#also the eternity song that also plays at the end hits me with powerful nostalgia 😭

[punster-2319]

The pop ballad cover of “Far Longer Than Forever” from The Swan Princess always reminded me of the titular song from Beauty and the Beast and “A Whole New World” from Aladdin (right down to Regina Belle being involved in the latter song), but the song is still a banger. Those pop ballads playing over the end credits of animated movies from the late 80s-the early/mid 90s were bangers in general.

And before anyone says anything, yes, I am aware that the studio behind The Swan Princess had written a song with a similar medley in their direct-to-video New Testament cartoons, which predated Disney’s Beauty and the Beast by a few years:

[thomasharpole]

Jubilance - 7/28

A evening with the Dave Matthews Band in Tampa, FL

I am still trying to piece together and process what I experienced last night in the sweaty mess of a pit, watching some of the most talented, world-class musicians weave unforgettable songs and melodies together with us. The last 2 hours of this show amounted to the most powerful and most spiritual experience I’ve ever had seeing live music. Words, especially in English, fall short of my experience and don’t do it justice. It seems futile to write about it, and yet I want to preserve this night in my writing and internalize the lesson from last night as much as I can.

To stand so close at a show is something I had only done 10 years ago, but I wasn’t ready at the time to understand what I was seeing. As a musician, to watch these men last night, who I have now listened to for the better part of 20 years, genuinely felt like spending time with family or the closest friends of your life.

I could see everything. I could see the smiles, the laughter, the concentration, the emotional highs and lows, and the chemistry of these humans on stage together. I could see Carter’s love and thrill for each band member, his genuine undying smile and extraordinary speed and language he speaks on the drum kit. I could see him feel every single cymbal hit before it even landed. I could see Jeff and Rashawn’s friendship as two brass players, and the way they observe each other through their intricate solos. I could see Fonz get giddy during certain musical moments. I could see Tim’s immense concentration and what feels like his access to another dimension in the way he speaks through his guitar. I could see Buddy fresh and fly demeanor, his constant smile while playing keys, and how he is so deeply appreciated by the other legacy members of the band. I could see Dave’s raw outpouring of himself into every song he sang, his soul eternally begging to be released and shown to the world through the language of music. I could also see the warm twinkle in Dave’s eye from 25 feet away, you could tell that he, who feels like a lifelong friend to all of us, felt right at home and his presence communicated something like “I am so thrilled and happy to be here with you, my loving family, after so damn long.”

The venue disappeared for me because we were so close. I felt like I was in a small room with these guys. I was listening to exactly what I would want to hear and watch if I knew I had one evening left until my life was over.

Below are a few moments from certain songs that I wish to hold onto forever.

Setlist and moments:

**I felt the show really started to take off from JTR onward, so I’m going to start song comments at that point.

Tripping Billies Raven Seek Up So Right When The World Ends Seven You Might Die Trying Satellite The Riff

JTR: the pit crew was absolutely thrilled when JTR started playing. “Rain down on me” resonated deeply with a crowd and musicians who were so brutally covered in the sweat and humidity of the evening, it felt as if everyone in this moment resigned to the extreme physical state we were all in, and the musicians were right there with us. The way the horns built the the jam motif in the end of this tune, teasing and getting snagged on the same melody (between 4 and 6 time sig) until their final release in the last 8 bars. The way Carter carries the group through the end, with Dave high stepping along the way… just fantastic.

The Song that Jane Likes: Sweet song, amazing visuals behind the stage, and first time playing this year on tour.

Typical Situation: Something happened at this point in the show that changed the dynamic of the rest of the night. I watched Carter and Dave come alive during this tune. First, to see Carter playing shaker, mallets, and drumsticks on one song and switch effortlessly between them was awesome. But when this song went into the 7/8 chromatic jam during the middle of the outro it was off the charts. Buddy was hammering the keyboard, Carter was slamming the china cymbals, and Dave was DANCING harder than I’ve seen in 4 shows. The pit sang this one loud.

Do You Remember: Endless 90s nostalgia for me. The visuals of the bicycle evoke extremely colorful feelings of my childhood on Ivy St. The endless summer days, the laughter and sports and quiet evenings outside. My dad sitting on a chair watching us. I could write pages on just this feeling, but this song is a portal into my childhood.

Grey Street: Felt the song coming, and as Carter counted the intro out loud the tempo is so recognizable, it almost has its own identity for this song as the drums roll into the opening chord. The third verse comes back to life and the pit loves it. The girl I’m with says something about me being the crazy man creeping and I make a maniac face and she laughs. The thrill of seeing someone I know witness this song in person, up close, is overwhelmingly wholesome. It feels for a moment, as if the night has conspired to make this all happen. I almost hit the floor during the yeah scream on Grey Street after the 3rd chorus. Belted the note too hard and lost oxygen to my head, felt myself about to pass out immediately and grabbed on for dear life. The sax and trumpet duel during the outro between Jeff and Rashawn is staggering and leads us into the final riff of the song which just punches you in its goodness and power.

If Only: Just a humble little song. I need to listen to this one again (live version) to draw out what I remember from the stage.

Dancing Nancies: Dark, absolutely astounding. Tim Reynolds played the most other-worldly guitar solo with visuals on the back of broken dolls, babies, all kinds of crazy things. Dave began the song asking all the right questions about what he could have been to the audience. The hits on the outro in series of 8 were felt in my chest. Best version of it I’ve seen.

Warehouse: My all-time favorite song from this band. This intro is the most visceral and raw sequence in the show. When the sax, trumpet, guitar, and keys come together all in tremolo in 32nd notes, the frequencies and overtones created along with Carter’s enormous rapid cymbal sound is so intense you can see the physical effect it has on Dave. The closest way I could describe this intro as if the soul is being extricated by force out of the body and almost vacuumed or sucked upwards into a new reality it has to reckon with. “Only hope you’re here to pull me out, when I start going under, as the warehouse slips away” gives me chills. (To get a slight idea of what this is like, watch this clip at 38–40 mins. It’s from a different show, but note especially Dave’s viscerally clear connection with something beyond our understanding around the 39m mark.)

The strobes and lights here only add to the intensity of this intro. The huge yell before the 2nd verse. The drive into the outro. The salsa hits at the end. Rashawn just driving the trumpet to where it sounds like a different instrument. And the final lyrics in the moment of great reckoning:

That’s our blood down there⁣

Seems poured from the hands of angels⁣

Then trickle into the ground⁣

Leaves the Warehouse bare and empty⁣

Then my heart’s numbered beat⁣

Will echo in this empty room⁣

And fear wells in me⁣

Til’ nothing seems big enough to stay long

So I am going away, I am going away

The final Eadd9 chord lands as the warm summation and resolution to the song. I see the faces of all of my friends from the last 10 years that have been moved by this piece of music as well, and every place I have been in my life when listening to this song. It’s a sweet ending.

Everyday: One of Buddy’s licks on the intro to this song was a 32nd note run that blew the entire band away. He played 16 notes in under 2 seconds down the scale. Carter, who is probably the most attentive to rhythm, had his jaw on the floor. Everyone was loving it. The improv vocals. The 3 part harmonies. The crowd singing Hani Hani come and dance with me. The final build. Richness.

PNP > Rapunzel: Endlessly playful song that is perfect way to end a show. Funniest part of the show is when Dave’s string broke about 15 seconds before the outro-dance-explosion that becomes the end of this song. It was very critical that the new guitar get on before the downbeat of the outro because of how much the song picks up and to keep that energy. As Dave is bending his neck to put the new guitar on, after 3 hours of playing and probably in some pain, he changed the last lyrics of Rapunzel to: “Every single thing you do to me, my god I’m FUCKED, but I’ll do, my best, for you, I’ll do yeaaaaaa. LOL! I’m sure he’s used this change before but it was timed so perfectly with him tangled in a new guitar strap, with his head banging against the various items, knowing he had about 3 seconds to pull of this change and it was not going well.

Encore:

Singing From The Windows: I could not hold it together for this song. After a year and a half of what has felt like chaos in the lives of many people and in humanity, the acceptance and hope that pours from this song, and out of Dave, is enough to floor anyone that has an ounce of care for the rest of our species. I looked around and everyone around me in the pit was crying. Dave got choked up on this song the other night and looked like he was barely holding it together. There was a quiet and serenity for a moment without the band, and all of the focus went to the songwriter and the gripping power one man and a guitar can have on an audience of 20,000 people.

Why I Am: Man, it really felt like Leroi still carries a presence in this band and you can tell why the band sings it often.

Stay: By this point, everyone was so insanely hot in the pit that they were belting Stay knowing that it was the last chance we would get to sing together. The way Carter syncopates the china cymbals on the outro of this song has always captured me. To watch Dave dance to this one more time while the horns went off and spread his arms wide on the final 3 seconds of the song was an exclamation point on a wild ass evening.

— —

Anyway, I wish that every human being could experience what I did last night. The world would be an infinitely better place. It’s not often that we have moments in our life that alter the course of the path we’re on, but I think it’s important to recognize them when they happen.

Whatever God is or means, or exists insofar as we allow him/her/it into this world, God was absolutely radiating last night. In the faces of the people, and in the entity that lives and breathes and is created when these musicians get together on stage. There is something above and beyond human form that I am humbled to have been a witness to.

It sounds a bit wild, but we are so unbelievably bigger than our bodies trick us into thinking we are. We are so much bigger than the Warehouse that contains us. And yet, we must live and do God’s work through this physical vessel because it is the only form that we take while we’re here. We must learn from this self and feed it, nourish it, teach it to become more than what it thinks it is.

One other thought: to share this musical experience alone is wonderful. But to have shared this band with someone I love so deeply is all a person could ever ask for. It is the epitome of the human experience, that is, to watch another person receive their own gift, their own joy, their own meaning from something you believe in, and to know they will carry it with them forever. They are changed by your truth. I got to see her become fully and endlessly alive because of this music last night. And that was infinitely enough.

We left the venue on fire with gratitute. It sounds wild, but I remember thinking I could die quite peacefully at that moment! I couldn’t conjure any other thing I needed to go do on this planet. I couldn’t conjure a negative thought. It was impossible. The word “ecstasy” doesn’t do this feeling justice, because the emotions are so much further in range than just intense happiness. Perhaps “awareness” or “power” or “spiritual fullness” resound a bit more to me, but for everyone it is different.

I think what’s most special about this band is that their music permeates into the core of who you are as a human being. It’s spiritual. It’s bursting with truth. It transforms how you see the world. It becomes your attitude and your way of life. This is why these guys sold more live tickets than any other group on earth for 10 years straight. The range of emotion embedded in the music is also the perfect analogy of what we as people honestly grapple with during our journey here. The lessons are clear. The music has given millions of people permission to live better lives: with jubilance, resilience, and an understanding that joy exists even amidst the deepest of pain. Each day we have an opportunity to show someone else this honest attitude, this truth, through whatever medium we choose. It is one of the greatest gifts we can offer another person. There is no question I will carry the richness of this experience with me, from now until the end of my life. I am forever thankful for nights like this, nights that are simply transcendent.

Thomas Harpole

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[noahmanskar]

The Best Albums of 2020 (and from the Before Times)

I read a lot of year-end music roundups, and several this year have come with a resonant caveat: It’s been harder to discover new music this year, both because of physical limitations (no shows, no record-store browsing, no chats with friends about your latest finds), and because the way we used music fundamentally changed. It certainly did for me. Rather than serving as the backdrop for a commute or a night out, it created moments of solace from cabin fever while doing dishes, or showering, or running semi-weekly errands. So I often turned to what was comfortable and familiar, songs that conjured memories and feelings to get me through the day. Even on the rare occasions of social listening, the groups I was with drifted into nostalgia — middle school dance tracks, mid-2000s emo, inherited dad rock, even songs from just a year or two ago, when everything was simpler, relatively speaking.

That’s not to say nothing new moved me. There was a handful of albums and songs that were crucial to getting through the doldrums. They soundtracked bike rides, long walks, longer drives and lots of small moments mentioned above. But I don’t think I can think about my favorite music of this year without thinking about the albums of the past that got me through it. Besides, one of the many lessons 2020 taught is that time is a bizarre illusion anyway. (This exercise also lets me write about some recent albums that I didn’t get to write about when they were actually released.

So here are the albums, past and present, that made 2020 bearable. I hope you found yours, too.

Tame Impala, “The Slow Rush”

Tame Impala’s fourth LP came out on Valentine’s Day. That afternoon, Claire and I had a lunch date to mark the occasion before we got on a plane to visit my parents. The night before, we had gone out to dinner with friends visiting from San Francisco and then to a bar, where we huddled next to strangers on a water bed. Roughly a month later, all of this would be unimaginable, and Kevin Parker’s lyrics to “One More Year” would be eerily prescient as we settled into this new normal:

But now I worry our horizon's been nothing new 'Cause I get this feeling and maybe you get it too We're on a rollercoaster stuck on its loop-de-loop 'Cause what we did one day on a whim Has slowly become all we do

The song is really about surrendering to time, and not worrying about it passing in spite of your ambivalence. The opening chants of Parker’s “Gregorian Robot Choir” make it easy to surrender. They carry you into a world where, as the cover art suggests, all that time you were worrying about has already passed, so you might as well dance. At the same time, the songs that follow, like “Borderline,” “Breathe Deeper” and “Lost In Yesterday” make it easy to remember what it was like to dance in a sweaty room with people you love, and to look forward to doing it again, after a little more time passes.

Fleet Foxes, “Shore”

There’s something comforting about the fact that Fleet Foxes released this record on the exact moment of the autumnal equinox. It’s a reminder that nature has its own rhythms that carry on regardless of what occurs in our human lives. They give us a measure of certainty in uncertain times. One of these rhythms — death — looms large in “Sunblind,” an ode to Robin Pecknold’s departed musical forebears: David Berman, Bill Withers, John Prine and others. This song exuding calm acceptance shifts into “Can I Believe You,” which wrestles frankly with doubt and fear.

These tracks contain profound contradictions, but sonically, they're both bright, hopeful and sure. That’s what made this album such a balm in the sixth month of this pandemic, a time of both growing darkness and hope for what might be on the other side. It reminds us that there’s power and beauty in feeling all these things at once.

Lil Uzi Vert, “Eternal Atake”

This one spent two years in label purgatory, but it finally arrived in March to prove Lil Uzi Vert can do it all. He’s at his most versatile here, spitting and crooning, boasting and balladeering. “You Better Move” is an early standout packed with playful nostalgia, including a beat that samples that classic PC pinball game and delightful jabs like these:

Yeah, step on competition, changin' my shoes Green shirt, bitch, I'm Steve, where is Blue? Every chain on, I pity a fool I'm an iPod, man, you more like a Zune Made her eat on my dick with a spoon, ew Versace drawers, bitch, you Fruit of the Loom

Then there are the melodic tracks like “Urgency,” which compel you to hum along even on the first listen. The excellent diversity made it worth the wait for this hourlong journey to another planet.

Sturgill Simpson, “Cuttin’ Grass Vol. 1: The Butcher Shoppe Sessions”

I haven’t spent much time with Sturgill Simpson outside of 2014′s “Metamodern Sounds in Country Music,” and I can’t say I’ve ever listened to another bluegrass album all the way through. But these new cuts of songs picked from Simpson’s catalog are wonderfully enticing. Simpson puts the talents of his backing band front and center, and their harmonies and rhythms illuminate his vivd songwriting in new ways. It was a great introduction to the genre for me.

Fiona Apple, “Fetch The Bolt Cutters”

I got here after the hype, after the perfect 10, after all the year-end number-ones. Fiona Apple lives up to all of it. Her compositions are complex and evocative, the lyrics tender and biting at once. Her artistry is unsparing. The chorus to the title track is already getting stuck in my head, and I can’t wait to spend more time with this one.

Bea Troxel, “The Way That It Feels” (2017)

Almost a decade has passed since I first saw Bea Troxel play. She was in an incredibly talented trio with two of my high school classmates: Maeve Thorne (who has an entrancing solo EP of her own), and Rita Pfeiffer (the violinist on this record). They ended up winning my school’s battle of the bands, and I got to interview them for the student newspaper. Shortly after our senior year, they recorded an album that still outshines most of today’s indie folk. So I jumped at the chance to all three of them again in Brooklyn. 

