The Yankees have been infuriating to root for this year, so I wasn’t following their ups and downs all that closely. In fact, I wasn’t following baseball all that closely, because the three AL teams I root for (in order: Yanks, Twins, Royals, due to birthright and geography) weren’t doing so hot, and the one NL team I root for (that would be the Cardinals) were so far ahead so early on that I didn’t even need to worry about them. The Yankees were frustrating, the Twins possibly even more so, and whereas last year’s record-settingly awful Royals season was somehow watchable, this year’s potentially even worse one has been beyond laughable; as far as I’m concerned, they’re not even a real baseball team.
But it’s September now, and true to form, the Yankees have pulled their thumbs out and started to play like they’d actually like to win. So I’m glued to the division race, of course. And Boston are thrashing the Orioles today (9-2, top of the sixth, right this minute according to ESPN’s online scoreboard), so I was miserable when Toronto took the lead, delighted when the Yanks took it back, terrified when things got tight again in the top of the eighth, and massively relieved when Mariano got out of trouble in that same inning. Right now it’s bottom of the eighth, two on, nobody out, edge of seat. Sheffield batting, 2-0. I hardly dare to hope for a win, so I won’t even say it’s looking good, although it is, especially with Mariano (can I just say “God bless Mariano Rivera”? Thank you) coming back in the…OOH, three-run homer, Gary Sheffield. So much for whether he should have come back this soon or not.
I love this time of year.
On the various music lists that I’m on/have been on in the past, people often include an “n.p.” at the bottom of their posts. It stands for “now playing,” and it’s followed by whatever they’re listening to at that moment. (There’s also “npimh,” which I like better: it means “now playing in my head,” and it’s used when a post’s content somehow calls to mind a song or song title.) I like looking at people’s n.p.’s; I’ve actually found out about new bands I’ve come to like just by asking about a record in someone’s n.p. line. N.p. lines are disappearing rapidly from one of the lists because a lot of the people there are using Last.fm/Audioscrobbler, so they just post lists of their top 10 scrobbles of the week, which is fine, except I liked it better when people posted actual content and then stuck an n.p. line at the bottom, rather than just posting a list of ten band names. But such is the march of technology, I suppose.
And I notice that various IM services have picked up on the n.p. idea now—I was a little alarmed the other day when I signed into MSN’s Messenger (which we use at work) to send a quick note to a co-worker who was talking to the client, and a little line appeared at the top of the message window showing the title of the song I was listening to. Oooh, creepy.
But I’ve decided that here on the blog, henceforth “n.p.” will stand for “now pimping.” I guess the more family-friendly version would be “now plugging,” but thanks to Postcard, I’ve gotten in the habit of calling the act of proselytizing for a band “pimping,” so I’ll stick with that.
Or maybe it should stand for “now proselytizing,” for that matter. I have a draft of a blog entry that I started months ago somewhere that’s actually called Proselytizing, and it’s about how like a lot of avid music listeners, I secretly think that my taste is the best and everyone should share it, but while there are certain bands that I actively proselytize for because I think that just about everyone I know—not to mention everyone on the planet—should know and love, there are some that I’m not as active in pimping because I know they’re not for everyone. In most cases, I fully understand why people don’t “get” those bands. They’re wrong, of course, but I forgive them. Dolorean were the example I was thinking of when I started the post, because although I think Al James can pretty much do no wrong, I understand that the band’s dreamy, slow, elegiac sound won’t appeal to everyone. So although I try to talk about them a lot, I don’t push too hard, because I know some people just plain old won’t like them. And I can live with that.
On the other hand, there are bands like the Delgados and the Libertines who deserve universal love. I won’t say this on an e-mail list, of course, where I am doing my best to remain polite and diplomatic because I got so sick of feuding with people (people who, for the purposes of my universe, were not actually people but merely faceless collections of zeroes and ones on the other side of a connection node, which makes it even sillier to get het up about disagreements with them), but in some small, impolite part of my brain, I believe fundamentally that if you are a fan of whatever you want to call the current post-indie-heyday rock genre and you don’t like the Delgados or the Libertines, you’re just wrong, and your head is implanted in some bodily orifice from which you really need to extract it. Okay, that’s only a small part of my otherwise well-behaved little brain that says that, but it does, in fact, say it.
And in that spirit, I want to start regular pimping of music, books, TV shows, and other forms of entertainment (I’d include movies, but considering how far behind the curve I am these days with movies—hell, I just saw “Vera Drake,” a highly acclaimed movie by my favorite filmmaker, last night—I think any movie recommendations I might make would be irrelevant, unless I’m pimping old classics, I guess) that I think everyone should be paying attention to. I’m going to try to pimp roughly five items per week; might end up with more than that, but given my, er, spotty history of keeping the blog updated, five seems like a good number to aim for at the start.
