A Warm, Fuzzy Feeling

A Holiday hitlist of more than mere music

ALBUM

I listen to a lot of ambient music; it’s the only genre by which I can even attempt to write. I don’t, however, always take special stock of the artist or the album in question. Former Mint Julep Hollie Kenliff’s fourth solo album For Forever, when recommended by one of my fellow Substackers earlier this month, proved itself an exception. It did so by being all the less overstated that even its kindred ambient spirit rivals. Perfect winter music to walk and work by, despite an album cover that evokes a Swiss summer, it’s full of wistful synths that build into dense layers, accompanied by instrumental (or choral but non-verbal) melodies that only gradually reveal themselves. Titles such as “Over Ocean Waves,” “Sea Sketch” and “Far Inland” suggest an environmental scope, but I prefer to go by the album’s own name – and that of 2023’s We All Have Places That We Miss – and hear this as music to evoke nostalgia, if possibly for ages to come. Either way, while largely electronic in musical construct, For Forever is thoroughly humanist in impact and providing ideal musical companionship even as I edit up this warm fuzzy feeling hitlist.

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BOOK

My thanks to Substack reader Dick Langford for recommending novelist Michael Faber’s very non-fiction book LISTEN: On Music, Sound And Us. Dick did so based on his belief that it has “the best description of tinnitus I've ever read.” And yes it is a good one, coming at the start of the very first chapter, but wisely confining itself to just a page and a half of self-pity tinged with decent attempts at wrangling wry humor out of the affliction, which Faber ultimately summarizes as the sound of “the brakes of a train that’s forever cutting its speed and never coming to a stop.”

Fortunately, my tinnitus is not that bad, so my sympathies go to Langford and Faber alike. Perhaps the greater sympathy afforded Faber, however, should be for the fact that, while he may have tinnitus, he lacks the aforementioned nostalgia gene. As such, music of the past carries no reference point for him, other than being, simply, music of the past: not for him its association with romance/promotion/death/citizenship. His demonstration of how a nostalgia for the associated memory drives the rest of us far more than does memory of the nostalgic song is just one of his topics that makes for fascinating reading.

Faber is a deft writer; he wouldn’t be an “international bestselling author” if not. And he’s funny about our musical tastes and subjective opinions that we like to present as fact. He’s also objective about those subjective opinions – like how the History of Great Music has, per His-story in general, been written by White Men at the expense of Non-White Men Music. (As recently as 2003, Rolling Stone only included one hip-hop album in its Top 50 albums of all time, and according to Faber, “there were almost no albums by women in the Top 500.” But hey, that’s Jann Wenner for you.)

Faber is also a chatty writer, and it’s fun to travel with him, as it can be with Bill Bryson. Unlike Bryson, however, he’s also something of a lazy writer, relying on YouTube comments and interviews with friends to make his point(s) rather than writing the words himself. This is a shame because when he does take the effort – reminding us in the introduction that CDs “may take as long as a million years to decompose,” or that we don’t so much listen to music these days as “consume” it – it usually resonates.

My copy of Listen is a loan from the local library, and I suspect I will either continue renewing it or purchase it outright for the Philosophy class I am starting in January, “Thinking About Music,” which, now I think about it further, would seem, both subjectively and objectively, to be a more apt title for a book that has us doing just that.

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SUBSTACK

A warm welcome to my old friend (and certainly neither of us are getting any younger), Kris “Over the Top” Needs, whose roll call of employment in this sordid industry of ours reads even longer than mine – albeit he’s lived almost a decade longer – and whose past writings, and there are LOTS of them, he is suddenly unleashing upon his Substack public at a pace that would make early Clash gigs seem pedestrian, had I been lucky enough to witness them.

Naturally, Needs’ 1976 first feature on the Clash – for the New York Rocker, not the British Zigzag that he would go on to edit in its punkiest days – is among them. So is his (debut Substack) article on London Calling producer Guy Stevens, his account of first meeting George Clinton (of whom he would write a biography a quarter-century later), his 1992 “Audience with Andrew Weatherall” and his more recent post on Weatherall’s final album (a collaboration with Kris’s current partner in rhyme, Nina Walsh), an interview with Keith Richards, and a feature on Laura Nyro.

