I'm delighted that, after all this time, I still discover songs and albums Susan loved before we were dating. Everything but the Girl's first record, 1984's Eden, was a big one for her at a certain time in her life. The opening track, and fairly big single, "Each and Every One" sounds like a breakup song. But Tracey Thorn revealed in 2023 that it was about something else:
I’d been in the Marine Girls. We were three naive school girls making indie music, and we got a bit more attention than we might have expected. We got written about in the music press, but often in a patronizing tone of voice. When I got a year or so older, I looked at it and thought, “I used to think that was a compliment, but actually it’s quite patronizing.” I expressed those feelings in a slightly coded way in “Each and Every One,” so people have always interpreted it as a love song. It sounds like I’m singing to an annoying boyfriend or something. And it doesn’t matter, in a way—what comes through is a sentiment of, “I don’t like being told what to do. I don’t like to be put in my place.”
The Sheep Detectives comes out on Mother's Day weekend, and it's an ideal film to see with your mom and/or family. Sweet and silly, it's a whodunit featuring talking sheep and dimwitted humans (and also Hugh Jackman). But the film's highlight is a great Julia Louis-Dreyfus performance as a sleuthing ewe. My review is here.
Joe Cocker made the song a hit. But Traffic recorded the original. Rest in peace, Dave Mason.
It has now been seven years since I saw Leaving Neverland. I've never forgotten it. Sadly, curious viewers will be unable to track the film down. For the A.V. Club, I wrote about a stunning documentary that has been buried.
I've thus far been mostly unmoved by the well-meaning but strained protest songs that have been written this year in response to Trump's myriad crimes and indecencies. But this Massive Attack and Tom Waits collaboration is just the right amount of snarling and sour. Maybe it works so well because it was actually written a while ago.
Anybody who lives in Los Angeles knows it rains here. In fact, it's supposed to rain a decent amount this weekend. Invariably, when we get precipitation, someone will mention Albert Hammond's 1972 hit. So let's give it a listen.
(Also felt appropriate to post this song the weekend that his son, Albert Hammond, Jr., plays Coachella with his reunited band the Strokes.)
Provocateurs dominate my segment of Press Play, where Shawn Edwards and I reviewed the button-pushing The Drama, Yes and Kontinental '25. As for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, it mostly provoked me to despair for society at large. You can hear our conversation down below.
Then, a funny thing happened, Small's sister Beverly reached out after seeing my post. Would I want to write an article about Shira? I was very intrigued. She was only a teenager when she made her album, and then never recorded another. But I didn't have a good hook for the piece. Still, I never stopped thinking about The Line of Time and the Plane of Now, which I listen to constantly.
Cut to March 2026. I'm at a screening of The Drama. Early on in the film, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson's characters are practicing their first dance for their wedding. Suddenly, a song comes on that knocks me sideways. It's "I Want to Lay With You," from The Line of Time and the Plane of Now. I thought I was one of the few people who had heard the record. How did this A24 movie find it? At last, I had the hook I'd been looking for.
With much thanks to my Los Angeles Times editor Josh Rothkopf, who loved the idea instantly, I reached out to Small, who turns 70 in June, to interview her about her short-lived music career and learn what she's been up to since. It was a pleasure to finally meet her and talk about an album that means a lot to me. (I also spoke to, among others, The Drama's music supervisor, who was also a fan of Small.)
Sometimes, you have ideas that just sit inside you for years. You think they'll be something you never get to write. I am so very glad this dream piece finally happened.
You can read my profile of Shira Small here. I hope you enjoy.
I was never much of a Killers guy. All I could hear were the better bands they were referencing. But "Smile Like You Mean It" is my kind of nasty/dark pop song.
Now that the early 2026 festivals are over, what under-the-radar films are worth keeping an eye out for down the road? I was on The Screen Podcast to discuss some of my Sundance favorites. (My colleagues Nikki Baughan and Wendy Ide appeared in a separate segment to share their picks from Berlin and elsewhere.) You can watch our episode below.
