"Baby, Now That I've Found You" by Alison Krauss and Union Station, 2002

I should say right up front that the more famous version of this song, by the Foundations in 1967, is way better. It's WAY better. I just learned this moment by reading a little of the band's entry on Wikipedia that the Foundations were not an American soul group, as I always assumed. In fact they formed in London. Somehow they managed to craft this perfect little pop-soul tune that to me has always sounded like a bridge between the doo-wop vocal groups of the previous decade and the rousing horn-blast soul to come. So yeah. I've always loved this song. On its own, though, it wouldn't make my Top 100. It took a pop bluegrass group and a toddler on my lap for that to happen.

When my son was about two, I used to sit down with him at the computer and bring up the songs I thought his toddler ears might especially enjoy, typically ones I liked a lot as a small child. (Not that I remember toddlerhood. But I do remember being four, five, et cetera, and I remember the songs I especially enjoyed. Most of them were from the 1950s and 1960s.) One song I tried out was "Baby, Now That I've Found You."

Upon clicking once on a link, though, I found myself watching the Alison Krauss version. I watched it once with Sam, mainly because he seemed a little interested, and then found the Foundations version. He didn't care at all for that one, but over the next few months, whenever he caught me sitting at the laptop, would say, "Baby song. Listen baby song."

I'm pretty slow, but I did figure out that "baby song" meant this song, and for about a year it was the boy's favorite and the one we'd listen to together most often. I think my son prefers Krauss's soothing and slow arrangement, making the song actually sound like a song sung to a baby, rather than to a lover.

"Ann Jane" by the Jayhawks, 1995

I'm not the biggest Jayhawks fan ever. I got very into the alt-country/No Depression sound right after college, though, particularly via Wilco's A.M. and Son Volt and those bands' respective leaders' shared history in Uncle Tupelo. Of the Jayhawks, I only knew "Blue," so I bought Tomorrow the Green Grass, and I liked it a lot. But it was not an everyday listen, and lots of the deeper cuts didn't leap out at me as fantastic right away. It took years. It took nearly two decades now for "Ann Jane" to present itself as my favorite track on the LP. This is odd to Jayhawks fans, who apparently regard the second half of Tomorrow the Green Grass as something of a throwaway. Apparently.

It's something of a dirge, with a persistent hi-hat that gives the song a marching feel, as if accompanying a funeral. I don't know exactly what the song is about, if I'm honest, but it feels to me like a big brother doing a shitty but touching job of comforting his little sister, though their father is dead or dying. If I'm wrong, I don't want to know. (I have a suspicion that the narrator here could be a man of God, or God Himself. I don't know. Like I said, don't wanna.)

I can't find a video for this track on YouTube, so here's a link to the MySpace version. You might have to watch a little ad first.

GUY IN REAL LIFE cover reveal

We'll take a short break from my Top-100 Songs posts (sorry those are taking so long, by the way; I had several deadlines this summer, and I had to make those my priority) to focus on my writing for a change.

If you follow my Twitter or like my Facebook, or if you keep up with the Epic Reads blog, you probably saw this already: the cover for GUY IN REAL LIFE (May, 2014 from Balzer+Bray) has been unveiled. If you missed it at any of those places, or if you just loved it so much and want to see it again, here it is!

First, the description from Epic Reads:

Lesh and Svetlana, two teens from St. Paul, Minnesota, are adrift in a sea of social coterie, desperate for something to change. When they crash into one another in a drunken bicycle accident at two am, they don’t yet know how close they are to finding it. For now, Svetlana is simply looking for a fifth member to legitimize the Central High School Gaming Club, and Lesh is looking to escape his being grounded for said drunkenness by entering, reluctantly, the world of online role playing games.

Lesh’s gaming life takes an interesting turn as, unable to figure out how to speak to Svetlana, he “becomes” her in-game. When real life and in-game life inevitably become entwined, Lesh and Svetlana both start to realize that the lines they draw to keep their lives in order are not so easy to maintain. Especially when you no longer understand why you drew them in the first place.

I love it to pieces. I hope you do too.

