new blue
I am astounded, amazed, thrilled, giddy, celebratory, gulping for air with anticipation. I am also dismayed, stunned, slightly angry, and still reeling with shock and alarm.
The Blue Nile has released a new album.
This, to a small but devoted group of people, comes like the news of a once-a-decade celestial event, because the release of a Blue Nile album happens, indeed, once a decade, and is, indeed, celestial.
Dismaying: the album has been out for a year now.
How could this have happened? How could you not have told me? How, how.... how.... how could this have happened? I've spent the last year starved of the new Blue Nile release.
I was (and am) signed up on a Blue Nile fan newsgroup — "theparade" — but a couple of years ago I began to winnow out some of the extra mail I'd been getting, so I changed my options to web-only and then promptly forgot all about it: cancer happened, then Protagonist stuff, then engagement, then marriage, then catherine's health, ... and here we are, a year after High and I've not only never heard a note of it but I never even knew it existed. Naturally, theparade exploded in July and August of last year, but I never gave it a thought.
I've remedied that dire situation: ordered it last night, vastly discounted (some consolation!), and ordered along with it a single that contains their first released song from 1982-ish, I Love This Life, of which there were only a thousand copies made and of which I'd only heard a cruddy, scratchy, overcompressed mp3.
The whole thing started this weekend. Catherine and I drove to Houston and back for a gig and a party, and took along the iPod. I'd finally gotten around to putting some stuff on it, and in the process had found an old mp3 CD full of Blue Nile singles, rarities, covers, collaborations, concerts, bootlegs, and other assorted fanstuff. So, for the first time in a long time, I got to listen to some of my favorite pop music.
There's music that makes you feel, and then there's music that feels you. The Blue Nile has concocted a potent recipe for the latter: deceptively simple pop music formulas and textures, disarming lyrics, and Paul Buchanan's voice. He's the anti-Karen Carpenter: her rosy, sunny, warm voice gave depth to the Carpenters' often depressing lyrics; his battered, prematurely grey, cloudy-sky voice gives depth to the Nile's otherwise sugary lyrics.
And what lyrics they are: some of the most romantic musical lines I can think of belong to the Blue Nile.
"I love an oooordinary girl."
"Stay! I will understand you!"
"Come with me / Only looooove is alive!"
"When you comb your hair / I'll be standing there."
Buchanan observes, rhapsodizes, and lists like a Scottish Whitman. Cigarettes, neon lights, a radio playing in the alleyway (it's a love song), morning light, the jangle of St Stephen's bells, families falling apart, crowded streets, an empty bar: he loves whatever he looks on, and his looks go everywhere. He loves this life.
The trip to and from Houston was underscored with some music for which I'd been very thirsty, and some other things I'd never been too familiar with, such as their collaborations with Chris Botti, Edi Brickell, Annie Lennox, Ricky Lee Jones, and a million others, mostly original tunes by Buchanan, all bearing the distinctive Blue Nile touch.
So, after another party Sunday night, I started going back through my songs and correctly labelling the files and adding in all the missing information. I needed some info on a song that Eddi Reader had done with them. I looked up Blue Nile on Amazon. That's when my heart stopped. I saw the familiar field of blue (Hats), the familiar field of white with the horse (Peace At Last), the familiar spare square (A Walk Across the Rooftops), but topping them off was something unfamiliar: a rush of color and the word High. Could it be?
How could this have happened? But ah. I'm waiting. I'm laughing. Isn't it good to feel this way?
The Blue Nile has released a new album.
This, to a small but devoted group of people, comes like the news of a once-a-decade celestial event, because the release of a Blue Nile album happens, indeed, once a decade, and is, indeed, celestial.
Dismaying: the album has been out for a year now.
How could this have happened? How could you not have told me? How, how.... how.... how could this have happened? I've spent the last year starved of the new Blue Nile release.
I was (and am) signed up on a Blue Nile fan newsgroup — "theparade" — but a couple of years ago I began to winnow out some of the extra mail I'd been getting, so I changed my options to web-only and then promptly forgot all about it: cancer happened, then Protagonist stuff, then engagement, then marriage, then catherine's health, ... and here we are, a year after High and I've not only never heard a note of it but I never even knew it existed. Naturally, theparade exploded in July and August of last year, but I never gave it a thought.
I've remedied that dire situation: ordered it last night, vastly discounted (some consolation!), and ordered along with it a single that contains their first released song from 1982-ish, I Love This Life, of which there were only a thousand copies made and of which I'd only heard a cruddy, scratchy, overcompressed mp3.
The whole thing started this weekend. Catherine and I drove to Houston and back for a gig and a party, and took along the iPod. I'd finally gotten around to putting some stuff on it, and in the process had found an old mp3 CD full of Blue Nile singles, rarities, covers, collaborations, concerts, bootlegs, and other assorted fanstuff. So, for the first time in a long time, I got to listen to some of my favorite pop music.
There's music that makes you feel, and then there's music that feels you. The Blue Nile has concocted a potent recipe for the latter: deceptively simple pop music formulas and textures, disarming lyrics, and Paul Buchanan's voice. He's the anti-Karen Carpenter: her rosy, sunny, warm voice gave depth to the Carpenters' often depressing lyrics; his battered, prematurely grey, cloudy-sky voice gives depth to the Nile's otherwise sugary lyrics.
And what lyrics they are: some of the most romantic musical lines I can think of belong to the Blue Nile.
"I love an oooordinary girl."
"Stay! I will understand you!"
"Come with me / Only looooove is alive!"
"When you comb your hair / I'll be standing there."
Buchanan observes, rhapsodizes, and lists like a Scottish Whitman. Cigarettes, neon lights, a radio playing in the alleyway (it's a love song), morning light, the jangle of St Stephen's bells, families falling apart, crowded streets, an empty bar: he loves whatever he looks on, and his looks go everywhere. He loves this life.
The trip to and from Houston was underscored with some music for which I'd been very thirsty, and some other things I'd never been too familiar with, such as their collaborations with Chris Botti, Edi Brickell, Annie Lennox, Ricky Lee Jones, and a million others, mostly original tunes by Buchanan, all bearing the distinctive Blue Nile touch.
So, after another party Sunday night, I started going back through my songs and correctly labelling the files and adding in all the missing information. I needed some info on a song that Eddi Reader had done with them. I looked up Blue Nile on Amazon. That's when my heart stopped. I saw the familiar field of blue (Hats), the familiar field of white with the horse (Peace At Last), the familiar spare square (A Walk Across the Rooftops), but topping them off was something unfamiliar: a rush of color and the word High. Could it be?
How could this have happened? But ah. I'm waiting. I'm laughing. Isn't it good to feel this way?
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