Troxel’s performance in particular was a revelation. I won’t ever forget how I fell into a trance as she picked away at “Talc,” which exemplifies her gift for natural metaphor. I haven’t stopped playing her record since, and it’s been a constant comfort throughout this year. Her voice is one of a kind, her songwriting is rich, and the compositions flow together beautifully. I can’t wait for more; in the meantime, “The Way That It Feels” will be on repeat.

Travis Scott, “Birds In The Trap Sing McKnight” (2016)

There’s been much ado about the brilliance of “Astroworld,” Travis Scott’s magnum opus, but I have a soft spot for his sophomore LP, where he reached the peak of the spare and heavy sound that started to take shape on “Owl Pharaoh.” There are plenty of sonic layers here, and the ordering of the tracks is a craft in itself — a series of peaks and valleys that glides from the haze of “beibs in the trap” to the climax of “goosebumps” and then into the cool waters of “pick up the phone.” It feels like Scott is guiding you to and from these destinations. The journey is, as The Weeknd might put it, “wonderful.”

Harmonium, “Harmonium” (1974)

One of my pandemic binges was “Letterkenny,” the sharp Ontario-set sitcom with top-notch banter and a great soundtrack full of indie hits and Canadian deep cuts. The fight scenes are elegantly choreographed, but so are the handful of sequences at the end of key episodes that reveal the show’s emotional bedrock. One such scene is set to Harmonium’s “Un musicien parmi tant d'autres” — the main characters are reveling in a bar with their Québécois pals, whom they’ve just helped beat up a rival group. As the song builds to its climactic chorus, leading man Wayne, surrounded by couples, realizes his longing for companionship. Another fight breaks out, but instead of joining in, Wayne makes his way through the slow-motion fray toward the woman he’ll propose to in the next season. (Their relationship later falls apart, but that doesn’t undercut this scene’s beauty.)

This is probably the first foreign-language album I’ve listened to in full, but all of it evokes that feeling for me — the joy of walking through the chaos to reach what’s really important. Not a bad sentiment for these times.

Bon Iver, “22, A Million”

To talk about this weird, dark and brilliant album, I need to talk about “715 - CR∑∑KS.” Everyone I’ve talked to about the third track on “22, A Million” either loves it or can’t stand it. I’m devoted to it to the extent that it was my most-played song on Spotify this year. It oscillates between tenderness and fear, between silence and explosions of sound. The lyrics are an epitome of Justin Vernon’s cryptic poetry. It’s isolated and spare and enthralling and beautiful in its own bizarre way — just like the rest of the album, which is rich with themes of persevering through the darkness in spite of the uncertainty about when the light will appear. Vernon is alone on “CR∑∑KS,” but he’s accompanied by a cacophony of his own voice. As alone as we might feel right now, there’s always someone else shouting through the darkness with us, even if we can’t see them.

[nimbus-cloud]

Yu Yu Hakusho Stage Review!!!

Before I start going over the show I want to stress just how INCREDIBLY lucky I got, because I got to see the show via a same-day lottery ticket, after failing EVERY lottery and general sales, and it was INTENSE!!!  On the Thursday when I lined up twice, there were easily 400 people in the line for both the matinee and soiree shows and even when my number was drawn, it was actually 2nd on the waiting list, not one of the original winners, and I may or may not have been seriously contemplating throwing some people down the escalators to move up on the list.  But three people canceled or didn’t show so I got to get in and I was bouncing off the walls inside, WHATEVER POWER WATCHES OVER ME, I owe it my eternal soul for the opportunity!

They opened the show with HOHOEMI NO BAKUDAN and I almost screamed from the nostalgia honestly.  They basically did an opening sequence with the song, mimicking the anime opening by having them fight one by one against a group of enemies... which is why a lot of those press release photos have Kurama fighting with his rose whip (when we don’t actually see his rose whip until later in the story that’s not in this play [ALSO HOW DOES HE MAKE FIGHTING WITH THE WHIP LOOK SO GODDAMN COOL INSTEAD OF AWKWARD?!?!?]), and why there are shots with Hiei letting out the Black Dragon or Kuwabara dual-wielding spirit swords.  I know some of us were curious how much story they were going to cover or how much they were going to skip, and it’s not because of some massive skip.  The story runs from the very beginning with Yusuke dying, spending time as a ghost, and then to just after retrieving the three artifacts of darkness.  They give us a hint of the four of them about to enter the castle of the Saint Beasts, so that might be where the next play (crosses fingers) will pick up the story.  

The format of the story has Koenma (adult ver.) narrating (sometimes with Genkai) as he’s watching “old” videos of the group and reminding himself how far Yusuke has come.  Based on his conversation with Genkai at the beginning, the “present” in the play is just before the Dark Tournament, and everthing else in the play is Koenma watching those videos (also why there are press photos of him with a remote control).  This is also why they could fit the Kurama and Hiei meeting backstory, because it’s Koenma watching old videos and wanting to look back on them too.  

And also Arayan as Koenma is SO FUCKING FUNNY we were all cracking up a LOT.  He can actually enunciate quite well with that pacifier in his mouth!  And he’s always changing back and forth between his adult version and baby version because he’s either watching/narrating or in the flashbacks himself as a baby.  He also really liked breaking the fourth wall while narrating so for some of the cute Yusuke-Keiko moments, for example, he was like, “What a cute young romance—WHO EVEN HAS A ROMANCE LIKE THAT IN MIDDLE SCHOOL HUH!?”

I haven’t watched Arayan live since 2015 when I saw him as Lao in a Kuroshitsuji Musical, so it was wonderful to see him again and in a role that allows him to do so much more and be such a ham.  

Tsubasa as Yusuke was amazing, fantastic, splendid, show-stopper.  I liked his Renji from when he was in the 2016 Burimyu, and so I thought I had some idea what his yankee characterization would be like (because obviously his Ishikirimaru isn’t a great reference point lol), but it’s even better!  He was so funny and so warm, and when he had the scene making the little kid laugh, I have NO idea how he was able to pull those faces.  He looked basically exactly like anime Yusuke pulling faces and I was wheezing so bad in my seat.  Mostly, I just couldn’t believe that he really unzipped his pants (while turned away from us) to stuff that kid’s ball into his crotch and dance around with it.  

Speaking of the little boy, we gotta give props to Genkai’s actress because she played so many side characters throughout lololol.  She couldn’t be Genkai for very long or often, so she was also Keiko’s shy, glasses-wearing friend in school, she was also Maya-chan (Kurama’s classmate that he and Hiei have to rescue) in the Two Shots scene, she was the little boy Yusuke saves (she tries not to talk as him), and she’s also obviously young Genkai.  Because she plays so many roles, there’s a narration bit where Koenma tells Genkai, “You know, in these videos, I keep seeing a lot of kids that look like you.”  And she tells him he’s imagining things.  

Plot-wise, they did skip one major scene from when Yusuke was a ghost, and that was the scene where his apartment caught fire and he had to “sacrifice” his spirit egg to save Keiko.  

Oh but I loved the bit where he had to possess Kuwabara to go tell Keiko not to cremate his body, because the way they did it was to have Tsubasa and Naoya do everything in unison together.  So all the choreography has Naoya as Kuwabara fighting all the guys that come at him, and Tsubasa just a little ways away doing the exact same thing, only he’s not hitting anybody.  And although it had been Naoya doing all of the talking so that we hear Kuwabara’s voice, at the point when he’s talking to Keiko and the lines start to get sentimental, they turn up Tsubasa’s mic so that they overlap for a little bit, and then they turn down Naoya’s mic so that at the end, we only hear Yusuke’s voice asking Keiko to wait for him.  He was also slowly moving off-stage while Kuwabara(‘s body) was talking to Keiko, so that the end of that scene has just Kuwabara and Keiko on-stage, but we hear Tsubasa-Yusuke's voice.  So I really loved how that was done because it mimicked the anime really well.  

I loved being able to see Kuwabara’s promise-between-men played out on-stage.  His squad was cut down to just two guys instead of three, since you really only need Okubo for that bit, and they needed to divide the ensemble cast between Kuwabara’s boys and the other punks who want to beat on Kuwabara all the time.  Naoya as Kuwabara was everything I wanted and more.  His voice, his expressions, his everything was just SO. GOOD.  And it was so funny to think how long I’ve been a fan of Naoya (since 1st cast Tenimyu days basically) and how I’ve never actually seen him live in a show until this.  So that was a real treat and a real blast of nostalgia on multiple levels.  I’m so happy he was the one to bring Kuwabara to life on-stage, he was wonderful, and I’m so grateful I got to see him.  

Yuka-tan's Botan was SO SO SO CUTE?!?!?!?  Oh my gosh she felt so perfect to me in every way, and I loved her dynamic with Yusuke and Koenma, there was so much cute banter.  I liked when Yusuke was laughing in Koenma’s face and Botan kept spanking him because, in case we forgot, he’s like actually 14 years old at this point in the story.  Sometimes she was the one watching the old clips together with Koenma so she also switches between being in the story to being part of the narration.  

If you wanted a critical review, this is not the place to look because I pretty much only found it wonderful and amazing and nostalgic and amazing but I do have one minor criticism and that is that Yusuke’s post-resurrection outfit for helping Kuwabara rescue Eikichi was not his fashion icon look from the anime.  He just had a regular color jacket instead.  Ugh, way to make him look “cool” stage staff. Lol  

The Two Shots scenes were interspersed between Yusuke’s ghost antics and I really do think my heart stopped when I first hear Hiroki speak.  I haven’t been a fan of Hiroki for as long as I’ve been a fan of Naoya, but he’s another one that I’ve seen so often in so many shows, but this was my first time seeing him live and he just has such a presence that it’s no wonder we call him HiroKing.  It was also fun to see Shouhei again since I haven’t seen him live since his last show as Noya for Haisute, and he’s as amazing as I remember.  Pretty sure he’s having a lot of fun playing early evil Hiei honestly.  Since both Hiroki and Shouhei have a lot of experience in other shows with sword-fighting (*cough TKRB/Hakuouki*), those bits looked really fucking cool.  

But YYH is heavy on hand-to-hand combat, not sword-fighting, and I have to say that they did a nice job with that too!  There were places where I felt like they got nice and creative with it, and it’s fun to see Naoya give Kuwabara a little extra flair with his.  The ensemble cast were integral to all of those fight scenes, and they had to do a lot of falling and flying around, and they also need a loud round of applause.  

Gouki’s actor ripped off his shirt TWICE!!! Not once, but two times!!!  And I mean RIPPED, like not stage rip, like he RIPPED that shirt.  So I’m assuming they just ordered a box of cheap t-shirts for him to rip through for the rest of the tour.  Mind you, I was not complaining about the shirtlessness.   It was also interesting because after Gouki’s defeat, they put him in spirit world as one of Koenma’s ogre servants as a replacement for George in the second act, so he and Koenma have some fun moments since he’s quite reformed once dead.  

As I mentioned, they do give us a sneak peek of the four of them meeting up just outside the Four Saint Beasts castle, with Kuwabara picking a fight with Hiei and all.  However, we did skip over Genkai’s tournament, which comes just before that so it’s possible we might not get that little arc on-stage even in the next show.  Maybe to avoid rushing Liz into Genkai’s old lady makeup, maybe because nobody cares about Rando anyway.  

The closing bows were also done to Hohoemi no Bakudan (I was maybe a teeny tiny bit hoping for Homework ga Owaranai), and during the closing remarks, Tsubasa very excitedly told us that during the afternoon show, Yusuke’s anime seiyuu, Sasaki Nozomu came to see them!  He was wiggling side to side and said, “I got a picture with him yaaay~” and then he asked us to come see them again in the Spirit World, to which Naoya started making confused faces.   Naoya: Sp-spirit world? Tsubasa: No?   Naoya: The story’s mostly in the human world, isn’t it? Tsubasa: Ahhh.... yeah! Naoya: You’re exhausted, aren’t you?

And that’s my review/summary!  Feel free to ask me questions about it or to just scream at me how much you love YYH~

[thesinglesjukebox]

HATCHIE - STAY WITH ME [8.08] The album's called Keepsake, and it's one we might want to hang on to...

Ian Mathers: I don't care what the lyrics say when you look them up, in the moment of listening I cannot decide each time whether "Stay With Me" starts with "it's all better, now you're gone" or "it's no better". I don't think the song can decide either. It's far from the first song to have that sort of power, just like the drum machine-and-synth, loop-and-swoop approach, while beautiful here, isn't exactly new. But I've heard dozens of songs like this (some even by Hatchie) since the last time one made me feel the way "Stay With Me" is making me feel right now. And isn't that maybe the only true miracle of pop music: that mere human beings can make "just another song," one that on the surface isn't that different than a bunch of others we merely like, and yet it can hit us just as profoundly, as heartwrenchingly bittersweet, as hopefully, as this one is hitting me right now? I could write an essay about the things in my life "Stay With Me" connects up to, people and times and places and songs, but it wouldn't make much sense to anyone else even if it wasn't incredibly, tiresomely self indulgent. But the experience I've been having with "Stay With Me" is among other things a reminder of the worth of staying connected and engaged with the world, in art as in all things, and not just going back to listen to all the things I already love instead. The chances of any other given human being having this reaction to this particular song today ("if I met you in a different moment/if I met you would I be this broken?") are small, sure, maybe even tiny. But god, I hope we all get to keep having those moments, and that we recognize the wonder of them in each other. [10]

Katherine St Asaph: I know this was written as a deliberate experiment in writing a pop song (or so they say; I too have claimed my paychecks as experiments), and thus I know the exact places the mechanics are there to get you (unending wistful chords, the yearning "Everything Is Embarrassing" vocal, with an octave jump exactly where it needs to happen), and the places the mechanics clank a bit too loud (the ending sags before the [perfect] bridge; "I'm not done / I've come undone" is kind of circular, kind of on its own nose). It's also been out for months. But the second time I heard this song it just happened to catch me at the exact moment of flood of memory, of accreted stupid unrequited crushes and breakups and failures and regrets, until I was in tears in a cab, which is really the ideal setting to hear this song. [9]

Edward Okulicz: Oh god, this hits me so hard in my heart, it hurts. "Stay With Me" would have been incredible had it been sung by someone like Foxes as a glass-shattering EDM epic, and it would have been incredible done as a shoegaze number by an alternative universe Lush, but it's also perfect as it is, midway between those two extremes. The lyrics are simple, but they're no more complicated than they need to be. It's some heavy-duty yearning but at the same time it's as light as air. I want to go dancing somewhere this is playing and stare down at my sneakers all night. [10]

Ashley Bardhan: This feels like pretty straightforward dream pop. Super soupy, drowsy vocals over a synth loop. It's very fine, very reminiscent of making out with a 23-year-old mattress boy named DYLAN. [6]

Julian Axelrod: Hatchie's ability to craft grand, immersive synthscapes is impressive, rivaled only by her commitment to pushing semi-formed lyrical conceits past the four-minute mark. [6]

Will Adams: There's a heartbreaking circularity to the lyrics ("you're the one who's won"; "I'm not done/I've come undone") that nails the sense of uncontrollable spinning that comes from an unrequited love. The vacillation between confidence and doubt, the paper-thin façade of indifference, the endless what-ifs and agonizing of what could have been had the cards fallen differently: they all add up to a devastating crush song that, despite never resolving, nonetheless sounds like a massive, necessary release. [9]