Coming up next, "Ann Jane" by the Jayhawks. . . .

"And Then She Stopped" by Dizzy Gillespie, 1965

Choosing a favorite trumpet player is tricky business, especially probably for a trumpet player. For most of my high school years as a player, I would have said Miles Davis, despite the fact that I often had trouble listening to him. I suppose I thought Miles, like much jazz and like all the new drinks I was trying at the time, was an acquired taste. Perhaps he is; I certainly like him more now than I did then. However, choosing him as a favorite was dishonest and an affectation. I discovered Clifford Brown my first year of college, and I loved his tone and his solo style and his pace, and I was like, "Ohhhh. This is way better."

I still think that about Clifford Brown, but in recent years I've remember how much I loved Dizzy's music even before I affectedly chose Miles Davis. (There was a brief period in which I worshipped Wynton Marsalis, for his exquisite tone and technical ability, and for his willingness to move, and skill at moving, from jazz to classical and back effortlessly. But he was rarely any fun.) I'd abandoned Dizzy as a fan probably because I knew he flared his cheeks, something every novice trumpet player is taught not to do. Also he kept showing up on the Cosby Show, which didn't seem disdainful of popular culture to a degree sufficient for a jazz musician. Miles Davis wouldn't even look at the audience, never mind appear on a sitcom.

Much in the way we can often as adults return to childhood favorites in movies and books, I returned to Dizzy only recently. Dizzy Gillespie composed and performed music that possessed all the qualities of bebop that I loved then and now. Maybe especially the Afro-Cuban stuff from the 40s, 50s, and 60s, like "Manteca" and "A Night in Tunisia" (I could just as easily have included either of those two on this list) and this piece, "And Then She Stopped," Dizzy's music had the wit and technical showmanship of most great jazz, but it was also eminently danceable and possessed a kind of musical humor. Jazz often cracks jokes, usually with brief musical allusions during solos, but I mean something more than that--Dizzy's compositions are inherently good natured and fun. Dizzy also played in the highest register of the instrument to a point that often seems a little absurd, setting off tiny musical fireworks. I love that.

A little of all of this is apparent in the video herewith, from a live performance of "And Then She Stopped" from 1965, the year of its initial release.

"Ana Ng" by They Might Be Giants, 1988

This song is particularly special to me for two reasons.

1) They Might Be Giants are distinct among bands that I like a lot, and not just because they're such freaky weirdos: I first liked them by seeing them live. When they toured in 1992 (I think) to promote Apollo 18, I had never heard them. Still, they came to SUNY Binghamton, where  I was a freshman, and lots of my friends were going. The show was right in the student union. Of course I went. And it was fantastic. I can't remember another time I went to see a band live whom I'd never seen or heard before and fell so thoroughly in love. I in particular loved this song, which had me (and everyone else) bouncing around the room like crazy people.

2) Like a lot of my favorite songs,"Ana Ng" is a perfect little self-contained story, though a weird one, I'll grant you. In this case, our narrator is in love with a woman who leaves clear on the other side of the planet, and he's never met her. Maybe they're pen pals, but I prefer to think it's some other kind of connection that is conceivably in the narrator's imagination. That idea, added with the lines "Who was at the Dupont Pavillion? Why was the bench still warm? Who had been there?" inspired me to take on perhaps the most challenging book idea I've ever had. I'll probably never finish it.

"Alison" by Elvis Costello, 1977

There aren't all that many Elvis C. songs more famous than "Alison," his very first single, recorded even pre-Attractions. I guess "Pump It Up" gets more radio play. Maybe "Radio Radio" and "Watching the Detectives" come close. And now and then he records something new, which gets a lot of airplay but then vanishes in to obscurity, where frankly it probably belongs. (Case in point, this new one with the Roots. I think it's horrible.) I'm not actually sure "Alison" is the Elvis song I'd call the best. Not by a long shot. "Beyond Belief." "Shipbuilding." "Big Sister's Clothes." But they didn't make my list. Who can explain these things?

