The maids face similar restrictions on weight, demands on their ability to maintain their image on the cafe floor, and have to perform what is called “magic time,” where they put a “spell” on the food or drink the customer ordered. They often have safeguards in place where they can enter and leave the building housing their cafe away from the public eye, and surgical masks are a bonus disguise to help hide their private life identities, just in case a customer tries to turn into a stalker. It is enough to drive one mad.

Japan’s most famous maid is Kobato Miku. Kobato is a one-time maid cafe maid, failed idol, and the founding member of the “impossibly hard rocking maid band” BAND-MAID. She assembled the band through music industry contacts and had planned on being the lead singer herself, but as they rehearsed it quickly became evident that her voice was inadequate. Kobato wanted to succeed, not stroke her own ego and thus a new singer was sought. One of the members she had assembled, MISA3 the bassist I believe, “…knew a guy.” Enter Atsumi Saiki, a pop singer with a dance background. The story goes that she was told of a new gig in a rock band, but no one mentioned just what kind of rock band. So when she showed up and they gave her the maid outfit to wear she wanted to tell them to fuck off and then walk away. She put on the damn costume and stayed, however, and has provided high-octane vocals for them ever since. In return they have not made her put on another maid costume, instead allowing her elaborate, gothic-styled dresses instead. Kobato then dedicated herself to learning guitar, and plays Hetfield-level rhythm next to the only other member still wearing the maid costume, lead guitarist Tono Kanami. Hirose Akane completes the five-(wo)man-band as the gorilla on drums.4

The first three “mini-albums” they released are filled with largely forgettable, generic rock tracks. But there were enough bright spots to earn them some real fans, for those bright spots were supernovas. Most people’s first experience with the band and their ridiculous outfits was the video for “Thrill” on youtube. 23 million views in a genre dead compared to mumble rap is an astounding number, with the majority of those views in the mid 2010s upon their debut. It is the showcase for what would take them to international success: hard driving, straightforward, riff-heavy rock music. No synthesizer bullshit. No melodramatic vocals. They are more AC/DC than Evanescence.

Their fifth album (the third full one), World Domination, showed they were the real thing. It opens with Hirose beating the time on her cymbal for “I Can’t Live Without You,” a song that sets the rock-hard tone for the album to follow. The second song, “Play,” adds a bit of prog flavor, and even when they slow it down a bit for “Fate” and even more for “Daydreaming” and “Anemone” they are still thunder and lightning. They wrote and arranged the album almost entirely themselves (some assists by longtime collaborators, rock producers Akutsu (responsible for the banger “Turn Me On”) and Tienowaka, as well as a cover of a visual kei song at the end).

Conqueror is arguably better, with richer sounds and a more thoughtful tone, as exemplified by the vocal opening bars of “Page.” Atsumi gets a chance to shine in the soaring “Wonderland.” They worked with T-Rex and David Bowie producer Tony Visconti on the track “The Dragon Cries.” “Flying High,” “Bubble,” and “Catharsis” are not to be missed.

Their best album (and also their most hideous cover art) is Unseen World. Written and recorded during the Japanese government’s wuhanic plague freak out, it has a chaotic sound akin to Led Zeppelin’s Presence, which was similarly produced under duress. “Warning!” starts the album off with a pace that never relents, and indeed they are in pure attack mode in “I Still Seek Revenge” and “After Life.” “Black Hole” anchors the album at a blistering 220 BPM, and my favorite track “Chemical Reaction” is a freight train that took “More Cowbell” to heart.

Subsequent BAND-MAID releases have not been as strong as 2021’s Unseen World, but there are still many worthwhile tracks. The EP Unleash has the hard-driving “Influencer.” 2024 saw the release of Epic Narratives, which starts off with the face-melting killer riff of “Magie.” Can Tono play that live? You bet your ass she can. The rest of the album is more poppish, with lots of upbeat and uplifting stuff like the song “Bestie,” co-written by Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger. In interviews the members have expressed a desire to make people feel good with their music, and their lyrics tend to be on the positive side. A little taste of the idol background of Kobato showing through, perhaps. Most recently they dropped Scoooop, with the standout “Zen” and a sound that is more chaotic.

BAND-MAID is the best of the Japanese all-female rock/metal groups, but they are only the tip of the spear. On the harder edge is NEMOPHILA, a heavy metal band whose lead singer Mayu loves to scream. They rose to internet fame with covers of Western rock and metal songs, including “Separate Ways,” “Whole Lotta Rosie,” and “The Trooper.”5 They also enjoy converting other genres into heavy metal, taking idol group NiziU’s “Make You Happy” and proving that adding some heavy guitars and a solo can make almost any song better. They covered BABYMETAL’s “Megitsune,” a song about a tricky female fox (foxes are trickster gods of Japanese folklore) that has a distinctly Japanese sound. They are not just a fancy cover band. The quartet has four studio albums to their name along with two EPs. Standout tracks include the mighty “Life,” a chills-inducing ballad with a distinct 1980s flavor, ferocious “Raitei,” and pure, distilled metal “Oiran.”

BABYMETAL was bound to come up before too long, so let’s talk about them. I found them unbearable when they came out. The saccharine idol-style vocals makes them sound as though they belong in the previous article about the idols, and indeed they rose to fame alongside AKB48 in that wave of the idol boom. They also have a lot of serious metal fans, and other metal bands take them very seriously. But I still find their music unbearable and avoid them whenever possible. If you are looking for an in-depth, nuanced view of their work, I am not the man to give it to you.

Other groups whose work demands a more nuanced view: doll$box, Mary’s Blood, Trident, LOVEBITES, Aldious, Hanabie. LOVEBITES, Aldious, doll$box, and Mary’s Blood are melodramatic theater-kid-style gothic metal whose leading ladies sound like they would have been enka singers in a different era. If you enjoy Evanescence you might enjoy them as well. Trident is a hard-rocking trio, but they don’t cover any new ground and sound a little generic. Hanabie is a newer group that rests at the harder edge of metal, with a lot more screaming and growling than NEMOPHILA. One of NEMOPHILA’s guitarists was a former member of Mary’s Blood, but she has since left the band to pursue her own projects.

There is also SHOW-YA, an all-girl rock group from the 80s who are seeing a new wave of interest thanks to the above listed groups’ popularity. Their sound is a little more Poison than Van Halen, so I never really got into them.

There are countless generic pop-rock girl groups as well. SCANDAL is the most popular of these. All the members are pretty and polished, like an idol group. Yes, they play their own instruments, and I guess they do it well, but they sound very much like a I-IV-V-VI pop-rock band… because they are. Despite being entirely forgettable their good looks have provided them with a long career.