Alex Clifton: Drenched in reverb, gorgeous synths and a lovely vocal line, and feels like a beautiful dream. It sounds like the end of a movie where there's a montage of the main characters heading off into the sunset, unsure of their futures but exchanging significant looks with one another. I hope this blows up, makes it big, becomes as iconic as it sounds -- everyone needs to hear this song. [8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: With a sturdy and prominent drum loop, "Stay With Me" brings to mind My Bloody Valentine's "Soon" and the sped-up Zeppelin sample on Chapterhouse's "Pearl." The key difference is how Hatchie's vocals are always front and center, clear enough that each word can permeate every synth pad and twangy guitar line and snappy kick drum with a melange of hopeful desperation and knowing despair. That spacious, ever-comfortable void that her voice rests inside reveals itself to be a place of unnerving contemplation. Despite this, Hatchie convinces you that this purgatorial dream state is far more desirable than the living Hell that is life spent all alone. [9]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The art of the fadeout is an intentionally obscure one. It's the art of making the encroachment of silence into an instrument of its own, of stretching a song's end into a beautiful eternity. "Stay With Me" has a gorgeous fade-out, ending in a heartbeat of a drumtrack as its shoe-gaze-leaning guitars depart, but it in itself feels like a fadeout, taking the dying hopes of some vaguely sketched relationship and letting them sprawl out before you. It takes a while to get going (it didn't click for me until the bridge), but it's the kind of song that deserves your patience. [7]

Alfred Soto: So THIS is the synth pop bauble that Chvrches have failed to write for six years? It stinks of the past, peeks through v-shaped fingers at the future, and in Hatchie's sweet lies ("It's so better now you're gone") an ever-present present. [8]

Joshua Copperman: The tedious, nearly bass-less first half of "Stay With Me" surprised me, especially as so many TSJ colleagues were raving about this song. The lyrics are concise without being cliché, the production is a mostly interesting mix of Madchester drums and modern dream-pop, but I'm left living someone else's nostalgia. Like Snail Mail and other, similar acts, I'm an outsider for not having the same childhood as every other music writer. That doesn't make this a bad song: Once the live drums and harmonies kick in at 2:51, it becomes difficult not to fall in love with the song. But even that is probably because it evokes my own nostalgia -- it sounds like "Wake Up," and not the "Wake Up" indie rockers used to reference. (A bit like this pre-"Radioactive" Imagine Dragons song too, which I loved when I was 15.) And I still remain locked out; the YouTube comments claim that "listening to this song feels like being in a club on ecstasy in the 90's." But really, this feels like hearing someone else remember that oft-reminisced-upon time period, reminding me once more that things were apparently better before I got here. [6]

Vikram Joseph: From sixth form through much of my twenties, I thought I didn't really like dancing; far too late, I realised I just hated having to fake it in bleak, sticky-floored provincial or university clubs, damp with straight machismo and broken dreams. These days, I can lose my shit to "Dancing On My Own" and "Make Me Feel" in queer spaces I feel safe and happy in, and that's wonderful. It stings, though, to have missed out on a kind of transcendence I feel like I should have experienced on the cusp of adulthood, and "Stay With Me" speaks directly, powerfully to that part of me. Those "Born Slippy" synths feel soft-focus and hazy like inebriated happiness itself; Hatchie's vocals in the middle eight feel like they're grasping for something intangible and impossible, chasing every lost night and doomed love into the first glow of sunrise. This is slow-motion, tear-streaked disco-ball euphoria to remind you of nights you're not quite sure belong to you or to cinema; a fever-dream summer dance anthem that makes me believe that the perfect places we have always aspired to are eminently real, flickering in spaces that our younger selves could never have imagined existed. [9]

Iris Xie: When I review songs, I repeat them in order to sink in their atmosphere and be flooded into their sentiments, because otherwise, it doesn't come clear to me. In this discovery process, I often find myself compelled to sing and ad lib along. For "Stay With Me," at 2:50, I found myself unconsciously singing the bridge when the midpoint of the kicks off into the instrumental, specifically these two lines: "If I met you in a different moment/If I met you, would I be this broken?" I kept singing these two lines over and over again as each repeat occurs, and then I realized that the bridge is the verbal personification of the instrumental, and it is the underlying sentiment that drives all the stark, urgent confessions, so naked in their desperation and knowing that it is futile and they won't be heard, but nevertheless, they must be said. This stands in contrast with the first two lines, which put on such a brave face that contains a bitter heart: "It's all better now you're gone/It's all better on my own." When you sing these lyrics over each other, the synths are so lively and comforting in this melancholy and blend together with warm guitar strums, and solid drums to illuminate these sentiments. Hatchie is in pain from having to deal with such a broken void, and the vibrant singing of the bridge contrasts with the reluctant, forlorn sentiment of the initial verse, so it actually reads: "It's all better now you're gone/If I met you in a different moment/If I met you would I be this broken/It's all better on my own." Even though Hatchie acknowledges it feels wrong, saying "stay with me" is the balm that she settles on to ease this pain of her lover's departure because she's responsible for this pain. The beautiful part about the instrumental is that it reminds me of why music, and art overall, is so deeply important: when one is able to access the space of these heartfelt emotions, and to use the tools at your disposal to create the specific weight and textures of those experiences, it also can help give shape to those who are also feeling these certain ways, and allowing them to release and transmit it. I've shied away from my own private embarrassment and shame about this exact situation for years, and have only recently started talking about it with my therapist and supportive friends, but yesterday, I allowed myself to look through old journals and communications about that relationship. In reality, I never allowed myself to feel comfortable with the endless weight of these emotions and regrets, for I never wanted to be haphazard about the textures of this experience, even in making art about it. I feared it'd only sour the reality and aggravate my anxieties about people not taking the level of pain I had seriously and mocking it. Putting myself in that impossible situation for not wanting to mar those moments, I shut it down for the past few years. But I've had to let those similar feelings wash over me in the past few months to create art and even give justice to the reviews that I want to give on TSJ and elsewhere, so now I have to acknowledge that buried sadness. I no longer feel shame about that plaintive way to express my emotions about those situations, for this song's fuzzy, warm haze of disorientation is so familiar, and now I trust myself to just go, which is what I did with this review today. I guess that's one reason why pop is so lovely -- a salve for private hearts, not ready to debut, until they are. It's clear now. [8]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

[thesunlounge]

Reviews 102: Faint Waves

I have been wanting to write about the meditative exotica of Faint Waves (aka Justin Weems) for a while, but every time I get ready to do a write-up, I learn another release is imminent and so hold off. But now is the perfect time to look back at Faint Waves’ wonderful year, given that Justin has just issued his most accomplished and far-reaching sets of songs yet: the magically transportive and guitar-led Hideaways II EP (following up 2017′s standout Hideaways EP) and the jaw-dropping Paradise Lost on eclectics, featuring one of my favorite tracks all year in the Dream Chimney dub of the title track. One thing that stands out immediately from the entire Faint Waves catalog is the mastery of melody; almost every track Justin produces contains some sort of irresistible ear-worm hook that I’ll end up humming or whistling for days on end (see “Cherry Blossom” for perhaps the most potent example). And underneath the melodic magic, he synthesizes his varied interests in synth pop, new age, tropicalia, film soundtracks, chill out, and adult contemporary into an adventurous and narcotic balearic haze.

Faint Waves - The Night & The City (Self Released, 2018) “The Night & The City” is spread across three mixes, with the original’s intro marrying textured basslines to Steve Reich-ian idiophones. After a hushed pause, the beat drops alongside faux-brass melodies and epic string sadness, marching away until a beatless midtro sees trumpets wavering over chill-out bass. And after floating a while in this zoned out space, the propulsive rhythms return and transport us back to the late-night urban atmospheres. The “Big Chair Mix” sees the horn melodies of the original transposed to Mark Barrot-style new age vocal pads and accompanied by neon arpeggiations. The beat comes crashing in with a 90s ambient house flair…an echo smothered break-y rhythm ranking among Justin’s very best. And the original’s dramatic beatless section is made all the more powerful here, as heady vocal samples drift over Chromatics incantations. The “Fargo Mix” is more restrained, with harp patterns and vibrant mallet tones giving way to vintage vocal pads and bleary (french?) horns. The drums are now reduced to a heroin jazz sway, with deep natural kick and brushed snare work supporting the sundown ambiance. The remaining cut is “After Hours Dealing,” nailing the sound of rain soaked city streets late at night with its feverish house pads and bass synth comforts. Marimbas and brass weave twilight nostalgia over a snare, kick, and hi-hat pulse while cerebral noises flash in the ether and moments of cinematic ascendency rush in, with everything flowing upwards towards a turbulent sky and noir horns breaking through the clouds like streaks of moonlight.

Faint Waves - Rain Rhythms, Vol. 1 (Self Released, 2018) Gentle yet effected rainfall underlies every moment here, joining first the smooth e-pianos, drums, and soft basslines of “Rain Rhythms No. 1.” This one evokes wistful views of a calm and grey sea from a faraway window, with every sound filtered through delicate yet tripped out echo fx. For “Rain Rhythms No. 2,” sparse dubwise hand drums sit below pads swelling in angelic harmony. It’s like a warm glowing fog, with pitter-patter cymbals keeping time, glassy vibraphones decaying to the horizon, and a midsection of floating beatless reverie. Piano and synthetic woodblock drift on waves of sunshine in “Rain Rhythms No. 3,” with a far-reaching and emotional melody played on pads sounding like heavenly sirens. I’m reminded of Aeoliah’s Angel Love, with transportive ivory heartache flowing above hazy rainforest rhythmics and affecting new age spells. And as time progresses, I find “Rain Rhythms No. 4” more and more compelling. It’s a deep plod into the heart of a dark forest, with sparse tambourine sounds forming the only rhythm aside from occasional kick drums. Wavering and slightly dissonant pads intertwine with deliriously beautiful yet heavily compressed pianos, while marimbas fall like water dripping off leaves. This is one of the few times unsettling and ominous vibes peak their way into the Faint Waves soundworld and their presence is all the more effective and interesting given the sharp contrast with the flowing beauty of the preceding three pieces.

Faint Waves - Amarsi Un Po (Self Released, 2018) “Amarsi Un Po” is a slight detour into the world of old Italian film soundtracks and pop, with string synths swelling in an orchestral prelude for the mediterranean flow to come. An airy drum shuffle, organic and embellished by thunderous timpani drums, is accompanied by sprightly music box melodies and irresistible reed instruments. And at some point the beats drop out, giving way to a string and acoustic guitar interlude evoking springtide romances, with adventurous solo flourishes and the sounds of coastal sunshine. Even better is the “Island Mix”, with seabirds and oceanic samples underlying the building string atmospheres. The rhythms here have a hypnotic flow rather than a shuffling stutter and the mediterranean reeds are replaced by spacious flutes and tropical marimbas. The guitar interlude is still preset, only now the six-string is smothered in celestial reverb and mostly floats alone, aside from foggy string plucks and the ever present sounds of nature. The Sketches from an Island vibes are strong on this one.

Faint Waves - Paradise Lost (eclectics, 2018) “Paradise Lost” comes to life on a swaying hand percussion groove and blowing synth wind. Rainsticks and deep blue ocean chords sweep in alongside tropical chiming melodies and gleaming mallet instruments, their lilting descent recalling nothing so much as the seaside bliss outs of Bonnie & Klein. This is especially true as swelling cymbals lead to a moment of pure balearic wonder, with exotic acoustic guitar explorations over moving synth chord tidal waves. The Dream Chimney dub takes the magical template provided by Faints Waves and transforms it into some long lost Coyote jammer. The kick and double time cymbals flow hypnotically with massive dubbed out synthbass bouncing through space. New age chimes flow through the mix like some universal ether and the rattles of the rainsticks are every present, stretched and looped into a cosmic breath alongside the sunset pads. Glassy marimbas are locked into an otherworldly dance; a melancholic descent that I would be fine living in forever. And all the while, flashes of acoustic guitar are refracted through prismatic fx, hitting those prime Max Essa vibes. Wisely, the guitar-led beatless stretch is preserved, only now chimes fall like shooting stars and the guitar is heavily obscured by heady reverb and galactic synthesis.

For "Sea of Dreams,” seagulls fly and converse above washing waves. Cymbals swell and introduce a massive kick drum pulse, circled about by gentle bongos and melodious Angelo Badalamenti pads that wrap the body and soul in euphoric warmth. Mystical vibraphones dance in a playful jazz flow and at some point, the kick picks up steam to bring in a spellbinding trumpet solo, both incredibly surprising and masterfully played. Faint Waves has worked with brass before but never like this, with such naturalistic warmth in the impressive jazz runs, sounding as if Miles Davis was scoring a sunset on the adriatic. The Rollmottle mix sees skipping house rhythmics soaring over sparkling blue waves…percolating, hypnotizing, propulsive. And as deep house pads repeat in hallucinatory syncopation, a towering Italo bassline fades into focus, bring us right into that eclectics wonder zone of dark disco and slow motion future balearic. Rollmottle also takes the original marimbas and morphs them into balls of energy bouncing off the sides of the mix, while claps decay eternally over the vibing cymbal work. And after a crucial bass drum drop out leaving just soaring basslines and ocean ambiance, that amazing trumpet solo drops from the sky, now hovering in jazz majesty over the chugging rhythm storm.

Faint Waves - Hideaways II EP (Self Released, 2018) Hideaways II starts with one of the strongest Faint Waves tracks in “Bonita,” as woodblock introduces some truly stunning guitar work. My mouth was agape the first time I heard it, as nothing else in Justin’s catalog hinted at such romantic riffscapes and gorgeous moments of blue sky harmonization. It’s the kind of sonic addition that sweeps his music towards the upper echelons of balearica, referencing strongly Phil Mison, José Padilla, and especially the recent work of Blank & Jones in its mixing of vaguely Spanish six-string fantasies and placid tropical downtempo. And behind the sweeping acoustic layers, new age chimes splash like sea spray, hushed pads add stirring oceanic ambiance, and synth leads sparkle like golden starlight. If there is any justice, this one will appear on a future Milchbar // Seaside Season compilation. “Tanzania” follows with a powerful downbeat rhythm and chiming synths and flutey pads joining forest fauna, while rainsticks and jungle atmospheres background vocal pads shimmering with meditative new age splendor. But the actual melodies skew closer to downer 80s synth pop, resulting in a captivating mix as a new age/world music palette is used to craft something that would fit in an episode of Twin Peaks.

We then find ourselves afloat on the “Mystic River” as cymbal swells bring with them a melody that is hard to describe, causing me to choke up, tears to well, but also a sense of warmth…vivid nostalgia, fond memories of old, wistful romances. The track features Amparo and sits somewhere in that Tommy Awards and Farbror Resande Mac zone, with glacial downtempo married to cold glowing space atmospherics. The cymbals occasional skip in cerebral patterns and there are these soft narcotic guitar riffs, evoking Cocteau Twins, Talk Talk, and other classic examples of moving post-rock. Following this trip, we find ourselves in some clearing in the jungle, as the starlight of “Wind Whisper” shines down in overwhelming brilliance. The track sees Maricopa leaning synth work swirling together with understated yet affecting mallet instruments, all over a classy downtempo rhythm with hints of blissed out jazz in the swelling basslines and marching cymbals and shakers. The journey ends with a reprise of “Bonita” and synthetic waves and solitary woodblock underlying the deeply cinematic guitar playing. Its beauty is brought into sharp focus here, untethered as it is to any rhythms or synth atmospheres, with the delicate yet confident runs and harmonies floating out to that magical realm where the sea meets the sky.

(all images from the artist’s and label’s Bandcamps)

[technicolorfamiliar]

Global Spirit Tour: 2017 - 2018

Prologue:

Something weird happened early in 2017.

I was looking for a song to lip synch to. In drag.

This was for a one-off performance with the improv group I was part of at the time. We had a string of a few LGBTQ events, and drag lip synchs were becoming a regular part of our season. I needed a song, and I needed to pick something I knew no one else in the group would choose. As someone who is secretly very competitive (and someone who knows I perform on stage better as a man anyway), finding the perfect song and perfect character to fit the song was stressing me out. So I turned to my beloved 80's New Wave station on Pandora for inspiration.

Eventually, the inspiration I desperately needed presented itself (this is the Weird Thing). It was, of all things, Depeche Mode's "Stories of Old" from Some Great Reward, a song I knew and loved deeply as a teenager but hadn't actually heard or really listened to in years. And with the inspiration from the song came the core inspiration for my character. Suddenly, everything locked into place - the look, the hair, the clothes, the physicality (read: how provocative I could get away with being at what was technically a family friendly event). And with that perfect vision for my character, all thing things I loved about Depeche Mode when I was in high school came flooding back to me. Wave after wave of nostalgia, the kind that makes you realize, "this is why I am the way I am."