So fast and furious were these initial posts coming at us that I literally dropped him a line to advocate he slow down, but I also appreciate that so many of his followers have happily signed on to my account as well. So to those freshly on board via the man whose Needs Must (as he called one of his multiple memoirs), know that I have yet to mine my own archives to quite this extent, while Kris has yet to post fresh commentary of the kind I know he can. And for my own long-term readers if you want the past with the present, and if you too thoroughly subscribe to the notion there are only two genres of music – Good, and Not – then sign up for Kris’s Substack. Among yet more posts I have yet to mention, there’s this tale of beaten beaten by Blondie…

BLONDIE '78: THE ART OF CLASS

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PODCAST

Paul Bearman, a Who fan now in his 40s, started this podcast once he discovered that, surprisingly perhaps, he had the field all to himself. For while there were plenty individual podcast episodes concerning The Who, there was, until now, no such thing as a Who podcast. Bearman, who suffers from the same Chronic Leukemia that my good friend Mike Peters is battling in especially vehement form right now, has corrected that rip in the time-space continuum with all due professionalism, introducing each episode of his Talking About The Who with a personal narrative and, knowing that actual members of The Who are in short number (i.e., the Two) and unlikely to come on board quite yet, gone after the characters around and about them for his initial interviews.

I was especially taken with Talking About The Who’s debut episode, an interview with percussionist Judy Linscott, less so for whatever snippets she offered regarding her stage work with the Who and Roger Daltrey than for her back story, which involves an American immigrant’s immersion into squatter life in early 1970s London and a chance visit to the Africa Centre that set her off on her life course.

Journalist/confidant (and my own former editor and ongoing good friend) Chris Charlesworth and early fan/postman poet/Quadrophenia inspiration Irish Jack have been subsequent guest, and if there’s anything I can promise about Paul’s interview with my good self, which I believe will drop in January, it’s that my audio will be more readily discernible. I admit up front, however, I had far less opportunity to see the group at their peak than these two, and absolutely no stories of late-night drinking sessions involving Keith Moon, Two Nuns and a Goat.

Then again, neither does Bearman, and though I suspect that his wish list for a 2025 Who tour presentation is a parlor game best left in the parlor for all the difference it might make, I have to confess that I too, would prefer any Farewell Tour to offer acoustic interpretations of rarities rather than one more blast of the classics. Where I concur even further is that us Who fanatics are a special breed, a unique breed, and Bearman’s account of how, as a kid in the 1990s, he became transfixed by the band’s catalogue, desperate to receive new/old albums as birthday/Xmas presents, seems all too familiar with my own introduction two decades earlier. The baton, I expect, will still be passed along, long after the Two retire.

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CHRISTMAS SONG

Carolyn Marosy’s “Maybe Next Christmas” dropped a few weeks back, and amidst the usual end-of-year rush, I nearly missed it, despite being a casual acquaintance and a big fan of her 2022 EP, Loners, Misfits & Rebels (especially the title track). (Carolyn was also featured in the Clash fans’ film On Resistance Street that I saw and wrote about this spring). Fortunately, Wallace Dobbins included “Maybe Next Christmas” on his Best-of-2024 end-of-year Rock’n’Roll Radio show on Louder Than War Radio this past weekend, and I tuned in, if only to find out which of the three Dear Boys tracks he had also included. (Yes, we too make some people’s Best of the Year.)

Just as well, because “Maybe Next Christmas” was rightly included as one of the only festive-themed choices. It’s a song that transcends the usual holiday fare, being instead a rock ballad about loneliness (“I ordered Chinese food, cried until dawn”), tinged with (forlorn?) hope that next year might be better. Marosy’s voice is strong enough to carry that weight and the arrangement/production is absolutely top notch. A powerful musical reminder that we don’t all have someone to hug and hold at this time of year.

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WARM FUZZY FEELING

But, rather than going out on such a downer, let me put on some fake down. It’s 0 degrees Fahrenheit as I type this in Hurley – that’s -18C for those who logically prefer metric – and one of the things I love most about the cold weather is that I get to wear my warm coat. Not just any warm coat, mind: the one I cannot wear in public without being complimented on it. These compliments have ranged over the last three winters from little old ladies in the supermarket check-out line to the younger gothier check-out workers, from Rock Academy students to their parents, from drunken dudes hanging outside the local dive bar to quite lovely-looking ladies on the inside of the finer bars in town.

And to all of these compliments I always come clean: this unidentified coat – I don’t even know what it’s made of, let alone who made it – is a Thrift Store purchase that set me back all of $8. Maybe I just got lucky; maybe I knew better than to listen to my kid who shrugged his shoulders somewhat dismissively that early winter day two years ago when I tried it on. Regardless, a massive shout-out to the good people at Free to Thrift in Kingston, whose ethos (“sharecycling, or wecycle!”) is well worth a full read, and proof positive that happiness, fashion status and a warm fuzzy feeling is available at almost any cost.

Dead Tony says hi also, by the way, a reminder that Halloween is not just for Christmas.

May you too have a warm, fuzzy feeling over the next few days, and I will see you on the other side.

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