The Southampton band Delays fell off my radar after their 2004 debut Faded Seaside Glamour. I had not realized that frontman Greg Gilbert died in 2021 from cancer. His high singing voice, which made many assume the group was led by a female vocalist, was key to their lilting, soaring sound.
This is not the sort of admission you normally get from LuPone. As The New Yorker's Michael Schulman put it in a very entertaining profile of her last year, "LuPone is Broadway’s reigning grande dame, with a big voice and an even bigger mouth. She’s one of the city’s last living broads: brassy, belty, and profane, with the ferocity of a bullet train coming right at you." Part of the fun of seeing LuPone live, I assumed, would be watching her steamroll through the evening, flexing her vocal gift while letting us Los Angeles residents know how lucky we were to be in the presence of greatness. Vulnerability was a surprise.
I grew up consuming a steady diet of pop, rock and hip-hop, largely avoiding musical theater and the sort of vocalists who belt, croon or soar. As I got older, Into the Woods and Frank Sinatra became part of my musical lexicon, but I remain more drawn to songwriters than singers. It's not as if Sinatra (or countless others) can't make a song their own -- make you feel that, for example, no one else has sung "I'll Be Around" before they breathed it into life. But I'll always take a Bob Dylan over a Michael Bublé, no matter how many octaves he's mastered.
I say all that to acknowledge that I can't always appreciate superhuman vocal technique. When it comes to singing, I go for emotion, feel and character over firepower and pizzazz. But even I sensed early on in Saturday's performance that LuPone seemed a bit off, not as confident as I imagined she would be as she flubbed a line or two. So when she stopped the show and offered her mea culpa, it got a huge, warm response from the adoring crowd, but it also confirmed what even my unsophisticated eyes and ears suspected. It also seemed to unlock something for LuPone, allowing her to fully embrace the fragility of the songs she was there to sing. Which helps enormously when you're singing about love.
The show was part of LuPone's 25th anniversary tour for Matters of the Heart, a collection of tunes that cover Broadway numbers and pop songs, happy reveries and sad ballads, and all manners of love, from parental to carnal. For this tour, which features piano and a four-person string section, she has been sticking to many of the tracks from the original album while adding some new selections, including "God Only Knows" and "The Last Time I Saw Richard," which depending on your mood might be the greatest song Joni Mitchell has ever written. But there was also "Being Alive," one of Company's show-stoppers now enjoying new life among filmgoers as "that song Adam Driver sings in Marriage Story." In the Noah Baumbach Oscar-winner, Driver's divorcing dad delivers it with the pain and regret of someone who understands the lyrics' bereft sentiments in his bones. On Saturday night, LuPone sang it like it was an aging rock band's guaranteed crowd-pleaser before they come back for the encore, her high-octane voice all showy guitar solos and flagrant smashing of instruments. I longed to hear the Driver version again.
Not unlike many Broadway albums, Matters of the Heart is a pristine rendition of familiar songs that lacks the electric spontaneity of a live performance. Plus, the record doesn't contain the bits of commentary LuPone sprinkled in on occasion during the show, helping to lay out the night's thematic through-lines. Before singing Randy Newman's "Real Emotional Girl," she told the crowd about meeting the love of her life, husband Matthew Johnston, while making the 1987 TV movie LBJ: The Early Years. She mentioned their son, calling him her greatest achievement, and then worked her way through "Real Emotional Girl," Judy Collins' "My Father" and Fascinating Aïda's "Look Mummy, No Hands," three different perspectives on childhood and the process of looking back at those strangers we call our parents. The mini-suite ended with one of her new additions to the show, Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time," which in this context was less about romance and more about the lost and regained connections between a mother and a child. LuPone never flexed, never tried to better the originals. If she wasn't in top form vocally, which my friend (a big LuPone fan) noted, she did what my favorite singers do, which is embody the song as if it's the only truth they know.
