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 winter 2020 issue--before the whole world shut down.
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I got some great music for Christmas. A new record by the Avett Brothers, the debut album of the Americana supergroup the Highwomen, a three-disc concept album by Sleeping at Last, and the thirtieth-anniversary reissue of one of the most personally significant records of my life.
Shawn Colvin is what might be called a folk music superstar. Her music has been the soundtrack to several significant points of my life: I first heard her cover of “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” by the Police while Kara and I were hot-tubbing on our honeymoon, and her collaboration with Steve Earle on the Beatles song “Baby’s in Black” was playing when a giant truck pulling a giant trailer plowed into the back of our one-week-old Toyota RAV4. My pastor and I figured out that we were probably at the same Shawn Colvin concert in the student activity center at Northwestern University in the early 1990s. But before all that, Shawn Colvin was the artist behind one of the first CDs I ever bought.
Steady On would become the Grammy winner for best contemporary folk album of 1991. (How she won two years after the fact is beyond me.) While aging teen idol Donny Osmond was reinventing himself as the “Soldier of Love,” Depeche Mode was milking the life out of “Your Own Personal Jesus,” and Milli Vanilli was pretending to sing “Blame It on the Rain,” Shawn Colvin was quietly strumming the opening chords to the title track and offering an ode to vulnerability:
“China gets broken,
and it will never be the same.”
It only got better from there, with the second track my favorite at the time.
“You’re shining—I can see you.
You’re smiling; that’s enough.
I’m holding on to you like a diamond in the rough.”
I had tracks I preferred over others, of course, but I very nearly wore the grooves off that CD. (Or however the technology works.) It occurs to me as I write this that this CD, still in my possession, is older than at least one of my coworkers. In the past that would have sent me into a fetal position, but I seem to be coming to peace with my advanced age.
Anyway, this year Shawn Colvin celebrated her thirtieth anniversary as a recording artist with a track-by-track return to this first album. Stripped away are the 1980s production values, tastefully executed at the time but certainly anachronistic today. The heart and soul of the record remains: Piercing and sober storytelling over lovely melodies and expert guitar work. Nobody does it like Shawn Colvin, and these songs prove it just as effectively as her later, more mature work.
I’ll draw your attention to two songs from the record. The first, “Cry Like an Angel,” was the song I turned to after terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, and aimed a third plane at the Pentagon. “The streets of my town,” she prophesied in 1989, “are not what they were. They are haloed in anger, bitter and hurt. ... May we all find salvation in professions that heal.”
The second was one of the lesser lights to nineteen-year-old me, but it’s the song she used to promote this new record, and it’s doing it for me quite nicely these days. It’s hard to believe she had this much soul when she recorded it in her thirties; I don’t mean that as an insult to my thirty-something readers (that’s an age range, not a quantity), only to point out just how much soul she crams in there.
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 winter 2020 issue--before the whole world shut down.
***
The safest place
Is the more or less middling: the mean average
Is not noticed.
—W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety
When I was a kid, I thought about 2020 a lot. That would be the year I would turn fifty, and at the time fifty seemed to me about the oldest a person could get. To speculate so far into the future seemed both pointless and irresistible. What would the world be like? What would I be like?
There were good reasons to wonder. When I was a kid, my society was enduring the aftermath of the abrupt end of a corrupt presidency. We were facing global tensions on several fronts; I read more than one library book about inter-continental ballistic missiles before I was ten. The Middle East was a powder keg. The economy was sputtering. People hadn’t learned not to pollute yet. There was disco music.
It wasn’t all bad, of course. Sure, we had Barry Manilow to deal with, but we also had the Ramones. (And Schoolhouse Rock: Rest In Peace, Jack Sheldon.) Sure, the rain had acid in it, but there was also this owl and this Native American guy actively appealing to us to give a hoot and not pollute. There was a chance I’d make it to fifty. There was a chance 2020 would be great.
I think about the past differently than the future or the present. In my memories, the hard stuff is less hard, because I know I’ve survived it. The scary stuff is less scary because it’s become more known than unknown. Even the lofty ambitions are right-sized by the passage of time. We aren’t cured of the past—we carry it with us—but the passion and the pain of it levels off. We become detached enough from it to consider it with grace.
In a matter of months I’ll be hitting my fiftieth birthday. Having reached this year of my preoccupation, I suppose it’s time to be preoccupied with something else—2070, perhaps, when I'll be a hundred years old, which seems like just about the oldest a person can get. Meanwhile, it occurs to me that there will be people thinking back to this unfolding decade with the same mix of melancholy, nostalgia, and (I hope) gracious detachment as I now think of the 1970s. Maybe one of those people will be me. Maybe it will be you. Maybe we should start practicing such gracious detachment even today.
"Fifty Nifty," Schoolhouse Rock