And so I was forcibly dragged back into all things Depeche Mode by one song, one incredibly underrated song stuck somewhere in the middle of what isn't even my favorite DM album.

(I ended up using a different song by a different band for the drag improv thing, at the directors' request, they thought something more well-known would be more appropriate, and at the time I agreed. But my character mood board was still very much focused on DM in the mid-80s.)

Funnily enough, at that same time, DM were about to release a new album and announce dates for their Global Spirit Tour. So the timing on my part worked out perfectly. I have a habit of rediscovering the music I loved in high school just as a bunch of new content is about to hit the internet (one day I'll write about how Danny Elfman and Oingo Boingo saved my life more than once).

For a little background, when I say I loved DM in high school, I mean that's when I first heard of them. I didn't grow up on Depeche Mode, as my parents - who were my major source of music recs until I was 15 - absolutely hated anything that had to do with 1980s synthpop, post-punk, or any other new wave music. But someone much older and much cooler than me gave me a mix tape with "In Your Room" on it and I was intrigued. That wasn't the DM song that sealed my fate as a fan. That was 100% "Never Let Me Down Again", but a nudge in the right direction was all I needed, and for that honest to god actual mix tape cassette, I am eternally grateful.

I was a teenager during the era of Playing The Angel, and I was lucky enough to see them on that tour with my best friend at the time. The tickets were my high school graduation present. Our seats were at the very back of what used to be the Nissan Pavilion in VA. I hardly remember anything about the show itself, and any pictures I must have taken on my old pocket digital camera are sadly lost.

Washington, DC:

It was 2017 before I managed to see another DM tour. For whatever reason, whether it was my busy work schedule, being broke, or waiting until shows were already sold out to look for tickets, I missed both the Sounds of the Universe and Delta Machine tours. So when the Spirit tour was announced, I was poised and ready to make what some people might consider irrational financial choices in order to see three separate shows between September 2017 and June 2018.

The lead-up to the September 7th show in DC was a lot of fun. I was going with my two close friends, so we enjoyed some additional bonding as we eagerly anticipated the show together. This was the only gig on the tour I saw with people I knew, and I have nothing against going to concerts by myself -- and sometimes traveling great distances to do so. But getting to share the excitement leading up to the actual day and at the event itself with two of my very good friends was really special. I'm really glad I got to share that experience with them, and have their positive, enthusiastic energy to draw on.

This is the part of the post where I go on a brief tangent about superfan elitism, bear with me: The hardcore DM fans would say, "Three shows? That's nothing." And I would say they're right, but that doesn’t make me any less of a fan. I could have gone to more shows, probably, but my bank account, my job security, and my sanity required that three be the maximum amount of shows I got to see on this specific tour. There are numerous ways a person can express their love of a band, a tv show, a piece of immersive theatre, or whatever. The level of insane superfan I am or am not does not mean that their music is any less important to me as an artist and as person. HOWEVER, the people who I encountered at these three DM shows who were on their phones the entire concert, people who had better seats than me who sat down completely unengaged the whole time, and the people making disrespectful and unrelated comments about the audience and the band themselves can go fuck themselves. That negative, attention seeking, distracting bullshit has no place down in the floor seats in front of the stage, they can go be terrible up in the mezzanine levels.

Which is exactly where my first show was spent.

Second or third tier seats for big arena shows are 1000% not worth whatever money you spend on them. They're too far away, and you're surrounded by people who act like they've never heard of the band they paid actual money to see. The only reason my friends and I were up there in the first place was because of how absurd the US ticket queueing system was for the first North American leg of the GST. I, like many others, have a lot of issues with how that was handled and am glad they scrapped it for the second round of US shows.

I'm glad I had my two friends with me at the DC show, though. The three of us were maybe the only people having a genuinely fun time in our section. This first show for me was the only one where I cried. I wasn't expecting to, but hearing and seeing Martin sing "Home" struck something in me. And then "Heroes". I knew it was coming, but it still managed to really resonate on a deep emotional level. I love David Bowie as much as they do, but knowing that "Heroes" was how Dave was initially asked to be in the band, and my own personal feelings and connections to Bowie, hearing Dave sing it as well as he did was everything in that moment.

I have a number of issues with that show in DC, but none of them have anything to do with DM or the show itself. They played more songs from Spirit at this show than at any of the others I attended, but there was also "Corrupt" and "Wrong", "A Question of Lust" and "Somebody". It was also the longest set list of out of the three shows, with 22 songs total, which is rare for them, from what I understand, because of how intense their live shows are, especially for Dave (which I got to experience more closely at the other two shows). His presence on stage radiates to the rafters of huge venues like the Capital One Arena -- but more about Dave in a minute. I can talk about how good they sounded in DC, and how much hearing those songs live meant to me on that night during that time in my life, how I felt the synths and bass and percussion in my bone marrow and in my soul, but I can't really talk about the all-consuming, sweaty frenzy of experiencing a show like theirs from the floor. For that, I need to talk about Berlin and Philadelphia.

Berlin:

So DM announced more dates in Europe. And, because I'm insane I guess, was online at some ungodly hour when tickets went on sale for the two shows in Berlin, Germany in January. I was able to get an early entry ticket for the January 19th show in BERLIN where I would be surrounded by other people who were actually genuinely excited to be there, which would be a huge improvement after the lackluster crowds in DC.

Am I glad I did it? Yes. Would I do it exactly the same way ever again? Probably not. Because queueing overnight outside the arena was worth it for the concert experience itself, but it's not necessarily something I need to do again any time soon. I'm a weak, American fan, and I own that. The German DM fans go so fucking hard and I am absolutely terrified of them.

Somehow, I managed to get a spot on the barrier without any pushing or shoving. I wound up in the pocket where the main stage becomes turns into the catwalk, right in front of where Andy Fletcher has his set-up. On either side of me were two other women who also were there by themselves. They were nice enough to talk to me and keep me company while we waited.

The show, though.

My consciousness went… somewhere else. I can’t really compare the feeling to anything else I've experienced. I've been to some other really singularly wonderful concerts, to see bands and musicians that I have deep emotional ties to, but none of them have been like this. It's the combination of being part of the masses down on the floor, on the barrier, exhausted and sweating and euphoric, with the power and intensity of hearing and seeing Depeche Mode perform live. I was hyper-aware of everything happening in front of me. Time did something strange, it crawled by so slowly and yet it was over before I could register what happened. I was an outsider there, but I felt like I was part of this massive collective, all connected by our desire to be there, our love of the music, united for a few hours, and I was so aware that everything that was happening on stage and around us was happening to eary one of the people in that arena at once.

The sound of the ignition at the beginning of "Stripped" reverberating in your rib cage, the driving, head-banging riffs in "I Feel You," the cosmic outro of "Cover Me," the field of wheat arm-waving during "Never Let Me Down Again" -- having it all happen to you, at that volume, at that frequency and intensity, is like having your soul yanked from your body and cast into decadent oblivion.

Honestly, it was a blur. But as far as I can remember, highlights included:

The additional songs from Ultra! Unexpected, but very much appreciated.

Experiencing Andy Fletcher's ridiculous awkward dad dancing up close and in person. There's a lot of hype about Fletch's moves, but let me tell you, they exceed any expectation.

Martin. Martin sang "Sister of Night" AND "Judas". I was overcome. People talk about singers sounding like an angel, but Martin L. Gore is the only person in the history of music that saying actually applies to in full.

And Dave. If he was anything like he was at this show when they were at the DC show, I missed the fuck out. Because yes, he performs to the whole arena, even to the people in the very back, but it's altogether something else to watch someone that animated up close. He's tapping into some energy and fire to fuel his work that I've only rarely seen in other artists. Dave Gahan never phones it in, he always performs like he's got jet fuel for blood and like every show really means something. He is outrageous on stage, in every sense of the word. He is endlessly inspiring, and deserves so much recognition and respect.

Philadelphia:

That said… to me, it seemed like the band as a whole was having way more fun at the Philly show than they did in Berlin. I can't put my finger on the specific differences, but they seemed lighter, more pleased with their work, and maybe genuinely surprised at the warmth of their audience in Philly. Martin smiled a lot more at the Philadelphia show, and Dave seemed looser, maybe less tired after a double in Germany.

The Philly gig on June 3rd was the best, by far, out of the three. The second US leg of the GST was announced and I, of course, being the way that I am, thought, "FUCK IT WHY NOT" and magically got a floor seat ticket right in front of Martin's side of the stage after the general tickets went on sale. And it was worth every penny and a short train ride from Baltimore.

I met a few more very nice people, a couple from Florida (whose first show had been cancelled due to the major hurricane last year) and a solo lady sitting behind me who let me join their conversation. And the man sitting to my left was British? European? So he also knew all the things the audience is supposed to do during specific songs that I learned when I was in Berlin. There were definitely some bastard people in the crowd, even down on the floor, terrible people who clearly weren't enjoying themselves, but the high energy of everyone else made it easy to shift focus to the band.

The set list was very similar to the one I heard in Germany, with the exception of two of Martin's songs from Music For The Masses and "A Question of Time" right before their closer -- "Personal Jesus." But again, the performances and mood behind most of the songs at the Philly show seemed lighter, more playful and mischievous (on Dave's part). And the time really flew by. I missed "I Feel You" in the set list, but that's a very minor criticism of what was, over all, a miraculous third show out of three very powerful concerts.

Epilogue:

The general consensus among fans is that this may have been the last big tour Depeche Mode have. They may keep recording together and separately, but another tour on this massive scale is unlikely. If that's the case, I'm so glad I found a way to see three very different shows on the Global Spirit Tour. I can’t imagine experiencing the same exact feeling these shows gave me; I certainly didn't feel the same at David Byrne's awesome American Utopia tour show this summer, and I don't expect the feel the same when I see Nick Cave in October.

Depeche Mode, especially now, at this stage in their careers, during this time in American and world history, and for me personally at this specific point in my life as I age out of my 20s, have been a source of sanity and compassion, of deep feeling and social commentary. Their music touches maybe the parts of myself I'm too scared to look at head on. After going through some of the things that have happened to me as an adult, and as I figure out the kind of person I want to be in the coming decade, obviously there are certain themes resonate with me more than they did when I first discovered DM as a teen. I am grateful to have had circumstances happen the way they did to lead me back to Depeche Mode, to delve deep into their music and history.

Those three shows changed the my standards for seeing live music. After being front row for the Berlin concert, how could I ever go back to being content sitting up in the second or third tier for any arena show? I've been spoiled.

And after a few months have passed, when I think about my experiences over the course of the Global Spirit Tour, it doesn't quite feel real. There are a few other concerts I've been to where when I think about it, I think, "Did that actually happen??" (Namely seeing Danny Elfman in Los Angeles on Halloween, 2014. Absolutely bonkers.) Seeing DM in Berlin is definitely one of those moments already, not even a year later.

I look forward to the future of their music. If Depeche Mode tour again, and that's a big if, the furthest I would travel to see them is maybe the UK, but hopefully that won’t be necessary! However, I absolutely would go see a solo show, if Martin or Dave ever had shows anywhere even remotely close by. I would absolutely travel to New York or LA to see a solo Martin show or Dave with Soulsavers. From what I can tell those venues are usually smaller, so it would be easier to have a more enjoyable, intimate experience.

But that's all there is. Nothing more than you can feel now, that's all there is.

Until next time.

Photo by me, Jan 19, 2018

[secretliz001]

翻译：Paul McCartney: One for the Road

原链接：https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/paul-mccartney-one-for-the-road-43295/ He blew it. Not that anybody spotted it. The audience at the Rosemont Horizon, outside Chicago, was too busy swooning in the ersatzcandlelight of a few thousand cigarette lighters and luxuriating in the warmbalm of nostalgia as a real, live Beatle reprised one of the band’s biggesthits onstage. Nobody appeared to notice — or care — that Paul McCartney had completely botched the words to his enduringturn-of-the-Seventies hymn “Let It Be.”

他搞砸了，虽然倒也没人发现。在芝加哥外的好事达体育馆，千千万万观众们都忙于举起打火���，在虚假烛光中陶醉，沉浸在温暖怀旧气息里，因为舞台上，一位真实的披头正在重演披头士乐队最受欢迎的歌曲之一。没有人发现（或者说，没有人在意）McCartney完全把Let It Be的歌词唱错了，这首发行于七世纪年代头上，经久不衰的歌。

 “I condensed that little one very nicely — it took on a newmeaning,” McCartney confesses later with an embarrassed laugh. “All I did was,I forgot the second half of the first verse and put in the second verse. And Ithought, ‘God what am I going to do? I’ll just do the second verse and probablyno one will ever notice that I’ve done it twice.’ But I was so thrown off thatI ended up getting it wrong in the last verse as well.” Not that it was all hisfault anyway, he insists with a disarming smile. “I spend most of my timewatching these little cameos in the audience. It’s like all human life isthere, a big sea of it. And it’s a bit distracting. If I get off on the wrongfoot, it’s because I’m hung up on the audience.”

“这首歌我提炼得不错，给了它些新内涵。”McCartney尬笑着坦白，“我就，把下半首歌的第一段给忘了，唱成了第二段，想着天哪咋办，要不我就直接唱第���段得了，大概也没人会发现我唱了两遍。然而我脑筋整个被搞乱，结果最后一节也弄错了。”他毫无防备地笑着，坚持说这并不都是他自己的错，“大部分时间我都在观察观众席。看着人山人海，人类生活都浓缩在那儿，有点让人分心。心思都在观众身上，把我的步骤都弄乱了。”

 And because, he might have added, that audience always was, still is and forever will be hung up on the Beatles. Currently in the midst of hisfirst major concert tour since his splashy 1976 American jaunt with the lateWings, Paul McCartney is digging deep into his half of the Beatles’ song bagafter spending most of the past twenty years pretending — in concert,anyway — that he had never been Fab in the first place. He is nowrediscovering to his eternal surprise, night after night, the enduring impactand resonance of the act he had effectively denied for all those years.

他可能还会补充说，这也是因为披头士乐队依然永远吸引着观众。McCartney正在进行一场大规模巡演，是自Wings乐队在1976年的那场高调美国巡演以来的第一次巡演。在���去的20年中，他一直在假装自己从来不是披头士乐队的一员（至少在演唱会上是这样表现的）。而为了这次巡演，他则深挖了自己创作的，占据披头士曲库一半的作品。如今每一晚他都能重新体验那份惊喜，那份他曾经故意拒绝面对，但是对观众有着经久不衰的影响和共鸣的惊喜。

 It’s not all hot tears and wet seats, of course, like it was in’64. At the Rosemont Horizon, where McCartney and his five-piece band holdcourt for three sold-out nights, it’s more like bright shrieks of astonishmentand deep sighs of contentment, spiced with moments of poignant intimacy anddroll hilarity:

Two teenage girls in the front row gently sobbing during“Yesterday,” a song written nearly ten years before they were born.

A middle-aged couple slow-dancing in the balcony to “Hey Jude.”

A family of three, including a little girl of kindergarten age,holding up signs that read, “We ♥ Paul,” except the little girl is holding the “We” upside down.

The thirtysomething fella in the tenth row holding a cellularphone over his head, apparently phoning in the gig to a ticketless yuppie palat home.

在好事达体育馆，McCartney和他的五人乐队举办了三场售罄演唱会。现在不是1964年，观众席已经没有粉丝们的滚滚热泪和湿哒哒的椅子。取而代之的是快乐的惊声尖叫和愿望满足的大叹，点缀着各种亲情与搞笑时刻：

前排的两个少女听着 "Yesterday "轻轻啜泣，这首歌是在她们出生前10年写就的。

一对中年夫妇缓缓地伴着“Hey Jude”在看台上跳舞。

一家三口，举着“We ♥ Paul”的牌子，不过那个看着才在上幼儿园的小姑娘把“We”的牌子举倒了。

第十排的三十多岁的小伙子高举着移动电话过头顶，显然在给一个没买着票只能家里蹲的雅痞朋友打电话。

 “I’m touching a lot of different nerves out there,” saysMcCartney, quite rightly. “Young couples and not-so-young couples who wereyoung when ‘Hey Jude’ came out. You see lots of guys doing high fives to eachother, a lot of communication, a lot of warmth.