Akai Koen was of a similar casting, only the members were quite a bit more ordinary in their appearance. They had the outstanding single “Highway Cabriolet,” an atmospheric love song with an enhanced echo effect to the main guitar riff that stands out above all the other music in this genre. The bassist killed herself during the lockdowns and they split up. The lead singer, of course also a former idol, now fronts AOOO, and what they’ve released has at least not been boring. We’ll talk more about the men in the next installment.

Somewhat of a recluse, Ado created a youtube channel of herself hiding behind (mostly) blue-haired anime avatars singing covers of electronic music in her closet at home. Her miniature studio came to include a decent microphone and lots of soundproofing. Her voice is phenomenal (and even saying that it feels inadequate: the range of tones she has mastered, her power, how dynamically she can use it all, there is no one else like her on the planet) and it was thrust right into everyone’s ears in her breakout song “Usseewa” (“Shut the Fuck Up”). Listen to it, and then ponder the fact that the owner of that voice was 17 years old at the time. Yes, the youthful lyrics come across as a little silly, but who cares? Her performance is awesome. She is now selling out stadiums where she prances around a stage (backlit so you can’t see her face), and there are videos of her out there freaking the fuck out over how embarrassing that creature on stage is. I should mention that she is one step removed from being a hikikomori,1 and without the success her otherworldly voice brought her she would still be living in her parents’ house eating cup ramen and watching anime. Instead she’s making April Fool’s songs where she sings in different registers to make herself sound like four different people, including male singers (convincingly, too).

Regarding “Usseewa,” the overnight success of the youtube video spawned dozens and dozens of covers. This was how I came across her, a cover by all-girl heavy metal band Nemophila (we’ll talk about them later), although not all covers were done in such good taste. There was a live performance on the long-running, very popular Japanese music show Music Station by ToshI, the lead singer of 1980s and 1990s heavy metal phenomenon X Japan. The words ring hollow coming out in his voice after his decades of success and high status as a Japanese music icon.2 If you’re a successful millionaire rock star in your 60s, you should probably just leave the youthful rebellion to the young.

This is Japan, so of course there is also a cutesy version, best exemplified here in a not-really-apology for “Usseewa”: “Atashi wa Mondaisaku” (“I’m a Controversy:” original Ado version, Yoshino cover). Yoshino is friends with Ado behind the scenes. There is a clip channel of them and male utaite Jaku Sansei singing karaoke together. Mostly vocaloid and anime theme songs, but Shiina Ringo (there she is again!) is one of their go-tos. All three of them collaborated on the single “Ready Steady.”

Yoshino’s voice is a lot cuter than Ado’s. When you listen to them sing together, it is clear that Yoshino’s pitch is superior to Ado’s (…at least until she runs out of breath at a live show; maybe she needs to do some more cardio). A soprano, she has a killer kobushi (a sort of stylish crack in the voice kind of like a yodel, often to break off the end of a long note but used throughout Japanese songs, extensively in enka; once you know what it is you can hear it all the time, even in Western music).

A lot of the vocaloid music they sing is astoundingly dark. It shouldn’t be a surprise, really. The target audience tends to be nerdy outcasts. There is a lot of loneliness there… navel-gazing, too. Here is something to cheer them up! A bubbly pop song called “White Happy,” it must be about unicorns and cotton candy! But it’s actually about how pointless life is. Should we even bother falling in love? Who cares, nothing matters, whatever. Oh, well, here is a touching song about two schoolgirls in love — wait, that one is actually about the regret one girl feels over bullying a classmate to suicide, possibly over a crush the deceased had on the narrator. Ah, here’s one, a catchy dance tune, it just makes you want to get out and wiggle your butt with your Beats on, doesn’t it? …except it’s about withering away in a toxic relationship. When you listen to a Vocaloid song and it sounds positive and upbeat, be aware that the lyrics may convey something else entirely.

Many songs make no effort to hide their darkness. “Wozuwarudo” adopts a muted style and a plodding tempo to go with its lyrics about fame, guilt, and suicide. “Shadow Shadow” is about selling yourself to get ahead, presumably to make it big in showbusiness, but straight up prostitution isn’t out of the discussion.

Ado and Yoshino are the only two utaite I spend any amount of time listening to, so I am not knowledgeable about the others. And boy are there so many others. I know Mafumafu exists, but only so I can avoid his creepy-ass voice and off-putting presentation. Ado is the only one worth listening to, although like I said, I prefer Yoshino. They (along with the other utaite) also perform original music, whether written for them or by them (“Usseewa” was one of the former), and some songs are quite good. Yoshino’s “Tenkousei,” about never really fitting in, is a compelling listen.

I had planned on using the Yoshino cover of the Yoasobi song “Idol” to transition into the topic of female Jpop idol groups, but it is not working out how I had hoped, so here is an ill-fitting paragraph about Yoasobi. A male/female duo, with the girl out front singing and the man hiding his ugly face behind the scenes and doing the songwriting, they write and perform a lot of anime theme songs and get a lot of streams (originally I wrote “sell a lot of records” but that really isn’t true anymore outside of the actual Idol machine) and are so boring. Yoasobi’s vocals are bland to the point of being aural Ambien, but they’re popular, so whatever. Consider yourself warned if you go looking for more of their work.

The song “Idol” is about the two-faced nature of showbusiness, particularly regarding the way the girls in these roles have a totally different public persona compared to their private life. It’s not breaking any new ground with that subject, entertainment makes people do whatever they think they must to get ahead and is nasty and cutthroat behind the scenes. But if you’re a girl and you’re not hideous and you like singing and dancing and dressing up you can try out for one of these idol groups. The groups have gone through changes over the years, although school uniforms and approachability have remained part of the image. O-Nyanko Club was marketed like an after-school club.3 Members collaborated with each other in side projects and “graduated” to solo careers or marriage and family, something that continues through today’s groups… sort of.

The 1990s saw comedy added to the slate of talents girls joining idol groups had to showcase. Morning Musume is the most famous group of the late 1990s and early 2000s,4 and they were invited on the Golden Time variety shows as guests. Their rise coincided with the rise of a massive wave of popular comedians and comedy variety shows that petered out in the latter part of the decade. Several members married and had kids and still go on to make appearances on the remaining shows, be it as regulars or as frequent guests. One Mo-musu member in particular became known for her comedic timing, spawning a “King and Queen” special prank show where she faced off with a male comedian: who could handle being pranked the best.

