I've introduced my mother to a few bands that she has really liked. They include The Clientele, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and, at least for this one car ride just after my father died, she enjoyed Luna.
When I return home to visit Mom, I tend to listen to albums I hadn't heard in a while. When I moved out or at different times when I visited, I used to leave CDs, mostly copies of some of the music I listened to in the late '90s and early 2000s.
I listened to a Stereolab album as I drove between my mother's temporary home and the mortuary where Dad's funeral was held. On this afternoon in early November, Mom and I would listen to Luna as we were on the road.
We were driving from the home she moved to temporarily while my father was near the end of his life to their home that they'd lived in for the previous 25 or so years. The houses were about an hour's drive apart.
Even though Dad was gone, it didn’t quite feel real. It seemed like he might still come back, like he was just around the corner. We were driving on the same roads we had travelled multiple times with him. And about midway through the ride, we stopped at a McDonald's, just as we had many times with Dad. He always liked meals with few sauces and no cheese, which often meant just the basic hamburger, not a Big Mac or Quarter Pounder, and a small fry. Mom and I had that same meal.
I'd brought Luna's Penthouse as one of the albums to listen to on our ride. That album took me back to living in New York City. I was there briefly for a university internship and had very little money. I'd regularly go to record stores like HMV or Virgin Records, both of which had headphone stations where shoppers used to listen to new albums. I listened to Luna's Penthouse for the first time there. I loved the song at the heart of the record, "23 Minutes in Brussels," which was a graceful mini-epic that vaguely reminded me of the Velvet Underground.
The album's cover photo of the Chrysler Building -- which I kind of approximated for my music card -- cemented the New York connection. (There's also a great write-up here about the album's art.)
A few years later, when I could afford to buy albums, I picked Penthouse on CD at the suggestion of a pen-pal friend. "You'll love it," she wrote. "It's better than the songs I sent on those old mix tapes."
She was right. I loved Penthouse then, and I still enjoy it today. The first song, "Chinatown," is wonderful and, like the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane," it contains one of my favourite lyrics in all of music. (Well, the "Sweet Jane" lyric isn't really a lyric so much as the way Lou Reed delivers the lyric, all skill and precision.)
In "Chinatown," Luna's singer and primary songwriter, Dean Wareham, describes a friend whose playboy lifestyle seems to consist of fancy cocktails and late nights, zooming around in taxicabs, hopping from club to bar in Chinatown and presumably other Manhattan neighbourhoods. This same friend is also elusive, having ditched Wareham and their friends for some unspecified reason. It struck me at the time as a sophisticated problem that I would've enjoyed, being in my 20s or 30s and not being able to keep up with friends who moved too fast.
The lyric in "Chinatown" that I love concerns Wareham addressing his friend:
You run around, chasin' girlies
You're late to work
and you go home earlies
I’ve always loved the silly rhyme of 'girlies' and 'earlies', something I later learned is called a 'forced rhyme' or an 'eye rhyme.' Whatever it's called, as we resumed our ride on that chilly autumn day, I put Penthouse into the car's CD player as we rolled out of the McDonald's parking lot, back on the small rural route that led to my parents' home.
The first few notes of "Chinatown" began within a few seconds, and as the song's instrumental beginning took hold, my mother said, "I like this."
"It's good," I said. "I'll let you know when the funny lyric is coming up."
Several seconds later, I pointed towards the CD player in the dashboard, as the lyric was about to arrive. Just as Wareham sang silly rhyme, my mother, who has always loved puzzling and puns and wordplay, laughed at the playful lyric, and we drove along the highway.
