I have a family of people I stick close to when I'm in Lower Alabama, whose hub is a record store in Daphne, Bay Sound, run by a fella named Billy Francis. Two of his employees and my dearest friends have been May Laughton and Camilla Aiken, the latter of whom has started her own label (tallulah records) and puts out my records.
Camilla loves to listen to music the same way I do. She's one of the only people I've ever met who seems to get zapped the same way I do by music. She kinda reminds me of Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront.
We don't have the same taste although we have a bunch of favorites in common. But she likes a lot of stuff that gives me diabetes, over-sweet power pop. This would be typified by the emasculated likes of Teenage Fanclub, lead by some bitch with the temerity to call himself Norman Blake. We all know who the real Norman Blake is.
I know, I know. I'm being mean. But she always asks me "How can you not like ________?!" (insert the name of fluffy pop group), and I'm going to give you a condensed explanation.
I don't trust happy fluffy pop songs, unless they're sung by someone who I know I can believe. Cynical hipsters don't do it for me. I wanna hear from the kinda guy who is saving up from his minimum wage job to buy a ring for his girlfriend. Here's one I always believe:
This is my kind of music. I like to hear people who haven't had their head kicked in by bad love, broken promises, or fate in a vindictive mood. Very few people can hold onto this and express it in an honest way. Jonathan Richman leaps to mind.
I generally don't believe in that summer feeling on the island of love. I mean, I believe in love, but I don't generally believe in it the way popular songs express it, or in that contrived rock'n'roll way that self-described rock'n'rollers... do everything in our image-savvy (re: post-1966) lives.
I want to think of love pretty much the way it's expressed here. I love this song, and I wish it was like this.
It ain't. I've been married and divorced. I've been hurt by people I've put my faith in. I've made bad calls. I don't think of love as the way to cure all the ills of a mean-spirited world. The older I get, the more I realize true love -- that elusive grail -- is more like this:
If you find this, hang on for all you'll ever be worth.