After Mo-musu, AKB48 and their clones in multitude took over. They were marketed as the attainable idols, appearing at handshake events and other meet-and-greets. AKB is shorthand for Akihabara, the anime/tech capital of Tokyo that spawns a lot of the weird shit we have come to associate with Japan. And there were 48 members of the group, with more in the junior wings waiting for their moment to shine. Not all of them could follow Maeda Atsuko into film/TV success which makes one wonder just what happens to the dozens of others (more on that later).

Even Ado has an idol group. She auditioned members for Phantom Siita, which takes its aesthetics from Japanese horror. Their videos feature lots of sampaku eyes and the schoolgirl outfits make them that much more off-putting. Unlike most of the other idol groups, the members of this group are skilled singers. They don’t hide their voices in large numbers and can show up and do it live without electronic trickery or adjustments.

There are anti-idol groups, too. Girls who had been rejected by other groups tried out in 2024-25 on a show called “No-no Girls.” The winners ended up as members of the anti-idol pop group HANA. They have some sort of relationship with rebellious pop/hip hop star Chanmina (we’ll get to her later, too), but their big draw is their skill as dancers, with the presumption that their earlier rejections were due to the girls’ looks being unfit for other idol groups. Everyone loves an underdog story.5 Their sound is a lot more pop with a heavy R&B influence than the other idol groups, and that makes sense given their relationship with Chanmina, just like how Ado’s strange idol group is strange like Ado.

The idol industry in Japan is a machine. There are routes to success, but like showbusiness in the West there are a lot of bodies littering them. Indie idol groups perform at malls and shopping plazas and parks, wherever there is open space. Wander around any random weekend and you will see them, such as the group who was performing in the Aeon Mall near my wife’s hillbilly hometown on a random Saturday in January.6 Performing with one of these indie and junior-league groups means financing your own costumes, helping find cover space, and paying your own way to and from venues. Some of these venues are malls where only the toothless, moonshine-drinking, barely literate Japanese live, like my in-laws.

Like every profession in Japan, aspiring idols put in long hours. They sweat and suffer and there is a lot of busy work involved. There are so many more girls who want to be idols than there are positions as successful idols. Why would anyone put themselves through the bullshit to achieve a position as something that many Japanese themselves find off-putting? Because, according to one indie idol, if they can make people happy by dancing and singing, they want to work as hard as they can to do so.

There are lots of costume changes involved in idol groups, and the idols themselves are desirable to a significant swath of the population. That desirability is an attractive point for women, particularly the women who want to become an idol. Many of the most famous, most popular idols of the past have married very successful men. Not just the famous actors or comedians they meet on variety show sets, but the executives and producers who control the whole thing behind the scenes. The important men. The powerful men. So you could marry the salesman or shopkeeper who will live in obscurity in Gunma, the hillbilly capital of Japan, for the rest of his life, or you could take a shot at an entertainment exec and get to live in Minato-ku and wear fancy clothes and get driven around in the back of an Alphard Executive Lounge.

If they want that kind of success, aspiring idols have to put up with a lot of bullshit besides the practice and being responsible for paying for all their costumes and practice time and transport to and from venues. With AKB marketing themselves… that is, being marketed as the attainable idols, you have to put yourself out into direct contact with the fans… some of whom are fanatical and perverted. While I am sure they have devised ways to weed the creeps out of the lines by now, there are photos of horrified idols circa 2010 having just shaken the semen-covered hand of a man who was masturbating in line.7 Rest assured, there are more depraved acts these women have to endure,8 and not all of it is from the fans.

Male idol groups exist in Japan, as well. The boy band. Johnny’s & Associates is was Japan’s preeminent boy band factory. They set the tone in the 1980s with Shonentai, and in the 1990s and 2000s SMAP and Arashi provided them their biggest successes. Members of SMAP crossed boundaries into variety shows and serious acting, and Arashi had the company’s biggest musical sales successes. Even if you’ve been isolated from Japanese culture, there is still a chance that you’ve accidentally seen members from one or both groups in your lifetime because their faces have been everywhere since their debuts in advertisements, TV shows, and movies. Like the girls, their music is formulaic and generic and generally not worth bothering with, and their looks are all polished to the point of femininity. And of course, the founder of Johnny’s, Johnny Kitagawa, was guilty of abusing the boys in his entertainment conglomerate, sexually or otherwise, crimes which were repeatedly covered up by the Japanese media thanks to the tremendous influence the man exercised.

The company has gone on to restructure into two new entities, with some key people stepping down (and naturally this all came to public light after Johnny himself died and went to Hell, not by the Japanese media, but by the fucking BBC because Vice was busy trying to figure out which Democratic nominee had the best rack or something9), and they now promise transparency so that this sort of abuse does not happen again, just like how no more girls were harmed after Epstein killed himself.

The male and female idol groups all operate under contracts with such draconian rules regarding their personal conduct that it is difficult to believe anyone would read and willingly sign such a document. They must always act in a certain manner. They must maintain body weight within a certain range. They are not allowed to date, to maintain the illusion of accessibility. In one highly publicized incident circa 2010, an AKB48 member was caught leaving the apartment of a male performer one morning. She went online and issued a teary apology after shaving all her hair off. She remained with the group, but I’m not sure anyone has ended up living happily ever after.

Where Johnny’s basically ran the entire boy band scene, Akimoto Yasushi was the creator of O-Nanko Club and AKB48 and many of its clones. Akimoto was part of the 2020 Olympic Committee in Tokyo and was recently given some medal by the government. One can only speculate on the abuse he oversees that will come to light only after he dies and goes straight to Hell (it is possible he’s clean).

The idol machine is interesting for its behind-the-scenes drama. It is a billion-dollar (hundred-billion-yen) industry where youthful good looks are prized above all else. It is a running joke that SMAP member Sakai Masahiro can’t sing, but he is handsome and very charismatic, and the girls hide their voices in choruses dozens strong (that 48 is not just a number chosen at random). There is little or no musical value in what they do, so in this section there are few links to their work. The massive sales successes the machine enjoys is largely due to the, uh, innovation of meet-and-greet handshake events brought into unholy existence by Akimoto and his AKB48 group. Fans are encouraged to purchase as many copies of the singles and albums as they can, as the physical album cases contain tickets which can be used to gain entry to these handshake events. I have seen the system described as both a lottery that results in frantic searches for the lucky tickets like we’re in a Roald Dahl novel, or as simply whoever has the most tickets wins. Whatever it is, the result is that it is a prominent part of the Japanese recording industry and is thus impossible to ignore.

Nine hundred copies.

That’s what ECM Records managed to sell from the original vinyl run of Bright Size Life.

