everyday is a child with teeth #1: turn on the bright lights
A couple of weeks ago, I went by myself to see Interpol at the Beacon Theater. I think this year was the year where I finally recognize that I enjoy going to a show by myself. Before I did it as a sort of “I don’t mind if there’s no one else to go with” sort of way but the truth is I love it. These days most of my music consumption is almost exclusively private; on my headphones on the train to and from work, and at my desk while I write. Going by myself to a show is the same feeling, it’s just me and my thoughts though I am surrounded by hundreds of other people. I don’t need to talk or make chit chat I can just simply be there and dance like no one is watching which I do because I don’t care and sing like no one can hear me because they can’t and I guess maybe this is what people call self care.
Anyway, back to Interpol. This is the fourth time I’ve seen them. The new record is good and I have been listening to it quite a bit especially when I write because I don’t know the words yet and so Paul Banks’s can’t interfere with my little reviews or news posts or what have you. The light design for the show was intense and detached: blinding white, disco reflections, laser lines of red that sort of mimicked the cover of Turn On the Bright Lights, but also like, Kraftwerk. On Instagram Paul Banks (I always like to refer to him by his full name, Paul Banks, just like I do Christine Baranski when talking about Gilded Age) posts stark black and white photos of brutalist buildings he encounters on tour and halfway through the show it occurred to me the lights were brutalist too, though I’m not sure I could explain exactly how; it was just a mood.
They played a great mix of new and old songs, and I wasn’t even disappointed that they didn’t play some of my favorites because I’ve seen them live before which is a nice feeling. I was excited to hear “Roland,” which lately I think about all the time. “He always took the time to speak with me and I liked him for that,” says the narrator about a man possibly caught committing a series of murders. I’ve always imagined that song told by like, one of the Law & Order extras who are giving the detectives the run down of what they saw while still going about their menial tasks. “Oh look it stopped snowing,” he adds after a description of his friend’s knives.
2002’s Turn On the Bright Lights remains to me a supreme example of the too cool/detached boys that I fell in love with in college, and while it’s true that maybe all boys in bands are too cool/detached, underneath the distance, Paul Banks is always secretly rooting for you to save him, to change him, to fix him. The first time I saw the band was on this weird little segment on MTV where they were all walking around Williamsburg in little suits (and was Carlos D maybe wearing a holster?) and my friends and I instinctively started laughing at them and then they said “Hi, we’re Interpol” or whatever, and we had heard of Interpol and I feel like it’s possible we’d already listened to a song or two and so we sort of loved them a little already and we became obsessed with them anyway. But then there was “NYC” a song that even back then I found a little cringe in its earnestness. “I had seven faces/thought I knew which one to wear/I’m sick of spending these lonely nights/training myself not to care.” Like sure, I had felt like that too I’m sure, but the thought of just letting other people know always shook me to my core. (Once I moved to the city I always skipped the song because it seemed too much on the nose to sing about “the subway she is a porno” while riding on the subway.) All of this to say that I was extremely surprised when the first chords of that song started ringing throughout the theater. Here’s Paul Banks, who has been wearing extra-large (possibly Celine) sunglasses the entirety of the performance, illuminated by lights that from where I am standing (row Q) completely obscure the band’s features so that they are just pitch dark silhouettes performing, who has no small talk or stage banter to share between songs, who is 45 years old and recently had a child, just fully committing to “NYC,” to its youthful honesty, to its complete revealing of post-9/11 feelings of everything. I sang along to New York Caaaaaares and closed my eyes and then the stage lights went full-on stadium bright white when he sang “It’s up to me now/turn on the bright lights.” I get the feeling there were likely many conversations about what the lights should do at that moment, trying to find a less obvious solution perhaps, but I appreciated their one-to-one interpretation. There was something otherworldly about their glow, like when you’re watching a Sci-Fi movie and a person encounters the bright light of an unknown entity. It was fucking beautiful, you know? And I guess if Paul Banks can still lean into radical honesty then maybe so can I? Idk but I’m still thinking about it.
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Anyway apparently Doug Aitken directed the music video for “NYC”? I don’t think I’d seen it before. While watching it I thought it would be great going into Dido’s “Here With Me,” so here’s a little music video playlist to set a mood.
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Here are four old records and one new one that I got really into this year:
Sinéad O’Connor: The Lion and the Cobra, 1987
Water from Your Eyes: Everyone’s Crushed, 2023
David Bowie: Earthling, 1997
Meat Puppets: II, 1984
The Del-Byzanteens: Lies to Live By, 1982 - This is apparently Jim Jarmusch’s old band which my friend Shane was like you have to listen to them and I found a YouTube link with the whole record so I am sharing with you as well.
Here are some songs I got really into this year in no particular order:
KoЯn, “Got the Life”
Meat Puppets, “Lake of Fire”
Luis Miguel, “Si Nos Dejan”
Kim Wilde, “You Keep Me Hangin On”
Water From Your Eyes, “True Life”