#amanda Petrusich

[astuteobservations]

excerpt from Hayley Williams for the New Yorker by Amanda Petrusich

[razorsadness]

To truly understand the Pogues requires a certain looseness of spirit. Not in the classically debauched, booze-and-cigs sort of way (though, to be fair, an affinity for hurling oneself toward oblivion in the back of some grim and sticky dive probably doesn’t hurt), but in a more elemental, constitutional way: these are songs for people who feel everything, want it all, love with irresponsible abandon, care too deeply, can’t let it go, embrace any chance to be subsumed by desire or ecstasy or utter devastation, and are, in the most general sense, tuned in to the overwhelming abundance of the human experience. If you are someone like that—preoccupied by the assorted ways in which we buoy and destroy one another, by how insanely good and bad it all feels—Shane MacGowan is your dude. Play his records as loud as you can, trip over something, stay up too late, pay for a round. Tell someone you love them, and that you always, always will.

—Amanda Petrusich, from "Shane Macgowan Leaves the Astral Plane" (The New Yorker, December 1, 2023)

[theblackestofsuns]

K. Wroten's illustration for Amanda Petrusich's piece on Olivia Rodrigo in this week's New Yorker magazine.

[whileiamdying]

Bon Iver Is Searching for the Truth

The artist Justin Vernon discusses his new EP, “SABLE,” the dream of a happy adulthood, and his worry that he’s purposely repeating a “cycle of sorrow.”

By Amanda Petrusich October 16, 2024

Bon Iver is the alias of Justin Vernon, a singer, songwriter, and producer from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Since 2007, when Vernon released “For Emma, Forever Ago,” his début LP as Bon Iver, he has been making formally experimental but gorgeously tender music that seems to take equal inspiration from Bruce Hornsby and the Indigo Girls, Arthur Russell and Aphex Twin. (The project name—a version of the French phrase “Bon hiver,” or “Good winter”—was borrowed from an episode of the television series “Northern Exposure,” a deep and formative work in Vernon’s life.) This week, Bon Iver will release “SABLE,” a three-song EP and the band’s first new music since 2019’s “i,i.” “SABLE,” is only a little more than twelve minutes long, but it feels revelatory, expansive, and raw. Vernon has a couple of different voices—a spectral falsetto; a deeper, throatier bellow—but it’s hard for me to think of another contemporary singer whose vocals carry quite as much pure, unmediated feeling.

Outside of Bon Iver, Vernon remains a wildly in-demand collaborator. He has a track on the newly remixed version of Charli XCX’s “brat” (he described the decision to participate as “a no-brainer,” saying “the art and the music, its aggression, its power, its pop-ness—it’s just amazing”), and he worked with Kanye West on “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (2010) and “Yeezus” (2013), two of the most acclaimed rap albums of the past few decades. He also appeared on Taylor Swift’s “folklore” and “evermore,” both from 2020; because of the pandemic, Vernon and Swift didn’t meet in person until long after “folklore” was released. “I wasn’t starstruck,” Vernon told me. “I was, like, ‘Wow, you’re somebody that I would have been very close friends with in high school. You’re real and you’re here.’ To see what she’s been up to, the propulsion, the expansion . . . I don’t know, it’s just unlike anything anyone’s ever seen. And yet there she was, this person who made a lot of sense to me.”

I previously spoke with Vernon at The New Yorker Festival in 2019. Earlier this month, we sat down again to record an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour, and continued our conversation after we left the studio. This interview, a composite of both encounters, has been condensed and edited.

Justin, it’s so good to see you.

It’s great to see you, too, Amanda. I was pacing around my room today, like, “I���m anxious! Shit.” I haven’t talked to anyone about music in any official capacity since our last conversation, probably. It’s been five years. I was, like, “Oh, that’s why.” Your nervous system’s kinda keyed up, and you have to have a CBD gummy, take a breath. Walk around the block, do some push-ups.

Five years is a very civilized pace, I think, and you’ve hardly been silent during that time. But do you feel any internal or external pressure to produce work on a certain schedule?

Nope, not at all. This one really came from personal necessity. It was just time. Some of these songs have been bubbling for five years.

“SABLE,” is just twelve minutes of music, but, for me, it feels a lot bigger than that. I wanted to ask you about the grouping of these three songs, in particular. You mentioned that they were written at different times, but I hear a very legible arc—a closed circle, almost. I hear the story—and this is quite relatable, to be honest—of a person trying, and then a person failing, and then a person finding some peace with their limitations.

Are you me? [Laughs.] That feels right. They feel like an equidistant triangle, a triptych. It’s three, and it couldn’t be longer. It runs the gamut from accepting anxiety to accepting guilt to accepting hope. Those three things in a row. There’s no room for a prologue or an epilogue at that point. Because that’s it—that’s what everything is.

From a place of guilt and anxiety, how vast is the distance to hope?

My friend Erinn Springer, who made the videos for “SABLE,” was telling me that with [the track] “AWARDS SEASON,” the word for her was “almost.” Time and time again, I’ve been sitting at that feeling of almost: we’re almost there, or we’re just about to get there, I can feel or dream of a place that’s coming soon. And I guess that’s what the song is talking about—change, and how we’re always partaking in it.

This is maybe an incredibly personal question, but—

[Laughs.] That’s good.

When you get to the place of almost—the thing is in reach, you can see it, you can feel it, it’s really close—is that when you panic? Because that’s when I panic.

I think that’s when I have to push further. These songs, they’re personal, of course, but the need to share them is also very personal. These are songs with truth that I’ve located, or been a vehicle for. But they’re true. And I was, like, These have to be shared.

The public piece is complicated. It also seems possible that your relationship to fame might change; maybe you want it one year and the next year you don’t.

I remember there was this moment during the pandemic where I was, like, I could stop doing all of this. I was driving my little A.T.V. around. I needed that—knowing I could stop. But getting back on the road there’s all this excitement, and then, so quickly, the anguish and weariness and impossibility of it set back in.

Do you think you’ll pull back from touring?

I’ll share a pretty vulnerable moment. I knew that we were gonna be taking some time off. It was the beginning of our last run. I was in Duluth. My family was there. I was so happy to be with everyone, but I was really suffering under the weight of everything. I was playing “[715] CRΣΣKS”—there’s no accompaniment. It’s really a crusher to do. It burns a lot of gas. I was scanning the crowd. I was just having a tough month. I was getting ready to start saying goodbye to the last sixteen years, in a way. There were six or seven thousand people out there, and I became overwhelmed with anxiety and sadness. I got choked up and started to weep. My bandmates were all up on the stage, leaning down, because it’s too short of a song for them to leave and come back. I lock eyes with Waz [Jenn Wasner], I can see Michael Lewis looking at me. And I’m crying—like, hard. Shoulders-heaving crying. And I feel unsafe, like this is not an O.K. place for someone to be. And the crowd is going wild, you know? I’m not mad at them. I would also be cheering for encouragement. But I was thinking, They wantthis. Or this is making sense to them. It wasn’t all negative—

But it felt like there was blood in the water?

