before their ridiculous four and a half star review of Bruce Springsteen’s High Hopes, they printed yet another exclusive interview with Bruce and this is what Bruce had to say about unreleased songs: “I take them out just to amuse myself. Very often, if I have nothing to do late at night, I’ll take them out and look at the different bodies of music.”
I went to visit Joseph and Donna and they had changed hospices by then and the new one was quieter, but it had the quiet of neutral, a place where everything was grounding out of time, where it felt like you had falled down a trap door, where you were floating in a sea of grief
Perhaps I was right but the Phish effect didn’t survive a lousy concert last December where all the good will they’d accrued went out the window and I remembered exactly why I’d been born sick of them for decades on end.
It seems as though for once and perhaps the only time, music can’t seem to help. I go back to Aretha Franklin and I wish I had a copy of that February 17th, 2012 concert at Radio City where Aretha mourned her Goddaughter Whitney Houston.
When you get past his agitprop and get closer to the pan-humanism of Imagine and Mind Games, this is what you find. The heart of Lennon, of Double Fantasy, is placing the love of one on an equal footing with the love of the many. Seeing one as part of the other.
It seems to me a possibility that the casual listener will not be buying albums they don’t really know for friends and lovers and that’s true but on the other hand, serious music fans won’t be taking the holidays off and this will be a terrific opportunity to reach people who wouldn’t have the time to check out stuff they don’t know under normal circumstances.
Don’t judge a band by its chorus, the seven minute “I Just Want to Want To Sell Out My Funeral” has the band ascending to a huge tempo shift and descending again over and over while they contemplate the residue from the inside out
At the heart of so many 2013 big albums, is the lack of song, from Prism to Artpop, from New to Hesitation marks, from …Like Clockwork to Britney Jean, the lack of songs kills the albums in their tracks. They don’t get heard often enough and when and if you do give them the time they need to hit your pleasure button they don’t.
