Smiles of Earth

I had a conversation the other day with a couple of upper management types at a well-known entertainment site — really just an introductory call, but one meant to suss out whether they liked the cut of my jib enough to bring me on board for pending expansion of their music coverage. (Think good thoughts, if you're so inclined!) Eventually, as it must, talked turned to our various philosophies regarding the state of music journalism in 2024, and why music-focused editorial spaces have been so thoroughly walloped over the last 15-20 years, and what we think these spaces should look like in the streaming era. It's a good thing we only had half an hour booked, because this is the kind of thing I could talk about all day — albeit perhaps not in a way that all listeners might find endearing.

As I told the folks on the call, I'm pretty sure my thoughts on this subject fucked me out of an editorial position at a venerable culture magazine a little over a decade ago, when I proposed eliminating traditional music reviews on the grounds that people can easily listen to pretty much anything that strikes their fancy at any given moment, and they no longer need critics to weigh in first. On the surface, I know this sounds awfully dismissive of music criticism's purpose, but that isn't my intent — I mean, I've been writing about music for money, off and on, for more than 35 years, and at this point, I don't see myself stopping anytime soon. If anything, I think using the written word to engage with other art forms might be more vital and necessary than ever. It just doesn't serve all the functions it once did, and gatekeeping is probably at the top of the list of items that deserve to be crossed off.

I don't know if sharing these thoughts during this week's call was any smarter than it was the last time I did it, but perhaps time heals all wounds, because at least no one seemed taken aback. Instead, we started talking about the curatorial role that great music journalism can serve when you shift your focus from "here's what's coming out this week/month/etc., and here's what's right or wrong with it" to "here's something I heard/read/watched, and here's how it made me feel, and why." If there's a single complaint that's most consistently shared across the board regarding the 21st century entertainment industry, it's that there's just too goddamn much of everything. According to my Spotify Wrapped, I listened to 148,829 minutes of music this year, a total that includes more than 28,500 songs and 13,000 artists — and I still suffer the same nagging certainty that you probably do: There are songs, albums, and artists that I'm sure I'd absolutely fall in love with, if only I could fucking find them.

I still find value in making an effort to keep up with new releases (hence the New Music Friday series here), but I don't think staying up to the minute with everything is anywhere near as important as it once was. We're all swimming in sound now, and rather than always paddling toward the horizon, we should head in different directions once in awhile. Do some diving. There's so much we're all missing, and a lot of it is wonderful.

If there's a single complaint that's the second most consistently shared across the board with regards to the 21st century entertainment industry, it's that discovery algorithms are pretty shitty. I spent about a year trying to train Apple Music to bring me cool stuff I'd never heard before, and it was never really worth a damn; Spotify is marginally better at this, in my experience, but getting good results out of it involves more than simply listening to things you enjoy — it's more akin to training an AI prompt (ugh), continually refining and rephrasing the question until you get a useful answer.

I'm sharing all this now for a couple of reasons. First, I think it's probably useful for me to offer up some sort of restatement of purpose in this space every so often, and even though I'm not sure I consider what I'm doing here "music journalism" — I'm not spending enough time on these posts to feel good about the level of analysis or insight — everything I just said about what I think music journalism should be still applies to my general approach. Second, and perhaps more importantly with regards to today's dispatch, I recently experienced a moment of algorithmic triumph that led me to a record I've been enjoying quite a bit over the last couple of days.

One of the frustrating things about algorithmic discovery is your lack of granular control — there's a list of reasons you're being offered this or that by your streaming platform of choice, but they don't all apply to what you're looking for, depending on your mood. I mean, as often as not, these searches start because I want to hear something that shares basic vibes with an album or song, but basic vibes aren't the only — or, I suspect, the main — driver behind the answers I'll get in response to the request. Spotify seems particularly in love with release date as an operative factor, which can be awfully annoying; just because I'm in the mood to hear something similar to a piece of music that happened to come out in 1989, that doesn't mean I want to hear "Forever Your Girl."

Fortunately, I wasn't asking Spotify to do any time-traveling the other day, when it occurred to me that it had been too long since I listened to Gang of Youths' excellent 2022 LP Angel in Realtime. But rather than listen to the album again, I decided to use its opening track as a launchpad and see where the algorithm took me. The song in question, "You in Everything," is a devastatingly beautiful snapshot of love and loss, and if you've never listened to it, here's your chance:

What does Spotify think I'm asking for when I plant this as a seed for discovery? Does it think I want to hear nothing but songs about the death of a parent? Music by Australian bands? Songs that were released in 2022? I really don't know, but at least in this case, the stuff I was served mostly passed the inscrutable vibe test. The chaff-to-wheat ratio was still suboptimal, but brought me a keeper in the form of Smiles of Earth, the (you guessed it) 2022 release by Cousin Tony's Brand New Firebird.

We should probably all lower our expectations when we're presented with music from a band that named itself after a line from American Beauty, and I would recommend lowering them here; while I really like Smiles of Earth, it isn't going to change your life. It's just a set of well-written and solidly performed songs, most of which come from a place of emotional honesty and availability that has at least something in common with the soul-baring Angel in Realtime. But it was a genuine discovery for me — I had no idea this band existed, despite inhaling music like a maniac on a regular basis and being a lifelong fan of recordings that present themselves with this level of intrinsic warmth. So is it better to keep kicking the tires on algorithms in the hopes that you'll eventually be treated to something you genuinely want, or is there still room for entertainment writers to passionately report from the front lines of cultural consumption, each of us adding our unique voice to a chorus that readers can tune into and learn to trust?

