Resilient Voices: Excerpts from Middling

I write an occasional newsletter (quarterly when I don't forget) to friends and family about my life: music, books, work, and getting older. I'd love to send it to you. Sign up for Middling here. What follows is an excerpt from the fall 2019 issue.

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I may have let my discipline slip a bit lately. I’ve been indulging my interest in vinyl a lot this year, which is at odds with my original purpose for switching to vinyl-only, which was to force myself to be more discriminating. Vinyl records are expensive and they take up a fair bit of space. But it can’t be helped when there’s so much good music to keep up with.

A lot of my new albums are not new, however. Case in point: You’re the Man by Marvin Gaye, the (intended) follow-up to his 1971 release What’s Going On. The record was shelved until this year, when it was released to mark the late artist’s eightieth birthday. I picked it up on Record Store Day in April. It’s a double-album, but the second disc is just b-sides and alternate takes, even a Christmas song. I lean hard into the first disc, and particularly side one. The title track is a nice jam that holds up well as an exemplar of its era; my favorite track is “Piece of Clay,” not written by Gaye but delivered with his signature passionate wisdom:

“That’s what’s wrong with the world today:
Everybody wants somebody to be
Their own piece of clay.”

Like I said, it holds up.

For my birthday this summer I asked for and received a vinyl edition of an album I loved when I was not yet married, Tanita Tikaram’s 1988 debut Ancient Heart. I already had it on CD—like I said, I’m not very disciplined these days—but I wanted to hear it scratched out at me at 33 revolutions per minute. Tikaram was, at the time, being compared to Van Morrison and other resilient voices; I eventually would buy her second disc and lost track of her after that, but something about this album really did it for me. Her breakout hit was “Twist in My Sobriety,” but every track has gravitas to it—even the sing-songy ”Poor Cow,” which my friend Chris and I would play on our college radio program as we announced the cafeteria’s lunch menu for the day. “Slice her up, slice her up, slice her up, poor cow.” Turns out I wasn’t very disciplined then either.

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