The rest of the show, I could barely function. If I could do that same touring setup and have somebody else sing the songs, that would be a little easier. But that whole night in, night out, let’s excavate Justin—I’m not built for it. When I say it like that, I think, How is anybody? But, that’s just me, I can’t.

Well, there’s so little distance in your work. I don’t know, maybe Bon Iver doesn’t need to be a road show.

When I used to go to shows, for me, they were excavations. They were explosions, they were unique. They were a band playing four new songs they made up last weekend, at an all-ages venue in Eau Claire. Or seeing Melt-Banana open for Mr. Bungle in, like, ’95—I’m watching something rip me open. And of course they were all also touring and doing the thing and everything, but just . . . I did it a lot, and I’m extremely proud of that achievement. I’m extremely proud of the team. When we were at Barclays, Yo La fuckin’ Tengo opened the show, and we played “Sh’Diah,” and Sean Carey’s doing free-jazz freakouts on drums, and Michael Lewis, my favorite living musician and improviser and soloist, he’s playing, and we are throttling free jazz to an arena that is absolutely understanding what we’re doing. And, like, check mark. Check mark! Thank God. But I can’t go to that well over and over again. It has to be something sacred—it has to renew. I come back to the name of the band. It’s a good band name, a good project name, because it’s like—good death, good winter. Things need rest. A life needs to rest at some point.

It’s funny, I used to be a cynic about things like weddings—why does it have to be a big, performative, public thing? But you realize that is sort of the profundity of it.

I put these songs out because I know there’s truth in them, and I want to share that with everybody. I think where it gets slippery is when it’s, like, “O.K., but we need to see the person who sings the song.” Lately, the song has seemed to be not enough. That’s the part that gets me a little sensitive. But that’s what art is, and that’s why I believe in art and expression so much. It does seem to be the thing that carries cultures forward, past their old haunts and problems.

I mean, I think art can be instructive as well as lifesaving. I’m certainly not the first person to suggest that. Historically, you’ve been pretty mindful. Even using the name Bon Iver puts a little air, a little space, between you and the world. But you’re in these videos. It was so lovely to see your face.

Thank you. It felt like there was a certain amount of acceptance in that. My great friend Eric Timothy Carlson, who does some of my art work, was, like, “Man, just when are you going to do your ‘Man in Black’ thing?” And I was, like, “Challenge accepted. Let’s go.” Hiding has been a valuable thing, and a way for me to express that I don’t think it’s all that important who I am—that the songs are most important.

For listeners who have been with you since “For Emma, Forever Ago,” I suspect the single, “SPEYSIDE,” might feel like a kind of return, insofar as it’s a little more stripped-down, a little less layered, than what you were doing on “22, a Million” or “i,i.” Do you think of the two poles of Bon Iver—music that’s minimally produced, versus music that’s maybe more maximally produced—as in opposition?

From “For Emma” until “i,i,” it felt like it was an arc, or an expansion—from One to All. “I,i” was very much me trying to talk about the We—the Us, outside of I. And when I got to these songs, the obvious thing was, well, people might think this is a return to something. But it really feels like a kind of raw second skin. I think about time in cylindrical, forward-moving circles. This feels like a new person, new skin. A new everything, more than a return. But I did feel like it was important to strip it down to just the bare essentials and get out of the way, to not hide with swaths of choirs. Just get it as close to the human ear as possible.

Can you talk a little about where and when you wrote “SPEYSIDE”?

The “SPEYSIDE” story is that I was in Key West. I had been living alone in the woods by myself, in Wisconsin, and it was getting dangerous. My parents had always gone down there, and I was, like, “You know what? I could just escape.” I went for three or four weeks. My brother and sister-in-law also came, and then we were, like, “Oh, this is so fun, we’ll stay another month.” It didn’t matter. They were just working from home. This was January, February of 2021, and I was reflecting a lot. The song came out mostly in its entirety. I was thinking about guilt and people in my life where I was just, like, “Oh, my God, I really did not do that right. I did not act the right way.” It just came rolling out, with help from rum. I would go out to the pier, and I would look back at Key West, and I’d see it as this island. I didn’t want to name the song “Key West,” although it would have been appropriate. Speyside is a region in Scotland, and it’s a whiskey. That’s the story with the song title. It was my little nod to southern Florida.

So, I have this running text thread with a close friend of mine where we text each other the loneliest things we can think of. We’ve been doing this for years. And so, every six months or so, I’ll get a text from him that will just say, —“Rental car shuttle, pre-dawn . . .”—

[Groans.]

Or “Horse, stuck in the mud.” A recurring character on our text thread is the pedal steel guitar.

Oh, man.

So the text will just be, “Pedal steel solo, Buck Owens, ‘Together Again.’ Apocalyptic!”

[Laughing.] That’s apocalyptic-sad right there!

There’s pedal steel on two of these three new songs. I’m curious about your relationship to the instrument.

Well, it’s a very good question, because it’s the most beautiful musical instrument that humans have constructed, for sure. It really is. It’s an impossibility, and truly an American invention. It mimics the voice, but there’s nothing else that slides between chords like that. They’ve been trying to make keyboards in this century that mimic that, and there’s just nothing like it. Greg Leisz is one of my favorite musicians to ever live, and I was very, very lucky to get to record him again. A very formative record for me was Bill Frisell’s “Good Dog, Happy Man.” That was the first time I ever heard Greg play. There’s a song on there called “That Was Then”—my high-school friends and I—we’re very, very, very close—we all have it as a tattoo. The moment in which we felt the most alive and together was this little seven-, eight-second passage where Greg played this pedal steel line. It’s the pinnacle of music to me. And so to get him on “SABLE,” is just amazing. He’s a master, right? And he’s so funny, and we get along so well, but even he’ll sit there and be, like, “Oh, shit, how does this go?” It’s just so many strings and pedals. But he’s always searching.

I don’t want to ask you too much about the lyrics, because there’s often an opacity and an obliqueness to your writing that I find incredibly beautiful; in a way, I’m not that interested in the literal meaning. So, feel free to fib your way through this part. But I did want to ask about the title. “Sable” is a synonym for “black.” It’s a piece of clothing that widows sometimes wear. It’s a river in Michigan that my fly-fishing friends tell me is holy water for trout. It’s also a weasel, though that maybe feels less relevant.

Yeah, that cutie!

You use it as a noun in “AWARDS SEASON”: “But I’m a sable / and honey, us the fable.” Can you talk a little bit about what the word means to you?

