Pop Culture Happy Hour: "American Utopia"

David Byrne and Spike Lee collaborated on a superb concert film of Byrne’s Broadway show American Utopia. (David Lee)

Unless I’m forgetting something the only band Pal-For-Life Glen Weldon and I have ever gone to see together was The Magnetic Fields a decade ago. Glen has declined invitations from me to performances by many other bands. Had we known one another in 2008, and had I known of his yen for Talking Heads, I certainly would’ve asked him to accompany me to Baltimore that September for the second night of ex-Heads frontman David Byrne’s tour promoting Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, his then-new album with longtime collaborator Brian Eno.

I wrote a brief review of that show for the Washington Post and then saw that tour two more times over the next year or so, at Wolf Trap and I at, I think, the Warner Theater. I loved the tour, devoted to Everything That Happens and the several other Byrne/Talking Heads albums on which Eno was a producer and/or a co-writer and performer. But I was frustrated, as I assume Byrne must have been, at the disparity in the audience’s reception of the superb new songs and the Heads classics: polite deference and ecstatic exuberance, respectively.

That’s a dynamic that repeats itself in American Utopia, Spike Lee’s superb concert film of Byrne’s latest show, which toured for a while before setting into a Broadway engagement at the Hudson Theater where Spike captured it last February, just before the Covid crisis struck NYC. Again Byrne has a strong album of recent material to work from, though only a quarter of American Utopia-the-show’s 20 songs come from Byrne’s 2018 album American Utopia. The rest are, with one unforgettable exception, mined from his 40-year catalog. I’m sure his fellow ex-Heads Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison must think that by securing an audience for his new work by continuing to perform the most beloved material by a band that hasn’t toured since 1984, Byrne is having his cake and eating it, too. (Frantz says Byrne didn’t even invite him to see American Utopia during its Broadway run.)

I was honored to discuss most of this on a Pop Culture Happy Hour episode hosted by Glen and featuring the great Soraya Nadia McDonald, who blushed when I congratulated her on being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize this year. If I ever get that close to a Pulitzer, I won’t be nearly so gracious about it.

Talking "Life on Mars" (the song) on the National Air and Space Museum's Instagram Feed

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It’s been an uncharacteristically un-prolific several months for me—I’ve been busy recuperating from / dealing with complications of knee surgery while trying not to contract COVID-19 during any of my frequent in-person visits to various medical facilities. But I did get asked by my friends at the National Air and Space Museum to talk for a few minutes about departed legend David Bowie’s association with Mars on the Museum’s Instagram feed on Friday, part of an evening of Mars-themed programming they’d assembled in anticipation of the Mars 2020 rover launch—now set for sometime between July 30 and August 15. The launch has been delayed a few times, but it’s certainly going to happen before Tenet is released in theaters.

Anyway, you can watch the video here if so inclined.

Talking Christmas Songwriting on All Things Considered

Here I am with Rhett Miller at Ram’s Head Live in Baltimore, Dec. 2018.

Christmas music has been an interest of mine for long time, obviously. My yulemix project is in its unfathomable 14th year, I wrote a Slate piece six years ago asking where the follow-ups to “All I Want For Christmas Is You” were (several complicated answers), and now that that last of the breakthrough secular holiday hits is 25 years old, I have at last gotten to bring this passion of mine to its natural habitat: The radio!

Rhett Miller’s band, Old 97s, has been a favorite of mine since I first heard them on KCRW in 2001; I’ve seen them play probably a dozen times since and for me and my pal Brian to sit down with Miller during their tour for their album Love the Holidays was a big thrill. Aloe Blacc’s Christmas Funk was my favorite new holiday release of 2018, and Molly Burch’s The Molly Burch Christmas Album is the one I’ve been spinning the most this year. I was happy to have comments from all three of these songwriters on my All Things Considered piece yesterday.

Let's Continue to Talk About "Let's Talk About Christmas!" (Side B)

Comprising fifty (50) more minutes of buoyant-if-occasionally-baffling yuletunes to obfuscate and illuminate your holiday season. It’s all so fresh, and I have so many other deadlines that’ve languished unmet while I’ve been making this, that I can’t think of one doggone thing to say about it. Just press Play.

Let's Talk About "Let's Talk About Christmas!" (Side A)

It’s quarter ‘til eight p.m. Eastern on Thanksgiving Day, so let’s talk turkey: The first side of the fourteenth mighty installment in my inexhaustible Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series is now available to provide a seasonal, tuneful, treacle-free, and generally baffling soundtrack to your Record Store Day cratedigging and any attendant treetrimming and/or halldecking. I believe this is the earliest in the season I’ve ever dropped one of these, and I expect you, Dear Listener, to give your own merrymaking operations a commensurate boost. Side A of Let’s Talk About Christmas! runs precisely 50 minutes, as shall Side B, so you can preserve this seasonal salgamundi on a single 100-minute high-bias cassette. Unless I deem it necessary to follow-up with a third or even a fourth side later. Stranger things have happened.

Act Naturally: "Western Stars," reviewed.

The Boss in Western Stars, filmed back when he was still a vital young man of sixty-nine.

From the Dept. of Straight Talk for My Heroes: Western Stars, the new motion picture from 1st-timer auteur Bruce Springsteen, is only the 4th or 5th most exciting filmed record of The Boss in performance, & it doesn't really work as an essay film, either.

My NPR review is here.

The Boss-tic Gospels: "Blinded by the Light," reviewed.

Nell Williams, Viveik Kalra, and Aaron Phagura go ballistic for The Boss.

My abiding love and respect for the work of Bruce Springsteen is a matter of public record and of a couple dozen records. But I must report to you that Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha’s new movie Blinded by the Light, about how The Boss inspired Pakistani-British journalist Sarfraz Manzoor to pursue his dream of becoming a writer despite the poverty and racism that surrounded him in Margaret Thatcher’s England, is the jazz-handsy Springsteen jukebox musical that Springsteen on Broadway was supposed to protect us from. It boasts some wonderful performances, though, as well as a previously unreleased Springsteen song that at one point was going to appear on the soundtrack of… Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Huh.

Anyway, my NPR review of Blinded by the Light is here.

The Great Work Concludes: Side D of "Blue Wave Christmas" Hath Dropped

Here’s a rainy New Year’s Eve bonus for you, merrymakers: Side D of Blue Wave Christmas, the yule-mitzvah edition of my longstanding Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series, has arrived, marking the conclusion of the most ambitious mixtape I’ve yet made. It’s long on merriment, long on obscurity, and long on length. That’s why I had to serve it to you incrementally. With this vestigal-tail chapter, some of the familiar voices from prior iterations have returned after mostly keeping mum so far this year. There are by my reckoning at least seven days of Christmas remaining, so I’ll leave you to it. You can find all four sides on this page. I wish for all of us a better 2019.

Holiday ephemera and etcetera. Seasonal exotica and erotica. Cuts so deep they’ll give you the bends. Cuts so Prime Jeff Bezos would deliver them to your door with two-day shipping, free, if I hadn’t already given them to you instantaneously and at my own expense.