At the time, Manfred Eicher no doubt blamed the lack of interest on bandleader Pat Metheny’s inexplicable decision not to use Dave Holland, a respected and ultra-competent upright bassist, on the record. Instead, Metheny had insisted on this fellow he’d been touring with — John “Jaco” Pastorius III. Eicher could have forced the issue; indeed, he was rather famous for forcing issues with his talent. Instead, he backed off and gave Metheny a chance to do what he wanted. He wouldn’t make that “mistake” in the future; the succeeding Watercolors, Rejoicing, and Pat Metheny Group LPs all featured a much heavier hand of Eicher intervention, to the point where the last of those albums has an absolutely ridiculous track order because Eicher wanted to optimize a particular song on the album for the part of the record groove with the widest possible dynamic range.

Bright Size Life was a confident, almost arrogant, effort from the 21-year-old guitarist. Six of the eight songs were originals, one was an uncredited revamp of a tune from Metheny’s mentor Gary Burton, and the last one was an Ornette Coleman composition. They are all profoundly odd pieces that frequently depart from conventional ideas of rhythm and meter. I heard “Uniquity Road” for the first time when I was seventeen years old and I was gobsmacked, it didn’t make any sense to me, like watching a wheel roll down a hill first slowly, than quickly, then back to leisure:

The sheet music is frustrating in a way that modern pop can’t begin to comprehend; the title track has basically a 148-note long verse form compared to, say, the 14-note repeating verse of Sabrina Carpenter’s most unusual song, “My Man On Willpower”. At no point does Pastorius play anything like a conventional bass track; it’s either unison with the guitar or a counterpoint-style melody beneath it.

Because Eicher wasn’t a fan of spending money on long studio sessions — and can you blame him, when the records don’t move a thousand units? — you can hear Metheny repeatedly flub notes and struggle with tempo. He has frequently stated that he is essentially unable to listen to the record now because all he can hear are his mistakes. Having just put out a book that I would already like to rewrite in its entirety, I can sympathize. Jaco, on the other hand, is flawless. Pastorius really plays Metheny right out of the studio for pretty much the entirety of the record. Which is reasonable, as Jaco was four years older and had much more experience playing outside of the academic environment. It’s very hip now to talk about Bright Size Life like it was a Jaco Pastorius record featuring Pat Metheny and, uh, Bob Moses.

Don’t be fooled by that. For all its infelicities, Bright Size Life is an utter masterpiece and arguably the most important jazz record ever made with a guitar. Before BSL, the average jazz guitar record was Wes Montgomery playing octaves over Beatles tunes for Creed Taylor’s studio. Afterwards, it was Mike Stern, Lee Ritenour, Al DiMeola, and so on. Every jazzbo knows it, owns it, has an opinion on it, has probably seen most of the tracks played live.

Depending on whom you believe — ECM themselves or the music press — Bright Size Life was released either on Feb 9 or Mar 1, 1976. I tend to believe ECM, which unlike most record companies of that era maintained good records and archives of what they did and when. It is available on Spotify and everywhere else you might hear music.

The best recent version on YouTube is from the tour with Richard Bona and Antonio Sanchez, largely because Bona has the courage to solo on his own ideas instead of Jaco’s:

The worst version is clearly the one-verse version I did with The Commander last year; he has Jaco’s part down just fine — and on a fretless! — but I am running a bit behind all the way through. The Yuno Miles joke that underpins the video also became immediately stale!

In my experience, there are just two kinds of jazz listeners: people who think Bright Size Life is better than Giant Steps and people who, were they to see Pat Metheny on the street in Manhattan, would slap him with a frozen fish. You should take a listen and see where you’d fall.

Partying with Japanese people means that you will find yourself singing karaoke with them. With fellow coworkers, this could be in a box (nicer than the word implies) at a big karaoke chain like Big Echo, or within the intimate confines of a “snack bar,” or at a stress-release party after a major event at a resort hotel. Being English-speaking Westerners, you’ll naturally gravitate towards the Western songs that are in the catalogs, and with millions of songs from all over the world to choose from, you can make the safe choice of “You Remind Me” to show off your manly gravelly voice.

Or you can learn something from deep in Japan’s cultural legacy and really impress your coworkers. Back in 2011 at an end-of-year party (bounenkai, the Japanese equivalent of a company Christmas party) with the real teachers at the school I was visiting that semester,1 I sang “Guts Daze,” a 1995 hit by Osaka band Ulfuls (urufuruzu, a katakana murder of the word “soulful”). It is a song more or less about taking your shot. While a huge hit that most Japanese people know, the Ulfuls have zero international presence. Non-Japanese have never heard the band’s name and know none of their songs. It was a pleasant shock to my coworkers to hear me go up and not just sing it, but sing it well. The incident made me instantly one of them despite the language barrier and my blue eyes and my ridiculous nose.

All this is to say that Japan has produced so much more music than anyone outside its borders has heard. The Ulfuls are a fairly poppish rock band who owe much of their sound to the Beatles. Hailing from Osaka, they have a strong comedic bent and their music videos are often fun. Even when they delve into melancholy (“Naketekuru”) they often couch it in something absurd to take the edge off, like a commercial selling an energy drink.2 On that same single the song “Ryouhou for You” was the theme of the annual high school boys’ baseball tournament at Koshien Stadium in Osaka.3 And when they do more serious fare they do it quite well. They are currently singing about dancing like old men, fitting for me as I’m not that much younger than they are.

The Ulfuls’ charismatic lead singer is Tortoise Matsumoto. A dream collaboration is his character-rich voice with my favorite Japanese artist, Shiina Ringo.4 Unfortunately, we did not get late 1990s Peak Ulfuls Tortoise with Youthful Exuberance Ringo at the dawn of her career, we got a silly 1920s Broadway style commercial for a shopping mall 15 years too late. Ulfuls have rightly earned a strong fan base and still sell records, but they don’t really cover any new ground in their most recent music. But Shiina Ringo, with a voice that can cut glass, will never run into that problem. She started her career5 singing pop songs backed by a blues-infused punk sound all her own which she called “Shinjuku-kei.”6 It was a vastly different approach from the biggest selling female stars of her era: Hamasaki Ayumi, Amuro Namie, and Utada Hikaru. All are polished-to-a-glow, pretty pop stars. Amuro can dance and sold millions and millions of copies of albums and singles to her devoted fans. Utada speaks English and grew up with wealthy, successful parents in the recording industry, spending some years in New York City and even releasing a rather regrettable album in the American market (I may be easy-breezy to her, but is she Japanese-y or Japan-easy?). Hamasaki writes all her own music and made a massive impact in the Japanese fashion world. She is the Queen Gyaru, she popularized the big golden hair and shiny makeup and garish outfits that blossomed across the nation in the late 1990s. Shiina, though…

I’ll pause here to give an honorable mention to Koda Kumi, because she was brave enough to ask the question, “What if a slut were to sing J-pop songs while prancing about in lingerie and simulating lewd acts with her female backup dancers?” Bless her and her many talents, for she sold many copies of her work as well.

