Brandon's Buzz

A historic live project from the queen of my heart is only one of this crowded week’s significant releases. Gentlemen, start your engines:

His debut disc — 2003’s flop A Beautiful World — sure didn’t make any waves, but a new reality emerged post-“SexyBack,” one in which criminally photogenic young men with preternaturally high voices and an immutable passion for synthesized soul could become megastars at the drop of an acutely tailored fedora.  And so it was decreed that Robin Thicke‘s sophomore record, The Evolution of Robin Thicke, would make him an overnight sensation. (Oh yeah, and a killer single — the irresistibly cheesy “Lost Without U” — plus the Oprah stamp of approval, didn’t hurt nothin’.) Thicke took his time crafting album number three, but we finally get a taste of Something Else this week.

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A yelled at me in a tersely-worded email this morning about the fact that I haven’t displayed my flair board in over a week.  So, without further ado, the recent additions:  down in the southeast corner, buttons for good ol’ numbers 11 and 18 (my two favorite quarterbacks ever); one hell of a triumvirate of female songwriters — Joni, Annie, and Patty, no last names needed — makes a (forgive me, belated) flair debut; a special button for my buddy Cris Collinsworth, whose sarcastic, brilliantly tossed asides singlehandedly make NBC’s NFL highlights show “Football Night in America” worth watching; and, finally, a painfully gorgeous heart.  (If you can’t tell what it’s made of, I’ll give you two hints:  it’s the finest portable music device ever invented, and it rhymes with “hi-Flod.”)

“San Diego and Oakland, where Lane Kiffin is still the head coach, but it’s still early in the highlights.”

— sportscaster Dan Patrick, leading into a recap of today’s Raiders/Chargers game (in which Oakland blew a 15-point first half lead and lost 28-18) on NBC’s “Football Night in America.”  (For those who don’t follow football, ugly rumors have been swirling about Kiffin’s imminent firing — an event that seems more certain than ever, now that his team has dropped three of four games after leading in the fourth quarter — since the season’s opening week.)

Conceived as a benefit project with one hundred percent of the proceeds supporting the charity — an honest-to-God four-thousand-acre farm area near Santa Fe, New Mexico which was conceived specifically to give cancer-stricken children something substantive on which to focus their energies and interests — named in the record’s title, The Imus Ranch Record finds a bevy of acclaimed country music stars wrapping their golden voices around tunes that were personally selected for them by the charity’s organizer, Mr. Don Imus, himself.  The lineup of talent is top-shelf — Vince Gill, Bekka Bramlett (Bonnie’s daughter, and still searching for her ticket to the big time), former Maverick Raul Malo, Dwight Yoakam, and my eternal hero John Hiatt, to name just a few — and the results are often fascinating (Patty Loveless presents a twangy take — one you gotta hear to believe — on Fleetwood Mac’s overlooked classic “Silver Springs,” WIllie Nelson offers a sweetly unique spin on the old R&B standard “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes,” and Lucinda Williams — whose latest album, Sweet Honey, is due October 14 — lays down a tender reading of Willie’s classic “Mammas, Don’t Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”).

Whatever you may think of Imus and his exploitative, self-aggrandizing stances, sometimes you gotta measure a man’s actions against his words.  The man has just displayed killer taste in music, and for as good and worthy a cause as this, that’s worth something.