It’s such a good question. For years and years, it’s just been there. There’s an outtake from the second record, I think, where I used it in a lyric. I don’t know what it is, but it’s true. I wrote it and I knew it was true, and I still didn’t know what it meant. I was, like, “Be O.K. with that.” But then I looked it up. Sable. Mourning. Deepest black. Also, place name. But what isit? For me, I think when I’m speaking that line, what it refers to is being the darkness. There have been times in my career where it has felt like I’m repeating a cycle of heartache. I was getting a lot of positive feedback for being heartbroken. And I wondered, maybe I’m pressing the bruise. Maybe I’m unknowingly steering this ship into the rocks over and over again, because . . . you know, I’m not, like, famous-on-the-street, People-magazine famous. But there have been a lot of accolades for me and my heartache. So it’s me asking the question: I’m a sable, I’ve been a sable. Am I repeating this cycle of sorrow? Or is this just how sorrow goes, and this is how everyone feels? That’s kind of what it means to me.

I hear joy and wonder in the work, too. But you’re right, that heartache is a part of the story of the Bon Iver. I think it’s easy to be dismissive and say, “Well, that’s a toxic notion, that artists need to suffer to make work.” But pain is generative, in a way.

That’s a really good way to say it.

When we’re grieving, when we’re hurting—I mean, grief is also an expression of love. I hate to say all of this, it seems like a terrible idea to perpetuate, but—

I think it’s either the most surface or the deepest thing. And, like we said before, grief can only come from the highest joys, the greatest things in life, you know? There were some things that I really needed to find out about myself in these songs. And so, in that regard, it’s been worth it, because I needed these songs to find out how I felt, and to really, actually say how I’ve been feeling.

I think of you as a person who considers language kind of pliable. And not just language but punctuation, too. You’ve made up some words. My favorite Bon Iver neologism is “fuckified.” It’s almost Shakespearean! Where does that playfulness come from?

When you said punctuation, my first thought was, I just did it wrong. But, no, it’s just expression. One of my best friends growing up—we’re still really close—we get into semantic arguments sometimes. He’ll say, “Justin, you can’t say something is super unique, or really unique. It’s either unique or it’s not.”

Your friend should get a job at The New Yorker.

Shout out to Keil! It’s the “SABLE,” thing. I didn’t really know what it was. And the “fuckified” in “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄”—you just have to kind of let it out as an expression. You brought up the opacity of my lyrics. It really feels like I’ve sort of found this new narrative structure in these songs, where it’s a little more clear what’s been going on, and I’m kind of just saying it, versus dancing around it.

The stories feel really close. Your voice feels really close. It’s a little like having you in the room.

I wanted it to be like that. To be right in your ear, you know?

“AWARDS SEASON” opens with the line “I can handle much more than I can handle”—that line flays me every time I hear it. I think it’s possible to perhaps understand those words as a person admitting to being overwhelmed. But, to me, it mostly sounds like someone discovering that they’re stronger than they thought they were. We’re lucky to learn that about ourselves in really tough moments, that we are actually pretty—

Resilient. And then there’s the spot where you know you gotta turn around and go back, because the mechanism isn’t working anymore. The metaphor I’ve always used is that it’s like running an engine with no oil. You are doing long-term damage. It takes a long time to re-oil, to reset the machine. My dad and I watched the Buster Douglas–Mike Tyson fight when I was growing up. Douglas’s mom had just passed but he still beat Tyson in Tokyo. Douglas would say you just have to “Suck it up.” My dad always says that. When I’m feeling like I’m not gonna make it, I remember my dad saying that to me. I don’t know—there’s times to suck it up and move on and get through it, and then there’s times where you gotta take a knee, and say, “You know what? I’m not strong enough for this, and I can’t do this alone.”

As you were saying that—“suck it up”—I was thinking, is that good advice? I think sometimes it is, right? And then, often, it is not, and it’s more complicated, and you need to ask for help and take care of yourself. But there are moments where we have to test ourselves a little bit, see what we can bear, what we can handle.

Yeah, right?

That Midwestern stoicism runs deep in the Vernon men.

Yeah, it does.

Speaking of healing: you’ve discussed the utility of psychedelic drugs in your life, in terms of managing anxiety or enabling creativity. I suffered abig loss two years ago, and there were times when the immensity of my grief felt truly insurmountable, to the extent that I wanted to manually reset my brain, to restore my capacity for happiness or lightness. There’s evidence suggesting that psychedelic therapies can be quite useful for grief. I’m still sort of figuring out if it makes sense for me. But I’m curious how that stuff fits into your life these days.

Well, these days, not much. It’s not in my life anymore, really. I once thought about pot, it’s sort of like going to the bowling alley and putting those bumpers up. It’s, like, “This rules. Every ball, I hit pins. Every idea I have has got legs.” After a number of years, that feeling gets really addictive. Mushrooms, LSD—there were times where it was very, very therapeutic. I think I look at it like opening a door. It has certainly stirred deeper pits of empathy and understanding and oneness with human beings and the world. Those were ideas I already had, but now solidified—that we are each other, and hurting one another is not going to get us anywhere but down. But the metaphor about it opening a door . . . you have to close a door. If you leave that door open too long, the snow’s gonna come in and you’re gonna get fried. I don’t look back with many regrets, although I do look back with accountability and a sense of reckoning.

Looking at your discography, I presume a kind of hunger in you for collaboration. You once said, “Power has come to me, but it’s not fun to wield by yourself, and it’s not as useful if it’s just your vision.” What appeals to you about resisting the auteur path?

I love this question. I believe in the power of the individual—don’t get me wrong—but I’ve always just found that it distracts from the point. Why do we like a song? Is it because of who’s singing it to us? Or is it the song? And I just think it’s the song. For me, it is. For me, it’s about the song and what the music does. It can be very distracting when it becomes, “Oh, I love Bon Iver so much. I want more Bon Iver. I want to see Bon Iver. I want to get his autograph.” I’m sensitive to it, and the attention can be overwhelming. I’m also uncomfortable with it because it distracts from the point that music delivered me to myself.

But I can also say when I first heard “Hello in There,” by John Prine, I was twelve years old, and I saw a universe of human joy and pain and love and life and death, all in three minutes. And of course I’m gonna be, like, “What was that?” And it’s useful, right, to have a name or whatever. But I’ve also found that in moments where I’ve thought, Oh, maybe I am really good at this, or really special, or I’ve got some sort of gift—really I’ve just rigged up a huge antenna to catch things. I have gotten better at crafting songs. But I just don’t need to dwell on it, and it’s not going to make the songs any more true or less true.

I wonder if what you’re talking about, the emphasis that we place on performers and performance, I wonder if it’s because—this is a very funny thing for me to say as a music critic—no one understands songwriting? Even songwriters! A lot of people speak of the process as almost this sort of divine channelling, wherein a sound or an idea or a melody comes to them, and they’re just receiving and recording it. It’s easier to be, like, there’s a guy up there and he’s singing and he has a voice and I also have a voice, that makes sense. But this other thing, where does the signal come from?

I mean, that’s the big question, right? Why are we worried about what happens when we die? What are we trying to find out? What is this mystery that we all seem to agree is there?

And music, in particular—neurologists are always studying it, trying to understand why it works on us—there’s no clear evolutionary advantage or reason for people to be absolutely devastated or buoyed by music. But we are, and we always have been. Maybe there’s a little bit of God in it.

