• You know something makes me feel old these days? Commercials make me feel old. Especially commercials for tampons and toilet paper, two products the networks wouldn’t even show commercials for when I was young. Then they arrived with the most delicate euphemisms advertisers could invent to praise the virtues of one brand over another. Lots of cloud-like pillowy softness and summer breeze or floral fragrance. Now I see ads where all traces of subtlety have been removed. Their functions are described bluntly, as are the all-too-human functions the products are designed to address. To be clear, I have no problem with the straightforwardness of the ads, everybody knows what the products are for, they just make me feel like I’ve been alive a long time, long enough to have witnessed a slow-moving societal sea change in attitudes and sensibilities. Of course, there are a million ways these changes manifest themselves, but these particular commercials drive the point home for me.
You know what else makes me feel old? To look at a list of albums that turn 50 this year. Brilliant, essential albums that came out in 1972 that have been an deeply ingrained part of my psyche for all the years since. Exile on Main Street, Can’t Buy a Thrill, Honky Chateau, Close to the Edge, Harvest, Transformer, Pink Moon, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, Slider, Eat a Peach, Never a Dull Moment, School’s Out, Paul Simon, Something/Anything, Manassas, All the Young Dudes, damn, what a list. And that’s not even counting the monumental jazz records released that year by Miles, Herbie, Lee Morgan, and others. Was 1972 the greatest year ever in rock and pop music? It’s a tough question, and comes down to personal taste, but when I'm as objective as I can be, ’72 has my vote. I’d love to hear other opinions.
• I was giving Andrew Bird’s latest album, Inside Problems, a listen the other day and it raised an interesting question. Is admiration enough? I can appreciate the wonderful craft of the album - the songwriting, the arrangements, the playing and singing. Every element of Inside Problems is meticulously crafted and quite lovely. And yet, I find the record makes no emotional connection with me. It’s like looking at a beautiful painting of a subject in which I have zero interest. I think it’s unlikely that I’ll ever give it another spin, which tells me that, for me, admiration isn’t enough. I’d be curious to find out if other music fans ever run into that same conundrum. Are there albums you admire more than like? Do you listen to them anyway?
• Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” just became the longest running (pun intended) #1 song by a female artist in 2022. And it’s at the top of the charts, of course, because of the featured placement it has in the most recent season of Netflix’s Stranger Things. It couldn’t have happened to a weirder artist. Prior to her popular resurgence, Ms. Bush didn’t really have much of a music career going anymore. It’s been eleven years since her last album, and there aren’t any reports that she’s working on one. Maybe this new influx of admiration for her work will open the door to a new album, maybe not.
I’m wondering how her newfound, Stranger Things fans are reacting as they rush to stream Kate’s records looking for the rest of her pop hits. Her diehard, long-time fans know that “Running Up That Hill” was an MTV fluke, an outlier in a career of dreamy, progressive, willfully artsy music. Will they even find more to love on the rest of the Hounds of Love album? Some will, no doubt, but I can’t help but think that a lot of people who are motivated these days to go back to her catalog are going to find she was rarely as easy to approach musically as that one hit song would suggest.
• I’ve been listening lately to the 50th anniversary reissue (there’s that number again) of Elton’s Madman Across the Water and am reminded of the work of one of rock and pop music’s greatest unsung heroes, Paul Buckmaster. Mr. Buckmaster’s great gift was the ability to orchestrate classical string instruments for rock music. If you don’t know his name, you’ve heard his work on several of Elton’s classic albums, Bowie’s Space Oddity, the Stones’ Sticky Fingers, Miles’ On the Corner and Big Fun, and the Grateful Dead’s Terrapin Station. He worked with artists as diverse as Bon Jovi, Tears for Fears, Carly Simon, Faith Hill, Carrie Underwood, Taylor Swift, Ben Folds Five, Goo Goo Dolls, Heart, Stevie Nicks, and Brandi Carlile. He was the go-to guy for every major popular artist who needed the sound of sweeping, dramatic strings on an album. Mr. Buckmaster passed in 2017 without the general public being fully aware of his name and accomplishments, but musicians knew he was an essential figure in rock and pop music history.
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