As someone who's long adored Dylan and Newman, I've been accustomed to more dazzling singers interpret their material, usually adding polish to the vocals or arrangements so that the songs become more pleasing to a wider audience. Too often, unfortunately, the very human essence of the original song gets swept aside in the name of making the tune "better." The phenomenon occasionally reared its ugly head Saturday night, most disappointingly during LuPone's performance of "The Last Time I Saw Richard," Mitchell's pained memory of a friend lost along the way. In LuPone's hands, it turned into a bit of an acted monologue, a Broadway ballad that abandoned Mitchell's direct, piercing treatment.
That said, my reaction to LuPone's interpretations definitely depended on my affinity (or lack thereof) for the originals. Two covers she performed while seated, her voice just above a whisper, practically demanding the audience lean forward to listen, were among the night's highlights. I consider "The Air That I Breathe" perfectly fine, and I had no previous knowledge of Beth Nielsen Chapman's "Sand and Water." LuPone latched onto both songs' emotional essence by pruning away their easy-listening tendencies to get at something real about, respectively, romantic contentment and the mourning of a dead spouse. And then, later in the show, she gender-flipped Dan Fogelberg's "Same Old Lang Syne" to fairly devastating effect. Much to the chagrin of my own parents, I've always considered the song sappy. Revisiting Fogelberg's version the following day, it hit harder than it ever had before. LuPone revealed the song's poignant chasm between present and past for me.
It must be both blessing and curse to have an incredible singing voice. At some point, age intercedes, diminishing your gift either incrementally or all at once. As Robert Christgau once wrote of Sinatra's 1993 Duets album, in which the Chairman of the Board struggled to prove he still had it, "He who lives by the larynx shall die by the larynx." I thought of that quote a few times Saturday night, despite LuPone remaining a far superior interpretive singer to most anyone who's ever walked the earth. Besides, I can roll with a diminished voice: Paul Simon's "A Quiet Celebration" tour from last year taught me that. If anything, the occasional lyrical lapse and false start only made LuPone's performance that much stronger and braver.
LuPone doesn't like being called a diva. In last year's New Yorker profile, she said, “I know what I’m worth to a production. I know that I’m box-office. Don’t nickel-and-dime me before you put me onstage. Don’t treat me like a piece of shit. Because, at this point, if you don’t value me, why am I there?” To be sure, LuPone has had her share of jerk moments that go beyond "Oh, she's such a delightful diva." Still, I also am wary of that sexist term since "diva" tends to be applied to powerhouse female singers who don't suffer fools.
Nonetheless, I was imagining Saturday's show to be a masterclass in grande-dame behavior, all of us mere mortals gladly paying our respects to a world-class vocalist stunning us with her instrument. Instead, I got a display of touching humanity that made songs like her evening-closing "Hello, Young Lovers" (from The King and I) and the 1940s' hit "My Best to You" feel like gentle prayers, to herself and us, to find love in a world growing darker by the day. I didn't write down what she said at the end of the night, but it was a plea that, despite the terrible country we're currently living in, that we remember that love is still a greater force than hate. It was a beautiful sentiment, almost as beautiful as these lines from "My Best to You" which she made hers:
So here's to you, may your dreams come true
May old Father Time never be unkind
And through the years, save your smiles and your tears
They're just souvenirs, they'll make music in your heart
Remember this, each new day is a kiss
Sent from up above with an angel's love
So here's to you, may your skies be blue
And your love blessed, that's my best to you
Some of the best love songs have a brittleness to them, because they know that love is delicate, always at risk of breaking if not properly handled. But maybe that's not always true -- maybe love is strong enough to outlive all of life's hard things. Even a diva's nerves.
(Photo by Jacob Earl.)
I'm seeing Patti LuPone perform this weekend. This is the opposite of that.
When you've been happily married for a while, people might get the impression that you forget what being single is like. Not true. The anxiety, insecurity, thrill, confusion, crushing despair: That sticks with you.
Which probably explains why I find Sombr's hyper-emotional, ultra-candid love songs so evocative. "Oh, right," I think, "I remember this feeling." "Back to Friends" articulates a universal sentiment with such unsubtle clarity that it takes you right back to that moment. I don't miss that time in my life. But I can't pretend it's not there still somewhere inside me.
