Brandon's Buzz

Tori Amos — “Silent All These Years” (from Little Earthquakes) —

In all my agita and verklemptitude over the One Life to Live series finale last week, I allowed two crucial anniversaries slip right past my addled mind: Friday actually marked the twentieth anniversary of the release of one of the seminal recordings of the 1990s, Tori Amos’ intensely personal, ionically charged quasi-debut record, Little Earthquakes. (Earthquakes isn’t technically Amos’ first album, as she was the brilliantly becleavaged, hellaciously hair-sprayed face of an ill-fated ’80s rock band called Y Kant Tori Read, whose one and only release was such a dismal failure that Amos has since disowned it.) The album was never the out-of-the-park commercial sensation it so richly deserved to be — quirky and disquieting generally makes for a lethal combo out on the mass-appeal market — although it did, largely on the strength of word-of-mouth and scattershot radio and television exposure, scratch and crawl its way to platinum status, and it undeniably laid the foundation not only for Amos’ future success but for the estrogen-fueled revolution that lay in wait just around the bend. (I know I’m given to hyperbole around here, but it seems absolutely reasonable to believe that there could nor would have been no Jagged Little Pill without the trail that this astonishing album so fearlessly blazed, and that gals like Liz Phair, Sarah McLachlan, Joan Osborne, and Jewel should write profusely effusive thank-you notes to Ms. Amos daily.)

(The second anniversary is much less culturally and sonically significant by comparison, but Saturday marked the third birthday of Brandon’s Buzz Radio, which continues going strong after thirty-six months and eighty-seven episodes, which have been listened to by roughly 56,000 people all around the world. I remain extremely humbled and honored by your response to the marvelous madness that I continually conjure up in this forum, and I hope you all continue to come along for the ride.)

Sadly, you can’t actually buy any of the tunes in the expertly-assembled video below — ridiculous, considering that no fewer than one of them is considered a touchstone of the form; yet typical, considering ABC’s piss-fucking-poor attempts to properly monetize one of the most valuable entertainment properties it has ever owned — but make no mistake: these are the songs of the day. (Pay close attention to this montage’s fifth clip, with Peabo Bryson lending his dulcet tones to a soap theme that continues to be regarded alongside The Young and the Restless’ powerfully pristine “Nadia’s Theme” as perhaps the greatest in history. God bless you, Peabo, you brilliant, brilliant man.)

“The fans are so loyal, so passionate, so invested in their stories…. I always ask how they started watching Fraternity Row: some of them were stay-at-home mothers, taking a break before their children got home from school; others were college students with free time between classes; many of them inherited a love of the show from their parents, or their grandparents, who were longtime fans themselves. I remember the first time I tuned into Fraternity Row. I was hooked instantly; I needed to know what would happen next to these fascinating people. Would the hero and heroine find their way back to true love? Would the villains get their comeuppance? Or would their crimes go unpunished? Would loving families overcome their obstacles? Or would their troubles prove too difficult to surmount? Ultimately, that’s what soap opera is about: families. Close families, rival families. Families that are unexpected, or families that we choose for ourselves. And when a show is lucky enough to have been on the air as long as Fraternity Row has been on, these families become extensions of our own…. We know them so well: they’ve become our friends. We yearn for their happiness, especially when it’s hard won. We laugh as they laugh, we cry as they cry, and we can’t imagine doing without them. And when things are at their very worst on the show, that’s when we seem to enjoy them the most. There’s just one thing we have to do to keep them in our lives: tune in tomorrow.”

