Special thanks to Ian for melodica on To Thee Oh Spacemen. Thanks also to Colin, Angela, Darin, Jeff, Nick, Rob C., Rob B., Leebert, Mandy, and my parents.
All songs performed and recorded by WALMARTIANS. All songs written by BDCummings. Cover image taken sometime in the 1950s near Abilene, Texas by Jerry Cummings.
What a year it has been. Here’s to a better 2017. Cheers!
All the Umbrellas in London by The Magnetic Fields
I first heard this song in December 1995. I was lying on the bed in a boutique hotel in Boston’s North End. The window was cracked open to let in the winter breeze as the room was stifling hot.
There was a small radio on the nightstand that was by chance tuned to a college radio station.
This was, as it turned out a year or so later, on the last night of my first honeymoon.
I was hooked immediately by the flanged drum beat and rolling synths of the intro. Then came Stephin Merritt’s deep voice with the opening lines:
If I make it tonight it’ll be all right
It’ll make a good song or something
I’ve been trying to give myself reasons to live
And I really can’t think of one thing
For a little over three minutes I was in a state of melancholic bliss. I still feel that way when I listen to it today.
I was sitting in a ramen shop here in Japan at lunch today and chatting with an Englishman about the incoming US presidential election results and BREXIT. Both of us were despairing a bit about our fellow citizens and their choices.
Now that the election is over though I think there’s no time for despair and there’s no point in indulging in nonsense about leaving the country (though I admit to have thought about it in more than a little detail).
The results are disappointing for many reasons, but mostly because they reveal what I suspected for most of this year. There was a great mass of ugliness lurking beneath the surface of electorate. Now it is out in the open and it is time to work against it. That’s what I think we should focus on in the coming months and years.
Cheers and all the best to all of us as Americans.