Having been atheist and an agnostic at different times in my life, growing up Lutheran and then studying world religion in college, I was cynical, almost angry that when we use the word “God,” we’re so often misusing it. But I’ve been saying the word again lately, because I’m sick and tired of saying “synchronicity and coincidence.” And I just don’t know what else to call it. I’ve had friends who are deeply, deeply religious, and they talk about what God means to them. I’ve been a little more open to it. I’m certainly not a theist. But I like the word “God” and I’m back to using it.

The performance piece of it and the writing-recording piece of it—I’m not a musician, but they almost feel diametrically opposed to me. It’s weird that anyone can do both.

Nobody ever says that, but I agree. I’ve always looked at ’em like they’re the masculine and the feminine. They are a yin and yang. Masculine is live.

It’s power.

Yeah, it’s out. The record is so timeless and concave, or whatever the metaphors are. I actually mixed the EP. These are my performances. These are the moments that I wanted to create. I’m not going to think about how to instantly re-create them [onstage]. I’ve been working on this song for five years. I’m not gonna do that to myself. I’m not gonna do that to these songs. I really worked hard on getting the guitar to sound like it’s in your head on “SPEYSIDE.” I’m gonna let that breathe for a second, before I get out there and go “Woooooo!”

To return to collaboration: it forces you to be incredibly honest and vulnerable. Things that are hard for me—things that are hard for a lot of people. You have to have a line of communication open that allows you to be really frank about what’s working. How has that been for you? Have there been moments where your vision has not aligned with someone else’s? Have you ever had to scream, “Get out of my studio!”?

Twice. You know who you are. . . . [Laughs.] I think there are just times when you have to communicate. You mentioned Midwestern stoicism. I just learned that saying how you feel is really important. I’m, like, forty-three years old. [Laughs.]

Can you teach me?

Oh, God, it’s really hard. You just have to do it. It sucks. But saying, “Oh, just try it again,” is a way of saying, “That wasn’t it.” And then sometimes you’re, like, “Well, it’s never going to be it,” and then you don’t really have to say anything. So I never had to practice being super honest. I would just be, like, “Well, I’m not going to use that,” or “I’m going to redo that later,” or “I’ll edit it.” “I’ll chop it up later,” is what they say. But, yeah, of course, some of my longtime collaborators, like Rob Moose, we just have a language that we’ve built over the years. It’s pretty easy for us to find what each other wants. And we’re both very good at giving space to the other. Like, “O.K., I’m not sure what you mean, but let’s explore that.” Rob’s one of my favorite collaborators, if not my favorite. Musically, what I’ve gotten to achieve with him is just kind of wild.

You and I are around the same age—twenty-nine.

[Laughs.] Yep . . .

And I wonder what this era of life—some people, not me, but some people might call it middle age—has felt like for you.

Kind of like graduating from a master’s program or something. Feeling a little old, a little aged out, a little like Chris Farley at the bottom of the hill in “Black Sheep” saying, “What in the hell was that all about?” Like I said, I think I’ve been reckoning a lot with times I haven’t been so great, or times I haven’t been able to be a good brother or family member. While I feel a little weary, I feel very young in another way, in the sense that I get a chance now not only to look back but to look forward. Kind of a refresh. Not a restart—these are forty-three-year-old bones. But I’m taking care of my body more. I’m taking care of my mental health more. And if I look back and see a lot of suffering in my past it’s because I wasn’t treating myself correctly. Certainly, I’ve had everything I’ve needed to be flourishing, to be a kind and loving person. But when I look back, I see a lot of confusion, anxiety, and despair. So I’ve gotten to this point now—and these songs have really helped me open that door, or whatever the metaphor is—to start a new journey and to be alive and present and grateful from now on, as much as I can be.

In one’s early forties, there’s often that feeling of, Oh, this isn’t quite what I thought was going to happen.

“Nothing’s really happened like I thought it would.” My best friend Trevor always refers to it as “the memory of the future.” When we were young, if our childhood was good, we project ourselves into a happy adulthood. You start to put pieces together, you start moving the furniture around. And then when you actually get there you realize you’ve been trying to steer toward that so hard that you kind of missed some shit, and it’s never gonna be like how it was. . . .

Sometimes we end up chasing these ideas from our childhoods, and they guide us for the rest of our lives, for better or worse.

I feel like we are barely driving. I look at it like you’re yanking on the wheel. You’re down below, by the gas and brakes. But that’s all we’ve got.

I can’t tell if that makes me feel helpless, or if it makes me feel empowered. Helpless in the sense of, “I’m not in control of this.” But it’s also freeing in the sense of, “I’m not in control of this.” Right?

Exactly. That is a freedom.

_The idea that life just follows some twisted path, like a river—

That’s been one of my favorite metaphors for life. The Daoist concept of the way of the water. Life is like a river, and if you don’t stay in the flow you’re gonna get stuck. You might get pulled under, you might be on shore or in a bend for too long. Or you can go down the river and drown, or flourish, or get to the Holy Land, or whatever. . . .

Who knows!

It’s multiple choice. Actually, it’s not multiple choice at all. Actually, not choice at all. Multiple possibilities.

“SABLE,” starts in a place of contrition, which is part of the process of becoming hopeful. But it ends in a moment of radical possibility.

Mm-hmm. It does. It’s that “almost” word again. It’s, like, we’re right almost there. Almost.

Maybe now the Almost feels less scary.

We’ve been through some things.

You made most of “i,i” at Sonic Ranch, in Texas, but “SABLE,” was recorded at April Base, your studio in Eau Claire. Do you work differently there than in other places?

Yeah. It’s been a big reflection point. It just so happened that April Base went under an intense renovation process right at the beginning of 2019, and that’s when we moved most of the stuff to Texas and set up there for almost a couple months. But then, when the record was done and we went on that tour, by that time, it was 2020. And then the pandemic happened and the studio was empty, so I had to move into this small house on the property and live there by myself. I kind of set up a makeshift studio. It was really a good experience, because I hadn’t set up my own gear in a long time.

The ritual of untangling the cables, plugging things in . . .

Oh, man, there was a point where I was, like, “I need to switch the screen so it’s over there.” It took me three days to untangle the cables. And I was, like, “This is good for me! This is really good for me.” But to answer your question about being out there: I think, for years—during the psychedelic mind-opening years, especially—everything was expanding quickly. Then, at a certain point, it started to feel a little stagnant. My social life, my creative and collaborative life . . . there was a circle and everything was inside of it. I hadn’t met a lot of new friends. I hadn’t really been in other studios. And so I think there’s been a little bit of action in the last couple years of, like, let me get out of here a little more.

And now you’re spending time in California. How does that feel?

Necessary.

All that sunshine.