The Buzz extends most sincere congratulations to the fabulously wicked
Jean Smart, who picked up her third career Emmy Award (and first for a regular series role) last weekend (pulling off a bit of an upset in beating out the favored likes of Amy Poehler of “Saturday Night Live” and the overdue Vanessa Williams of “Ugly Betty”) for her fearless performance as Christina Applegate’s flippant mother from hell on ABC’s freshman hit “Samantha Who?”  You have no idea how thoroughly it warms my heart to see the members of the crackerjack cast of “Designing Women” — now and forever, my vote-getter for funniest situation comedy in the history of television — earn the well-deserved kudos that they were criminally denied during that classic’s original run.  True, Delta Burke, Meshach Taylor, and Alice Ghostley all reaped Emmy nominations for their work in the series, and the show itself won a trio of Outstanding Comedy Series nods, but “Women” was barely recognized for its whipsmart writing — only one nomination for the brilliant Linda Bloodworth-Thomason in the show’s second season — and three of the estimable ensemble’s four titular members — Smart, Annie Potts, and the show’s invaluable tentpole Dixie Carter — were consistently shut out despite years of bravura work.  Thankfully, all three of these women have been subsequently recognized for their brilliance:  Potts received an Emmy nod after replacing Susan Dey in “Love and War” (as well as a pair of SAG Award nominations for terrific work in Lifetime’s breakthrough foray into dramatic series television “Any Day Now”), and the phenomenal Carter at long last snapped her own Emmy drought last year with a startling guest shot on “Desperate Housewives.”  But, by far, the most significant post-“Women” success has been enjoyed by the versatile Smart, who has excelled at both comedy (prior to her current triumph, she nabbed two Emmys for guest shots on “Frasier” and was devilishly uproarious on a couple of heartstoppingly hilarious CBS sitcoms — “High Society,” a brilliantly outrageous (and outrageously ribald) Americanized take on the Bri’ish sensation “Absolutely Fabulous,” and “Style and Substance,” a broad farce loosely based on the world of Martha Stewart — which never got fair shakes) and drama (her indelible performance as the unstable First Lady in the fifth season of “24” earned her a fourth Emmy nod).  And to those critics who are now whispering that Smart didn’t deserve this victory, I say this:  just consider it a make-good on all those years when she was unjustly ignored.  And suck it up already.

Over the past few months, I’ve become great pals with a fabulous woman name of JoAnn Kubasek, who hosts a fascinating online talk show called Stardish on the BlogTalkRadio network.  Although of late, the show has branched out into the worlds of film and Broadway, Stardish’s main beat is the soaps; JoAnn has recently landed terrific interviews with industry icons like Linda Dano, Catherine Hickland, Michael E. Knight, Ilene Kristen, and countless others, and she has done yeoman’s work in constructing this amazing forum for the fans to connect with their favorites.

I’ve had the immense honor of participating in the evolution of this show, both on air (it’s been great fun being able to pick the brains of some of my favorite stars, and — although I did no such thing — JoAnn likes to credit me with “saving her ass” the night she had soap legend Judi Evans, whose acclaimed work she was unfamiliar with, as a guest) and behind the scenes (I’ve done some freelance writing on behalf of the show in recent weeks, and eagerly anticipate further assignments).

Depending on the lineup of guests, Stardish airs most weeknights at 10pm EDT (9 here in Texas, y’all) and can be heard at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/stardish.  I’m quite excited to be co-moderating a soap chat on the show tonight, and you’re all invited to attend and throw your two cents in!

“I want to be in tune. I want to sing pretty. I want to sing sweet. It’s only a relatively recent development that it was appealing to sound bad, you know.”

— the legendary James Taylor, discussing his new album (Covers, due next Tuesday) with Rolling Stone.

I spent a goodly portion of Saturday fearing that Gavin DeGraw — the most commercially successful, if not the most talented, of the latest wave of twenty-something singer-songwriters taking popular music by storm — had perished in the same South Carolina plane crash that killed four people (two crew members and two civilians) and critically injured artists Travis Barker (formerly of Blink-182) and DJ AM, both of whom had performed a free show with DeGraw the previous night.  The NTSB initially refused to release the names of the two civilians who had died (presumably until they could properly notify the families involved), which was all well and good, except nobody had heard from DeGraw all morning; you start connecting those dots, and you’re on the fast track to Basketcase-ville.  (I even got Sherry Ann all worked up when I sent her a panicked text message inquiring what she had heard on this matter; heroically, she solved the case by going to www.gavindegraw.com, whose front page blared the magnificent headline:  GAVIN WAS NOT ON THE PLANE!)  I was inconsolable, wondering how in the hell I was gonna eulogize DeGraw here on the Buzz — seriously, it would have been like Buddy Holly dying all over again! — and while I’m not quite sure what’s appropriate to say now — “Hey Gav… glad you’re still alive, buddy”? — I’m sincerely happy that, even though four human beings tragically lost their lives, the survivors are well on their way toward a full recovery, and we didn’t have to endure another day the music died.