But back to "Alison." I had a dear friend during and after high school by the same name, with that extra common "l," and often, when I was bored, I'd call her up and sing this song into her answering machine. (Sometimes I'd sing "Alison's Starting to Happen" by the Lemonheads, but that didn't make the top-100 list.) When I think about it now--the song, that is--it makes me a bit uncomfortable, but it fits right in with Elvis and his Angry Young Man aesthetic: there's something vaguely misogynistic about these lyrics. While the narrator claims his aim is true, and seems to love Alison, he also wishes she would just shut her silly mouth. He also casts a dark eye on her former loves in a manner not entirely becoming, I'd imagine, to a woman being wooed.

Still it's a fine and brief pop song, deceptively simple, with really strong lyrics.

Next time, another love song, sort of, and a whole lot weirder. Think 1964 World's Fair.

"There's a New Girl in Town" by Linda Lavin, 1976

I don't even know what to say about this song, the third* song--alphabetically--on my Top-100 Songs list, the theme to the CBS sitcom that ran from 1976 till 1985, Alice.

My mom watched it for a few of those year. I remember that. I watched it with her a handful of times. We all remember "Kiss my grits!", right?

But I sure didn't remember (or particularly care about) the theme song. Then the internet and an explosion of mp3s turned up. I think it was in around the year 2002 that I downloaded from some website of probably ill repute a huge collection of TV theme songs. A few stood up for nostalgic reasons--like Silver Spoons, the theme of which should probably be on this list too but as of right now isn't; Alf, a show so miserably bad that I can hardly believe I watched every episode; Family Ties and Growing Pains, both with theme songs that have truly stood the test of time but still sound remarkably of their time, if that's possible--but Alice's theme stood out by sounding nothing at all like a TV theme, at least to my ears.

Linda Lavin, the show's star, sings the theme, which is an uptempo bluesy thing with a country tinge and lyrics aiming right at the heart of 1970s feminism. (The sitcom was based on the film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, which I've never seen but I suppose I should one of these days.)

*In my iTunes, this song is listed as "Alice," rather than as "There's a New Girl in Town." That's why it's third on the list. Forgive me!

"Alarm Call" by Bjork, 1998

In 1993, a handful of CDs rotated in and out of my CD player. Their jewel case booklets decorated my dorm room's door. They were Hey Babe. They were Red Heaven. They were Blind. They were Star. They were Last Splash. They were Copacetic.

And they were Life's Too Good.

I loved this record. My sophomore year roommate has told me that, to this day, several of the CDs I put on repeat during my marathon afternoon naps/depressive states still bring him down, reminding him of the dark and musty room. Perhaps the Breeders, though I think he's a fan. Probably Belly. Definitely the Throwing Muses. But I cannot imagine that the nordic pop madness of the Sugarcubes could possibly bring him down. Bjork's infectious pixie voice and Einar Orn's mad rantings, along with a sound so exotic that compared to the distinctly American music I normally listened to, made this record and this band seem to soar above all the rest like heat lightning. Sure, it was already five years old by 1993. But it was new to me, and I spent hours on end with the CD on repeat, drifting in and out of NyQuil hazes and dreaming in Icelandic.

I'll probably say more about this album later, specifically "Delicious Demon," since it too is on the Top-100 List.

But in 1993, something else important happened, something I was really looking forward to: Bjork's Debut.

I hated it. HATED it. Where her voice used to bring girlish psychedelia to a frenetic new wave sound, here it was, on the first single "Human Behaviour," accompanied by an obnoxious techno--a dirty word among my ilk in 1993--tympani's BOOM BOOM and a video so bizarre that we'd often switch off 120 Minutes when it popped up, which it did quite often those first few weeks. I was done with Bjork--besides listening to Life's Too Good, which I still did.

So we fast forward. We fast forward to the new millennium, in fact, and we meet Vespertine through a friend at work. This was my second entree to Bjork and her genius. Yeah, I said it. Genius. Today I consider her one of the most original and groundbreaking artists in music. Vespertine became my new Life's Too Good in many ways. I let this album, full of electric clicks and unidentifiable sounds, somehow woven together to create some of the most beautiful and unusual music I'd ever heard, wash over me for weeks. During those weeks, I looked backwards--at Debut and Selmasongs, the soundtrack to a movie I'd loved, Post, full of amazing songs that nearly made the Top-100 as well, and finally Homogenic.

