Joe Bonomo's Blog, page 12

What else can I do

I listen to music in some form or another every day, and at times all that I want—all that I need—is a groove. As much as an exquisite melody, a surprising bridge, and chord- and key-changes can send me, sometimes sheer propulsion is enough.

The Rugbys formed in Louisville, Kentucky in the mid 1960s out of the remnants of a couple of other local bands, that regional Big Bang that confounds astronomers by happening in small towns everywhere. Their debut single, a cover of Sir Douglas Quintet’s “Y...

Tell it how you like

We’re a dozen or so years away from the release of ¡Uno!, Dos!, and Tré!, Green Day’s impulsive trio of albums that managed to rope in thirty galloping songs. Band members Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool raved about the albums during promotion, as you do, but consider it cooly these days. Sadly, the era is best remembered for Armstrong’s implosion at the I Heart Radio Music Festival on September 21, 2012 and his subsequent stay in rehab. Armstrong has written about his alcohol and...

Strange arrivals

Alphabet City, NYC

On a recent visit to Maryland to hang with family I swung by the offices of WMUC, the radio station at the University of Maryland where I had a show for three and a half years as an undergraduate. The joint looked pretty much the same, startlingly and pleasingly so, and unsurprisingly I’ve had some bands and tunes from that era rolling in my head ever since.

Tav Falco is an artist who I’ve never fully connected with, which to me feels appropriate given his cultivated air of myst...

The many shapes of sacredness

I’m generally adverse to Christmas music. There are plenty of reasons for this, yet writing about my low tolerance for seasonal music seems annoying, a churlish gesture in this month with no point but to be contrarian. Viva all who crank the Yuletide tunes!

The other night, Amy and I were in the car while choring when on a whim she pulled up a video of “O Holy Night” performed by The Choir of King's College, in Cambridge. It’s her favorite Christmas song, and I love it, too. The song’s history is...

The Lifespan of a Fact

[SPOILERS BELOW]

How in the hell are they going to do this?

Variations of that question have bounced around in my head since I first learned of the theatrical adaptation of John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact, a book I admire and have been teaching for years (and wrote a bit about here.) The play, written by Gordon Farrell, Jeremy Kareken, and David Murrell, opened on Broadway in 2018 featuring Daniel Radcliffe, Bobby Cannavale, and Cherry Jones. I never saw a performance on that...

Margo Price Macro Doses

In my latest for The Normal School l take a deep dive into Margo Price's two new albums, Strays and Strays II, beautiful, moving records that originated in and blossomed from Price's mushroom trips and her reckoning with new realities.

You can read it here. My Normal School music essays archive is here.

Photo by Alysse Gafkjen

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He's so respectable

(In which I promise to avoid the phrase “ancient art of weaving.”)

Essayist Phillip Lopate champions self-skepticism as a crucial element in writing. From E.M. Cioran, Lopate borrowed the term “thinking against oneself,” something that he acknowledged to Melissa Giannini is “a powerful part of the [essay] form. That you don’t just assert; you think, ‘yes, but,’ or ‘okay, okay, we know that. What is there to be said against it?’” I think I know the answer to the question I’ve posed in my subtitle....

A boy like me

Gianni Morandi

In 1966, the popular Italian singer Gianni Morandi released the single “C’era un ragazzo che come me amava i Beatles e i Rolling Stones,” translated as “There was a Boy like Me who Loved the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.” The story of the celebrated song coming into being is a familiar one of happenstance and luck. At the Italian Song website, Sarah Annunziato has translated Morandi’s tale of the song’s origins which he’d posted to Facebook in 2013. “It was the summer of 1966, wh...

Wordless...

Tommy Keene at Boot & Saddle, Philadelphia PA, 2015. Photo by Chris Sikich. Used by permission.

I’m recalling a conversation in the mid-1980s with a friend, a member of a local band in Washington D.C., who was lamenting the fact that local star Tommy Keene wasn’t being given proper credit for his terrific guitar playing, which many placed third among Keene’s gifts behind his songwriting and singing. Onstage, his playing felt primarily rhythmic, despite his occasional searing solos, in service to ...

All their little plans and schemes

Time is a perpetual motion machine. Yet consider, also, its alarming elasticity. With the Beatles’ release of “Now and Then,” we’re as far from “Free As A Bird” now as “Free As A Bird” was from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And an analogy suggests itself: “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love” are to Please Please Me as “Now and Then” is to Abbey Road. The gusts of Zeitgeists that have blown through all of those years and time- and date-stamped eras, the equivalent for humankind of the pencil...