I came across this video while helping out a friend who is having jambalaya tonight, because having and especially cooking jambalaya without listening to Fats Domino is kind of sinful. I’m sharing it with you because of the two absolutely outstanding saxophone solos and also the completely inexplicable yo-yo guy. The one guy waving a hankie ends up playing the trumpet eventually. The other guy? He’s a mystery.
Category: Music
#REVIEW: you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, by Olivia Rodrigo
I know, I know, the number of people on the planet who were hoping to find out my opinion on this album is approximately zero. That includes my wife. No one needs this review. You’re getting it anyway.
I just looked, and I’ve talked at least briefly about all three (yes, three; she released a kickass live album last year) of Rodrigo’s previous albums in this space. I owe the fact that I pay attention to Olivia Rodrigo at all to the fact that I’m a teacher; I never wrote the entire post and at this point it’s irrelevant, but her first album creeped me out on a deep and fundamental level as someone who is supposed to be an advocate for kids, and I never said a whole bunch of things about the people responsible for her career when she was a minor because I know how the internet works and they would be interpreted as me talking shit about her. And then Guts came out and bad idea right? was a world-class banger and a lot of the trepidation I had went away; it was clear pretty quick that the no-longer-quite-a-kid had more maturity and control over her own music than I’d been giving her credit for, and if the adults had been steering her wrong as I’d thought, she’d either gotten new adults or started ignoring the old ones.
All that said, I can boil the “review” part of this down to a single sentence if I want to: the last time an album has dominated my listening time as thoroughly as yspsfagsil was Dark Matter, Pearl Jam’s most recent album. That should be enough for anyone who has paid attention to my opinions on, well, anything; Pearl Jam is my favorite band of all time and at this point in my life is not going to be dethroned. This thing came out on June 12 and I’ve probably listened to it at least twenty times all the way through since then. I’m not sure there’s a song on here that I like as much as bad idea right? but the duet with Robert Smith, what’s wrong with me, is her best song.(*) drop dead, stupid song and maggots for brains are great tracks. Hell, I’d say the first five tracks on the album– those three, plus honeybee and u + me = <3 (**) are as good an opening five as any other album I can think of. I don’t love less, I suppose– in general the higher-energy songs rank higher in my esteem, and less is all high-register and piano; I kind of want to know what Billie Eilish would do with it– but there are no weak songs on here, and the most amazing thing is Rodrigo released a pop album in 2026 and the shortest song is still over three minutes long. I have grown so tired of music clearly written for TikTok. There’s none of that.
I genuinely can’t wait to see where Rodrigo’s career goes in the future. I started that sentence off saying “in twenty years” and then remembered I’m turning fifty this weekend. Let’s just say the future and go with that. Either way, this kid’s the real thing and if you have any interest in pop music at all and you haven’t at least streamed this yet, get on that.
(*) Olivia Rodrigo being singlehandedly responsible for making The Cure relevant to an entirely new generation was not something I was expecting of her during the Sour years, and I love it. Recall that The Cure’s latest album was also unexpectedly fantastic.
(**) yes, she literally says “you plus me equals a heart” in the refrain.
Friday melancholy
Today would have been Mom’s 74th birthday.
I’m sitting alone in the office listening to the new Taylor Swift album, which I, being a man of intelligence, have not purchased yet, since she’s sure to release an extended edition with 2345 more songs any minute now.
Initial verdict is it’s okay. Not sure about the song about Travis Kelce’s dick. And apparently at least a couple of them that I didn’t pay close attention to the lyrics of are about Charli XCX and, instead of Taylor’s exes, one of Travis’ exes, which is an exciting new realm of petty for Taylor to move into.
I dunno. I feel like I should be doing something more significant than sitting in my office, listening to pop music, and waiting for a game to download, but it was an insanely long day (eight teachers out, so I not only covered a class on my prep, I doubled up my advisory too) and this might be the limits of my mental capacity at the moment. At least going to bed at 8:00 last night stopped my stomach from trying to invert itself.
The Weird Al show
My God, that was an incredible show.
Al Yankovic is 65 years old. It was literally 90 degrees in the shade in Indianapolis yesterday evening. I have no idea how anyone on stage even survived the experience in the first place, and they put on a two-hour-plus show featuring at least a dozen costume changes (everyone in the band, not just Al himself) and startlingly impressive dancing. If my foot ever ends up above my head, it is not going to be on purpose, and it is likely that I have either just died or am about to. Al did a high-kick like five or six times during the show. And when I talk about costume changes, I don’t mean, like, wearing a different shirt. I mean getting into a full-blown fat suit complete with facial prosthetics in three minutes and then doing an entire song in that getup, or doing the last fifteen minutes of the show in Jedi robes.