I loved them all, though probably not as much as Vespertine's magical beauty. Last year, though, as I worked through draft after draft of a new novel, a protagonist of which is a girl verily obsessed with Bjork's music, I found myself and the character returning to "Alarm Call." It was my character's ring tone; it became my ring tone. It's a song about humanity and joy, about finding happiness in music and by merely enjoying life, as if it's very simple. The song--and the character in the novel--would say it is very simple. A radio. Good batteries. A joyous tune: Free the whole human race from suffering.

Also it's got that "Beep beep. Beep beep. Beep. Beep beep. B-b-b-beep beep" thing. I car-dance to this one.

"A Sunday Kind of Love" by Etta James, 1961

The first on the Top-101 List, in alphabetical order, is this standard song as performed (most famously) by Etta James.

I'll be totally up front: before a certain commercial that played incessantly in the year 2003 or so (I think it was for men's pants), the only Etta James tune I'd have known was her other perennial favorite, "At Last." But Beth and I spent a tremendous amount of time in 2003 watching TV. We watched all of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We watched Sex and the City. We also watched Trading Spaces till our eyes bled. I'm assuming TLC ran the pants commercial a lot. "A Sunday Kind of Love" became one of our favorite songs, and probably our first "our" song. We connected with the lyrics--with this idea of the right, relaxed, long-term kind of love--so well, that when we got married in 2006, it was our first-dance song.

My 100 (and one) Favorite Songs of All Time

If you're my Facebook friend, you might have noticed, for much of the months of April, May, and June of this year, I was obsessing over a list of my own creation: My Favorite Songs of All Time.

These are not the best songs of all time. In fact, I consider a lot of my personal favorite songs to be, well, not very good. Several of my favorite bands (like Helmet and Hum) didn't make the list at all.

I went through my iTunes and my memory, adding songs as I went. At one point the list was over 300 songs. It took a good long while for me to narrow that down to a list close enough to 100 (104, to be precise) that I felt it was as tidy a list as I could make. I shared it on Facebook on June 15.

I've made a few changes to the list since then, removing a song or two, adding a song or two. (I knew it was time to remove something if, while listening to the playlist I made of these songs, I tended to skip a certain song. For several weeks, I listened to only this playlist, so this was by no means an easy test to pass. The songs that remain on the list have play counts now in the triple digits in the last couple of months alone, and I'm still not sick of them somehow.) The list now stands at 101 songs.

Over the next few months, I intend to blog as often as I find the time on each song from the list. But for today, I'll share a few statistics. Of the 101 songs on the list as it stands now (for it's never really final):

43 songs feature a woman (or girl) on lead vocals
2 songs have no vocals at all
20 songs have at least one guitar solo
5 songs have three guitar solos
7 songs feature a steel guitar
6 songs have no discernible guitar playing at all
10 songs are shorter than 2:30
2 songs are longer than 6:00
1 song won a Grammy
1 song has me singing back-up vocals

So watch this space for the complete and final (for now) list, day by day (when I have time). 

HAUNTED AT 17

Fantastic fellow YA author Nova Ren Suma is celebrating the imminent release of her new novel 17 & GONE this week, and so has asked any number of her writerly friends to . . .  well, let’s let her tell us. She explains.

If Nova had asked what haunted me at 13, you’d get a ghost story. It would feature my late grandfather visiting me during my dreams and my waking hours, sometimes carrying his own head, usually smiling, and once looking at me as he stood above the bed with such scorn and disappointment that I closed my eyes and screamed until he was gone.

If Nova had asked what haunted me at 4, you’d get a story about a funny-smelling basement, a short-lived daycare center, and vague shadows on the faces of strange children and stranger adults.

But Nova asked what haunted me at 17, and there’s nothing vulgar or supernatural about it. At 17 I was haunted all day, every day. Fear crawled over every inch of body, inside and out, like tiny spiders tickling my soul, nibbling at my skin, devouring my heart.