“不同的人对我的表演都有感触。”McCartney说。他没说错。“不管是对年轻的情侣，还是对“Hey Jude”刚出时很年轻但现在已经不年轻的情侣。你可以看着好多人互相击掌，看到各种交流各种温暖。“

 “It’s not so much déjà vu for me. I’ve come back asanother person. I have different sensibilities now. I have kids, all that.Let’s face it, the first tours the Beatles did, the main essential thing wasscoring chicks. I’m a different person now, because that’s not allowed” Hegrins.

“但其实我对这场景并不熟悉，因为我回归时已经成长为另外一个人了，带着更多感情更多见解，有了孩子什么的。老实和你说，披头士第一次巡演最重要的目标就是找妹子而已。现在我不一样了，可不允许我这么干。”他笑笑。

 “And what I find now is, I get really touched by the audience,” hesays. “I keep telling Dick Lester [the director of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, whois making a film of the tour] to capture all the little things we see from thestage. Nobody in the audience really sees it. But we do, because we’re lookingat them. And that’s the real show.”

“我发现自己倒是被观众感动着。我一直和Dick Lester说要捕捉到从台上向下看的各种细节。（Dick Lester是A Hard Day’s Night and Help!的导演，也在为此次巡演进行拍摄。）我们能看到观众在席内看不见的细节，因为我们才是面对观众的人。观众的反映才是真正的演出。”

 That’s also the crux of Paul McCartney’s continuing dilemma as anex-Beatle. McCartney, 47, has been a solo artist for nineteen years, nearlydouble his tenure as a Beatle. In 1988 he made a welcome return to his Fiftiesrock & roll roots with the Russian-only “covers” album Snova v SSSR, a.k.a. Back in theU.S.S.R. Last spring he released his most critically acclaimed(although commercially disappointing) album in years, Flowers in theDirt. In addition, his recent songwriting partnership withElvis Costello has yielded two Top Forty hits, his own version of “My BraveFace” and Costello’s recording of “Veronica.” He capped 1989 by debuting afine, new touring band featuring top-drawer studio and road guys who couldoutplay Wings blindfolded — guitarist Robbie McIntosh (the Pretenders),singer-guitarist Hamish Stuart (Average White Band), keyboardist Paul “Wix”Wickens (Paul Young, the The) and drummer Chris Whitten (the Waterboys, JulianCope), plus McCartney’s wife, Wings vet Linda, on keys and harmonies.

这也是McCartney作为一位前披头士一直进退两难的症结所在。47岁的他已经单飞19年，几乎是他披头士生涯的两倍。1988年，他推出了一张只在俄罗斯发行的翻唱专辑Snova v SSSR（又名Back in the U.S.S.R.），令人欣喜地追溯回（影响到他的）五十年代的摇滚乐根源。去年春天，他发行了多年来最受好评的专辑Flower in the Dirt，虽然商业成绩不理想。此外，他最近与Elvis Costello的合作了两首歌曲，McCartney版本的My Brave Face 和Costello的 Veronica，都打到了排行榜前四十名。1989年，他首次组建了一支优秀的新巡演乐队，都是优秀的录音室和巡演音乐人，蒙着眼睛弹也能超过Wings乐队--吉他手Robbie McIntosh (Pretenders)，主唱吉他手Hamish Stuart (Average White Band)，键盘手Paul “Wix” Wickens (PaulYoung, the The)和鼓手Chris Whitten (Waterboys, Julian Cope)，再加上他的妻子，Wings乐队常驻成员Linda，负责键盘和和声。

 Yet it has hardly escaped McCartney’s attention that many of thepeople packing arenas and, later this spring, stadiums on his 1989-90 worldtour are not coming to see him play obscure album tracks from Flowers in theDirt. They are coming to see the Beatles-by-proxy. They arecoming to have their emotional buttons pushed by the songs that defined andtransformed their youth — “The Long and Winding Road,” “Can’t Buy MeLove,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Good Day Sunshine,” “Things WeSaid Today,” “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” the climactic“Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End” medley from Abbey Road. Theyare coming to see many of these songs performed live for the first time (thebulk of the Beatles oldies in McCartney’s show postdate their 1966 retirementfrom the stage) and, quite possibly, the last.

然而，McCartney当然不会假装无视，其实铺满场馆的人们并不是来听他演出Flowers in the Dirt中稍显晦涩的曲目。他们是来食用披头士代餐的。他们希望听到那些定义并改变了他们青春的歌曲，去触动自己的情感开关— “The Long and Winding Road,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Good Day Sunshine,” “Things We Said Today,”“Back in the U.S.S.R.,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” Abbey Road中高潮迭起的 “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End” 组曲。他们的目的，是来欣赏史上头次（也有可能是最后一次）现场演出的披头士老歌，大量1966年披头士离开舞台以后创作的曲目。

 At the Rosemont Horizon and later that week at the Skydome inToronto and at the Forum in Montreal, you could feel the audience buzz take apalpable dip every time McCartney went into an unfamiliar number from Flowers in theDirt, like the reggaefied shuffle “Rough Ride” or “We GotMarried,” a Flowers highlight recalling the hard-rock melodrama ofmid-Seventies Wings. The pressure drop was particularly noticeable at thebeginning of the two-and-a-half-hour show, as the crowd cheered the soundtrackof Beatles, Wings and solo McCartney hits that accompanied Richard Lester’sopening rockumentary-film montage with its kinetic blasts of Beatlemania,flower power, Vietnam, et cetera. After which McCartney and his band hit thestage and stepped right into … his new single, the appealing butcomparatively low-key “Figure of Eight.”

在他巡演的各个场地都能感觉到，每次McCartney表演一首Flowers in the Dirt中的新曲目，观众的热情会陡然下降，比如雷鬼风的“Rough Ride”或者 “We Got Married”，令人眼前一亮回想起七十年代中期Wings的硬摇旋律的“Flower”。这在开场尤其明显。观众们欢呼着披头士，Wings, McCartney的solo作品，伴着导演制作的记录着摇滚年代开场，屏幕上展现了披头士狂热，花之力，越战等等。之后，McCartney和乐队上台直接演出新单曲，是吸引人但相对低调的 "Figure of Eight"。

 “We did thaton purpose — we had to do that,” McCartney argues over aveggie burger (the McCartneys are devout vegetarians) during a preshowdinner break backstage in Toronto. “Originally, we were going to open with ‘ISaw Her Standing There.’ But I really got upset by the idea. I was going homeone night and I thought, ‘That’s really betraying our new material, sending itright down the line.’ Like saying, ‘Hey, I haven’t been around for thirteenyears and I haven’t done anything worthwhile. Here’s the Beatles stuff.’

“我是故意的。“McCartney吃着素汉堡解释道（McCartney一家都是坚定的素食主义者）。”本来我们想拿I Saw Her Standing There开场，但我真的不支持这个想法。一天晚上回家的时候我想着，‘这简直在背叛我们的新作品，整个把格调拉低了’。这个安排就好像在说，‘嘿，我神隐了13年，啥有价值的事都没干。喏，给你们听听披头士的歌得了。‘“

 “It’s the obvious thing. Boom, bang, Beatles, Beatles. Then yousay, ‘Now we’d like to do some new material.’ Boo! Hiss! I’ve seen the Stonestry and do it, and it doesn’t go down that great. That’s a fact of life. Evenwith the Beatles, new material didn’t always go down that well. It was theolder tunes. ‘Baby’s in Black’ never went down nearly as well as ‘I Feel Fine’or ‘She Loves You.’ That’s just the nature of the beast.

“真的很明显。如果上来就砰砰唱披头士的歌，然后说‘现在我们想演一些新作品。’嘘声就来了。我见过滚石他们这么做，效果不太好。这就是人生嘛，就算是披头士，新作品落地激起的浪花也不会大，老歌才更能带动人们。唱‘Baby’s in Black‘的效果就没有唱‘I Feel Fine’ 或 ‘She Loves You’好。这行就是这样。”

 “It is hard to follow my own act,” he admits. “But the only answerto that would be to give up after the Beatles. I only had two alternatives.Give up, or carry on. And having elected to carry on, I couldn’t stop.”

McCartney has been consistently productive as an ex-Beatle. He hasnot, however, been consistently successful. His Eighties chart duds include Pipes of Peace,Give My Regards to Broad Street (the soundtrack to hisdisastrous feature film of the same name), Press to Play and thesolo/Wings “greatest hits” package, All the Best. Notably, McCartneyincludes only one song from the first three albums in his current show: “SaySay Say,” his Number One duet with Michael Jackson, from Pipes of Peace, isfeatured in Richard Lester’s opening film.

他承认，“追上先前的成就很难，唯一的答案是在披头士之后就放弃。只有两个选择：放弃，或者继续。既然选择了继续，我就停不下来。"

McCartney作为前披头士一直都很高产，但也没有持续成功。他80年代排行榜上的哑弹包括Pipes of Peace、Give My Regards to Broad Street（超灾难的同名电影原声带）、Press to Play和Wings的精选集All the Best。值得注意的是他本次演出只收录了前三张专辑中的一首歌：Say Say Say，是他与迈克尔-杰克逊合作曲，打上了榜单第一，也在演唱会片头影片出现了。

 Flowers in the Dirt has done reasonably well saleswise — 600,000 copies inthe United States, 1 million in continental Europe by year’s end — but hasnot been the chartbuster either McCartney or his manager, Richard Ogden,certainly hoped for.

Flowers in the Dirt的销量相当不错--在美国发行了60万张，到年底在欧洲发行了100万张--但还没有达到McCartney与他的经纪人Richard Ogden希望的畅销程度。

 “It was as if it didn’t exist,” Ogden says ruefully. “I sat with aradio program director from Chicago, very nice, very up about the show. And hesaid, ‘What’s the next single?’ And I said, ‘We’re just starting with “Figureof Eight” ‘ And he said, ‘What about “This One”? That’s really good.’ And Isaid, ‘That came out in August, mate.’ That really drives me crazy.”

“打单结果就好像消失了一样，”Ogden怅然若失地说，"我和一个芝加哥的电台节目总监坐着，他人很好，对这个节目很上心。他说，'下一张单曲是什么？’我说：" Figure of Eight " 他说"那This One呢？这首很好听。”我说, ‘这首8月份就发行了啊，老哥。’真的好抓狂。"

 McCartney’s response, says Ogden, is a bit stoic. “Paul’s beendoing this for a long time, and he’s going, ‘I don’t want to think about thisanymore. You guys sort it out.'” In fact, McCartney’s response to his ongoingEighties commercial and, until recently, critical slump has been to get out andplay, something he had done infrequently (Live Aid, the 1986 Prince’s Trustconcert) since Wings broke up following his arrest in Japan in 1980 forpossession of marijuana. In 1987, with Ogden’s active encouragement andorganization, McCartney initiated a series of Friday-night jam sessions at asuburban-London studio with an eye toward eventually finding enough new,inspiring players to start a formal band. He also liked the idea, he says, ofhaving a rockers’ equivalent of cafe society.

McCartney的反应倒是挺淡定，他在这一行太久了。他说，“我不想考虑这个了，你们搞定吧”。实际上对于自己八十年代作品商业上的低迷，和最近才上升的风评，他的对应方式一直是出去演出（Live Aid，1986年Prince的Trust演唱会），虽然自1980年在日本因持有大麻被捕后Wings解散以来，他很少这样做了。1987年，在Ogden的积极鼓励和组织下，McCartney在伦敦郊区的一间录音室发起了一系列周五晚上的即兴演奏会，目的是找到足够多新人、有灵感的乐手来组建一支正式的乐队。拥有一个像咖啡公社一样的rocker团体，这个想法他很喜欢。

 “The Beatles nearly did that once,” says McCartney. “We were goingto open an Apple tea room, where we could all go and be intellectual, talk artor Stockhausen. So I thought, ‘We’ll do a similar thing with the jam. Maybe theword will get out that there’s a jam every Friday night, see who shows up.’ Butin fact, because it’s done by your office, and they just ring specific people,it didn’t work out like that. Whoever they rang, showed. Whoever they didn’t ring,didn’t show.”

McCartney 说，“披头士差点就这么干了，本来我们想用Apple的一个茶室，大家都进去开拓思路，聊聊艺术或者Stockhausen。我想着我们的即兴排练也学样，每周五的活动的话传开了，看看谁会参加。但其实因为是办公室组织的，而他们只会给一些特定的人打电话，效果不好。接到电话的人会参加，没接到的就不参加。”

 When asked why he stayed off the road for so long, McCartney saysvery casually: “I just couldn’t be bothered. Until Live Aid came along, Ididn’t think of doing anything live. I don’t know why. Maybe because nobodyasked me. Nobody asked me personally, anyway. I’d hear little things here andthere; I heard that Elton John was quoted as saying, ‘What he needs is to getback on the road.’ But it never seemed that vital for me; I was alreadyenjoying myself.”

问他为什么这么久没有巡演，McCartney反应很随意，“我就不是很care嘛，在Live Aid之前都没想过现场演出，我也不知道为什么。大概因为没人问过我吧，至少没人当面问过我。小道消息确实听说了点，我听人说Elton John说过“McCartney他现在需要的是回去巡演”。但这对我来说也不太关键，我已经很享受自己的生活了。”

 McCartney was never really much of a road hog. Wings’ first andonly American tour came ten years after the Beatles said sayonara to the roadat Candlestick Park. And it’s easy to tell how much time has elapsed by watchingMcCartney’s current show. The production is heavy on Seventies arena kitsch:lasers galore, levitating keyboards. McCartney’s between-song patter alsoprobably seems quaint (“We’re going to go back through the mists of time, to atime known as the Sixties”) to veteran Eighties concertgoers used to thenarrative command of Springsteen or Bono’s spiritual cheerleading.

McCartney从来都不痴迷巡演，披头士在Candlestick Park演出和观众彻底说byebye十年后Wings才在美国巡演。这是第一次也是最后一次。而看McCartney现在的演出，马上就能知道时间过去了多久。这场演出充满了七十年代舞台上的奇特风格：激光灯效，键盘悬浮着，对于八十年代资深演唱会观众，他们已经习惯了Springsteen 的narrative command【？】或者Bono的精神鼓励的，McCartney演出间歇的唠嗑风格古早，“我们将穿过时间的迷雾，回到一个被称为六十年代的时代”。

 One distinctly Eighties aspect of McCartney’s tour is hiscontroversial tour-sponsorship deal with Visa for the 1990 American shows. TheVisa arrangement — reportedly worth $8.5 million, which McCartney saysbasically covers the cost of transport for the tour — represents a new,potentially troublesome twist in pop-music sponsorship: rock & rollsponsored (some will say co-opted) not simply by a merchandiser butby a credit-card company, with close ties to banks and their complex networksof possibly questionable investments. McCartney says he vetted Visa asthoroughly as possible before saying, “I do.” “It may be true that they are agigantic money corporation,” he says, “but I can’t see what’s wrong with that,unless you can prove to me South African links.”

本次巡演的一个明显80年代特征是他与Visa公司就1990年美国演出达成的赞助协议，这个协议其实有点争议。据报道，Visa公司赞助达850万美元，McCartney说，这笔钱基本上包括了巡演的交通费。它代表了流行音乐赞助中一个新的、潜在的麻烦：摇滚乐的赞助（合作）不是简单地由一个商人赞助，而是一家信用卡公司，与银行及其可能会出问题的复杂投资网络关系密切。McCartney在说 "我同意 "之前，他尽可能彻底地审查了Visa。"他们可能确实是一家巨大的财团，"他说，"但我不觉得有什么问题，除非你能向我证明他们和南非之间有关系。"

 McCartney also insists he is not betraying any kind of political,social or emotional trust represented by the Beatles or the songs of theirsthat he’s performing on tour. “Whether you like it or not,” he says, “no matterwhat people thought was going on in the Sixties, every single band that didanything got paid for it. You look back at the early Beatles concert programs,there were Coke ads. We always got paid for everything we did, and when we madea deal, we always wanted the best.

