All Alone in the Moonlight

Like FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM and WHATSAPP, I was down for some time on Monday—unlike them, my downtime was planned—so this will be short today. I'll use my allotted time to point you to this delicious dive by ADAM GOPNIK into the musical CATS (not, perish the thought, the movie), which was inspired by the recent revelation that its songs served as catnip for DONALD TRUMP. Gopnik's piece is about a number of things but mostly about how a healthy human actress, BETTY BUCKLEY, learned to sing in the voice of a decrepit, dying cat, and how the actress, no fan of the former president, nonetheless understands the particular appeal of her show-stopping number ("Its only function is to stop the show! If you don’t stop the show, you haven’t done the song") to that particular fan of this particular corner of musical theater. It's a show-stopping essay about great (and not so great) theater, and songs and how they're sung, with a guest lesson from a well known (and now disgraced) Spanish tenor. One day, maybe next time I have some down time, I'll tell you about my traumatizing evening at the Broadway show, which I did not, and still do not, understand.

Dot Dot Dot

PANDORA is shuttering music analytics pioneer NEXT BIG SOUND, which it bought in 2015. Many of Next Big Sound's tools have been integrated into Pandora's AMP platform but the company says it will discontinue its social-driven Pandora Predictions chart (while helpfully suggesting other companies who collect similar data)... SXSW, threatened first by a pandemic and now by Texas politics, says it will remain in Austin in 2022... Yes, KACEY MUSGRAVES really was... A dozen ways to digitally play the same song.