He was studying in the New York City police academy, aiming to follow in his father’s footsteps as a Brooklyn beat cop. But his killer voice, his love of music, and his dream to be a part of that world carried him out west. A string of smashing club gigs in the Bay Area brought him to the attention of Columbia Records, which — thanks to the bracing success being enjoyed by a young Jersey Everyman called Bruce Springsteen — was at the forefront of the burgeoning regular Joe movement that was spreading like wildfire across the rock music landscape, which had struggled for a time to stay relevant in the wake of the disco explosion of the late ’70s. A strong debut album and a simple name change — Edward James Mahoney became one Eddie Money — and the rest was history.

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We get a bit of a breather this week, after last Tuesday’s jam-packed release slate. But with one band on the cusp of a major breakout, and a musical legend taking a moment to reflect on a brilliant career, things are plenty busy out there in your local record store as September crawls toward the finish line. To wit:

They’ve been touted as the next big thing ever since their noteworthy 2003 debut Youth and Young Manhood, yet the immense heat surrounding them has never quite translated into record sales.  But could the tide be about to turn for Tennessee band Kings of Leon?  Their fourth record Only By the Night arrives on store shelves this week, and its leadoff single — the captivating, explosively erotic “Sex On Fire” — is a classic radio smash just waiting to happen.  Forgive me, but I smell a real big hit here.

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“Good evening, I’m Martin Sheen.  For seven years, this set was my home on The West Wing, a television series about service and selflessness that won Emmy Awards for virtually everyone involved, except me.”

— oft-nominated powerhouse (and accidental focal point of Aaron Sorkin’s masterpiece) Martin Sheen, gently lecturing the audience of the 60th Annual Emmy Awards about the power of democracy

More handmade buttons on tap for today, with shots of A’s favorite Austin skyscraper, of a California sunset I was privileged to witness a few summers back, and of one of my favorite places to eat in the city (love the penne and meatballs!).  Oh, and also, of some cute guy I happen to know fairly well.  (He’s almost certainly gonna kill me for that one!)  Also:  another Tori button (one just wasn’t gettin’ it), and one of King George — a real one, this time.

Despite a relatively tony cast — Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Cloris Leachman, Candice Bergen, Bette Midler, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Carrie Fisher would pretty much comprise any enterprising artist’s dream canvas, methinks — and a fair box office showing on opening weekend, Diane English’s new update of the classic ’30s screwball comedy The Women has been roundly reviled by critics, a great many of whom seem to hold English’s past triumphs — as the creator and producer of the television classic “Murphy Brown,” as scorching hot a political potato(e) as the medium has seen this side of Archie Bunker, she was once one of Hollyweird’s most elite power brokers — unjustifiably against her. And while I’ll refrain from debating the film’s merits and/or charms (except to say that I was at once amused and outraged at the numerous news reports — I read no fewer than five of ’em — which expressed shock and awe at the fact that the movie attracted a sizable percentage of gay men to theaters nationwide), I’ll tell you without equivocation: the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is worth checking out.

Anchored by a pair of divine Annie Lennox tracks (“Womankind,” from last year’s disappointing Songs of Mass Destruction, and “Money Can’t Buy It,” one of Diva‘s multiple classics), the record also features terrific work from Feist (“I Feel It All,” perhaps the strongest song off of her Grammy-nominated breakthrough The Reminder) and KT Tunstall (“Someday Soon,” from her underrated sophomore release, the slow-burning Drastic Fantastic) as well as tunes from up-and-comers Jessie Baylin and The Bird & the Bee (a band my friend Chip turned me onto earlier this summer).  To hear some critics tell the tale, the soundtrack is a damn sight better than the film it supports; having not seen the movie, I’ll just say that to even think about matching the quality of its music, it’s got a lot of ground to make up.