McCartney坚持认为他并没有背叛任何一种披头士乐队代表的政治、社会或情感寄托，也没有与他在巡演中歌相左的行动。“实话实说不怕你惊讶，"他说，"不管你觉得六十年代是什么风气，每个乐队做的任何举动都是有报酬的。你回头看看披头士早期的演唱会，有可乐做的广告。我们做任何事情都会得到报酬，做交易总是希望得到最好的。“

 “Somebody said to me, ‘But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.’That’s a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now let’swrite a swimming pool.’ We said it out of innocence. Out of normal, fuckingworking-class glee that we were able to write a ‘swimming pool.’ For the firsttime in our lives, we could actually do something and earn money.

“有人和我说，‘可是披头士是反物质主义的呀。’这只是个传说罢了。John和我以前真的会坐下来写歌，说“咱们写个游泳池出来”，这些都是无意识说出来的。这种普通的，tmd工人阶级的志趣使我们通过写歌赚到了一个“游泳池”。这是我们人生第一次，确确实实可以种瓜得瓜挣大钱。

 “You get any act around the table with their record company, theytell their manager, ‘Go in and kill.’ They don’t say, ‘Oh, let the punters inat half price.’ We’ve actually done a lot of that — the free program, thatwasn’t necessary.

“你和唱片公司打交道，他们都会和经纪人说，‘去吧，大干一场’。他们不会说，‘欧我们票价打对折吧’。事实上我们也做过免费的项目，不过也没必要罢了。

 “And I think it’s just going to be tough if people don’t like it,”he says coolly. “Stick the finger up and say, ‘Sorry, boys, it’s tough. You maynot like me because of it. Tough darts. I know I’m not doing it for whateverperception you put on it. It doesn’t alter me.’ I’ve taken money off of EMI.The Beatles took money off of United Artists.

“而且我认为如果人们不喜欢，他们就得忍着。”他酷酷说，“我会举个中指说，‘Sorry咯，这事就这样了，你可能不喜欢，但你也只能忍着。我做这个并不是为了你对我的看法，你怎么想都不会改变我’。我拿的是EMI的钱，披头士拿的是联美公司的钱。”

 “I wish we’d taken a little more actually,” he says, suddenlylaughing, taking some of the chill out of the air. “The accountants on A Hard Day’s Night gotthree percent. We got a fee.”

他突然笑着说，“我倒是希望当时多薅点，A Hard Day’s Night的会计都拿了百分之三，我们只拿了一笔固定的钱。” 气氛突然放松了起来。

 “I‘m actually getting tired of Paul interviews,” Linda McCartneyremarks with a shrug while her husband is being trailed by a television-newscrew backstage in Chicago. “People always ask him about the same things. WhatJohn said about this, or what such and such Beatles song meant? Why don’t theyask him about other things, about the important things going on in theworld?”

当他电视新闻人在跟着McCartney在芝加哥场后台采访时，Linda McCartney耸耸肩说，“Paul的采访我都已经疲了。人们总是问他同样的问题：John说了什么，或者这个那个披头士歌曲是什么意思？他们为什么不问其他的，问问世上真正发生的重要事件？"

 For many of the press hounds, radio DJs and TV interviewers following this tour, not to mention the fans who are paying for the privilege, the Beatles are still one of the most important things in the world. In a world still reeling from their original sound and remarkable creative vision, the Beatles’ significance as a cultural touchstone and spiritual anchor cannot be overestimated. In the Sixties the group was the embodiment of youthful ambition and utopian desire amid the graphic realities of war in Southeast Asia and at home in the urban ghettos. Now, with the world plagued by crack, wracked with racial hatred and poised on the edge of ecological apocalypse, talking about the Beatles is like a form of therapy.

对于关注这场巡演的许多狗仔，电台DJ，和电视记者，更不用说付钱来看的观众，披头士乐队依然是世上最重要的事情之一。他们的原创声响和非凡的创作理念仍在影响着这个世界，作为文化试金石和精神支柱的意义是不可低估的。在六十年代，这支乐队在斗争纷飞的东南亚和城市贫民窟，体现了青年们的志向和对乌托邦的向往。而现在，在这蔓延着毒品，种族仇恨和生态灾难的世界，谈论披头士乐队更像一种疗愈手段。

 That seems to be just as true for McCartney as it is for any fan. During rehearsals for the tour, the band would take an occasional tea break, at which point, Paul Wickens recalls, “anecdotes would come out about the old days, little stories about him and John.”

对McCartney来说似乎也是如此。在巡演排练期间，乐队偶尔会进行茶歇，Paul Wickens回忆道，“他会说一些旧日轶事，关于他和John的小故事"。

 But the usual aura of Beatlemania that accompanies McCartney wherever he goes has increased tenfold, at least, with the inclusion of so many Beatles songs in his set. The recent settlement of the band members’ lawsuits with their record company, Capitol-EMI, and among themselves has also brought the tiresome issue of a Beatles reunion back to the fore. McCartney himself fanned that flame at the start of the American tour in November when he suggested during a Los Angeles press conference that with their legal differences settled, maybe he and George Harrison might write songs together for the first time. (He didn’t say anything about writing with Ringo Starr.) Harrison quickly put the kibosh on a possible reunion, issuing a terse press statement: “As far as I’m concerned, there won’t be a Beatles reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead.”

但无论McCartney走到哪里，平时就伴随着他的披头士狂热至少成十倍地增长，毕竟他的演出中加入了这么多披头士的歌曲。最近，乐队成员结束了与Capitol-EMI唱片公司的诉讼，这也重新聚焦了披头士重聚这个老大难问题。McCartney在11月的洛杉矶巡演的新闻发布会上表示，随着他们解决法律分歧，也许他和George会第一次一起写歌。(他没有说任何关于与Ringo一起写作的事情。)George很快就打消了这个念头，发表了一份简短的新声明：“就我所知，只要John没活回来，披头士是无法重聚的。"

 Indeed, John Lennon is an extremely conspicuous presence on McCartney’s tour, by his very absence. His name, his music and his celebrated differences with McCartney during and after the Beatles’ lifetime repeatedly come up in both interviews and idle conversation. Lennon figures prominently in the autobiographical passages that constitute the bulk of the 100-page concert program McCartney is distributing gratis at his shows. But in discussing Lennon in the context of his own contributions to the Beatles’ legacy, without Lennon to answer back, McCartney runs the risk of looking like he’s grabbing all the glory.

事实上，John的缺��反倒在本次巡演中成为了一个极其显眼的存在。采访和闲谈中人们都反复提及他的名字、音乐以及他与McCartney在披头士解散前后的著名纠纷。巡演中免费【免费!!!!!!!!】发放的【多达!!!!!!!!】100页场刊大段的自传段落中，John的身影占重要地位。但在讨论Lennon对披头士作品的贡献时，此时没有Lennon回击，McCartney看着像抢走了所有风头。

 For example, a portion of the program’s interview section is devoted to McCartney’s adventures in the nascent London underground of the mid-Sixties: hanging out with art scenesters like gallery owner Robert Fraser, attending avant-garde music concerts, helping to set up the pioneering Indica Bookshop and Gallery, funding the seminal underground newspaper IT (International Times). “I’m not trying to say it was all me,” McCartney points out in the program, “but I do think John’s avant-garde period later, was really to give himself a go at what he’d seen me having a go at.”

例如，场刊访谈有一部分是关于McCartney在伦敦六十年代中期新生地下艺术中的穿梭：与画廊老板Robert Fraser等艺术界人士混在一起，参加前卫音乐会，帮着打造先锋书店画廊Indica，资助开创性的地下报纸IT（International Times）。"我并不想说这都是我的功劳，" McCartney在场刊中指出，"但我确实认为John后期对先锋艺术的探索，是为了给自己一个新生活的机会，因为他看到了我经历的新生活。"

 “Because I talk about this so much, people go around saying, ‘Oh, he’s trying to reclaim the Beatles for himself, to take it away from John,'” says McCartney while relaxing on the chartered jet ferrying him, his family and the band between Toronto and Montreal. “I’m not doing anything of the kind! I’m not trying to claim the history and achievements of the Beatles for myself. I’m just trying to reclaim my part of it.

"因为我经常谈这件事，所以人们到处说，'哦，他想把披头士据为己有，从John那里夺走它'，" McCartney乘着包机轻松谈到（这包机在多伦多和蒙特利尔之间接送他自己、家人和乐队成员）。"完全没有的事! 我不想把披头士的历史和成就据为己有。我只是想找回属于自己的那部分。”

 “It’s not sour grapes. It’s true. I was there in the mid-Sixties when all these things started to happen in London. The Indica Gallery, art people like Robert Fraser. I was living in London, and I was the only bachelor of the four. The others were married and living in the suburbs. I was just there when it all started to happen.

“真不是酸葡萄心理，六十年代中期伦敦百花齐放的时代，我就在那旋涡中心，在Indica画廊，与Robert Fraser这类艺术人士在一起。我就住在伦敦，也是乐队里唯一一个单身的。另外三个都结婚了住在郊区，我只是正巧那时在那地而已。”

 “The difference is that once John got interested in it, he did it like everything else — to extremes. He did it with great energy and enthusiasm. He dove into it headfirst with Yoko. So it looked like he had been the one doing all the avant-garde stuff.

“It’s the ultimate conundrum,” he admits rather helplessly. “If I don’t say anything, I go on being the so-called wimp of the group. If I do open my mouth, it looks like I’m sullying John.

"不同的是，约翰一对它产生兴趣，他就开始走极端，就像他做别的事情那样。他以极大的精力和热情去投入，和洋子一起，一头扎进去。所以看起来他才一直在做各种先锋前卫的活动。”

"这是终极难题。"他颇为无奈地承认。"如果我什么都不说，我就一直是所谓的群体中的懦夫。但如果我真的开了口，看着就像是我在diss约翰。”

 “And this has only become an issue because he’s dead. Because of the mythologizing that inevitably comes with someone as special as that. And he never wanted that for himself. I remember driving in a car, listening to an interview with John on the radio on the day he died in which he said, ‘I don’t want to be a martyr.’ He didn’t want that responsibility, to be larger than life, to be some kind of god.”

No one brings it up, but this discussion, ironically enough, is taking place on the evening of the ninth anniversary of John Lennon’s murder.

"而正是因为他去世了，这才成了一个问题。因为他地位如此特殊，不可避免会被捧上神坛，可他从来都不想这样。我开车时，听过约翰去世那天的电台采访，他说，'我不想成为烈士'。他不想要那种责任，大于生命，要成为某种神什么的。"

虽然无人提及，但讽刺的是，这场访谈是在John Lennon遇害九周年的晚上进行的。

 “The fact is, we were a team,” McCartney states firmly as the plane begins its descent, “despite everything that went on between us and around us. And I was the only songwriter he ever chose to work with. Nuff said.”

"但其实我们是一个团队，"他在飞机开始下降时坚定表示，"尽管我们之间以及周围环境发生了各种事情，但我依然是唯一一个他自己选择合作写歌的人，就是这样。"

 A day in the touring life, McCartney style, is a nonstop series of interviews, photo opportunities, press conferences, sound checks and meals grabbed quickly by a band on the run. And, of course, the nights are busy, too.

McCartney的巡演生活每天充斥着持续的采访、拍照、新闻发布会、试音，在奔波中随意扒几口饭。当然，晚上也很忙。

 This evening’s performance at Toronto’s Skydome includes McCartney’s nightly plug for Friends of the Earth, the international ecological lobbying group that he is promoting throughout the tour. As the final notes of the closing Abbey Road medley reverberate around the cavernous Skydome, McCartney and the band jump into a fleet of golf carts, which zoom through the hallways to a waiting tour bus. With all aboard, the bus pulls out of the Skydome Starsky and Hutch-style before most of the fans have even left their seats. Back at the hotel at 1:00 a.m., McCartney hosts a small bash for the tour entourage in his suite. The food is vegetarian Chinese. The main attraction is a video of the evening’s Sugar Ray Leonard-Roberto Duran fight. At 2:30 a.m., as the party breaks up, McCartney, wearing a bathrobe, dances alone in the living room to the new Quincy Jones album.

今晚在多伦多Skydome的演出，包括McCartney每晚为Friends of the Earth做的宣传，一个国际生态游说组织。当空旷的Skydome回荡着Abbey Road组曲最后一个音符，McCartney和就乐队跳上高尔夫球车，穿过走廊驶向一辆等着的巡演大巴。大多数歌迷都还没来得及离开座位呢，大家就都上了车，飞速驶出了Skydome，像在演警界双雄似的。凌晨1点回到酒店，他会在套间里为随行人员举办一场小型派对，吃的中式素食，电视里放着当晚Sugar Ray Leonard-Roberto Duran的比赛录像。凌晨2点半派对散场，他会穿着浴袍，听着Quincy Jones的新专独自，在客厅里独自跳舞。

 Sedate in tone, organized with stunning military efficiency, the 1989-90 Paul McCartney World Tour is strictly business — the business of putting on a good show, promoting the latest record, getting maximum publicity and attempting to satisfy the constant public hunger for all things Beatle.

“This is more like a Beatles tour, strangely enough,” says McCartney. “In doing this tour, I’ve taken hints. If someone comes up and says, ‘How should we do this?’ my mind goes back to the best tours I’ve been on. And those were the first Beatles tours of America. They were highly organized, very efficient.

基调沉稳，组织高效，1989-90年Paul McCartney世界巡回演唱会是一场严格的商业活动—是为了举办一场优秀演出，推广最新唱片，获得最大宣传，并试图满足公众对披头士相关的持续渴望。

"挺奇怪的，这倒更像是一场披头士巡演，"McCartney说。"巡演中，我有一些自我暗示。如果有人过说，'我们应该怎么做？'脑海里就回想起我参加过的最好的巡演：披头士的第一次美国巡演，组织得很好，很有效率。

 Where there was once the hysteria of four wild boys with the world at their feet, however, now there is the calm of a middle-aged man who spends nearly all of his offstage hours meeting with assorted advisers, attending to his family (he and Linda are accompanied on this series of shows by two of their four children, Stella and James) and in turn being attended to by personal staff and security, the most prominent of the latter being three muscular, well-dressed men who look as if they had graduated with honors from Secret Service finishing school. Hell raising, needless to say, is at a premium on this tour.

曾经的，是四个狂野男孩带动的歇斯底里，站在世界之巅，现在的，是一个冷静的中年男子，几乎把所有台下时间都用在会见各种顾问、照顾家人（四个孩子中Stella和James这次陪他和Linda巡演），并反过来又受助理们和安保的照顾，其中最突出的是三个肌肉发达、衣着光鲜的男人，看着像特工学校毕业的优等生。Hell raising【？】在此次巡演中很重要。

 “I’m not used to that,” Robbie McIntosh says of the tour’s emphasis on organization. “When I was with the Pretenders, we would do a sound check and then we would go to a pub or something. Now with this, I get a feeling I can’t do that. It’s a lot more regimented, basically because the security is a lot heavier, because of who Paul is. And I guess because of what happened to John, although nobody directly mentions that.”

"我不习惯这样。" Robbie McIntosh提到这次巡演很强调组织性。"当我和Pretenders乐队在一起时，做完音响检查，我们就回去酒吧或者别的地方。现在我感觉自己不能这样做了。一方面因为Paul的身份，安保工作更加严密。另一方面我猜也是因为John的原因。虽然并没有人直截了当提出来。"

 McIntosh observes that the band “is sort of sacred” to McCartney, wholly separate from business. “He never talks business. Never, ever. He’s never mentioned money or anything like that to me. If he’s got something to say, then he’ll say it to the manager, and you will get it from him.

McIntosh发现乐队对McCartney几乎有些“神圣”，是完全与商业活动分开的。“他从来不说商业上的事情，从来都没有。他对我从来不提钱啊什么的。如果他想说，他会和经纪人沟通，经纪人再来和你沟通。”

 “And he’s got a very young approach as far as the band,” says McIntosh “You’d think this is his first band the way he goes on. You see him at sound checks, going around in circles and doing those silly little jumps. It’s a real novelty to him to have a band again — and he treats it like that.”

