No longer missing
The return of a favorite band, plus my weekly shareables: geezer rockers, a campy vampire wrestler, and men's wear for dogs
If I had to name the 10 songs that play most often on the jukebox in my head, “Missing” by Everything But The Girl would definitely make the list.
It came out in 1994 but became a huge hit the next year after a series of remixes, especially the Todd Terry house mix. I still like the original best. There’s a subgenre I think of as “melancholy dance music,” and this, to me, is its greatest track. The vocal by Tracey Thorn still haunts me.
The reason I bring this up is that, 23 years after they disbanded*, Everything But The Girl has new music out.
*I started to use “broke up” here but that’s not quite right; the two band members, Thorn and Ben Watt, have been a couple for 40 years. They’re married with three children.
They’ve got an album called FUSE coming out in April, and this week they released the first single, “Nothing Left To Lose.” It is, as I expected and hoped, melancholy dance music.
I tend to have mixed feelings when a band I loved gets back together, or a film I enjoyed gets remade, or a TV show rebooted. There’s the hope that they find the magic again, and the worry that they become an old tired copy of what they used to be.
My favorite TV show of all time, JUSTIFIED, is coming back with a sequel of sorts this summer. I will watch the hell out of any and all adventures of U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens. But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little nervous about it.
A version of this discussion comes up all the time in sports, when aging athletes try to squeeze out one last season at the end of a brilliant career. The most obvious example is Willie Mays—who some consider the greatest of all time—flailing around in the outfield for the Mets at 42. The question is: Do those painful moments stain everything that came before? For me, the answer is no. When you get to do something you love, do it for as long as they’ll let you.
I hope this new Everything But The Girl album is fantastic. I hope they keep making music together if that’s what they want. Either way, they’re not going to ruin “Missing.” I can hear that bass line in my head, even as I’m writing this.
10 things I wanted to share this week:
My earlier post this week was about the precious gift of my team winning it all. Go Dawgs.
This Joe Bernstein piece about the Geezer Dance Party in Ann Arbor is an early candidate for my favorite story of the year. Can’t stop laughing at this paragraph, quoting a bartender: “Plus, Ms. Anderson said, the happy hour regulars are ‘creatures of habit’ who rarely change their drink orders; the only downsides, she added, are that they lose stuff a lot and have, on a few occasions, needed an ambulance.”
Bernstein’s Twitter thread about how he discovered the Geezer Dance Party is a great lesson for journalists—or anyone else, really—in taking the time and making the effort to follow something that seems interesting.
WARNING: Michael Schulman’s Q&A with Janelle Monáe is full of spoilers from GLASS ONION. But if you’re OK with that, it’s also a buffet of thoughts on creativity, identity, reinvention and hard-ass work. And the kicker is like one of those post-credit scenes in a Marvel movie. It’s amazing.
DOG NEWS: While I work on my book, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: Dog wear at the big men’s wear show.
I keep trying to avoid pro wrestling stories on here but great ones keep popping up. Here’s the New York Times Magazine profiling Danhausen, whose character I would describe as “awkward scrawny unintentionally hilarious demon.”
I urge not just journalists, but everyone who might be a little down in the dumps, to listen to this Longform Podcast interview with Texas Monthly writer Katy Vine. She is so relentlessly cheerful and upbeat and thrilled to be doing her job that it made me want to pull over the car and start writing. She sounds like an absolute joy.
A profile of Adeem the Artist, who crams a hell of a lot of “alt” in “alt-country.”
This is the 40th anniversary of the Martin Luther King holiday—which is a good time to remember that Stevie Wonder basically willed the holiday into existence.
And here’s the song that did it. Happy birthday, Dr. King, and thank you, Stevie.
See y’all next week, everybody.
I saw Everything But the Girl at the Royal Albert Hall in 1986. I was sitting on the very top level, having bought the cheapest available ticket on the day of the show. They has a large string section with them, to recreate the sounds of their then-current album, BABY THE STARS SHINE BRIGHT. (Which is now apparently also the name of a Japanese clothing brand.) And then at the end it was just the two of them on stage, with Ben on acoustic guitar playing the album's great cheatin' song, "Don't Let the Teardrops Rust Your Shining Heart." And Tracey's sublime voice, One of those moments where the whole audience quiets down and just listens.
They've been disbanded for HOW LONG?? Unbelievable. Thanks for the heads-up, I'll be on the lookout for that album!