Obviously, I have no answers to that question, but I'm going to keep doing my little thing here, and if you're reading this, I'm grateful for that. Being offered the opportunity to bring those ideas to bear on a larger stage wouldn't be the worst thing that ever happened to me. We'll see what the future holds — and in the meantime, here's Smiles of Earth.

Watching: I believe I mentioned all of these the last time I wrote one of these posts, but because I'm still thoroughly enjoying them, I will repeat that the current seasons of Shrinking (Apple TV+) and What We Do in the Shadows (Hulu) are thoroughly delightful — and similar, at least insofar as they both start off with a string of episodes that are good but not great before really hitting their stride. Both shows have made me guffaw in recent weeks. Setting all that aside, they're obviously very different — Shrinking is a finely balanced dramedy about coming to terms with the shit that weighs you down, and finding your people along the way; WWDitS is a frequently profane sitcom about vampires living on Staten Island. But they're both blessed with stacked casts and sharp writing, and they're both among the best that television has to offer right now.

Also in the extreme upper echelon of TV titles is Somebody Somewhere (HBO), which aired its series finale on Sunday, and went out the way it entered: graceful, wise, and packing a bittersweet emotional punch. If you haven't treated yourself to this beautiful gem of a show yet, you owe it to yourself to repent as soon as possible. You'll have three perfect seasons waiting for you when you do.

I've also been sort of hate-watching the latest chunk from the final season of Cobra Kai (Netflix), a show that started out as an irresistible blend of several different flavors of cheese before falling prey to the law of diminishing returns. It's been six years since Season 1 premiered, and like most shows that revolve around young characters, it's gotten to the point where it can't hide that these actors are getting pretty long in the tooth to play teenagers, but that isn't Kai's only problem now — I would also argue that it's soared past the point where its insistence on perpetually pumping up the karate stakes can be even partly covered up with its self-aware charm. Another season, another tournament, and this one is THE BIGGEST OF ALL; rinse and repeat. This is a case of me being in for a penny and in for a pound — having come this far, I'll keep tuning in until the damn thing's done.

Naturally, I also tuned in for Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary (HBO), the latest installment in Bill Simmons' Music Box series. Like a lot of folks, I found it to be a painless and often entertaining watch, with a couple of significant caveats. One, if you care at all about this music, you're most likely not going to learn much of anything about the artists or the songs; it's pretty surface-level stuff. Two, it offers extremely short shrift to the Black artists who not only laid the foundations for "yacht rock," but who had some of its biggest and most enduring hits. I mean, George Benson is mentioned in passing, which is preposterous — he and Al Jarreau deserved as much time as David Pack or Christopher Cross, and ignoring Earth, Wind & Fire was a choice I don't understand.

The last current series I want to mention is The Day of the Jackal (Peacock), starring Eddie Redmayne in the title role of the latest work to adapt Frederick Forsyth's classic novel. I went in with low expectations, primarily because I still remember the pain of the 1996 film adaptation starring Bruce Willis and Richard Gere, but this is a taut thriller blessed with a solid cast and topped off with all the fabulously exotic locations you expect from an international caper. If you're in the mood for an expertly arranged game of cat and mouse between a lone assassin and the forces determined to stop him, you'll dig it.

Reading: I recently enjoyed Box Office Poison: Hollywood's Story in a Century of Flops, which lives up to its title by taking the reader on a tour through some of the most infamously ill-received films from the last 100 years. To his credit, author and film critic Tim Robey avoids most of the usual suspects; this isn't yet another book giving you the inside story from the set of Ishtar or Heaven's Gate one more time. Instead, he starts at the beginning, with the epic and ultimately doomed ambitions fueling early flops like D.W. Griffith's Intolerance before moving on to more modern duds that deserved better (Sorcerer) or never should have been released at all (Nothing But Trouble). It's fun and informative, with a soupçon of personal perspective from Robey along the way. Highly recommended for film fans, or anyone who's fascinated by failure in general.

I also want to recommend How I Became a Famous Novelist, the Thurber-winning 2009 novel from Steve Hely, a writer best known for his work on a long list of shows that includes Veep, 30 Rock, and The Office. Hely's protagonist, a shiftless twentysomething named Pete Tarslaw, reacts to a wedding invitation from his ex-girlfriend by deciding to write a bestseller — a task he's deemed eminently doable because he's also decided that being a novelist is a wildly lucrative scam perpetuated by writers willfully spoon-feeding pabulum to a nation of dopes. It's funny as hell and incredibly creative, even if its premise is the stuff of fantasy. (Authors getting rich? Ha!)

Speaking of authors getting rich (or the opposite), here's as good a place as any to note that I've been doing a whole bunch of podcast interviews to try and drum up extra interest for Langley Powell and the Society for the Defense of the Mundane. I'm not sure how much of an impact, if any, this has had on book sales, but I've had some really enjoyable conversations along the way; if you're interested in listening to me babble on and on about writing, among other subjects, you've got no shortage of options here.

Around the Corner: I know we have a couple of Record Player episodes waiting in the chamber, although I'm not sure when they'll be posted — my dear co-host Matt Wardlaw is now steering the ship for Ultimate Classic Rock's podcast, and while he figures out the new lay of the land, we aren't moving at our usual pace. But speaking of my dumb ass on other podcasts, I recorded a pair of appearances on the UCR show earlier this week, and I assume those will be out soon.

Beyond that, work continues on the trio of book projects I've dropped on my plate. I conducted a really wonderful interview for the RESET project last week, I'm perpetually pinning down interview subjects for Death by Power Ballad, and I crossed the 25,000-word mark with the next novel this week. Progress, #AmWriting, all that good stuff. Onward!