Except that today’s list is only going to include one item, I think, because (gee, how surprising) this one requires a little more than just a couple of lines of “why I think this band/record/book/blog/TV show is good.” Here goes:
1. Steve Dawson, “Sweet Is the Anchor.” Steve is the co-lead singer, along with his wife, Diane Christiansen, of the recently dormant but not dead Chicago band Dolly Varden, and this is a side project of his. It’s being billed as a solo album, though he recorded it and has been playing it live with a band, featuring vibes, pedal steel, and some cool percussion (not to mention Diane doing backing vocals). It’s quite different from the slightly alt-country-tinged indie rock (or whatever we’re calling it) of Dolly Varden; Steve’s a big soul fan, and there are hints of soul and gospel all through the record, but it’s not exactly a soul record. It’s hard to describe, so just listen to some MP3s here, and if “Love Is a Blessing” is a little too slow and long for you, don’t be put off; it’s a great song, but it is a little more lugubrious than others on the record. The instrumentation is part of what makes the record cool, but Steve’s songwriting and his gorgeous voice (and Diane’s too) are what really make it stand out. It was the only thing in my CD player for a good long while recently. Go see Steve and band live too, if you get a chance, because the record really comes to life when they play it live—though unless you live in Chicago, you probably won’t get a chance to see them.
In the interests of full disclosure, and because I’ve mentioned Dolly Varden at least once on the blog but haven’t really talked about them at length, I’ll take a little detour here to pimp them, even though they won’t have a new record out until next year at the soonest. I had never even heard of them until I was asked to interview them, back when I was living in Chicago and still writing for the MoMzine. Corrie from Miles of Music sent me their then-new record “The Dumbest Magnets,” and my friend Roy was also pimping it at the time, so I expected to like it, and I did, pretty okay. And then I listened to it some more, and then a few times more, and with each listen I found myself falling in love with it a little more. It’s that kind of record: you don’t just want to listen to it, you want to date it—gaze deeply into its eyes and take it with you everywhere you go.
I interviewed Steve in person and Diane by phone, and really took to them as people, too; they’re extremely gifted (Diane is an artist as well as a musician, and one of these days, I’m going to buy a painting of hers), but also totally down to earth and normal— that is, normal in my definition, which is “having a lot of common ground with me.” The article was one of the best I did for the MoMzine (though I can’t prove that, unfortunately, since the old archives aren’t online anymore). I’d always chat with Steve when I ran into him at shows during my remaining months in Chicago, and we stayed in loose touch after I left. They put out another record, “Forgiven Now,” which objectively speaking is pretty much every bit as good as “The Dumbest Magnets,” except that I’m not capable of objectivity about the latter.
Steve and Diane also put out a pretty stellar duets record (no longer available, alas, but you can go buy the entire Dolly Varden catalog at their site), and then I pimped Steve and Diane for a duet show at Twangfest 7, where they were rapturously received by at least five of us. (Twangfest Wednesday night shows are usually as much about everyone seeing each other again for the first time in a while and catching up and chatting as they are about the music, which is fine, but that night I wanted to physically assault anyone who talked during Steve and Diane’s set.) Bill and I were planning our wedding at that time, and we agreed that Steve and Diane would make a wonderful wedding band for us, so I took a deep breath after the show and asked Steve, who said they’d be honored and to send him the details.
So Steve and Diane sang at our wedding, with their then-preteen daughter in tow. She hung out with Bill’s niece, who’s just a year younger, and they hit it off, and our families, including my dad, absolutely loved the performance—my oldest brother ended up buying one of their CDs. It couldn’t have been better. The did both appropriate covers (”Together Again,” “If I Needed You,” that kind of thing) as well as their own material, including the title song from “The Dumbest Magnets.” It’s a song that Steve wrote about his wedding to Diane, and objectively, it was probably a little weird for me to request that they sing it at my wedding—it’s their wedding song, not ours, after all. But it kills me, it’s such a perfect (and I mean that word in the most literal sense) song, lyrically and musically, and I couldn’t not have them sing it. Bill and I were married on a glorious October day in one of the pavilions in Tower Grove Park in St. Louis, and the reception was at the Eliot Room at the Schlafly Brewery in St. Louis. Schlafly is where Bill’s favorite beer is made, and where Twangfest’s Wednesday night shows are held, so it was sort of a natural (if amusingly so) place to have our reception. But it’s also a beautifully restored old building with lots and lots of big, wide windows, and there’s a line in “The Dumbest Magnets” that goes “Room all lit from the outside/Indian summer,” and just at the moment that Steve and Diane sang that line, the late afternoon sun was still streaming in, and…well, okay, enough mushiness, but it was a moment of pure, soaring joy, and maybe that captures a little of how special that song, that record, and that band are to me. So I’d probably pimp Steve’s new record even if I didn’t think it was superb…but fortunately, it is. And that’s what I’m pimping today.
Next: a simple five-item pimp list, just to prove that I can too write a post that’s less than novel length.