Said the Gramophone

EREV XMAS

The Owls - "Welcome to Monday". This song is a greeting card, The Owls' cheery omniscient hello on your strained Monday morning.

Welcome to Monday
We hope you are working hard again.
Welcome to Monday
We sent you a card to let you know we're thinking of you.

And it's nice of them to do so, to send a pop song telegram in shades of blue and rosy pink, with mildly jangling guitars and a jetstream swirl of synths. If it's God singing (and She sings in the first person plural, so there's a hint of She-knows-something-we-don't-know), well despite Her insensitivity to how much Monday sucks, She's sweet to be taking this personal interest. Something in Her dry, pretty voice suggests Mia Doi Todd, or maybe just a world that's kind & good but not flashy in its offerings. A Monday that will provide for you only if you ask it to, demurely.

The Owls - "Isaac Bashevis Singer". Isaac Bashevis Singer: author, humourist, Nobel Laureate, Jew. Were he still with us he would probably be doing the same thing as I'm doing on this Christmas Eve: noshing on mixed nuts, Ferrero Rochers, waiting at a loved-one's house for a matriarch to return with some cabbage rolls. It's a good life.

But one of the things I like to do with this song, this tender portrait, is to disconnect it from the "real" Isaac Bashevis Singer, the I.B.S. known and beloved, and instead to give the song to an anonymous Isaac: one who aged and died in NYC without ever becoming famous, who smiled and shook his head whenever he read an article about the famous writer who shares his name. Our Isaac, this gentle bachelor who works as a watchmaker or a newspaper seller or a watercolourist, this guy too has a wide circle of friends, has lady callers and superstitions and on Christmas Day he throws a feast for all his cherished ones, gentiles and Jews and a solitary Hindu, serving fruitcake and gefilte fish, kosher wine and Austrian bubbly, Ferrero Rochers and mixed nuts. And his turntable never stops spinning.

[buy Daughters and Suns, absolutely the most diverse & pretty a group of pop-songs you'll hear before the end of the year]

Posted by Sean at December 24, 2007 12:46 PM