Shiina Ringo did not stick with the usual pop music topics of partying, dancing, and love and/or sex. Instead, she dealt with desperate loneliness in her biggest hit, “Tsumi to Batsu.” Obssession in the oddly touching “Gips.” Prostitution in retro banger “Kabuki-chou no Joou.” Drugs and sexual word play in the upbeat “Marunouchi Sadistic.” Her first album Muzai Moratorium and its follow up Shoso Strip are two of the most complete albums I have ever heard. Muzai is (much) more radio friendly, with more familiar sounds that are still more jazzy or bluesy or punky than her contemporaries. Strip is more daring and is home to her two biggest hits, “Honnou” and the aforementioned “Tsumi to Batsu.” She was pushing the envelope very early in her career, and “Tsumi to Batsu,” being her biggest hit, is a song she continues to perform to the delight of her fans. She performs it in different arrangements, and it still kills.

Shoso Strip was only the beginning of her experimentation. Her third and fourth albums are an exclamation at the end of the first phase of her career. Her fourth, Heisei Fuuzoku, serves as the soundtrack to the Ninagawa Mika movie “Sakuran,” based on a manga about a prostitute courtesan in Edo Japan. Most of the songs on it are reworked versions from her exceedingly weird experimental avant-gard third album, Kalk, Zamen, Kuri no Hana, whose title comes from an amusing argument a couple of guys on her team were having whether semen (zamen) smells more like chestnut flowers (kuri no hana) or chlorine (kalk, sort of). ANYWAY, the original album is full of experimental sounds and unconventional instruments (mostly), such as the didgeridoo on tracks “Meisai” and “Kuki,”7 the karimba and jaw harp in “Torikoshi Kurou,” or the vacuum cleaner(!) easing us into “Yattsuke Shigoto.” It is difficult to comment on the lyrics. On one level, bridging the gap between the cultural expectations of Westerners and Japanese provides a challenge, and putting on top of that the abstract and poetic Japanese Shiina uses renders the task almost moot, as her songwriting is on a different level from your average Jpop artist. She spends a lot of time on this album exploring the nature of life, “Kuki” in particular could be seen as either hopeful or despairing depending on one’s mood. At any rate, anyone who loves music will find both of these albums endlessly fascinating.

She performed several more rearranged versions of songs from these albums at a jazz concert released as on video as Baisho Ecstacy. “Okonomide” is an especially good track from this performance. For NHK she contributed the song “Ringo no Uta” played over a stop-motion video on e-tele during their children’s programming. The official promotional video features Shiina donning costumes from her previous videos and moving through them, ending with her as she was at that moment, which she saw as the end of her solo career. The single included a version of Shoso Strip’s “Yokushitsu” with its EDM beats completely removed in favor of a more orchestral arrangement. She translated her lyrics into English and renamed it “La Salle de Bain.” Her voice can be difficult to listen to at times, but these two songs in particular show her skill in using what she has and the emotion she can convey. She doesn’t belt out a high note and hold it with an impressive vibrato. She seizes her gifts and uses them to make people feel something, whether it is difficult and unpleasant or warm and fuzzy. She does this far more effectively than her contemporaries, most evident in a 2016 duet she performed with her friend Utada Hikaru. Utada’s voice is easier on the ears, but less interesting, less emotional.

Shiina formed a band called Tokyo Jihen (the Tokyo Incidents). Drummer Hata Toshiki lived a true rock star life, in one incident getting drunk and running nude through a park somewhere in Tokyo… although now he farms with his parents and goes fishing a lot. Bassist Kameda Seiji worked with her throughout her solo career, and he has had a long, successful career as a producer outside his association with her. Keyboardist Izawa Ichiyo she continues to work with on solo projects, including the big duet album she released in 2024. He replaced H ZETT M, the keyboardist in Phase 1. Guitarist Ukigumo, a successful producer in his own right, is also a replacement, ably stepping in after Phase 1 guitarist Hirama Mikio left. Hirama has continued to collaborate with Shiina Ringo in her ongoing solo work.

Tokyo Jihen’s maiden album Kyoiku kicks off phase one with a punky cover of “Ringo no Uta,” and their second album, Adult, is drummed into existence by the steady beat of “Himitsu.” While both albums are worth listening to front to back with lots of interesting things going on in the deep cuts (“Service,” “Ekimae,” “Keshou Naoshi”), the music is best experienced in the concert video Just Can’t Help It. It opens with “Yukiguni” and sets a mysterious tone that evokes the feeling of listening to something you’re not supposed to be listening to, which sends you right into “Genjistu wo Warau.” There’s an urgency to the performance. A danger. Tokyo Jihen is a forbidden fruit.

They produced three more albums and an EP before splitting up. Variety is the most interesting one, a collection of mostly 3-ish minute pop-rock songs in an eclectic, uh, variety of styles. “Fukushuu” is there with a menacing, heavy guitar. “SSAW” gives us a light and whimsical sound. “OSCA” is a romp named after an old Alfa but doesn’t seem to be about the car at all. Sports is the best one with the best singles. It opens a capella with “Ikiru,” an interesting blend of chords and electronic manipulation unlike your usual generic Jpop I-IV-V-VI. “Denpa Tsuushin” showcases Ukigumo in a hard driving riff and “Noriki” is led by Izawa’s synthesizer. “Kimaru” is the best track, a slow build a la “Stairway to Heaven” but in about 70% of the time, but my favorite is “FAIR,” perfect for a fine, not-too-hot summer afternoon with the windows open (and the top down if you have a convertible). Discovery is their most commercial one, with seemingly every song being used in a commercial tie-in, or as the theme song for a TV drama on one of the major stations. “Osorubeki Otonatachi” (“Les Adultes Terribles” [live version from Discovery concert video]) is the best song, and the lyrics are even in English so you can enjoy it, too. In 2021 they reunited and released Music, another strong effort that is enjoyable from front to back, accompanied by a youtube series “Hanakin,” a sort of Tokyo Jihen variety show following each of the members as they cook, work out, go fishing, or just laze about at hot spring resorts eating and bathing.

Shiina Ringo has continued her solo career while not with Tokyo Jihen, although she continues to work with the individual members in her other projects. She writes a lot for other A-list talent. Her most recent album is a collaboration with other successful musicians (the second in her discography), accompanied by a video release of an elaborate concert worthy of Carnegie Hall. While it is unlikely anyone here at ACF would sing any of her songs at karaoke, she is definitely worth listening to, and stands at the very pinnacle of Japanese popular music.

