Nothing Compares

It's been five years and zero days. April 21, 2016, was a Thursday and I was in New York on a day off from this newsletter. I was heading to Boston the next day for the beginning of Passover. ADAM WRAY, who was then curating FashionREDEF, called me with the news: a report that someone had died at PAISLEY PARK. I think they were already saying it happened in an elevator, but I might be remembering that part wrong. Awful news. And it didn't occur to me, didn't cross my mind at all, that it might be him. Why would it be him? I don't think I knew what fentanyl was. Not yet. I went about my business in the East Village, a little shaken, and maybe a little trying not to think about it. The news I didn't want to hear, the single most horrible news of what was already turning into the darkest year I'd ever lived through, came shortly after. I don't remember the exact moment, or who or what told me. I do remember feeling dazed, gutted, speechless. I remember the emptiness more than anything else. I remember walking around aimlessly. I remember getting into a cab on Broadway and hearing "THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE WORLD" on the radio and tearing up inside and thinking to myself what a weird coincidence. It took a minute to register that, duh, everybody knew. The cab driver knew. The world knew. The radio knew. And then the tears started showing up outside.

I've thought about PRINCE a lot over the past five years. He still feels unusually present to me, partly because of the steady stream of music and video that has continued to surface as archivists pore through his legendary vault (which, as we learned after his death, was basically a small, disorganized room behind a locked door, which, we learned just this month, Prince had long forgotten the password for). Partly because of his unconventional, unfinished memoir. Partly because of events like the cathartic dance party thrown by MAYA RUDOLPH and GRETCHEN LIEBERUM's Prince cover band, PRINCESS, in downtown Los Angeles the night before DONALD TRUMP's inauguration, when Prince's death still seemed like current news and his music remained as a spiritual rebuke to all that had happened in the months since. Partly because of the generosity of all that music, which skips freely between concise pop songs and open-ended jams, between sophisticated piano ballads and horny funk grooves, between boys and girls, sacred and profane, starfish and coffee. Partly because I still think the entire histories of pop, funk, blues, soul, rock and more reside somewhere within the perfect stripped-down two-and-a-half-minute sprawl of "TAMBORINE" and there are days when I still can't come up with a reason to listen to anything else.

I beat myself up every now and then for my terrible decision to pass up this not-so-secret secret show, 10 minutes from my house, in March 2014 because I was tired and I had an early flight to SXSW the next morning. And I'm an idiot. And I figured there'd be other four-hour secret shows 10 minutes from my house because, for a ridiculously long time, that's exactly how it felt. It still does sometimes.

Rest in Peace

JIM STEINMAN, operatic rock songwriter extraordinaire, best known for writing the entirety of MEAT LOAF's bombastically fantastic BAT OUT OF HELL, an album that by my reckoning was six years long, ending in 1983 with this BONNIE TYLER epic that Steinman wrote and produced. He also collaborated with the likes of CELINE DION and ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER... Producer, engineer and harmonica player BOB LANOIS, who opened Grant Avenue Studio with his brother Daniel in the 1970s in Hamilton, Ontario... Filmmaker MONTE HELLMAN, who directed JAMES TAYLOR and DENNIS WILSON in the groundbreaking TWO-LANE BLACKTOP.