The man’s voice is still on point, too. The set list was ridiculous; some of the songs were done medley-style where he’d do a verse or two and then move on, but he’s been doing albums since the early eighties and while there probably wasn’t literally a track or two from every single album, the show absolutely spanned his entire career. I discovered that there are Weird Al songs that I probably haven’t heard in thirty years that I still have memorized. I was singing along with songs and mentally trying to jump ahead to the chorus to figure out what the hell I was singing.
The polka was new, and there were at least a couple of songs that were unreleased. He covered the costume changes with video vignettes featuring every single time anyone on a TV show has ever mentioned him, random little clips of weirdness, and a bunch of junket-style interviews with celebrities where I’m pretty sure some were him being inserted into other interviews, some were him interviewing people who had no idea who he was, and some were piss-takes where everybody was in on the joke.
(I’m going through my MP3s right now. Nothing was played from Poodle Hat. No, that’s wrong, he did Ebay. Still looking.)
(Okay, I’m pretty sure the only album he didn’t do a song from was 1993’s Alapalooza. That’s it.)
Anyway, yeah. Best birthday ever, y’all.
View from my Hotel Window: Indianapolis, Weird Al edition
Kinda meh! But we’re here.
GUESS WHAT HAPPENS TOMORROW
I have been a huge fan of “Weird Al” Yankovic for my entire Goddamned life, and I will be seeing him in concert in Indianapolis tomorrow night, at the same venue I saw the Counting Crows at a couple of weeks ago. I would really appreciate it if the world would stop getting worse until the show is over. If the asteroid is coming, that’s fine, but don’t hit us until, like, 11:00 PM. The show should be over by then.
In other news, I’m really glad I’m going to be out of town tomorrow, because I keep getting into deeply stupid little spats online with deeply stupid people, and I need a fucking cleanse badly. I’m driving to Indy and back– my wife has the newer, nicer car at the moment, and so she has inherited long-distance driving responsibilities along with it– but I need to not be on my phone in the car, so I’m going to do the driving.
I was about to explain one of the spats, but Christ, you don’t need it. I was hoping to share some of the stupid with you so you could appreciate it from afar, but instead, I’m not going to make your world dumber. I’m a Goddamned saint.
In other other news, IU just cut my major, because the governor told them to, and I’ve spent a significant amount of my non-online time in the last 48 hours trying to decide how I’m going to handle it when they announce they’re building an ICE concentration camp in Elkhart. There was talk of one going in during the last time this pigfucker was in office, and it ended up not happening, but I’m pretty sure it’s inevitable now. This is gonna be the start of my supervillain arc, or at least my “tries to sabotage something, fails, and is arrested immediately” arc.
Mental note: delete that paragraph before doing anything.
So yeah. I hate it here. How are you?
Briefly: The concert
My son and I are having a movie day for Father’s Day, and I’m finally getting him to watch the Lord of the Rings movies, en route to eventually conning him into reading the books. So I’m going to make this quick; I assume you can find it within yourselves to forgive me.
Dinner was at the Bosphorous Cafe, and dinner made the trip worth it all by itself. The damn show could have been rained out and driving down just for Turkish food would have been completely fine. I had Lamb Mediterranean, along with a pile of other stuff. Absolutely delicious. And the first things I noticed when we walked in was a relative lack of white people and a table or two speaking Arabic, which is always a good sign in any restaurant featuring non-American cuisine.
We had really good seats:
That’s without any kind of zoom happening, and there were huge screens on either side of the stage, so … yeah, great seats. And we’ll be back in a few weeks for Weird Al, and we have better seats for that show.
The openers, the Gaslight Anthem, weren’t bad at all, and they played a deep Pearl Jam/Mother Love Bone cut called Chloe Dancer, which … well, I figured out who my people in the crowd were really fast.
The Crows hit the stage at 9:03. Here’s the set list, if you’re a fan. They did four songs from the new album, all of the ones I wanted to hear except for one– they didn’t play Bobby and the Rat Kings, which is one of my favorites. We got an acoustic set and a few piano songs over nearly a two hour show. Adam had to stop a song because he sneezed. And the crowd got really into the show:
Seventy-eleven thumbs up, would concert again.
Taking tonight off
And I listen for the voice inside my head
…nothing?
I’ll do this one myself