Humanizing The Vacuum

Thanks to my readers. I’m glad the year’s over. I can’t think of a better summary — what I’m leaving, what the next twelve months augur — than the embedded song.

The relatively sane people who don’t dedicate themselves to criticism must assume we’re born having listened to, watched, and read everything. The reality is more banal: we’re constantly playing catch-up. I don’t think we do a good enough job reminding our readers about discovering older stuff that we overlooked or for which we once had no sympathy.

Here’s a couple of  “classic” artists I finally paid attention to this year:

Harry Nilsson. Other than “Coconut,” “Jump Into the Fire,” and Mariah Carey’s cover of “Without You,” I hadn’t heard a note of the Beatles’ favorite hellion until I said the hell with it and bought Nilsson Schmilsson and Son of Schmilsson in rapid succession a couple of months ago. Tunes and attitude I expected and got; what grabbed my collar was Nilsson’s voice, a protean thing that could howl (“Jump Into the Fire,” “You’re Breakin’ My Heart”) and moan (“Down”) with a precision I associate with another piano-playing weirdo named Kate Bush. As a fan of aesthetic dissolution, I now need recommendations for the tread-carefully post-Pussycats records. Anyone?

Merle Haggard. Same story. 2006′s superlative one-disc compilation Hag: The Best of Merle Haggard held my appetite for a few years, until a combination of guilt and loving Jason Fine’s “The Fighter: The Life & Times of Merle Haggard” in a 2009 issue of Rolling Stone led me to Keep Movin’ On, Serving 190 Proof, Big City, Back to the Barrooms, and If I Could Only Fly. Plenty of bathos, self-righteousness, and failed attempts to prick one’s seriousness, and also fantastic songs sung by a musician whose voice has aged better than Willie’s — enough to justify my reviewing with confidence this year’s I Am What I Am, an excellent minor work.