I mean, holy hell. I am Wisconsin, through and through. But if I’m just there then what is April Base for? And what’s my love of Wisconsin for if I don’t have to come back to it? Also, it’s a little lonely out there. A lot of my family and my oldest friends have all moved away. And so I also haven’t had a lot of opportunity to meet new friends that weren’t somehow connected to the past—

Or to your work.

Or to my work. In L.A., it was just, “Hi, my name is Justin.” “Hi, my name is So-and-So.” “Do you want to be friends?” “This is great.” And I almost started crying when I realized—this is my first new friend, based on normal circumstances, in sixteen or seventeen years. That’s been a very positive thing. There’s a little anonymity for me, walking around. A lot of anonymity in Los Angeles, in particular. So it’s been very positive and challenging, in the best ways.

What you’re saying about making new friends in midlife—I get it, there’s a giddiness to it. It’s nice to meet new people now because we’re always changing, and here’s this newest, freshest iteration of you, and you get to present that to someone, instead of them inheriting a bunch of ideas.

You don’t have to open your book and be, “Who am I again? This is how I am? These are the things I believe in? Let me just make sure I get all that. . . .” You can just be. ♦

[dk-thrive]

not the major devastations but the strange little ache that feels like a precondition to being human...the slow accumulation of ordinary losses

Last fall, the National débuted a new piece of merchandise: a black zippered sweatshirt featuring the words “SAD DADS” in block letters. The band—which formed in 1999, in Brooklyn—was lampooning its reputation as a font of midlife ennui, the sort of rudderless melancholy that takes hold when a person realizes that the dusty hallmarks of American happiness (marriage, children, a job in an office) aren’t a guarantee against despair. For more than two decades, this has been the National’s grist: not the major devastations but the strange little ache that feels like a precondition to being human. No amount of Transcendental Meditation, Pilates, turmeric, rose quartz, direct sunlight, jogging, oat milk, sleep hygiene, or psychoanalysis can fully alleviate that ambient sadness. Part of it is surely existential—our lives are temporary and inscrutable; death is compulsory and forever—but another part feels more quotidian and incremental, the slow accumulation of ordinary losses. Maybe there’s a person you once loved but lost touch with. A friend who moved to a new town. An apple tree that stood outside your bedroom window, levelled to make way for broadband cable. An old dog. A former colleague. We are always losing, or leaving, or being left, in ways both minor and vast. “The grief it gets me, the weird goodbyes,” Matt Berninger, the band’s vocalist, sings on “Weird Goodbyes,” a recent song featuring Justin Vernon, of Bon Iver. Berninger steels himself to confront the next loss: “Memorize the bathwater, memorize the air / There’ll come a time I’ll wanna know I was here.”

— Amanda Petrusich, "The Sad Dads of the National" (The New Yorker · April 28, 2023)

[dianevbi]

Flipping through The New Yorker, I came across a timely piece about Sinéad O’Connor, days after her untimely death. The meditations on death run true. Amanda Petrusich, a music journalist, writes, “When something disappears before we want it to, we are left powerless, incomplete, yearning. There is simply no antidote to that kind of humiliation.” She illustrates with a verse from O’Connor’s…

[rustbeltjessie]

That night, I had two opposite—but equally intense—impulses. One of them was to get fucking wasted. To get as wasted as I would have in those “singing along to ‘Sally MacLennane’ in the pub” days; to get so plowed all the stuff that Shane’s death brought up for me would sink beneath a stream of whiskey. The other was to not drink, at all; to not only stay sober that night but to never touch a drop of booze again. Because of Shane’s life-long struggles with addiction, because of so many of my beloveds’ struggles with addiction, because of my own struggles with addiction—my own affinity for hurling [myself] toward oblivion in the back of some grim and sticky dive, as Amanda Petrusich put it in her wonderful tribute to Shane. —from "That night, Rain Street went on for miles."

The newest installment of my newsletter is about Shane MacGowan/The Pogues, punk/poetry, addiction, and romanticizing things that are 'bad,' amongst other things. I've been working on this one for a month, and I'm glad it's finally out in the world.

[jonnylovers-in-neverland]

Coldplay’s Self-Help Pop

Chris Martin, the band’s front man, discusses reading Rumi, making music like an apple tree grows apples, and the band’s new album, “Moon Music.”

An interview by Amanda Petrusich (September 30, 2024)

On a recent afternoon in Malibu, Chris Martin, the front man of Coldplay, was enjoying a brief pause between tour dates. “We have breaks, but only in the way that Serena Williams has a banana between sets,” he said, pulling his bare feet up under him. Martin, who is forty-seven, was wearing an emerald-green sweater featuring a picture of the earth, affixed with a tiny white button that said “LOVE.” Later on, when he took the sweater off, he revealed a blue T-shirt with the same button. I wondered, but did not ask, how many of them he owned. It felt indicative of Martin’s quintessence at this particular moment: LOVE, layered ad infinitum.

Martin was in the midst of converting an old property into a studio and the de-facto Coldplay HQ. The complex was beset by scrubby clay slopes dotted with sagebrush, California aster, evergreen oaks. Martin likes to send visitors home with unlabelled jars of fresh honey from an apiary nearby. We sat at a picnic table overlooking a meadow. In conversation, Martin is engaging, magnetic. When I apologized for putting my sunglasses on—the light had suddenly shifted—he grinned: “No, I love it. It sort of flips the script. We’ll talk about your album in a minute.” We’d been discussing the gurgling anxiety inherent to any romantic entanglement—the fear of starting to need someone. It’s an idea that arises in “feelslikeimfallinginlove,” the swooning first single from “Moon Music,” the band’s tenth record, which comes out in October. “I know that this could feel like that / But I just can’t stop / Let my defenses drop,” Martin sings in the opening verse.

“There are two methods that humans use to survive,” Martin said. “One is calcification and sequestering and separating: my stuff, my tribe, my this, my that. And then the other half is so open to everything. Those people fall in love a lot more, but they also have a lot more heartbreak.” I guessed that he was in the latter camp. “I’m so open it’s ridiculous,” he said. “But, if you’re not afraid of rejection, it’s the most liberating thing in the world.” Well, sure—but who’s not afraid of rejection? “Of course,” Martin said, laughing. “To tell someone you love them, or to release an album, or to write a book, or to make a cake, or to cook your wife a meal—it’s terrifying. But if I tell this person I love them and they don’t love me back, I still gave them the gift of knowing someone loves them.” Martin noticed a slightly stricken look on my face. “I’m giving this advice to myself, too,” he added. “Don’t think I’ve got it mastered.”

Coldplay, which formed in 1997, in London, has sold more than a hundred million records. (Besides Martin, the band includes the guitarist Jonny Buckland, the bassist Guy Berryman, and the drummer Will Champion.) The ongoing tour for “Music of the Spheres,” the band’s prior release, has sold ten million tickets and made close to a billion dollars, becoming the highest-grossing rock tour of the past forty years. It has broken attendance records in countries including Romania, Singapore, Brazil, Colombia, the Netherlands, Chile, Portugal, Sweden, France, Indonesia, Italy, and Greece. (When I brought this up, Martin was quick to note how colonialism has enabled his success: “We’re only able to play in so many countries because people who spoke English did such terrible things all around the world.”)