Steve at 17

I might be overstating it, but only a little, and apologies for how emo we got there in the last paragraph for a minute. The point is, I wasn’t haunted by ghosts, and I wasn’t haunted by stranger-danger. I wasn’t haunted by anything so definable and tangible (is a ghost tangible? Grandpa seemed tangible) and defeatable. I was haunted instead by an impossible future.

This haunts everyone at 17, I suppose—anyway everyone I knew at 17, I realize now. It’s a rare and special adolescent who sees the mystery of adulthood and freedom and self-reliance and responsibility looming like the exit in a ¼ mile on the LIE that you have to get into the right lane for right now, and is not overcome with constant low-level anxiety and downright fear. I suppose this is why I find young adult fiction so compelling: it’s the time in our lives that seems so crucial, so particularly relevant, to what kind of child we’ve been, to what kind of adult we’ll become, to how we’ll turn our backs on those things and people that don’t fit our ideas about life and goodness, and how we’ll overcome the ones that stand in our way. The freedom of majority age and leaving home brings with it more than non-curfew and legally purchased cigarettes and voting and the open road and a place of our own; it also brings a new form of socialization, in which the walls of our school and the people within are no longer our only recourse. We move freely in the world, and we associate with whomever we like.

It’s exciting, of course, but it’s also terrifying. The rules will change. They’ll be malleable and unclear for many years—more years than we ever imagined as we grew up, watching our parents engage in this world beyond school. People often say, “If I only knew then what I know now,” the implication being that their younger days would have been easier and more easily navigable with the wisdom of their later years. Short of winning lottery numbers, though, I disagree. If I’d known at 17 what I know now—about how little guidance we really have as adults, how unclear it is whether we’re really adults at all and why, about the vagueness of expectations placed on us—I’d have been positively terrified and frozen.
So here's the irony. As teens, my friends and I fought back the fear with two substances, for the most part, as often as we could get away with it. We drank on weekends, smoked on weekdays and weeknights, and kept ourselves as comfortably numb as we could. But these things did nothing to slow the onset of the future; that's always coming at you, no matter what you do. No, these things instead removed the only thing we actually had, the only thing we could actually take part in, affect, and to some degree control: the present.

Yeah, so. Happy release day, 17 & GONE!

My new jam

This Swedish pop tune is my new favorite song.

New Year's Resignations

I haven't blogged in over a year, with the exception of a Wordle of GUY IN REAL LIFE, but I can think of no better day to dust off the EXILE than today: New Year's Eve day. The day of resolutions.

As I've done in the past, I will now list several accomplishments for 2013. However, mixed in with the aspirations will be easy or crappy things. This makes it more likely that I'll get some of them done.

1. Finish my three (yes, three) young adult WIPs. (Aspirational)
2. Have a beer now and then. (Easy)
3. Get on the elliptical at least 3 times a week till spring. (Aspirational)
4. Level that Pandaren hunter. (Crappy)
5. Completely and utterly fail at parenting. (Easy)
6. Abandon one of the WIPs in #1. (Crappy)
7. Be late with most of my freelance work. (Crappy)
8. Learn canning and make lots of tomato sauce when the tomatoes are ripe. (Easy . . . ?)
9. Bike more than drive. (Aspirational)
10. Create an illustration portfolio. (Aspirational)

So there's that done. I'll be back in a year or so to check on this. I guess.

Finished a manuscript.

Made a Wordle.


I cheated and took out "like," but I can't understand why "jelly" isn't bigger.

This day is totally humped.

It’s Wednesday. The work-a-day, rat-race, Office Space world calls it “hump day.” That’s always sounded vaguely (or not vaguely) vulgar to me. Then again, I’m a tremendous prude. For me, it’s not hump day. In fact, most weeks I think of Wednesday and Thursday as my weekend, as that’s when the boy goes to pre-school, and I can get stuff done around the house and get a fair amount of writing done as well. They’re often excellent days.