"搞乐队这方面，他的各种行为都显得相当年轻，" McIntosh说，"他的做法会让你以为这是他待的第一个乐队。试音时你会看到他绕圈圈，傻傻在蹦跶。对他来说，再度拥有乐队是一件很新奇的事情--他也是这样应对的。"

 The sound checks are shows in themselves. McCartney doesn’t run through any of the songs in the regular production; instead, he leads the band through a batch of oldies (Carl Perkins’s “Matchbox,” an old Beatles cover, and tracks from the Russian album, like “Just Because” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”), the Wings B side “C Moon,” the jaunty British music-hall number “Me Father Upon the Stage” and a Latin-hustle medley of Beatles songs.

试音本身就是一场演出。通常人们会过一遍歌单，但McCartney不这样。他会带着乐队演一些老歌(Carl Perkins的“Matchbox,” 翻唱披头士的歌，俄罗斯独家专辑里的歌, 类似 “Just Because” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”这种。)Wings的B面单曲“C Moon”，英式音乐厅的欢快曲目 "Me Father Upon the Stage "和披头士曲目的拉丁风串烧。

 “He’s a real clown,” Wix says quite admiringly. “He loves to show off, and he loves to be there doing it, making people laugh.”

And sure enough, onstage you can see by the light of his beaming, vintage Beatle Paul smile and the way he throws himself into the sixteen Beatles songs featured in the show that no one is enjoying this forward-into-the-past expedition more than McCartney himself.

“It’s twenty years, man,” McCartney says a bit wearily in response to the questions that have dogged him the whole length of the tour — why Beatles songs, and why so many?

"他真的是个小丑式人物。"Wix相当佩服地说。"他喜欢炫技，喜欢在台上搞笑让观众快乐。"

在舞台上，你可以从他那笑容满面、复古的披头士Paul的笑容，以及他投入演出中的十六首披头士歌曲中的方式看出来，没有人比他本人更享受这种向着曾经去探索的征途。

麦卡特尼有些疲惫地回答了困扰他整个巡演的问题--为什么是披头士的歌，为什么这么多？

 “You can’t keep angry forever, twenty years after an event that hurt,” he says, referring to the band’s acrimonious breakup. “Time is a great healer.”

谈起披头士乐队的激烈解散，他说道，"已经二十年了，老兄，二十年前的事我再心痛，也不可能永远生着气。时间很能疗伤。"

 McCartney explains that in preparation for the tour he actually sat down with pen and paper and drew up a list of his favorite Paul McCartney songs, Beatles and otherwise. He came up with so many of them that at one point there was talk, briefly anyway, of doing two completely different shows in each city. “I’d said to myself, ‘You’re a composer,'” he says. “‘There’s no shame in doing these songs.'”

他解释说，“准备巡演时自己真的拿着纸和笔，坐下来，写了一份他心中的Paul McCartney最佳曲目，其中包括披头士乐队和其他时期写的。单子太长了，甚至一度提到要在每个城市做两场完全不同的演出。"我对自己说，'你是作曲人'，"他说，"'演这些歌并不丢人'。"

 The songs of late partner John Lennon were a different matter. “In fact, I considered doing a major tribute to John,” says McCartney. “But it suddenly felt too precious, too showbiz. I was going to have a whacking great picture of John and just say, ‘He was my friend.’ Which was true. I’m totally proud to have worked with him.

演出已故搭档John Lennon的作品则含义不同。“我其实考虑过加一个John的致敬环节，但这回忆对我来说太珍贵，这环节也太作秀了。我本想挥着一张John的照片说，‘他是我的朋友’，这是真的，能与他合作我真的很骄傲。”

 “But then people started saying, ‘Why don’t you do “Imagine”?’ And I thought, ‘Fucking hell, Diana Ross does “Imagine.” They all do “Imagine.”‘ That’s when I backed off the whole thing. You go on tour, you sing your songs, arrange ’em nice, do it, and if you do it well enough, that’s what people will remember.”

“但人们又要说了，‘为啥不唱Imagine?’我就觉得，‘草了，Diana Ross也唱过Imagine，所有人都唱Imagine’。于是我退却了。我就想着去巡演，唱着自己的歌好好编排，如果做得够好，大家是会记住的。”

 Paul McCartney was rather late out of the starting gate for the 1989 Dinosaurs on the Road Sweepstakes, eating the dust already kicked up during the summer and early fall by the Who, the Rolling Stones and even Ringo Starr. But he’s not bugged either about his membership in the club — “I’m another dinosaur,” he says frankly — or by the implicit pressure to prove his viability as a contemporary artist to an audience obsessed by his past, if necessary at the expense of his peers.

【这段的典故没咋看懂，也没查到，有无老师解答？】

 “It’s never stopped,” says McCartney, sitting on a bench in the Montreal Canadiens’ locker room while a sold-out house awaits him inside the Forum next door. “I will never stop competing with every other artist in this business. Pet Sounds kicked me to make Pepper. It was direct competition with the Beach Boys. So what? That’s what everyone’s doing. Although when Brian Wilson heard Pepper, he went the other way.

“竞争从来没有停止过，”他说，在更衣室里坐在板凳上，隔壁漫长的人都在期待着他演出。“我永远不会放弃和这行艺术家们竞争的。Pet Sounds促使我推动Sgt. Pepper项目，这是和the Beach Boys直接竞争，但又怎样呢？大家都这么做。虽然Brian Wilson听完Sgt. Pepper，他就调转枪头啦。”

 “But, yeah, it’s competition. If you put ten children in a room, after an hour or so, they’ll sort themselves out. The smart one. The big, tough one. The cowardly one. The funny one who’s the friend of the smart one and the big, tough one. They will establish a pecking order.”

And where does McCartney place himself in rock’s pecking order?

“I’d put me at the top. Just because I’m a competitor, man. You don’t have Ed Moses going around saying, ‘Sure, I’m the third-best hurdler in the world.’ You don’t find Mike Tyson saying, ‘Sure, there’s lots of guys who could beat me.’ You’ve got to slog, man. I’ve slogged my way up from the suburbs of Liverpool, and I am not about to put all that down.”

“但竞争就是这样。你让10个孩子在一个屋子里，过一两个小时，他们就分出区别了。聪明孩子，壮硕孩子，强悍孩子，怂孩子，以及和聪明孩子壮硕孩子强悍孩子关系都很好的搞笑孩子。他们自己就会分等级。”那McCartney认为自己在哪一级呢？

“我觉得自己是最高一级，因为我确实很有竞争力。你看不到Ed Moses到处说：‘我是世上第三好的跨栏选手哈。’也不会发现Mike Tyson说，"很多人都能打倒我啊。”人必须要努力啊，伙计。从利物浦的郊区一路打拼上来，我不会放弃这一切的。"

 Nor is he about to let all that go forgotten. With the key Beatles lawsuits settled, he’s keen to go ahead with the long-discussed authorized Beatles film biography, The Long and Winding Road, although the project hit an early snag in terms of finding a director. McCartney mistakenly attempted to solicit interest from top screen talent by sending form letters outlining the project to the likes of Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott and Michael Apted. “George [Harrison], who’s in the film business, went, ‘Major no-no, man, we shouldn’t have done that.’ And he should have stopped me. It was a mistake.”

他也不打算让这一切消失于记忆深处。随着披头士乐队关键官司解决了，他开始积极推进讨论已久的乐队授权电影传记The Long and Winding Road，虽然在找导演时就早早遇到了阻碍。他错了，他试图征求顶级大导的兴趣，他向Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott 和Michael Apted等人发送了邀约。"涉足电影行业的乔治说，'可千万别，咱不能这么干。’他确实该阻止我，这决定是错误的。"

 Yet having willingly reawakened the Beatlemania beast with his current show, Paul McCartney enters the Nineties with a new variation on his old Seventies dilemma: How do you follow an act like the Beatles — again? He talks of making a new album with his touring band, and he’s halfway through a major orchestral and choral piece, written with British conductor Carl Davis, to be debuted during the 150th-anniversary celebrations of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic next year. More important, though, he’s come to realize that you don’t follow an act like the Beatles. You learn to live with it, and learn from it.

Paul McCartney通过他目前的巡演，有意唤醒了人们对披头士的狂热。进入九十年代后，他对这七十年代的老难题态度又有了变化：如何重现披头士的行事作风？他说自己会和巡演乐队一起制作一张新专辑，和英国指挥家Carl Davis共同创作的大型管弦乐和合唱作品也已经完成了一半，将在明年皇家利物浦爱乐乐团150周年庆祝活动中首次亮相。但更重要的是，他已经意识到，自己不能重现披头士的作风了，而是要学会与之共存，并从中学习。

 “I’ve already done the thing where you go out and shun the Beatles,” says McCartney. “That was Wings. Now I’ve done this whole thing. I recognize that I’m a composer and that those Beatles songs are a part of my material.

“出门演出，假装自己不是个披头，这事我已经干过了，就是Wings。我现在想要的，是意识到自己是一位作曲人，而披头士的歌曲是我作品的一部分。”

 “The only alternative is that I turn my back on it forever, never do ‘Hey Jude’ again — and I think it’s a damn good song,” he says before heading out onstage, where he’ll play it again for a grateful crowd. “It would really be a pity if I don’t do it. Because someone else will.” 

“另一个选项是，我得永远无视披头生涯，永远不能唱Hey Jude。可这真tm是首好歌。”他上台演出前说着，“如果我永远不唱那就太可惜了，因为会被别人唱掉的。”

[yungvenuz]

GAMES OF THE YEAR 2017

First off, 2016 GOTY, and Runner Ups 

2015 GOTY and Other GOTY

2014 I don’t think I did any actual post but it was DROD Second Sky and Full Bore

This year I had five clear stand-out favorites! I didn’t include any AAA titles because if I have to read one more word about Zelda in the next month my head will explode.

5) Hollow Knight

I almost excluded Hollow Knight based on the above provision of no mainstream games allowed, because I assumed that a game with its level of polish would have to have a large team behind it. Finding out that the team was essentially two people (and some of their personal friends brought in to record a few voice lines each) was jaw-dropping, particularly the fact that nearly every art asset in the game came from a single person. Holy shit.

If I had to pick a single reason Hollow Knight is on the list, it would have to be Quirrel, a traveler you meet several times throughout the course of the game. The final encounter with him at blue lake was truly exceptional. It’s the sort of scene that makes me wish I could just leave the characters there to reminisce and stop worrying about the plot altogether.

If I had to pick a second reason for including Hollow Knight, it would be Zote the Mighty.

4) Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

Getting Over It’s trailer didn’t immediately grab me, despite my being a fan of Bennett Foddy’s previous works. I figured there would be a limit to what could be drawn from a somewhat obnoxious physics gimmick and found art. 

I was totally wrong! The concept tempted me, and I eventually gave in and got it out of curiosity more than anything else. What sets Getting Over It apart is its narration, provided by Foddy himself, which discusses the game, its influences, the culture it’s a part of, the feelings of the players, and more. It’s a deadly serious game, despite one of its trickiest early challenges being a floating curvy playground slide. 

It’s also a game that can wipe out an hour or more of progress in a few stupid seconds, and fully aware of the power it holds over you as a result. At first, Foddy will fill the air spent trying to navigate your way back with inspirational quotes from a range of authors on the topics of hardship and failure. Particularly gruesome failures are matched with blues songs (all in the public domain, in keeping with the game’s dedication to using only free second-hand assets).

In an interview he did for a podcast (this one) after the game released, Foddy called his core intention “Anti-Design”, the process of exploring game mechanics that deliberately diverge from the seemingly objectively correct design decisions that have been distilled from decades of game making. It pays off not to take the conventional wisdom as unimpeachable gospel, as Getting Over It demonstrates-- its popularity with streamers and youtubes gave it multiple weeks on the best selling charts on steam during a highly competitive season.

3) Card City Nights 2 (Also available in app form!!)

This is a self-indulgent entry, since a lot of the fun of the Card City Nights series comes from the characters that are drawn from Daniel Remar and Ludosity’s rich catalog of freeware games, all of which I’ve played and loved. Even without the nostalgia, though, it’s still a wonderfully silly and funny game, and the card game component is well done too.

The game is played on a combined playing field of 6x3 card slots. Each (well, most) cards have arrows pointing to other card slots on the field, and cards are activated once three cards of the same type have been connected along these arrow chains. There’s a lot of depth to figuring out the right balance of damaging cards to play and making sure there’s ways to activate them, and there’s a lot of room for combo or trick decks to play as well.

I don’t have a ton to say about this one, except that I found almost all of the jokes to be funny, and it has some seriously great #aesthetic too.

2) Wuppo

In recent years I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with the failure of open world games to accurately represent civilization and society. there’s something grim about stepping out of a town with thirty npcs in it (each with their own fully fleshed out backstory!, as bethesda might describe it), and then traveling to a settlement filled with “bandits” or “raiders” and killing twice that many people in a single building. No matter how many sacks of skulls decorate the area to designate the people I murder as evil, it’s striking that the supposed enemies of progress and civilization so vastly outnumber the people I’m supposed to help. And if the bandits aren’t programmed to do anything but sit around a table trying to eat a meal until I smash through the door of their abandoned castle/vault/scrap fortress, that muddies my justification even further.

That’s not to say such games can’t be fun, but I feel cheated whenever they describe themselves as open world games. When a game bends over backwards to the player’s perspective, when every npc can be talked to until their entire life story is known and every friendly city is surrounded by a hundred dens of villainy, that’s about as closed an experience I can imagine.

Wuppo is the first game I’ve played that truly matched my conception of an open-world experience: one in which it’s up to you to fit yourself into the world around you rather than bending the world to your will. There are hundreds of other people filling the streets of Wuppo, all travelling, or eating, or working, or playing. You won’t talk to most of them, but the way they fill the world provides authenticity to the cities you visit. There’s a save-the-world plot that shuffles in near the very end of the game that I honestly think detracts from the experience, since I think the true joy of Wuppo comes from the low stakes of the opening premise, of trying to find a new house to live in.

It would be remiss of me not to bring up Matt Thorson’s An Untitled Story (downloadable for free from the sixth from the bottom icon on his website) here as well, a game that very closely matches Wuppo in its gameplay, graphical, and plot style. 

1) Monolith

Monolith follows the roguelite formula set by Binding of Isaac and refined by Enter the Gungeon. It hits all the notes it needs to: it’s fun to play, boss attack patterns are just the right difficulty, and there’s enough variety in each run to keep things fresh, but what really sets it apart is its setting. 

The game casts you as a scavenger exploring an abandoned tower in a ruined city; not much is known at the start except that it was apparently the birthplace of “the power eternal”, a source of infinite energy which turns out to be the imbuing of ghosts into objects to provide them with powers or keep them charged. Some unknown disaster destroyed the facility long ago, and now the tower’s halls are filled with loose ghosts, mechanical defense systems, scientists that tampered with the power eternal for their own ends, and beasts that have nested in the ruins. 

The different factions don’t have a direct impact on the gameplay, but they blend together to create a perfect mix of horror, fantasy, and science fiction cues that work really well for the game. On top of it all, the tone is eerily upbeat in the early stages, what with the feline scavenger offering upgrades and advice between runs, or the impossibly cheerful stage one music (helpfully labeled as “Tonal Dissonance” in the soundtrack). Stripping away those cheerful tones as the player approaches the deepest layers of the tower serves to set the mood for the final boss fights without any words needing to be exchanged.

I also appreciated that the upgrade system in Monolith is more stable than the games it takes after. While there is variety in the weapons, their powers are roughly equivalent and allow the player to skew to their favorite style of play. There are burst weapons, and steady damage weapons, and less powerful weapons with defensive abilities like blocking incoming bullets, but there’s nothing that will instantly clear your way to the bottom as can happen in Binding of Isaac. This also means there’s never a run that gets two or three floors deep and runs out of steam and has to be restarted. 

[chroniclesofawkwardness]

Yellow Bird

Last Friday, I witnessed something I'd always thought would be funny to see in person. I laughed, but not as heartily as I thought I would.