“I’m not gonna spend an hour plus watching this but I’m willing to bet Rick doesn’t ask ‘Why are you such an asshole?’”

That text from an old friend was how I found out that Rick Beato had released a video of a detailed interview with Journey guitarist Neal Schon.

I understood why my friend didn’t want to watch it, but of course I watched it. Immediately. I will go to my grave believing that pre-Raised On Radio Journey is in the top 10 finest bands of all time. Not rock bands, not pop bands. Bands, period. They were so good that it’s almost impossible to wrap one’s mind around how good they were. They were so good that people believe stuff about them that isn’t true, just because it sounds more plausible.

An example, and one that utterly infuriates me: In the first season of Treme, which is normally so good about music, Steve Zahn’s gadfly character “Davis” has assembled an all-star cast of New Orleans musicians to record an anti-George W. Bush tune. Someone asks Davis if they’re going to lay down the parts separately. He responds, indignantly,

“What band is this? Journey?”

before indicating that the track will be recorded with the full band live. Ha ha! Very funny! Because when you listen to something like “Open Arms” or “Stone In Love” it seems obvious that it was the product of some Steely-Dan-esque 410-day perpetual studio session. Except it wasn’t. Most of the album was recorded live, just like the band’s past few albums had been. They were really just that good1. If you want proof they could do it live, here’s the Escape tour from Houston. I watched it on MTV the first time they showed it, back in early 1982 or thereabouts. Yes, I am really that old, and I was really (un)lucky enough to have MTV in 1982.

There’s no punching-in on this. Steve Perry really does sing like that. (The end-of-track vocals on “Mother, Father” are him, not a backup or studio singer, which still astounds me now.) Steve Smith is an astounding monster of a drummer. Jonathan Cain does about five different roles during the concert. Ross Valory is beyond criticism.

And Neal Schon is… well, go watch any other live rock guitar performance of the era then come back for comparison. Those were the days of shambolic addicts like the 30-ish Jimmy Page barely getting through their songs on stage. Even Alex Lifeson struggled to play his studio parts in concert. But you’ll wait in wait for Neal Schon to even make a picking mistake in this show. Most of the time he increases the difficulty from the originals. Who else could play like this in 1981? Lee Ritenour. Larry Coryell. Maybe Mike Stern. Certainly Pat Metheny wasn’t that deft back then; I’ve heard enough bootlegs from that era to know. But there were no rock guitarists who were as precise and perfect as Schon. Especially not Carlos Santana, who launched Neal’s career when the latter was 15 or 16 years old. Heck, I’ll go ahead and say it, since it’s true: Eddie Van Halen wasn’t that accomplished as a live artist until he was in his forties and no longer recording any music worth hearing.

As ACF readers know, I am an awful but enthusiastic amateur guitarist and I can attest to the fact that it’s easier to learn EvH or Eric Johnson riffs than it would be to play the stuff on Escape correctly. If you told me my life depended on either correctly duplicating “Panama” or “Mother, Father”, I’d take the former and a hammer to the index finger over trying the latter. Neal Schon should go down as the finest rock guitarist of the Seventies and Eighties.

Except he won’t, because people hate him.

And they have some good reasons to hate him.

We might as well enumerate said reasons, just to get them out of the way. This list is not comprehensive.

0. Journey wasn’t a band in the traditional sense. It was a Neal Schon showcase arranged by his manager, Herbie Herbert. Everyone else was an employee, a bit player, a Toto-style studio pro brought on to make the star look good. This was a tremendous burden to put on a teenager, and all indications are that Schon came to accept it as his due.

1. Perhaps because Journey was an old man’s pet project starring a kid surrounded by jazzbos, the band was desperately unhip from the beginning. Whatever planet the New York Dolls or Violent Femmes were from, Journey was on the planet farthest from that one. The absurd Star Wars seriousness of the album art and merch, combined with the soap-opera lighting of their first music videos, seemed almost like Herbert was daring people to make fun of Journey. This dare was gleefully taken up by the entire music press.

2. When Journey was reimagined for the Eighties as a pop-rock band with the addition of Jonathan Cain and Steve Perry, they went to #1 on the charts with “Open Arms”, the most effective power ballad in human history. It made them mainstream and it meant that even their most devoted humbucker-guitar-playing 12-year-old fans (such as, uh, me) had to turn their noses up a bit. Rather than back away from that vibe, the Perry/Cain/Schon songwriting trio leaned in with “Faithfully”. If you are over 40 years old and you claim to not know “Faithfully” by heart, you are either a recent immigrant from a non-English-speaking country or a congenital liar.

3. Schon, noting that Steve Perry “seemed to have the hot hand” at the time, allowed Perry to fire Steve Smith and Ross Valory so they could be replaced with more pop-friendly, less virtuosic players. (The most famous of which was, of course, Randy “Yo, dawg” Jackson from American Idol.)

4. When Steve Perry left Journey for medical and (mostly) emotional reasons, Schon decided to simply replace him with Steve Augeri, who was a store manager at The Gap prior to becoming Journey’s lead singer. When Augeri permanently damaged his vocal cords, Schon replaced him again, this time with a Filipino tribute-band performer. As a consequence, Journey toured for more than three and a half decades with a generic lineup, largely playing the music they’d written and performed over just seven years from 1978 to 1985.

5. In 2012, “Real Housewives” personality and former winemaker Tareq Salahi sued Neal Schon for absconding with his wife, Michaele Salahi. Salahi claimed, and apparently proved in court, that he found out about this because Schon sent him “an email of his large penis, said email being sent for no other purpose than to humiliate and injure the Plaintiff.” The text included with the picture was brief and to the point: “I am fucking your wife.”

6. When Salahi eventually got his divorce and his lawsuit settlement, Schon married Michaele in a pay-per-view ceremony. This wedding, Schon’s fifth, did not do the numbers the couple had hoped for…. so Schon skipped out of paying the city of San Francisco more than a quarter-million dollars in venue fees.

7. Steve Perry, who retains 12.5% of Journey, sued Neal Schon a few years ago for mismanagement.

8. In 2020, Schon sued Ross Valory and Steve Smith, who had returned to Journey as employees, for supposedly trying to take control of the band. Then Schon fired them, again. Steve Perry apparently sided with Valory and Smith, despite being the one to fire them the last time.

9. Jonathan Cain, who is effectively the only other “real” member of Journey, sued Neal Schon for mismanagement and for repeatedly maxing-out the band’s million-dollar-limit Centurion Card. Finally in 2024, Cain was able to get the court to appoint a third-party babysitter for Neal Schon’s expenses. The band continued to perform together during the lawsuits, but — I am not making this up — Schon prohibited Cain from playing rhythm guitar during “Wheel In The Sky”, presumably out of anger or resentment.