Today, though, is a crappy hump day, by most indicators. The boy was anguished at pre-school drop-off this morning, which puts a steaming pile of dung on my whole morning. Weather wise, there’s no sun. It’s gray and raining. This is never good for my soul, though as a teen and twenty-something I think I liked to pretend I was the type to really get my jollies on a day like this. And finally, I just learned my car—which went in a for a simple oil change—needs about a grand worth of work.

So! Here’s what’s going to get me through the afternoon:

1. I wrote my post for Boys Don’t Read. Two days early.

2. Any day now, I will get an email telling my Star Wars: The Old Republic account is active, and I can start playing the new MMO. I was in the beta testing on this one, and I can tell you: it’s excellent. If you’re a Bioware fan, this will not disappoint. (If you haven’t liked Bioware, you won’t like this either, I think.)

3. The weather is by miles preferable to the typical December day around here, which would have a foot of snow already on the ground, bone-chilling cold and wind, and probably another foot of snow falling.

4. The car. This might be the nail in its coffin. And that means I’ll get a new car. Which sounds fun!

Giving thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving. If you’re reading this on Turkey Day itself, you’re probably taking a moment away from the festivities . . . and away from your family. Hell, I hope like crazy that you’re also a blogger and writing an entry right now so I have something to read when I take my next break from the family.

But it is Thanksgiving, and down there someplace it is a holiday that’s meant to be about something more than turkey and stuffing, and more than pilgrims and natives, and more than the Lions and the Cowboys. It’s about remembering what we’re thankful for, and that—for most of us—includes family.

For some of us—even if we’re thankful for family—family might not be there for us. That’s why there are groups like YouthLinkMN. And that’s why I’m excited about the Brooklyn, Burning/#FridayReads promotion and fundraising we’re holding through the end of the year.

The details are here, but I want to add this: even if B,B ain’t your Friday Read—even if you’ve read it already, or won't read it till 2015, or never plan to read it—if you’ve got a photo of you holding the book, or holding your e-reader with B,B loaded, you can tweet that with the #FridayReads hashtag, and you’ll (just like that!) earn ten bucks for YouthLinkMN.

It’s an important group, doing important work, especially as we enter the holiday season—and with it, the cold long Minnesota winter. We've raised a little already, but I'd really like to hit our donation maximum of $1000. Please help out. There are a few Fridays left in 2011!

#FridayReads and YouthLink fundraiser

ETA: Thanks to Bryan Bliss, the donation per #FridayReads tweet is now TEN DOLLARS, which makes the maximum give a full thousand dollars.

I'm dusting off the blog. This is important.

According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, "more than half of the youth interviewed during shelter stays reported that their parents either told them to leave or knew they were leaving and did not care" (http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/youth.html). Among homeless youth, LGBTQ youths are disproportionately represented. It's not a great stretch to assume that these kids sexuality and their parents' inability to accept and approve is the core of the problem.

That's from the author's note in Brooklyn, Burning.

This is YouthLink. Read their "about" page, and read about their intervention services. They offer a place to hang out, help with education and career, and even a place to live.

And here's the point: beginning this Friday, and continuing on all Fridays right up till December 23, the Friday before Christmas, I'll be keeping a close eye on #FridayReads. For every #FridayReads for Brooklyn, Burning, I'll donate five dollars to YouthLink*. I'll also encourage readers to do the same, either by matching my five bucks, or by donating whatever you can.

Thanks. Please help spread the word.

*Details: Tweet must be on a Friday between 9/23/2011 and 12/23/2011, and must include the hashtag #fridayreads and my Twitter handle @sbrezenoff, and must include a photo of tweeter holding a copy of Brooklyn, Burning. It can totally be a library copy, so no purchase necessary. One donation per tweeter. Also, my limit is $500, because I am not a wealthy man.

Two stars.

In today's high-speed, Twittery world, this is undoubtedly old news, but I wanted a good forum to quote from the two starred reviews Brooklyn, Burning has received in the last couple of weeks.

From Publishers Weekly: "For readers with little use for labels, it's an intimate yet wonderfully open rock ‘n' roll love story."

And from Kirkus: "A lyrical, understated punk-kid love song to Brooklyn and to chosen family" and "Overall, the tone is as raw, down-to-earth and transcendent as the music Scout and Kid ultimately make together."