Working second shift means I'm still in the building long after most other employees have gone home. Fortunately, summertime affords more hours of daylight to accompany the stillness that often envelops the building after six o'clock in the evening. I usually take lunch around six o'clock because I like to walk the quarter mile from one end of the building to the other in relative peace an quiet instead of having to play Frogger with my co-workers in the atrium. During business hours, I can usually spot three distinct types of employees. The first type is someone using his or her cell phone, head down, yet bent slightly forward, eyes and/or thumbs transfixed on a screen. It's amazing that people in this state don't account for more workplace accidents. I want to startle them like a caged animal who occasionally has to tap on the glass walls of his cell to remind the hordes of gawking humans who he is. I imagine a mass of humanity piling up like cars on the freeway after one wintery fender bender causes more chaos then it should. In the words of Talking Heads, as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention.

The second type of employee travels in horizontal packs of usually three, but sometimes as many as five or six across. These people are impossible to maneuver around whether I'm simply trying to get from point A to point B, or I've decided to just walk on a break instead of visiting Starbucks. My Fitbit has a unique way of making me feel like less of a man if I don't take 117 more steps to win the hour. The frustration of not being able to maneuver around type two is only compounded by the fact that if I do manage to find a clear path beyond a chorus line of co-workers, I immediately find myself on a collision course with a member of type one. Naturally, this person is oblivious to his or her surroundings. I have no choice to fall back in line behind type two before an incidental touch with a warrior from type one causes all hell to break loose. For all I know, such a tangible moment could result in a sexual harassment complaint to Human Resources, or accusations of attempted theft of a personal electronic device.      

Employees in the third group must all have Fitbits because I can spot them just by looking at their shoes. This group changes into tennis shoes on breaks or lunches and power walks up and down the atrium. I don't mess with this bunch. Who am I to interfere with someone else's mission? Truth be told, some days I like to just people watch, especially when power walkers swing their arms while walking or insist on demonstratively touching a wall to prove that they made it to the end of a given segment of their journey. I have yet to see an instructor compelling them to do so by yelling words of encouragement into a microphone, though this would admittedly be hilarious.

Quarter miles in solitude are also meaningful because they remind me of my teenage years. This was the time when my taste in music began to take shape, owing to far too many hours in my room listening to bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Soundgarden. Choosing to take steps as an adult in my free time is as empowering today as choosing the next track on my favorite CDs was then. Whether chaos stems from puberty or the workplace, there are few things one can control in life. Among these are musical preferences and the use of one's own body.

Initially, I was drawn to the bands I mentioned earlier because their music was popular at the time. Many of my friends were listening to the same songs, and I wanted to fit in. Or so I thought. Pearl Jam's Jeremy and Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun were all over the radio and MTV, so being into them seemed like just the thing to do. I'll always be able to say that Superunknown was the first CD I bought with my own money and that Pearl Jam's Ten was one of two cassettes I still owned long after even CDs were turning into an antiquity. (The other one is The Joshua Tree by U2.) Though childhood nostalgia will always be tied to those bands that came out of the Pacific Northwest in the late 80s and early 90s, my attachment to the music has evolved as my own circumstances have changed along with the circumstances of the people who made the music.

Seventeen-year-old me was content to understand maybe one out of every five words of a given song as long as I liked the sound. I didn't think much about the subject matter as long as the beat resonated with me emotionally whether I was angry, sad, depressed, or something else.

Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights (2002) began to change the way I thought about music. When I bought it, I was waist deep in my Master's thesis where I explored the directions of rock and folk music in Yugoslavia during the wars of the 1990s. As a graduate student, I began thinking about not only how music sounded and how it made me feel, but also what the musicians were saying in the lyrics of the songs. NYC from Turn on the Bright Lights is a good example:

I had seven faces Thought I knew which one to wear But I'm sick of spending these lonely nights Training myself not to care

The song spoke to me at a time when I was still processing my parents' divorce, and reflecting on a childhood spent usually doing one of three things: Losing myself in a textbook, gazing up a stereo (most good Catholics were looking up to the Virgin Mary), or seeking sexual release through masturbation. It's amazing how hard some old habits die, and how lengthy the time of dying can be. Think of Unglued by Stone Temple Pilots:

Moderation is masturbation What is what and what makes you feel good? All these things I think about I think about Always come unglued Yeah I got this thing it's comin' over me I got this thing its comin' over me I got this feeling comin' over me Over me

When I got into Led Zeppelin, I began to wonder why many of the artists I'd grown up listening to hadn't included a few words of homage to these influential predecessors in their liner notes. As I discovered the blues of Robert Johnson and Junior Kimbrough, I wondered why Led Zeppelin hadn't done the same thing. More recently, I've come across artists such as Odesza and Pretty Lights, whose music is more electronic in nature. Yet something about the time in my life when I bought Superunknown still has hold of me.

Why do generations have to lose their heroes? Is the loss of such individuals as much a blow to the collective consciousness of men and women of a certain age as it is the true end of an era? I don't imagine musicians like Scott Wieland of Stone Temple Pilots and Chris Cornell of Soundgarden (both of whom haven't been gone all that long) ever set out to be placed on pedestals by throngs of adoring fans. I think their music spoke to a generation that largely wanted to be left alone to gaze up at the stereo. This is not because this generation is afraid of living. Maybe those like me, who can vaguely remember records, but were more concerned about filling the scratches on a randomly discovered copy of Nirvana's Unplugged in New York with toothpaste, found their voices through the music of the period in human history when cassettes were on the way out and filesharing was in its infancy. Maybe we didn't realize the influence their music had on us until we returned to it as adults to look beyond the sounds and into the lyrics. Until those who created it began to leave us.

As I drank a cup of coffee in the early evening of that Friday, I saw a small yellow bird fly full speed into the glass window nearest my desk. Being of a certain age, my first thought was of Soundgarden's song Like Suicide, which I'd read Chris wrote about a crow he killed to put it out of its misery after he heard the ill-fated bird crash into a window.

Dazed out in a garden bed With a broken neck Lays my broken gift

Just like suicide

I immediately thought the bird was dead. It lay there on its back without moving for what seemed like an eternity. His or her fellow birds probably thought so too. Moments after the collision, several even smaller birds hopped gingerly up to their fallen friend and began pecking at him or her. They say the animals are always the first to know.  Still, the comedian in me wondered if, in a darker more cynical sense, the birds were laughing hysterically to themselves. I imagined their dialogue going something like this: "Did you see what Steve's dumb ass did? There's no way he's coming back from that! LOL!"

On a more serious note, some of my concerned co-workers went outside to check on the bird. After several minutes, it managed to stand upright and waddle its way into the grass, having surely sustained one hell of a concussion if not worse. I even wondered if this particular bird had planned to end its life. After all,  just like with humans, one can never be too sure of exactly what goes through someone's mind right before making the ultimate decision.

One of the reasons I'd admired Chris Cornell was that whenever I'd return to the music of Soundgarden, be it after months or even years away, I'd discover a lyrical depth that both my academically-experienced ears and still-youthful soul could appreciate. I also felt that Chris had "made it" where many of his contemporaries had fallen short. He lived past age 27. He had children. Those aspects of his life reminded me that there was hope beyond the desire to  be left to gaze up at the stereo; that the desire to be left alone with your thoughts, to create, is not always a bad thing. Chris and others showed me whether they meant to or not, that you don't have to be a social butterfly or a Social Justice Warrior to be happy.

All these thoughts occurred to me within the five minutes that passed between the bird hitting the window and it staggering away what I assumed would be its final resting place. It's no wonder that those five minutes felt like twenty years.

During those five minutes, I'm sure singular employees were staring at their cell phones to catch up on text messages or wish their cousin's boyfriend's dog a happy third birthday. The last of the packs of five or six across were about to break up for the weekend. Hell, even the power walkers who so demonstratively swung their arms at every opportunity were making plans to meet up at Zumba class on Saturday morning followed immediately by reconvening at the bar to unplug the Wi-Fi, drink wine, and get housewife wasted. Still looking good in yoga pants after two kids, a tummy tuck and a breast lift had to be worth celebrating.

Oblivious to the plight of little yellow bird.

That evening, like most, I chose to walk the quarter mile alone, and enjoy the long days unique to summertime. The bird's sudden and violent ending reminded me of the fragility of life, and how important it is to spend yours doing things that bring you joy. I fall off the wagon sometimes. I don't always eat right, and I'm not ready to publicly disclose my browsing history. But, more often than not, I think I make good choices. I just try to be a decent human being. At some point, despite my nostalgia, I decided I wanted more out of life than being left alone to gaze up at the stereo, but I don't regret listening to music alone in my room. I discovered some damn good stuff in the process. Your taste in music is another of few things you can control in life.

I'm still here though many of those who crafted the soundtrack of my youth are going or have gone away. Knowing they’re gone is tough, but it’ll be okay. I’ll be okay. I still believe there's hope, and no one can take away my freedom to choose hope over despair, life over death, and joy over sadness. Regardless, I’ll embrace whatever life throws at me. No labels. Just an open mind. 

[tune-collective]

Boys Meet World: Love Finally Finds Japandroids on Life-Affirming 'Near to the Wild Heart of Life' (Critic's Take)

Boys Meet World: Love Finally Finds Japandroids on Life-Affirming 'Near to the Wild Heart of Life' (Critic's Take)

Everyone who attempts to hang on the highs of adolescence longer than traditionally deemed acceptable is ultimately forced to face the very scary question: When does this stop being romantic and start to just be kind of sad? No one’s self-ascribed glory days last forever, and the only thing more heartbreaking than giving up on your ideals and dreams too early is holding onto them for far too long. Eventually, you take one wrong look in the mirror, or in the faces of the similarly minded people you surround yourself with, and suddenly everything you knew to be right and true in the world seems to flip — from there, it’s pretty tough to ever get all the way back. And at that point, you just hope that there’s still something else out there beyond fire’s highway.

Vancouver power duo Japandroids, who release their long-awaited third album Near to the Wild Heart of Life today (Jan. 27), have been one of the world’s most exciting rock bands for nearly a decade now, largely because their music has always teetered on the precipice of this moment. They were never that young, at least as we knew ’em — by 2009 debut album Post Nothing, Brian King and David Prowse were already about a half-decade out of college, though they still thrashed and threw down like a couple of undergrads. Even then, the weariness was setting in: “We used to dream/ Now we worry about dying,” went the chorus to breakout crit-hit “Young Hearts Spark Fire.”

The true thrill came from how Japandroids acknowledged the sun setting on their youth, but still raged against the light’s dying like true believers in rock’s power to grant immortality. And the stakes doubled for 2012’s highly acclaimed Celebration Rock, recorded in the duo’s late 20s after ulcer scares nearly robbed King of a lot more than his innocence. The album was a triumph, more fearful and more resolute than ever, shot through with a now-or-never urgency that made for emotional and instrumental catharsis more explosive than the firework sounds that opened and closed the LP.

The worldview of Japandroids before Wild Heart was based on obvious and agreeable central tenets: going out, drinking, smoking, yelling. But most of all, it was based on devotion to one another: The rush of Post-Nothing and Celebration Rock tapped into the quintessentially young feeling of your group of friends — maybe just one friend in particular — being your entire world, of everything being “We” by default, of any other way of life being virtually unimaginable. Because they played as a guitar-and-drums duo uninterested in roster expansion, because so many vocals were delivered in unison, and because pronouns were more often plural than singular, the sense of solidarity was absolutely intoxicating for two albums.

But the longer Japandroids took to return for LP3, the less the formula seemed repeatable for a third time — could Brian and Dave, now solidly in their 30s, really spend a third LP seeking teenage kicks and have it feel more inspiring than depressing? Or would there finally have to be something else?

Near to the Wild Heart of Life arrives with that something else in tow — the duo has found love, in a place that wasn’t nearly as hopeless as they might’ve feared. Which isn’t to say that Japandroids’ first two albums were heartless by any stretch, but they mostly treated opposite-sex interaction as an adolescent combination of fantasy and curiosity, something to be talked up (“We run the gauntlet, must get to France/ So we can French kiss some French girls”) more often than actually achieved.

Celebration Rock‘s “Younger Us” was inarguably the duo’s greatest love song to date, and it was of course an ode to each other, with the kind of pinpointed moments of true friendship (“Remember that time when you were already in bed/ Said ‘Fuck it,’ got up to drink with me instead?”) to make you waste a whole night digging for dumb college photos on Facebook. But the “pain from an old wound” element of the nostalgia in “Younger Us” pulls no punches; the song’s emotional wallop comes from its open admission that those days of peak fraternity are now firmly in the rearview, and only getting farther away.

From the first track of Wild Heart, it’s clear that Japandroids’ world has expanded beyond one another. The title-track opener is a narrative that posits itself as a sort of origin story for the band itself, telling the tale in wide, apocryphal pen strokes of how King left his hometown to conquer the world and “make some ears ring with the sound of my singing.”

But break the song down by verse and it reads as the story of how King learned to move beyond Prowse and his old life, with his “best friend” instructing him “You can’t condemn your love/ To linger here and die,” and ultimately getting his buddy “all fired up/ to go far away.” (Indeed, in real life, King moved from Vancouver to Toronto before the album’s recording.) Then in the second verse, the singer receives further encouragement and a kiss “like a chorus” from a female bartender, and in the third and final verse, he’s visited by an ambiguous apparition (“My body broke out in a sweat/ From seeing you in dreams”) that seems to be prepping him for that something even bigger than friendships and hookups.

The majority of the ensuing album finds King embracing that thing called love — the more conventionally romantic kind — in a way seen only in flashes through the duo’s first two albums. “Be the beast, but free what burdens me/ And I’ll love you ‘cause you love me/ All life long, till I’m gone,” he sings on “True Love and a Free Life of Free Will,” an eternal commitment echoed in second-side centerpiece “Morning to Midnight” (“But if you’ll hide me and heal me in your sanctuary/ I’ll stay forever”), statements from a place in too deep to remember what life was like on the outside.

Wild Heart‘s most seemingly inconsequential track, the swirling two-minute interlude “I’m Sorry (For Not Finding You Sooner)” unfolds as the key to maybe the whole album, as King follows the titular apology with the explanation: “I was looking for you all my life.” Of course it’s not literally true, it just feels that way when you’ve found the person that finally allows your entire life to make sense, and you can’t help but look back in frustration on all the time you wasted beforehand.

It’s not just the lyrics that offer a newfound sense of contentedness and spiritual calm, either. The group’s production has flattened significantly from the first two albums, no longer allowing King’s guitars or Prowse’s drums to froth over the top like a beer poured from the tap without caution. The tempos have slowed, too — the title track still blisters and “North East South West” makes you want to grab a hockey stick and rush the ice like the third Sedin twin, but the majority of the album is more early U2 than early Replacements, more open plains than dingy basement. Even the chant-along vocals have chilled, with the howled “OH OH OH OH-OH-OH”s and twenty-two syllable “WOAHHH-AH-OHHH”s from their previous album replaced with Gallagher Bros-like “Yeahhhhhh, yeahhhhhh“s and ghostly “Sha la la la la la“s. The result remains thrilling, but it’s a different kind of excitement — with lower peaks but a wider base, less heart-stopping but also less ephemeral.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3KtKAySDBs

On Celebration Rock, the duo began the album asking themselves “Don’t we have anything to live for?,” answering the question: “Of course we do, but until that comes true — we’re drinking / and we’re still smoking.” Now, on Wild Heart emotional climax “No Known Drink or Drug,” they’re testifying that neither of those titular vices “could ever hold a candle to your love” — not so much an open repudiation of those cheaper early thrills as an unapologetic acknowledgement that they’ve since located a better deal. The considerable power of Near to the Wild Heart of Life is in its explicit presentation of Japandroids as living proof that those who fear the story of their adult lives will end up as one long ellipsis can still have chapters, even entire books to go. True love and a free life of free will can make the nights of wine and roses last forever.

Source: Billboard

http://tunecollective.com/2017/01/28/boys-meet-world-love-finally-finds-japandroids-on-life-affirming-near-to-the-wild-heart-of-life-critics-take/