“Moon Music” was produced by Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker behind twenty-seven No. 1 singles. Martin described Max Martin’s technique as “a mix of mathematics and fluidity, of real structure and being totally open,” adding, with a kind of proud certainty, “He’s our producer now.” Martin also confirmed that Coldplay will make two more albums and then stop recording, though the band will continue to tour. “Yesterday, I went to see the L.A. Philharmonic. All those songs were released two hundred years ago,” he said. “It still felt extremely vibrant. So perhaps there’s a point where new material is not essential to make an amazing show.”

Martin, like many successful songwriters, explains the work as a kind of divine channelling: a song appears and he receives it. “If you’re lucky enough to have the space to let the music talk to you, and through you, then you can relax a bit,” he told me. “I’m just sort of doing what I’m told, the way an apple tree grows apples.” He said that establishing the Coldplay catalogue as finite has been liberating for the band: “By knowing there’s an end point, nobody is phoning it in. We only have two more chances. And most of the songs already exist, in a skeletal form.” I asked if that last day in the studio might be sad for him—a final take, the feeling of knowing that something is over. I find ending things so excruciating, I told him, I’d often rather just go down with the ship. He gave me a sympathetic look. “I think it will feel amazing,” he said.

At some point, Coldplay became—how else do I say it?—motivational. In recent years, it has felt less like a band than like an engine of unrelenting positivity, a high-grade confetti cannon straight to the face. The shift started around 2014, with the release of “Ghost Stories,” which contained little rancor or moodiness, fewer nods to Echo and the Bunnymen, less audible guitar. Coldplay, once skewered by critics for being too plaintive and self-pitying, was now broadcasting the opposite message: everything is magic. It reminded me, in some circuitous way, of “Attitude,” the punk band Bad Brains’ one-minute opus from 1982, in which the vocalist H.R. barks, “Hey, we got that P.M.A.!”—a reference to “positive mental attitude,” a phrase coined in 1937 by the author and probable con man Napoleon Hill. He was peddling a notion that we today refer to as manifestation: “Anything the human mind can believe, the human mind can achieve.” But Bad Brains still had fury, bite, edge. For whatever reason, Coldplay had willfully neutralized itself.

In Malibu, when I needled Martin about that change—what happened, exactly, to the yearning and discord of “Parachutes” or “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” the band’s first two releases?—he attributed it both to a burgeoning interest in Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic, and to his experience working with the visionary electronic musician Brian Eno, who produced “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends,” Coldplay’s fourth album. Martin said that Eno’s purity and sense of wonder had helped him “completely abandon the concept of trying to be cool. He came in with the enthusiasm of a nine-year-old for everything.” Mostly, though, Martin sees the change as incremental, organic. “It’s not like it was black-and-white, and then became color,” he said. “The first song on the first album is called ‘Don’t Panic.’ There’s also a song called ‘Everything’s Not Lost,’ which is exactly the same message that we’re singing now. Just sung by a slightly less experienced, more insecure, younger person.”

Though he likely wouldn’t frame it this way, Martin appears motivated by a kind of vocational mandate. He occupies a rarefied position, insofar as it’s actually possible for him to make the world a little less fractured, for a couple of hours, seventy-five thousand people at a time. This requires obliterating his ego, and accepting that a lot of people will find what he’s doing—bouncing around a stage covered with rainbows, singing lines such as “In the end it’s just love,” as he does on “One World,” which closes “Moon Music”—unbearably corny. In a way, the messaging has to be flat to translate so widely. On “Clocks,” a lush and tumbling track from “A Rush of Blood to the Head,” Martin sings about grappling with his own fallibility and bafflement, of trying his best to be of service in the world: “Am I part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?” His voice swoons, flutters, dissipates. “You are,” he answers. It’s a strange lyric, but I’ve always appreciated its strangeness: cure, disease, good, bad, hurtful, benevolent. You are.

These days, Martin describes the band’s message as “No one is more or less special than anyone else.” He went on, “The reason I’m able to say that is because we’re one of the few groups of people who get to actually see it. We travel everywhere. What Ryszard Kapuściński would call ‘the Other’ is not real.” I asked him what it felt like to stand onstage in, say, Kuala Lumpur, or Helsinki, or Tokyo, and hear the crowd bellowing his lyrics back to him, to one another, to themselves, to the air. “It feels like the answer,” he said. “It feels like: This is where humans actually work. It has nothing to do with us as a band. There are points where, hopefully, nothing exists except ‘We’re all just singing this together.’ ”

Ultimately, Martin hopes that by providing solace, and a place to unify, Coldplay can actualize some change in the world. I thought this sounded idealistic, even quixotic, until I considered all the ways in which I had been made better by songs. “If you’re able to live as yourself and understand who you are, whatever that might mean in terms of your gender or sexuality or what you like to eat or where you like to live or whether you like table tennis or riding donkeys . . . if you’re allowed to be yourself, would the world be as aggressive as it is?” Martin asked. “My feeling is no, I don’t think it would. I think much of the violence and conflict comes from repression, suppression, unreleased damage.”

Eventually, the air started to cool. Martin brought me a sweatshirt. Our conversation wound toward more existential matters: people we’d lost, what it meant, what it didn’t mean. “Death is in our songs a lot,” Martin said. “Maybe as a way of encouraging living. And also faith—the idea that, well, it’s O.K. It’s all O.K., isn’t it? I’m sure that’s crossed your mind.” The sun was beginning to ease into the Pacific. We sat for a moment in the hazy yellow pre-dusk. The air was parched, salty, soft. “Everything is perfect, of course,” Martin said. “Everything’s as it’s supposed to be.”

[serpentinesheldonserpentine]

Bookstore gems.

Amanda Petrusich explores the deep river that is American Music and finds its branches and tributaries.

I started reading this last night and will finish it tonight.

[4trackcassette]

John Cale’s Inventive Retrospection by Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker

It is not hard to sense that same spirit in Cale. In the early nineties, Cale closed most of his sets with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which Cale first recorded in 1991, for a tribute album titled “I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen,” and later included on “Fragments of a Rainy Season.” “Hallelujah,” which was released by Cohen in 1984, has been covered so relentlessly that it now feels like a shortcut for conjuring feelings of despondency. In 1991, though, the song was still an obscure track from “Various Positions,” a record that nobody was paying much attention to. Cohen’s take is cool and moody, sung in a staid, stately baritone. Cale’s version is sparse and undulating, and he sounds freshly gutted after every verse. It’s this iteration—which Jeff Buckley covered in 1994 and Rufus Wainwright sings on the soundtrack for the animated film “Shrek”—that most people recognize.