The full text of the Kirkus review will be on their site in the next few weeks, closer to the official release date.

Wasted youth.

A man whom I hardly know put a photo on the internet that depressed me deeply.

Well, that's a little misleading. The man in question was a member of my high school graduating class (Roslyn High School, 1992; go Hilltoppers! Err, Bulldogs!*), and though we weren't in quite the same social circle in our school daze, we did have some friends in common. We were also unflichingly of the left. I remember fondly one time in particular in Economics class that we bombarded our teacher with leftist arguments while she tried to teach the roots of capitalism in America. Poor lady.

The Dead at their most relevant

Anyway, the point is if there is one realm in which this boy (now gentleman) and I didn't see eye to eye, it was music. That's because I spent the years from 1988 till 1992 (give or take) interested almost exclusively in music recorded between 1967 (say, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, or the Grateful Dead's eponymous debut) and--well, as long as the Dead recorded it, there was really no end date. I wore Pink Floyd shirts throughout middle school. I wore Jethro Tull shirts, Led Zeppelin, and of course tie-dye after tie-dye. There was a never-ending stream of Dead shirts.

The Dead at their least relevant, when I saw them eleven times

This other boy (the one who recently posted a photo; try to keep up) was what I would have called New Wave. I think that's appropriate. NIN leather jacket. Jane's Addicition. Depeche Mode. The Cure. All that sort of thing. It was very of the now (then), without being Top 40. Keep in mind most of the years in question are 1991 or earlier, and as we all know, 1991 is the year punk broke. So in 1992, when I finally began to come around to my own generation's music, the rest of the country was coming around too.

The Blake Babies, my favorite band (and genuinely of my own generation) when I was 19 and 20 or so, by which time they had recently broken up. Sad face

The late '80s and early '90s were something of a renaissance of Classic Rock, perhaps. I think some of us were--in our deluded minds--rebelling against an over-produced sound that seemed to dominate the contemporary music. Turns out, that was a pretty shallow attitude, which is ironic, because we thought we were being deep, I assure you.

So what was the picture he posted? A collage of his collected ticket stubs from circa 1990. They were from some great bands, most of which no longer exist. If I were to create a similar collage from that era, it would be 90% Grateful Dead stubs, and here's where the depression comes in. By obsessing over music from the past--some have called it "our parent's music"; to be fair, not the case, since my parents were jazz and Broadway fans--I ignored (and therefore forever missed) the music of my own generation. I can listen to it now, and I do, but I'll always know I wasn't a part of it, during its heyday, and its era of creation and greatest relevance.

This is probably much ado about nothing. If you haven't noticed, I tend to do that. Now I better connect it to young adult literature. Shouldn't be a problem, because in a lot of YA lit (and teen movies, actually), protagonists focus on nostalgia culture. In King Dork and The House of Tomorrow**, music-obsessed characters hold the progenitors of punk and New Wave up on high, and seem to think nothing of their contemporary music. (You'll often find the same tendency when it comes to film teens.)

Maybe it's a symptom of writing for people twenty years younger, but is it a problem? Does the story lose verisimilitude if the main characters don't adhere to their own generation's art? Of course not. Though most of my friends didn't share my extreme Deadication, we all had our "thing": one of us was big into be-bop and Kerouac; another stuck with Tull; another Led Zep; and another adored Ronald Reagan. Don't ask.

The point is, do teens really look in the way-back machine for cultural icons? Of course, and teen lit doesn't lose any believability by doing the same. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to shake the protagonist who wants to join the Rat Pack (or nowadays, even the Brat Pack), or form the next Ramones, or talk like Clark Gable, or dance like Betty Hutton, and shouting, "Live in the now, dammit! It won't be now very long!" Then I'd walk off grumbling, "Youth is wasted on the young."

I must be getting old.

*Some teams were the Hilltoppers (like track), and some were the Bulldogs (like football). Who knows.

**The House of Tomorrow was not marketed as a YA novel, but it is one. If you like realistic YA, go read it. Right now. Go. Why are you still sitting there?