home Brexit) have no small impact on the direction their ninth album begins to take.
For most Americans and non-anglophiles, the title Home Counties requires some explanation. The two-word term refers to the seven counties surrounding London—in other words, the suburbs. All three members of Saint Etienne grew up there before moving to London as adults; it follows that one can view the record as reminiscent and hyper-specific of a time and place as Fox Base Alpha and So Tough were of early ’90s London, only observed from a great distance instead of documenting it in real time. However, the album transcends childhood nostalgia because of the band’s obvious love/hate relationship with the region, elevated in no small part by that recent specter of Brexit hanging in the air—throughout the actual Home Counties, more people voted to leave the EU than remain, whereas London voted heavily in favor of the latter option.
The result is an intriguing push-and-pull for Saint Etienne: emphatic and celebratory as always, but now guided by hindsight and filtered through a sharper, critical eye. Initially, it resembles Good Humor more than anything else in the band’s catalog thanks to its live-band feel (the winsome yet enigmatic “Unopened Fan Mail” could easily slot into it) and the fact that Cracknell’s, Stanley’s and Wiggs’ coming-of-age years coincide with the AM radio gold the earlier album successfully emulated. However, Home Counties is no Good Humor II: a mosaic of instrumentals, spoken word interludes and tone poems along with the expected three-minute pop songs, it’s the band’s longest (19 tracks in 56 minutes, but they do fly by) and most varied album since Finisterre (maybe even So Tough)—it plays like a thoughtfully, lovingly compiled mix tape that coheres into a shimmering whole after multiple spins.
As you’d expect from a band known for their meticulous, often hand-crafted attention to detail, Home Counties has ultra-specific talismans woven throughout its fabric. It makes ample room for birdsong and a pastoral children’s choir (“Church Pew Furniture Restorer”), a spot-on Northern Soul simulation (“Underneath The Apple Tree”), a little harp and plenty of harpsichord (most prominently on “Whyteleafe” and “Take It All In”), and not one or two but three recreations of vintage radio transmissions, with quiz show “Popmaster” rather tongue-in-cheek in offering such decidedly modern prizes as “a digital radio or a blue-tooth speaker.” For a band whose early albums were liberally sprinkled with sound bites from classic films, this reprises a tradition of dropping references that will go over a majority of listeners’ heads but also lend much distinction and texture to the world depicted within.
Throughout, Saint Etienne can’t help but retain a certain fondness for where they’re from. In one song, Cracknell eagerly encourages us to “Take It All In” over a baroque retro-pop arrangement with a vaguely trip-hop beat, resembling a rather unlikely cross between The Association and Portishead. “Dive” is a memory of the kind of sensual, horn-driven funk workout one could get down to at the local disco or at a backyard, tiki torch-lit house party. With its clarion chorus and propulsive beat, “Magpie Eyes” encapsulates the bittersweet feeling of being young in a small town after summer’s gone with nothing to do but seek hidden treasure among what remains. Along those lines, “Out Of My Mind” further evokes both the euphoria and turmoil of adolescent infatuation, its ebullience and urgency rendering it a proud successor to such past triumphs as “Nothing Can Stop Us” and “Lightning Strikes Twice”.
Still, they just as often firmly (if considerately) resist suburbia as the utopian ideal. “Whyteleafe” may imagine an alternate universe where David Bowie never left home for London, settling into an ordinary life as a local businessman (Cracknell singing, “His sweet mu-ni-ci-pal dream” over a surging synth is one of the album’s most indelible hooks), but it’s merely a clever “what-if” scenario (and, a year after his death, a refreshingly unconventional Bowie tribute.) Meanwhile, the protagonist of “Something New” is desperately searching for “a sound that she knows could be fun”, and the song’s electric 12-string guitar and Mellotron-aping synth lends her support, especially as it gives way to the resolve and warmth of a brass coda. “Train Drivers In Eyeliner” sweetly advocates for more flamboyantly attired, Whitesnake-listening conductors in an attempt to gently shake up the status quo: “All over this land, that’s our plan,” Cracknell coos, as if stumping for the idea at a Town Hall meeting.
As Home Counties proceeds, it further scrutinizes suburbia, putting aside any notion of rose-colored lenses. Its primary hues purposely turn darker beginning with “Breakneck Hill”, a gorgeously drowsy instrumental that sounds straight out of Twin Peaks. Its spooky female sighs and Eno-esque ambient drone set the scene for “Heather”: a Hitchcock film in miniature, it recalls a neighbor or a childhood friend. Maybe she’s a ghost now, for “She comes and she goes like the warmth in the daylight.” Near the end, Cracknell repeats, “This house is haunted” as the sputtering but insistent rhythm and minor key synths swirl around her, almost fortifying her claim. Perhaps, this tale’s ghost is the narrator herself, wrestling with her past and present selves.