— the ever-eloquent Victoria “Viki” Lord (the peerless, radiant Erika Slezak), on yesterday’s penultimate, heart-wrenchingly majestic episode of One Life to Live, beautifully eulogizing Llanview’s own soap opera, Fraternity Row — and in a funny, marvelously meta way, One Life itself — as only she can. (One Life has always been more than happy to wink right back at us and send up the conventions of the soap genre that it has mastered so brilliantly, even in its last days: in the storyline, in case you’ve been foolish enough to not follow it religiously, WVLE — the local channel which airs soap-within-a-soap Fraternity Row, which once counted, in his days prior to his successful stint as Llanview’s police commissioner (!), homespun hero Bo Buchanan as its executive producer (!!), and the aforementioned Ms. Lord’s spunky spitfire of a long-lost daughter Megan as its lead actress — has canceled the series after a forty-three year run (wink, wink), which has led to quite the hue and cry from many of Llanview’s citizens, even those of whose undying love for the show we have had no prior knowledge. And Thursday’s episode of One Life featured Llanview’s local talk show paying tribute to Fraternity Row — much the same way The View did this very morning with One Life — which gave Miss Viki one final chance to crumble, cry, carry on with her trademark stately stoicism, and then teach us a little bit more about ourselves. Myself, I started watching One Life in that unforgettable summer of 1988, just a few months before my mother passed away, and in times great and horrific, wonderful and wrenching in my life, I have CLUNG with both hands to that show, above any and every other show, and I’m quite sincere when I tell you, there have been times throughout those years when it felt like I didn’t have a friend in the whole world except for Viki, Bo, Clint, Nora, Renee, Cord, Tina, Megan, Jake, Blair, Joey, Dorian, Asa, Max, Luna, Marty, Gabrielle, Sarah, Mel, Andrew, and Dr. Larry. The show lived its one life with a ridiculously reckless brilliance, and it comes to an end today after some 11,000 episodes and 43 years —- indeed, after one of the most remarkable runs that American television has ever witnessed. And so today, I salute my fellow fans who mourn right along with me, and I thank Agnes Nixon, all the writers and producers, camera guys and crew(wo)men who have upheld and succeeded her genius with all the grace that the world will allow, and all the actors who have collectively breathed such gloriously gorgeous LIFE into the hallways and highways, into the bedrooms and byways, of Llanview, PA. From the bottom of my hard and heavy heart, thanks for every last one of those magnificent memories.)

Dog’s Eye View — “Everything Falls Apart” (from Happy Nowhere) —

“I met God this afternoon /

ridin’ on an uptown train /

I said, ‘Don’t you have better things to do?’ /

and He said, ‘If I do my job, what would you complain about. . . ?’”

U2 — “New Year’s Day” (from 18 Singles) —

Dan Fogelberg — “Same Old Lang Syne”
(from The Very Best of Dan Fogelberg) —

These things are just too easy some days. (And don’t pay no mind to the fact that, technically, as per the song’s elegantly evocative first verse, “Same Old” actually takes place on Christmas Eve: it’s still the best one year ends, another one begins tune that anyone ever sat down and thunk up.) Happy 2012, y’all; may it bring us all peace, prosperity, powerfully riveting music, and a presidential candidate on the Republican side of the aisle that actually passes the smell test on the first swipe. (Is that too damn much to ask?)

Leona Lewis — “Colorblind” (from Hurt: The EP) —

Hot on the heels of her brilliantly electrifying reinvention of Snow Patrol’s “Run,” which she transformed from an unassuming indie-pop piffle into a brash, crashing power ballad, Lewis turns her attention to this unheralded Counting Crows classic, lightening the mood just enough to matter, and digging beneath the trademark angst and agita to unearth a moving, pristinely potent melody and message.

Matt Pond PA — “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight”
(from Winter Songs) —

This would probably have been much more cute (not to mention relevant) had it been posted before the holiday rather than days after the fact, but I was so swamped trying to get ready to leave town for Christmas that I never got a chance to get this posted, so please forgive me my tardy proud father moment here: one brisk evening early last week, A and I took our beloved shmoofy-head out for her very first experience of admiring Christmas lights, and while it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the things she sorta likes from those that she really likes — if only because she always seems to hurl her entire being toward enjoying whatever the heck she’s doing in any given moment of her day — I choose to believe that she had the time of her life meeting all the new people she encountered and taking in all the serenely illuminated beauty. (The photos below would seem to bear that out amply.)

Bob Dylan — “Must Be Santa” (from Christmas in the Heart) —

We here at the Buzz wish you all a very merry Christmas, and here’s hoping that all you churren — naughty and nice — received a visit from the man with the long, white beard and the flying reindeer in the wee hours of this day.

Joni Mitchell — “River” (from Blue) —

I always found it funny that this little tune — the token heartbreaker on many a holiday album — was considered in some circles to be a modern Christmas standard, because a) it is so depressing and full of melancholy, and b) it only mentions Christmas in passing in the first verse. Then, after all these years, it dawned on me recently — don’t remember how, but I was thunderstruck in that moment — that it shares the exact same melody and chord structure (if not general mood and sentiment) as “Jingle Bells.” Ooh, you’re a sly one, Joni. (Merry Christmas Eve, y’all.)

The Original 7ven — “#Trendin’” (from Condensate) —

For reasons that, thus far, all involved continue to talk around rather than about, Prince has stubbornly barred his former farm-team-slash-proteges from using the name The Time, under which this band recorded four classic funk albums throughout the ’80s. No matter: Morris Day and his original compadres burst forth from their professional bondage with a new name, a new album, and their nifty knack for creating masterful melodies — not to mention their trademark cheekiness, which is on full display in this adoringly winking ode to the sexiness of social media — fully intact.