10. Schon recorded any number of fairly awful solo records, including Beyond the Thunder, an Windham-Hill-esque smooth jazz album so bad Schon has retroactively removed it from streaming services. (But I still dare anyone to play the licks correctly.)

11. It is commonly agreed that Schon is a truly awful person, in person. He travels with armed guards and is broadly unpleasant to both fans and random people. A quick search of the Internet reveals dozens of personal anecdotes that are universally unflattering to Schon.

No wonder my friend didn’t want to watch the Rick Beato interview… but he, against all odds, has really missed out. The Neal Schon that shows up for this seventy-four-minute discussion is nothing like the man described above. He is painfully humble, crediting perhaps a dozen other musicians as inspirations and speaking kindly at length about both Steve Perry and Jonathan Cain. When Rick compliments him on the famous opening to “Lights”, Schon openly admits that he was imitating Jimi Hendrix. Elsewhere he talks about being overshadowed by Carlos Santana, admiring Wes Montgomery, and how he is permanently inspired by Miles Davis.

At the age of 71, Schon is letter-perfect on the details of how and what he recorded all of the major Journey tracks. This is highly valuable to both fans and other musicians, and is a welcome contrast to the drug-deranged uncertainty shown by a lot of other rockers when discussing the past. Schon can tell you more today about recording an album in 1978 than Slash could tell you in 1992 about recording a 1987 album, for example. He proves capable of playing all the famous licks in studio-perfect form, on a whim. When Beato mentions Wes Montgomery, he responds immediately with… a Wes tune, played on octaves. He offers a lot of interesting details about playing with Jan Hammer and Elvin Bishop, as well.

Most interestingly, Schon is in really good humor throughout. Which is not always the case with Beato’s interviews, perhaps because Rick wants more details than the average podcaster or music journalist would. He is also perfectly happy to confine their discussion largely to things that happened forty years ago. I’ve watched more than one Rick interview where the “talent” keeps trying to steer the conversation to something about which the audience simply won’t care. Schon is exceptionally workmanlike here, discussing various amp settings and guitar choices from 1980 as if he’d not done a single thing he’d rather talk about since then.

The only part of the interview that rubbed me the wrong way was Schon’s suggestion that he wrote bass lines for Ross Valory. This is almost a trope in rock nowadays. David Gilmour was always caustic about Roger Waters’ ability as a player and writer, at one point telling an interviewer that he played all the bass on Pink Floyd records because Waters was too poor a musician to be recorded. I can believe that; even in his The Wall tour, Waters had a bassist off stage. I am much less fond of the late Eddie Van Halen’s continual digs at, and disrepect to, Michael Anthony, which ranged from questioning his ability to play the bass at all to describing Anthony’s voice as a “piccolo trumpet… a limited tool.” Ask yourself how well any of those classic VH records would have done without Michael Anthony.

No sane person doubts Ross Valory as a bass player. He is justifiably famous for his (deliberate, by his own admission) Jaco-like chorus tone on the fretted bass. He played B-E-A-D for his entire career instead of E-A-D-G, and consequently created a lot of things that you just can’t play on a conventional bass. Go listen through Escape and tell me that record would work with anyone else, even Jaco, playing bass. I don’t believe that Neal Schon created the bass part for “Stone In Love”. It’s too similar to stuff Valory was doing for years. And even if he wrote part of the line, he had nothing to do with the unique, syncopated way it’s played. So, yeah… I wish Neal had stayed quiet about that.

Since the interview, Schon and Cain have formally announced the end of their collaboration as Journey. There will be one more tour, after which Cain plans to permanently retire. Schon, on the other hand, says he will do “something”. And that he’d love to see Steve Perry come back. And that Gregg Rollie, who sat in with Journey briefly after forty years away, could come back, too. (Ross Valory and Steve Smith? They’re not welcome.)

It is easy to turn up one’s nose at Neal Schon’s desire to keep playing Journey’s music, in some form, into his middle to late seventies. If we are sympathetic to the man, however, a lot of his flaws seem a bit less severe. He was literally raised on a live performance stage. Can you blame him for not wanting to wrap up his professional life at the age of… thirty-three, when Steve Perry walked away? Can you imagine just doing nothing from that age forward? Can you imagine spending years in front of an adoring crowd and just quitting?

Ask anyone who has ever performed for tens of thousands of people, which does not include me but does include Brother Bark, whether that level of affirmation is easy to walk away from. A few years ago, Josh Tillman aka Father John Misty dragged a Rolling Stone journalist on stage with him and had the crowd cheer for the journalist, just to show the poor dorky guy how seductive it can be. I’m not inclined to judge Neal Schon too harshly because he won’t give up the limelight or even behave like a normal person. I don’t see when in his life anyone would have trained him to be a normal person.

I also think it’s important to once again point out that “normal people” tend to make lousy art. There’s something about the creative process that demands a little bit of ego, a little bit of irrationality, a little bit of psycho-or-socio-pathy. Normal people never have thoughts like “Everyone should listen to this music I’ve just written.” Normal people don’t live out of vans and pawn all their stuff to chase their dreams of being artists. The great Ross Bentley once said to me, “If you still own a decent street car, you’re not serious about being a professional racing driver. Because a professional racing driver would have already sold that car to fund an opportunity.” As he told me this, I had a one-of-a-kind, four-month-old lime-green Audi S5 in the parking lot behind us. But I didn’t go home and sell it, because I wasn’t serious about being a professional racing driver.

I’d like to think that Neal Schon is on his way to being a generally likable fellow. He has settled his lawsuits, he has stayed with his crazy fifth wife for a decade and a half now, he can say nice things about Jonathan Cain in an interview. I don’t think it’s too late for him to become a regular guy. But I also don’t think it matters. The world is full of likable, low-ego, low-drama 71-year-old men. None of them ever wrote “Stone In Love”, or recorded it perfectly, or played it perfectly live. Mark my words. The esteem in which Journey is held will only increase during the years to come. Other bands were hipper, or cooler, or more in touch with the mood on the street. In the long run, they will find their fame and critical respect as fickle as those moods. So, too, will the critics that laughed at Journey wither into irrelevance over time. Can you name a single person who wrote about Pride and Prejudice upon its publication? Brother Bark once said, regarding some critic, “Just write one song as good as the worst Fiona Apple song on Tidal.” And we laughed, because we knew that would never happen.