Cale also monkeyed with the lyrics. After he heard Cohen singing different words to the song during a show at the Beacon Theatre, he asked about alternative verses. Cohen reportedly faxed him fifteen pages of unused lines; from these, Cale pulled together new lyrics, which change the entire narrative trajectory of the song, making it bloodier, less celestial. It contains a heartbreakingly succinct account of how it feels to watch someone fall out of love with you:

There was a time you let me know What’s really going on below But now you never show it to me, do you? I remember when I moved in you And the holy dove was moving too And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.

The fifth verse opens, “Maybe there’s a God above / but all I ever learned from love / was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.” On this line, Cale resists the temptation to sing “you” as the more colloquial “ya,” which Cohen often did, and cheekily—to make it rhyme in a satisfying way with “hallelujah.” He seems to know that the lyric contains too tough a lesson to be made cute: how to be bested by someone you trusted but still land a blow on your way down. How to survive.

A week before Cohen died, in November, Cale released a video for his version of “Hallelujah.” It features Cale—sturdy and muscular, dressed in black, with heedless white hair and a goatee that makes him appear slightly devious—seated at a grand piano overrun with crickets and mealworms. A long string of pearls is wrapped around his left wrist. In one sequence, Cale is lying flat on the floor, and the worms are inching around his face. The evocation, of course, is of decomposition.

[dustedmagazine]

Bill Callahan — Resuscitate! (Drag City)

Photo by Patrick Masterson

One could argue a bit of malleability, some openness to interpretation, is a hallmark of any decent song, but Bill Callahan’s songs are more often than not built with loose borders, pockets to be filled with riffing and vamping, space to stretch the legs. While he undeniably releases records of songs — YTI⅃AƎЯ, the album in support of which he was touring for Resuscitate!, was his eighth under his own name and something like his 19th if you count the Smog works — there’s a degree to which they bleed around the edges, unfurling in ways that make you forget where you started and with only a vague awareness that it will eventually end.

Such unfurlings may be less comforting or familiar for the indie-rock audiences from whence Callahan came, but they’re practically de rigueur among jazz and jam band audiences — which, curiously, is whom Resuscitate! seems to propitiate over the course of its 10-track, hour-and-a-quarter runtime. Where Callahan’s records hint at or explore with restraint such reaches, in person, they’re allowed to bloom in full. Songs naturally mutate once they've been laid to tape, Callahan says in the liner notes, but these songs were evolving with a Bruce Banner-esque ferocity and needed to be documented.

It’s hard to imagine a better venue for such documentation than Chicago’s Thalia Hall, a stately former opera house dating from 1892 in the Pilsen neighborhood with excellent acoustics regardless of where you stand or what you’re watching. It’s also hard to imagine a better group of backing players, with veteran Chicago concern Natural Information Society’s Joshua Abrams and Lisa Alvarado and tenor sax man about town Dustin Laurenzi, plus stalwart Austinite guitarist Matt Kinsey, Dirty Three drummer Jim White and Congolese singer-songwriter Pascal Kerong’A (who opened for him on the night in question) all playing their part during the course of the March 2023 midtour set. The results are illuminating.

A word about the tracklist. In an interview for The New Yorker a couple of years ago, Callahan told Amanda Petrusich he has a particular talent for sequencing (“It’s the only thing to do with making music that I think I’m good at,” he laughed), so he presumably gave great consideration to what ultimately got released — and what didn’t. That’s also illuminating: Left out of Resuscitate!’s final tracklist is “Cowboy” (Gold Record), “Bowevil” and “Drainface” (YTI⅃AƎЯ), “Too Many Birds” (Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle) and “In the Pines” (A River Ain’t Too Much to Love). Callahan’s set may have erred on the heavy side of recent material (as much of this tour did), but he was even-handed in what he cut and ruthless in how he ordered what was left; only opener “First Bird” is left untouched in its original place.

He would’ve been fine leaving the sequence as he played it, frankly, but Resuscitate! sharpens Callahan’s considerate cowboy demeanor even whilst songs expand in length and narrative moments stretch out in relatively small spaces, extending into stories that meander, convoluted and beautiful as any bedtime story.

You could see why this would appeal to certain festival folk, and the mood on the ground that night was very much akin to one you’d find at an appreciative Oslo show or a late-hour Bonnaroo set despite a healthy heaping of reverent Callahan faithful. The whoops and hollers are there in the margins of or breaths between as songs unfold like loose unbuttonings, ebullient exclamation marks left in the wake of, say, Laurenzi tearing it up during the nearly 13-minute “Coyotes” or occasionally breaking through the mix as “Naked Souls” hits its groove. Such flavor is endemic to live albums, but it’s interesting how much Callahan has tried to collar it despite the music’s open-world expansiveness. Not that he was ever much one for it, but there’s also minimal banter; the focus remains squarely on the songs’ real-time evolution.

Smog standby “Keep Some Steady Friends Around” might be the most indicative track for where Bill Callahan was at during this snapshot in time. It’s as domestic as its newer setlist compatriots — and heavier in a way, as though Callahan has deeply observed over the decades what it means to have steady friends around, and what it means to build a gate. What Resuscitate! reflects is where that gate lies: Forever the folk troubadour but now with a more stable home life to lean on, Callahan can afford himself the luxury of opening up that gate and letting more of himself out — though what he lets in remains the provenance of his closest confidants and spiritual tribe. Even at his most open, the gate remains a gate.

Patrick Masterson and Margaret Welsh

[algebraicvarietyshow]

Incorporating Pitchfork into a men’s magazine also cements perceptions that music is a male leisure pursuit, and undermines the fact that it was women and non-binary writers – Lindsay Zoladz, Jenn Pelly, Carrie Battan, Amanda Petrusich, Sasha Geffen, Jill Mapes, Doreen St Félix, Hazel Cills; the fearless editing of Jessica Hopper and then the most recent editor-in-chief Puja Patel, to name but a handful – who transformed the website in the 2010s. It also suggests that music is just another facet of a consumer lifestyle, not a distinct art form that connects niche communities worthy of close reading, documentation and, when warranted, investigation. It was Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan who reported that Win Butler of Arcade Fire – a band entwined with the site’s rise to relevance – had been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women (extramarital relationships that Butler says were consensual); Pitchfork that published writer Amy Zimmerman’s report into 10 women accusing Sun Kil Moon songwriter Mark Kozelek of sexual misconduct (Kozelek denies the allegations). I wonder whether GQ will invest resources into reports like this, to sit alongside e-commerce pieces on how “The Best Cordless Stick Vacuum Will Turn You Into a Clean Freak”, to take one current example from their culture news feed.

[whileiamdying]

The Untouchable Tina Turner

Some people perform music; some people become music.

