M.I.A. - "Paper Planes". FORGET IT'S SUMMER. Just forget it. THERE IS NO SUMMER. Summer's done. Come 2010 we'll only have one season anyway: THE HOT SEASON. So let's start early. Starting now, in 2007, l'été est passé. We'll just act like it's this all the time. Like it's awesome all the time. Like you can eat ice-cream and dance in shorts-and-t-shirt all year round.^* In the once-words of my good friend Dave: FUN TIMES FOREVER. And the sky will crisscross with sparkling jet-planes, and M.I.A. will be playing on the roof of the YMCA, just her and a sampler and a girl with a bass drum. And I'll learn to play electric guitar so I can learn to play this song - a high, keening guitar-line, lazy-crazy, useless for anything except "Paper Planes", but the only part you can learn. Because the sing-along chorus is literally impossible to sing along to: it's machine-gun pow and cash register kaching, and yet still the summer's second anthem, the best thing since ella-ella-ella. Sorry Dan: if "Paper Planes" is "filler" then it's like the cotton batten that fills yr favourite doll, the sap in the greening tree, the high-fives that make it worth getting up in the morning.

Hear M.I.A.'s KCRW recording of "Paper Planes" via Gorilla vs Bear - you can hear the way she's already singing it different, romping all through it, finding new swing-sets hidden in the pop-song's nooks and crannies.

* - I guess in some places you can ice-cream and dance all year round. But it's more fun if it's in Montreal.

[pre-order Kala, which is, unexpectedly, totally amazing]

Fleetwood Mac - "Walk A Thin Line". Jordan calls it The Summer of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, but as I say in the comments to that post - for me 'twas the spring of Rumours and 'tis now the summer FUN TIMES FOREVER of Tusk. I do not know what this says about my life other than the need for a harpsichord in it, and my love of wooly mammoths.

On "Walk A Thin Line", Lindsey Buckingham sings in that mode which Fleetwood Mac perfected: a jubilant sorrow, a melancholy joy, an addicting lament. There's a dozen voices there with him, glad and ruined, talking about fate, want & wonder, all as the beat clomps on & on, at once trudge and soar. And with some of the most magnificent drums I have ever heard on a song, the wisest drums I can remember, the stumble &: smile of a man as goes to hug his unrequited love: oh heart, beat on, foolish and dear, oh oh & oh no & yes.

Apparently Buckingham blamed Tusk's commercial "failure" (only 4 million sold!) on home taping. If you're reading this Lindsey, I hope that you warm a little bit to Said the Gramophone.

[buy]

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Join me at this Friday's Bollywood Bike-In at Montreal's McAuslan Brewery. Cheap beer, projected films, and DJs under the stars.

It's been a few days of birthday! A verily and merrily, then, to Matt Perpetua, Andrew Rose, and Dan Zabbal.

[mammoth drawing by Christina McSherry]