A few tracks later, laden with sweeping, urgent strings, “What Kind of World” fully acknowledges this identity crisis in relation to its milieu. “This is my home but I don’t feel at home tonight,” Cracknell declares before suggesting, “Let’s find another country / a better one,” and it has a thunderbolt’s impact—for many, the suburbs are a place to escape from due to their isolationism, conservatism and provincialism; Brexit enables the suburbs to uphold these tenets, legally cordoning off the outside world. It’s an easy explanation as to main reason why the members of Saint Etienne left the Home Counties, but it doesn’t necessarily shed light on why some people stay.
“Sweet Arcadia” makes an effort to elucidate on this. Opening with another talisman, a watery electric piano of the kind heard on such ‘70s hits as “I’m Not In Love” and “Just The Way You Are”, it’s another Cracknell spoken word piece in the tradition of “Teenage Winter” and “Over The Border”: “The trains took us away from the smoke,” she begins, narrating a travelogue through obscure, self-contained locales with names like Benfleet and South-End-On-Sea. A fetching, suitably locomotive rhythm moves us along as she recounts how the modern suburbs came to be. Over aching chord changes, she recites, “We built our own cinemas, we named our own houses,” charting the ever-forward march of progress until she concludes, “We took your land, and made it our land. Sweet Arcadia.” Her narration disappears halfway through this nearly eight-minute-long epic, consumed by extended flute and soulful organ solos as the beat slows to a wavering ebb-and-flow as if hovering on water.
After Cracknell mournfully sighs the song’s title repeatedly at the close, we’re left not with a resolution but unease. Saint Etienne have offered us plenty of reasons to both love and loathe suburbia; such a mass of contradictory feelings is more true to life than art that would either merely bask in the glow of its idyllic landscapes or only reveal them to be nothing but a cultural wasteland. And as much as this trio has forged a career on songs about transcendence and escape, Home Counties is a step in another direction, observing the world not just as it could be, but also as it is.
And why can’t we consider both simultaneously? If the penultimate “Sweet Arcadia” is to Home Counties what “Hello Earth” was to Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, closing track “Angel of Woodhatch” is this album’s equivalent to “The Morning Fog”. Its gentle woodwinds and sparkling wind chimes potentially suggest promise and renewal; here, with no lyrics to guide us toward a particular opinion, they could simply infer calm and stillness—a sweet surrender to a complex world with so many moving parts. Home Counties is Saint Etienne’s “mature” album for sure, but its richness and teeming ambiguities gives that off-derided term a good name.
(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #98 – released October 21, 2016)
Track listing: Sloboda Narodu / Swedish Guns / We Got Game / Thieves of State / Occupied / This Thing Was Bound To Happen / Can’t Be Guilty / Committed To The Cause / Running Out Of Love / Teach Me To Forget
I’ll never forget waking up painfully early on November 9, 2016, reaching for my phone and confirming what I and many others had dreaded—the most inconceivable, worst possible outcome of a presidential election in my lifetime (to date, I fear.) Opening Facebook, I scrolled past one confused, incensed, disgusted reaction after another from assorted friends and celebrities until coming across a link to a YouTube clip from The Radio Dept. for their song, “This Thing Was Bound To Happen.” In that moment, as much as I was in a state of shock, I mentally responded, “Well, of course.” Months of anticipation and assuredness, gradually worn down and defeated by time, determination and dumb luck—all of it led not to the outcome we expected or thought we deserved. It all simply felt inevitable now, like the punchline to a bad joke.
That’s not to say The Radio Dept. necessarily predicted this outcome, but the song and its parent album, released less than three weeks before the election, undeniably tapped into themes and feelings analogous to that of the current American political climate. In fact, said album, Running Out Of Love is essentially an extended protest/warning against the rise of fascism in the band’s home country of Sweden. It was decidedly not an overnight development: one of its most pointed and savage tracks, “Occupied”, was initially released as a single back in the summer of 2015.