By Amanda Petrusich May 25, 2023

On Wednesday, one of the great American voices—gritty, vehement, tender, and red-hot, containing, somehow, both the entire history and future of rock and roll—went silent. Tina Turner, who was born Anna Mae Bullock, in 1939, in Brownsville, Tennessee, died at her home in Switzerland, at age eighty-three. She was known for her superhuman resilience, and, in a way, I came to believe that she was actually invincible. In 1988, when she was forty-eight years old, she performed to some hundred and eighty thousand fans in Rio de Janeiro, ousting Frank Sinatra from the record books by drawing what was, at that point, the largest-ever ticketed crowd for a solo performer. The show was filmed, thank heavens. The energy is uncanny. Bionic. It’s like watching an Olympic final in Being Badass. Early in the set, wearing a fringed minidress, heeled ankle boots, and a pearl necklace, Turner performs “Better Be Good to Me,” a single from 1984. It’s a song about being in love with someone you don’t entirely trust. “Should I be fractured by your lack of devotion?” she wonders in the first verse. The next bit contains all of her magic. She’s asking a question, but her tone isn’t earnest, it’s incredulous. How dare this person expect her to compromise? “Should I? Should I?” she roars. You will want to holler “NO!” at your screen—but, of course, the question was always rhetorical.

Turner was brought up on a cotton farm and educated in a segregated, one-room schoolhouse. She grew up singing in the choir of the Spring Hill Baptist Church in Nutbush, about sixty miles northeast of Memphis. Her great-great-grandfather, Logan Currie, Sr., had been enslaved in the same region. “I hated the cotton field,” she told Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in a 2007 interview for PBS. “There were those hairy worms crawling, the spiders.” Turner later moved to St. Louis, where she met Ike Turner at the Manhattan Club, a Black bar and venue. She eventually persuaded Ike to let her sing with his band, the Kings of Rhythm. They became romantically involved, and, in 1960, formed the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, becoming hugely popular on the Chitlin’ Circuit, a series of Black-owned night clubs throughout the southeast. In 1971, they had a crossover hit with their cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” and performed the song on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” For the broadcast, Turner wears a gold flapper dress. She bounces around the stage vigorously, so gleeful and open and strong that it feels as though, surely, she must have an extra set of lungs stashed somewhere. There’s a looseness to her performance that’s far funkier and more human than the hyper-choreographed, steel-eyed stylings of her modern counterparts. I don’t know how to describe it. She is simply very, very alive.

It’s still hard to write about the sixteen years she spent in that abusive, ugly relationship with Ike. She escaped the marriage in 1976. She was thirty-seven years old, and in possession of just thirty-six cents and a Mobil gasoline card. “I didn’t fear him killing me when I left, because I was already dead,” she told People, in 1981. It was the first time that she had spoken publicly about the abuse, and she described it as “torture.” Besides the usual subjugations (beating and berating her), Ike had changed her name and assumed control of her career and finances. It’s easy to think of this experience as the defining trauma of Turner’s life and art—to presume that it shaped and informed her music in a deep and irrefutable way—but it feels stupid, even unfair, to give Ike, who died of a cocaine overdose in 2007, any more air in her story. There have been two memoirs, a Broadway musical, a feature film, interviews. Turner was asked to confront and remember her abuse for decades after it ended. It feels proper to free her of it now. “I don’t like to pull out old clothes,” Turner said in “Tina,” an HBO documentary from 2021. “It’s like old memories, you just want to leave that in the past.”

Let us look, then, to the nineteen-eighties, a decade in which Turner, liberated from her marriage, dominated the charts and the national imagination: the voice, the power, the presence, the legs, the wardrobe, the hair. My God, the dancing! How free does a person have to be to move that way? Freer than I have ever felt or been, certainly. Some people perform music; some people become music. If you’re having a miserable day, one foolproof cure is typing “Tina Turner live 1985” into the YouTube search bar, and bearing witness to something virtuosic, if not divinely ordained. At the time, Turner was on tour in support of the multiplatinum “Private Dancer,” her fifth full-length album, and the record that resuscitated and then ignited her solo career. There’s some extraordinary footage of David Bowie joining her onstage at a show in Birmingham, England, for a duet of “Tonight,” a song first released on Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life,” in 1977. Bowie, who co-wrote the track—it features a repeating Aretha Franklin sample—appears on the original; he went on to record it for an album of his own, in 1984. Turner guested on Bowie’s version (they skipped Pop’s spoken-word intro, which describes a heroin overdose). Watching them do it live is electrifying. Bowie is grinning so much and so wildly that I wonder how he even manages to keep on singing. They slow dance for a bit in the middle, while Tim Cappello plays a shirtless saxophone solo. I would call this section “steamy,” but it feels like too chaste of a word. “This is a privilege,” Bowie says, when it’s all over. Boy, does he mean it.

Turner’s later years were appropriately lavish. After she retired, she lived in Küsnacht, Switzerland, in an estate known as the Château Algonquin, with clear views of Lake Zurich, and, according to a 2019 profile in the Times, “a life-size two-legged horse sculpture suspended from a domed ceiling, a framed rendering of Turner as an Egyptian queen, a room stuffed with gilded Louis XIV style sofas.” A plaque on the gate announces that, of course, no deliveries should be attempted before noon. Who would dare? Turner stopped performing in 2009, freeing herself of a substantial burden: “I was just tired of singing and making everybody happy,” she said. “That’s all I’d ever done in my life.” How glorious that must have felt—having only to worry about her own joy.

I was having lunch in Chinatown with friends when the news was announced. I had ordered a glass of white wine—indulgent for a weekday afternoon, I suppose, but I was feeling a little indulgent. I experienced a quick pang in my gut when one of my companions announced that Turner had died—the sharp, needling ache that comes when someone who you didn’t know personally, but who you understood to have contributed, in a profound and robust way, to the general goodness of the world, had left it. I swallowed the last of my drink. It felt right to be a little unsteady in that moment. “Tina would have had the wine,” the group chat later confirmed. Did Turner even drink? Who cares? The point was that she found a way to tap into some deep wellspring of ease and abandon and self-love, and drew from it when she needed to. And now she has left that for us, in her music, in her voice, in the singular way she occupied a stage. In this sense, she is untouchable, forever. ♦

[funskelet0n]

vampire weekend art by dennis ericksson for the new yorker article by amanda petrusich

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Billy Talbot of Crazy Horse :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

I'm slowly making my way through the members of Crazy Horse. First, there was Poncho. Then there was Nils. And now, you can read my Q&A with bassist Billy Talbot over on Aquarium Drunkard. Will I ever make it all the way to the whitest of whales, Neil Young himself? Who knows?! (In the meantime, Amanda Petrusich did a great job with this interview for the New Yorker.)

Anyway! Billy is not quite the raconteur that Poncho or Nils is, but he is a supremely soulful/thoughtful dude, just like you'd expect. He's the guy! That bass line in "Cowgirl in the Sand," the groove of "Tonight's the Night," those shaggy, awesome vocals throughout the years.

"Billy's a mystery, isn't he?" Neil mused in Shakey. "Billy's great. Billy's the reason why Crazy Horse is great, and Billy's also the reason why Crazy Horse has never had a hit record. 'Cause Billy's great, but not 'I can dance to it' great, know what I mean?"

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