Quite a lot swirling around in the ‘ol noggin this month—has anyone else felt like their mind is a merely dust devil of whirling information? In place of a grand unified theory of July, I give you an omnibus edition of a column. Think of its scattered nuggets like a crap version of the six minutes on Abbey Road that strings together “Mean Mr. Mustard,” “Polythene Pam,” “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” “Golden Slumbers,” and “Carry That Weight.” Delightful little ditties that didn’t quite add up to full songs but the Beatles couldn’t part with them. Can’t blame them. Even broken-off bits of things can be beautiful.
Hollywood Forever
I cannot remember how Atlanta-based singer-song writer Tyler Lyle’s music came into my life a few years ago, but the only song of his I know popped up in a recent desultory shuffle of the 6,367 songs on my phone. I hadn’t heard Lyle’s “Hollywood Forever” in five or six years, but listening to it again made the hairs on my arms stand up. Lyle’s somewhere along the Americana spectrum between Wilco and the Avett Brothers and “Hollywood Forever” is a gently building boot stomp of a tune. (From his delightfully titled 2015 album The Native Genius of Desert Plants, which also contains the song “Winter is for Kierkegaard,” which I’m frankly afraid to listen to as it’ll likely send me into a depressive spiral usually reserved for Danes in February.)
It starts with a simple acoustic guitar being picked. At the end of the second verse, the drums kick in and Lyle asks the existential question embedded in the chorus:
What do you call the fear of being forgotten?
What if no one remembers your name?
What if we’re just the food for the cotton
The roots of the garden, one day?
Does it frighten or free us
To think the world doesn’t need us, at all?
At the end of the third verse, Lyle is hooting, as if to loudly confirm his own existence, barbaric-yawp-over-the-rooftops-of-the-world style. I’ve played the song a few times a day for the past few weeks, grappling with the “frighten or free us”-ness of it all, and wondering why certain songs get so stuck in our heads and how personal the stickiness is. I mean, go listen to “Hollywood Forever.” You’ll prolly hear it and think, “Tyler Lyle seems fine, but he’s no [insert your favorite singer-songwriter here].” And that’s fine, Tyler Lyle will be my guy. I’m not trying to convince you to like his music, just to tell you that I’m in the thrall of this song and there’s good reason for it and I hope it doesn’t stop. I wish something similar for you.
Brekkie Sammich
On Sundays, the deli down the street from my house is closed. I don’t begrudge the deli folks a day off, but Sunday is the one day that I’m home and casting about for some breakfast. It’s a cross I bear. (While I love to cook, I have a rule against cooking breakfast. It’s simply too early in the day to start filling the sink with dirty dishes—it’s too depressing. The few times I’ve tried I’ve ended up on the fainting couch for the remainder of the day.) Since the $5 bacon, egg, and cheddar on a hard roll at my local was out of the question, so I thought I’d pop across town to the upscale market for a fancy brekkie sammich, or however they cutesify its name.
I walk in and step up to the counter and tell the young man behind the register my order. “I’d like a bacon, egg, and cheddar on a croissant,” I say. (I pronounce croissant kwa-sohn, which drives some people who care deeply about me absolutely bonkers. It’s the acoustic embodiment pretention. I might as well just say, “Je voudrais un croissant.” And regarding said kwa-sohn: A hard roll is generally good enough for me, but as I’m in the fancy place, I might as well break out my pretentious diction and get some fancy bread while I’m at it.)
After I make my order, the dude behind the counter says, “That will be $17.28.”
I say, “I’m sorry?!? What?!?”
He points at the screen, which reads $17.28, as if the numbers made any more sense on the screen than they did in his mouth, and says, “Yup.”
I say, “I’m gonna go.”
Dude says in a commiserating tone, “I understand. No offense taken.”
I walk out into the bright morning sunshine thinking I may have to rethink my stance on cooking breakfast.
Everything is Wrong All the Time
At a recent family gathering, I spent some time with my sister’s kids—there are four of them—and I watched the oldest boy, Hunter, eating fruit. Hunter is four, and he’s what we used to call “a handful.” Good kid, but one with enough energy for two or three children. But there he was, eating fruit at the table in the church basement, looking as blissed out as I’ve ever seen a human—the embodiment of simple human happiness.
It reminded me of a profile of the playwright Tom Stoppard that Kenneth Tynan wrote for the New Yorker in 1977. In it, Tynan asks the question, “What is Tom Stoppard’s version of happiness?” To find it, he quotes a radio play Stoppard wrote in 1969, in which a middle-aged man attends a class reunion at his former school and recalls a single moment of unalloyed delight. He was seven years old at the time.
“I remember walking down one of the corridors, trailing my finger along a raised edge along the wall, and I was suddenly totally happy, not elated or particularly pleased, or anything like that—I mean I experienced happiness as a state of being: everywhere I looked, in my mind, nothing was wrong. You never get that back when you grow up; it’s a condition of maturity that almost everything is wrong all the time, and happiness is a borrowed word for something else—a passing change of emphasis.”
I sat down next to Hunter and dug into some strawberries and pineapple but I couldn’t quite muster the same caliber of joy. Knowing what I know at the ripe old age of 52, I can’t help thinking Stoppard may be on to something here.
Leningrad
Following my column last month detailing my ongoing journey working my way through Rolling Stone‘s list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, I received a bunch of reader mail with new music for me to check out. Thanks to everyone who sent in song recommendations, and a special shout-out to Lawrence Holzworth, who turned me on to Leningrad, a rock group that loves horns, rap-singing, and cursing in Russian. I have no idea what frontman Sergey Shnurov is saying but the music sounds like the very danceable love child of Gogol Bordello and Lady Gaga and a railroad spike. This must be the stuff of Russian dancefloor legend. Please keep your music recs coming, and for those curious about the Rolling Stone countdown, I’m currently listening to #217, Definitely Maybe by Oasis. You’ve got to be more than a little bit cocky to open your debut album with a song titled “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star.”
This article appears in July 2023.