Before that, the band, which primarily consists of vocalist Johan Duncanson and multi-instrumentalist Martin Larsson was dormant for a number of years due to a legal battle with its record label. I had come on board with Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002-2010; as comps go, it’s nearly up there with Pet Shop Boys’ Discography and The Go-Betweens’Bellavista Terrace (it even has a lovely cover of the latter band’s “Bachelor Kisses”.) However, like most people, I had first heard them in 2006 on the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Prominently placed in the film, their song “Pulling Our Weight” fit right in with a king’s ransom of new wave/post-punk classics from the likes of Adam Ant, Bow Wow Wow and New Order. Upon hearing it, I guessed Coppola had unearthed a long-lost gem and was surprised to discover it was then only three years old.
On Lesser Matters (2003), Pet Grief (2006), Clinging To A Scheme (2010) and all the singles in-between, The Radio Dept. conceived of and came close to perfecting their own take on a drowsy but hook-laden, 1980s-inspired dream-pop, their distinct instrumental palette falling somewhere between The Cure’s reverb-drenched guitar attack and New Order’s bass-and-synth driven cerebral dance music. Sonically, Running Out Of Love edges towards the latter of those two poles, with the seven-minute “Occupied” a straight-up “Blue Monday” tribute in its insistent thump, thump, thump beat and klaxon-like pings that eventually build to an anxious, relentless fury.
The song’s lyrical content matches and often exceeds the sound in its vehemence. Duncanson’s an even milder-sounding vocalist than New Order’s Bernard Sumner, so when he sings, “It’s a shame how some people claim to be one thing or another / when in fact, it’s nothing but an act,” such brutal honesty is all the more unexpected and effective. This “speak softly and carry a big stick” approach is all over the album. On “We Got Game”, he complains, “So sick of hearing about that middle ground”, for it doesn’t exist with “racist loons / the kind of guys you wouldn’t like to spoon.” Later, “Teach Me To Forget” rhymes its title with the phrase, “’Because baby you’re so good at it,” as the song’s minor key melody and trance beat heighten an anger and disappointment the singer’s melodic croon can barely mask.
A steady rage courses through the bulk of Running Out Of Love. The single “Swedish Guns” proceeds as a call-and-response between the song’s titular objects and the things one can accomplish with them. “You need a helping hand? Get Swedish guns / Secure a piece of land / with Swedish guns,” Duncanson sings, and on and on over a martial/reggae beat. “This Thing Was Bound To Happen” happily buzzes along like vintage Human League, but it’s deceptive, for the resignation of the song title proves to be just a coping mechanism for utter despair (“Now I just want to get out of here / suffocate this fear.”) The Eno-esque instrumental title track consists of delicate synth and guitar licks and an brittle, singular note repeated, morse code-style for over three minutes. It certainly evokes loss—of love, time, perhaps life itself.
Fortunately, while The Radio Dept. never shy away from the horrors of totalitarianism, nor do they wallow in their misery. Their social commentary is steeped in empathy for the afflicted and a call for resistance. “Sloboda Narodu” (the title is a Yugoslav slogan that translates to “Death to fascism, freedom to the people”) is an energetic, percussion-bolstered anthem that kicks off the album on an upbeat note; “We Got Game” is nearly ebullient in its simulation of circa-1990 house music (Inner City, Technotronic) while “Can’t Be Guilty” gently floats along like a cross between ABC and The Blue Nile, its pretty melodic layers perfect for a melancholy scene in a John Hughes film, only one where a character says, “Wake me when the world has settled / then, just give it to me straight.”
This protest/pop hybrid reaches its apotheosis on “Committed To The Cause”. It begins with a melodic bassline overlapping with a second one, the twin hooks soon buoyed by a very early ’90s beat of the sort you’d find on a Happy Mondays or Primal Scream album (only darker.) Minor key verses shift into a major key chorus where Duncanson sings, “And they’re never gonna give it up,” repeatedly until getting to the title. The sublime melody and chord progression evokes potent feelings: defiance, resignation, a sense of the inevitable. Even during its extended instrumental coda, heavy with irresistible house-music piano and a synth filigree that could’ve been lifted off a Toto (!) record, the song’s momentum is sustained and deepened—you almost don’t want it to end, but it abruptly does, and the spooky title track carries these feelings further, all the way through the closing, quietly seething “Teach Me To Forget”.
I listened to Running Out Of Love incessantly before and after the election; admittedly, it didn’t seem especially more prescient or relevant after November 8 than it previously did—I’m even cautious to say it captured a specific moment, given that, at this writing, we’re decidedly still living in such a moment. Regardless, I seek pleasure in pop music as much as stimulation and provocation. Like most “political albums”, this one has plenty of the latter elements but crucially, just as much of the former. For good and for ill, the concepts The Radio Dept. confront and dissect here will always be relevant.
Up next: “We took your land, and made it our land.”