Whitney Houston — “Try It On My Own” (from Just Whitney…) —

I (re-)learned a simple but eminently valuable lesson yesterday, and that is this: no matter how big and imposing my 2500HD Chevy Silverado pickup truck may appear at first sight, as a deceptively meek two-wheel-drive machine, it is absolutely not intended for use as an off-road vehicle, and any attempts to defy that hypothesis are performed at the driver’s own peril, embarrassment, and ferocious frustration. To wit: while crossing some day-job chores off the to-do list yesterday afternoon, I — without even giving an iota of thought to what the hell I was actually doing — drove off in a mud hole and managed to get myself hopelessly mired in a hoppin’ hot mess. (It has been rainy and cold for the biggest part of the last two weeks here in the Centex, and the plot of earth that I was occupying yesterday is very well saturated, so what indeed ended up happening would not have been at all difficult to predict, but again, I wasn’t paying an ounce of attention to the situation on the ground when I threw the truck into drive and took off, and I fully own that particular brain fart.) I rocked back and forth for a spell, shifting between reverse and low-gear drive and trying to build up enough momentum to propel myself in either direction out of the muck, but it eventually became clear that, if anything, I was only making my predicament worse, so I trudged off, all MacGyver-like, in search of something — anything — that I could put to use as tools. I happened upon a pair of three-foot-by-three-foot-by-quarter-inch squares of solid wood which we use as signage and, recognizing by that point that I had little left to lose, grabbed them and put them on the ground directly before the truck’s front wheels in the hopes that I could spin myself onto the boards and give the tires enough of a clear surface to grip onto and gain some forward traction.

The basic premise of my escape plan proved to be structurally sound, even as it devolved into a twenty-five minute push-pull process of inching the vehicle forward in baby steps, and then positioning the boards anew to keep up with the progress. About halfway through this ordeal, I noticed a man sitting in his own pickup truck, maybe two hundred feet away, and watching me. Not talking on the phone, mind you, and not checking his oil or his Twitter, and certainly not offering to help me in any way; no, no, just sitting there with his eyes firmly trained on me, as though he were watching the second act of a brilliantly entertaining action film instead of a brave young man desperately trying to coax his automobile back onto the pavement. And while, to be perfectly fair, I’m not sure what he could feasibly have offered me in the way of concrete assistance, I’m equally unsure if I would have accepted any help the asshole might have offered had he seen fit to actually get off his bee-hind and walk over to where I was; if it’s true — and it is — that I was stupid enough to have gotten myself into such a magnificently ridiculous mess in the first place, I felt obliged to prove — to myself and to my audience of one — that I also was sly enough to hurl myself the hell out of it.

Which, I’m proud to say, I ultimately was, even if it did comprise a maddening half-hour of my life I’ll never, ever get back. Luckily for me, I had Miss Whitney’s uplifting words — originally delivered in her unfortunate crack-is-wack phase, but completely capable of giving me gentle comfort and riveting reassurance all the same — ringing in my ears the entire time, cheering me on. (As for you, my vulturous voyeur: someone — God, Krishna, Allah, somebody — was watching you today too, sir, with every bit as much hungry absorption as you watched me — and I know you were watching me, because you cranked up your truck and sped away the moment you understood that I had made it back to safety, and I refuse to believe that was just a silly coinky-dink — and karma is a savage fire-breathin’ bitch, you rude, inconsiderate, ignorant, useless asswipe.)

(And, to heap insult atop injury: due to some ill-timed clumsiness later in the afternoon yesterday, I nearly ripped my easternmost nipple plumb off my chest in the middle of the Target parking lot. But perhaps that’s a story best saved for a more appropriate occasion….)

Marc Cohn — “True Companion”
(from The Very Best of Marc Cohn) —

From the betcha didn’t know file: while watching Jeopardy! last night (as is our bedtime ritual most evenings, as boring and predictable as that may sound), A and I learned a nifty, fun fact about the word companion, whose origins derive from Latin words which basically translate to “one with whom you would eat bread.” (I don’t know jack about Latin, but I’m reasonably well-versed in one of the language’s closer relatives, Spanish, and thus I immediately recognize the root words comer (“to eat”) and pan (“bread”), and I’m delighted to know that the folks who write Jeopardy!, whose clues of late have regrettably turned toward the banal, is still capable of tossing out a zinger that temporarily jolts my brain straight off its axis.)