Earlier today I re-taught myself how to play “Don’t Stop Believin’” on the piano. YouTube makes it a lot easier than it was in 1985, trust me. You would think that overexposure would kill that song dead, the same way Tony Soprano was shot dead while it played at the end of the HBO series. (There’s no other sane interpretation of said ending, by the way.) The truth is that you can’t erase the power and vitality of that song. Even if everything about it is self-consciously serious and lampoonable. Even there is no “south Detroit”. If you heard it for the first time today, you’d be astounded. Go look at what the Top 40 right now. The best of it isn’t close. Every song on Escape is better than anything on the charts now.

Even, it pains me to say, “Open Arms”.

It’s not exactly a one-hit wonder. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have almost ten million followers on Spotify, they’re still touring, they’re still making music. Their track “Heads Will Roll” has nearly 900 million Spotify plays across three different remixes. By contrast, “Maps” has just 269 million plays. Not that much in the greater scheme of things. A month’s worth of Sabrina Carpenter Spotify traffic, if that.

But everyone knows “Maps” — and when it came on at the Outback Steakhouse last week, I saw heads tilt all around the restaurant. Everyone knows it. They might not who sang it, the story behind it, or even most of the lyrics. But they all know the most important part:

Wait! They don’t love you like I love you.

It was a different world twenty-four years ago. The record labels bitched and griped about Napster or LimeWire but they still had unlimited power, they still controlled the world. They could still, for example, offer my brother a record contract so bad he decided he would rather go work in a cell-phone store kiosk than be hobbled by recoupables.

And that’s basically what they did to Karen Lee Orzolek, known professionally as “Karen O”. Her baby band, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, had some buzz in New York, and there were contracts on offer. Presumably awful ones. But they also had some money from touring — and while the official biographies never mention it, Karen was NYU-via-Oberlin and Nick Zinner, the guitarist, was at Bard College, so they had family money, too. So they financed their own EP and used the leverage from its success to get a decent contract with Polydor for Fever To Tell, their proper debut.

It was an era of self-conscious indie rock, and Fever To Tell was yet another fairly anodyne exercise in same… but the third single off it was “Maps”, and that was when everything changed. The song was written in five minutes, which is probably why it comes off as incoherent and brilliant at the same time. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs had been touring with Liars, another cookie-cutter NYC post-pop-punk band, and Karen was in love with Angus Andrew, their singer, but at some point their tours diverged — remember, the labels had total control back then — and Karen found herself alone as Angus presumably tore through a double-stacked line of groupies and club meat.

The first line is officially

Pack up, I’m straight enough

And that’s how I hear it, both on the studio version and a couple live takes — but Karen comes off the end of the last word so much that some people hear it as

Pack up, I’m strayed enough

As in — I’ve strayed far enough, or too often, from you. And then after a few “Oh, say say say” we get right to the meat of it. Wait — they don’t love you like I love you. Karen claims that this comes from a letter she wrote to Angus.

(People wrote letters back then. On paper.)

Maps — they don’t love you like I love you!

Which makes sense, of course. Back then, people toured with a map. One guy drives the van. Another guy reads the map. It didn’t work that well. Any touring musician of the era has stories about getting lost, and about the van breaking down. Sometimes both at the same time.

The second verse is

Made off / Don’t stray / My kind’s your kind / I’ll stay the same

I’ve heard it said that “A woman chooses a man in the hopes he will change. A man chooses a woman in the hopes she won’t.” What a great lyric. My kind’s your kind. What a reassuring and wonderful thing to believe about someone. It’s the opposite of, the antidote to, the loneliness that it’s possible to feel even in the midst of the most intense relationship. Is this woman really my kind? Or is she alien from me beneath the skin, irrevocably differentiated and distanced by the circumstances of her upbringing, her culture, her luminescently awful past? In the critical moments where we need to completely understand each other, how much of her will be… inscrutable?

Then we return to the single line of the chorus, sung with increasing energy, increasing desperation. Wait! she cries, again and again. The song wraps up quite deliberately, descending to a single chord. This was popular at the time as well, a deliberate and conscious response to the artsy and complicated radio fade-outs exemplified by “Don’t Stop Believin’” or “Ride Like The Wind”, and I blame 10,000 Maniacs for it. Natalie had three albums in a row where each song would end with her singing some minor third or something as the band crashed to a sodden halt behind her.

Here’s an example: the last ten seconds of “Gun Shy”.

“Maps” owes a lot more to 10,000 Maniacs than Karen O would probably like to admit. The whole Millennium NYC pop era lived on the back of Natalie Merchant like the Lilith Fair depended on Kate Bush for primal motion. But that in no way diminishes the brilliance of “Maps”, which is solely due to how it expresses…

…and my long-time readers know what’s coming, maybe…

…what Robert Bly called “yearning and longing, those strangely un-American feelings.” To hear “Maps” is to be dropped in the middle of yearning for someone. And how much more resonant is it now, when Tinder and Bumble and Seeking and “the socials” have put each and every one of us in the position of a rock star, when a thousand potential partners for tonight are little more than a swipe away? There was once a time when normie men and women could separate for a night or a week or a year and not have to worry, Ulysses-like, that an infinite number of suitors would present themselves in our absence. Now people are getting picked up on LinkedIn, for God’s sake. On Facebook Marketplace. A friend of mine met his girlfriend in some kind of nerd-ass online sorcery game. She left her current dude for him. How did that conversation go?

“Can you get takeout on the way home tonight? And oh, yeah — we’re over, I agreed to hook up with some guy I’ve never met in real life. We were online and he was pretending to be a scarlet-scaled dragon while I was pretending to be an ancient wizard.” What can you possibly say to that except…

“Wait! They don’t love you like I love you!”

The video for “Maps” focuses on Karen shedding a single tear. Supposedly it was legit, because Angus the boyfriend was supposed to show up for the session and he didn’t bother. But let the record show that Karen then dated Spike Jonze, the BMX wannabe who directed said video. It’s possible to be a helpless victim and a predator at the same time.

The hallmark of a great love song is that it feels universal, heartfelt, relatable. Like Robin Pecknold, on his own self-financed EP, crying out that

"I wouldn't turn to another," you say
On the long night we've made
Let it go

Anyone who has ever been… un-chosen… knows what that’s like. And anyone who feels on the verge of being un-chosen knows what he wants to say.

Wait! They don’t love you like I love you!

That night in the Outback Steakhouse, I saw a young man turn to his girlfriend beside him as the song played. He put his hand on hers and silently mouthed Karen’s plea. Then he smiled, but without much hope.

Readers, he is cooked. You know it. I know it. And as previously-cooked yearn-ers and long-ers, can’t we, each and all, relate? Wait!