#11 The Fallen By Watchbird - Jane Weaver

Ol' Jane and me, we go way back. Back to before the worldwide web was much of a thing at all. The best way I knew back then to find new music was go tramping round record stores in my lunch hour, pawing through the bargain bins. Of course, back then there were record stores.

That's where I first came across ol' Jane Weaver, only of course I didn't know then that's who she was. I picked up these two singles by Kill Laura because there's a name you don't pass up or not for a pound a piece you don't, anyway. I got them home and played them and they were good. They were better than good. Here, have a listen for yourself.

Now, that's a chord progression. Sure, it's the Velvet Underground's chord progression, but it's not what you steal it's what you do with it, isn't it? And then there's the fuzz and the crackle and the voice. That voice.

So after that I bought all of ol' Jane's stuff I could get my hands on and I kept on buying it. All the Kill Laura. All the Misty Dixon. (We'll get to them). All the Jane Weaver. 

So many Jane Weaver albums, I have. When I was doing this list I piled them all up and they stacked higher than almost anyone's except Lloyd Cole's. Who knew? 

Who cared? Not many. Here's ol' Jane in 2006, sitting on a plastic chair in a field somewhere. There she was, knocking out classics, one after another, all those years. They could all be on this list. No-one wanted to know.

Yeah, well, they love ol' Jane now, don't they? All she had to do was turn herself into a one-woman Hawkwind then throw in a bit of Can for credibility. Literally, with Malcolm Mooney on guest vocals.

All that came later and I love those records, The Silver Globe, Loops in the Secret Society, Modern Kosmology. The motorik. The merciless drive. But I love the faery lilt of the early ones, too, Seven Day Smile, Cherlokolate, any of them, all of them, they could all be on this list.

I had to pick and I picked The Fallen by Watchbird. It's the transitional shift from psychfolk to krautrock. It's prog, come on, let's own it. Psych prog, folk prog, prog punk, twist it how you want there's prog in it, at the core.

Ffs, that makes two prog albums on this list, with the Ultrasound. You think you grow up but you don't, not really.

What's it about, this album, then, with the funny name? Search me. Ask ol' Jane, I guess. There's a story in there at the back of it, just like there would be in a Gentle Giant album, I'm sure of that. 

There must be. There's a book. Oh yes, there's a book. I bought it. I tried to read it but I didn't get far. I didn't get far at all.

I'll stick with the songs. The songs are superb. Better than the later stuff everyone loves. The stuff that sells and fills halls and gets on TV and into the pages of the quality press. Not that that stuff's not great, too. It really is. It may even be better. But this is the one I remember.

This one and Misty Dixon but we'll get to that.

All in good time.

#12 Superorganism - Superorganism

In 2017, I pegged two new bands for future global domination. Each of them had single word names beginning with "S". One was Starcrawler. The other was Superorganism.  

This makes the third time I've name-checked Starcrawler in this series, although neither of their two excellent albums, both of which I own, features in the final twenty-five. The four-piece alt-rock combo has steadily built a reputation as an incendiary live band with a powerhouse rhythm section behind one of the most fearsome front lines you're likely to see and some really great songs. They're not ruling the world yet but they're working on it.

Then there's Superorganism, a peculiar quirky, self-conscious eight-strong art-rock collective frequently received by outraged music lovers as either a scam or a joke. They released their eponymous album three years ago. Since then... nothing. And yet it's Superorganism who make the list. Why?

I've listened to the Superorganism album dozens of times but I've barely played either of Starcrawler's albums at all. Simple as that. Both bands are superb to watch - the eighth member of Superorganism is there just for the visuals ffs - but Superorganism are also endlessly entertaining to listen to. Starcrawler are that little bit too rawk! for me. Especially the second album.

There's absolutely nothing rock 'n' roll about Superorganism, for all they affect the annoyingly smug, self-satisfied pose of people who know they're cooler than you'll ever be. I find it all too easy to imagine them lounging around the decaying orangery of some minor stately home, a decrepit pile formerly owned by a louche and drug-addled minor aristocrat but currently being squatted by some art-left ne'er-do-wells whose trust funds have been temporarily suspended for indeterminate misdemeanors.

Which is actually not a thousand miles from the truth, minus the aristocracy and the trust funds (and probably the orangery), in as much as they do (or did) all live together in the same house. They met "online in music forums and via mutual friends over a number of years" and ended up both recording and living together. 

Four of the eight had been another band entirely, something I did not know until much later. What's more, it was a band I'd not only heard of but a couple of whose songs I'd downloaded from YouTube a year or two earlier.

Had I known half of Superorganism was really the Eversons, New Zealand controversialists known for their tasteless sense of humor and heavy use of irony, I'm not at all sure I'd have been quite as willing to believe. And that was before the revelations about one of the band that got them thrown off their New Zealand label. Guess which one of Superorganism it was. Yes, you're probably right.

All this is just biography, though. We're not going to get into the art/artist debate again, not this time. Let's focus on why this album is so high on my personal favorites list.

Three reasons: Orono Noguchi's bored, affectless vocals, the gleefully jarring arrangements and those big, booming, catchy choruses. I am such a sucker for lack of affect in a singer (not such a thrill in a work colleague, let me tell you...) and off-kilter arrangements always do something good to my nerves. And who doesn't like a great singalong chorus, eh? 

Also they are relentlessly entertaining in all the live clips I've seen. Then again, so are Starcrawler, but it didn't help them any when it came to getting picked.

Not everyone agrees, of course. One of my favorite memories of 2017 was reading the YouTube comments after Superorganism's incredibly flat, mannered performance of Something For Your Mind on Jools Holland's iconic muso love-in, Later:

"If this is the standard bearer for music in the 20teens, it's definitely going to hell in a tatty hand basket"

"Wouldn't think Jools would entertain any of this shit. Most of it is just pre recorded samples, with zero live merit"

"Absolute mindless drivel!!!! That's not music!"

And possibly my favorite of all...

"I was dissapointed to find the lead singer a young little Chinese girl.." 

Pretty sure all of that suggests they were getting everything right. They certainly were for me. As the very different and far more accessible version of the same song they turned in for the much funkier Triple-J set shows, they knew exactly what they were doing.

I can honestly say I love all of their songs... unfortunately that's because they've recorded so few of them. They're pretty much all on this one album.

As for global domination, it's looking very much as though it's already over for Superorganism. A footnote in the history of rock bands too clever for their own good is about the most they can hope for.

Unless that second album turns out to be a killer...

# 13 The Golden Mile - My Life Story

Original release date : March 1997

Since I seem to begin most of these posts either by describing where I first discovered the band or explaining why I can't remember, I guess I'd better go over this one again. I have mentioned it before, quite possibly more than once, but I don't flatter myself that anyone's going to remember.

It was some time in the mid-90s, back when I was still going out of an evening, now and then. I'd come home sometime after eleven, having had a few drinks with someone or other because back then I also had friends and I still liked a drink. Not sure how closely related those two facts might be.

I came in and switched on the TV. We still owned a TV. We even watched it once in a while. Anyone sense a theme developing? 

Mark Radcliffe hosted a show in the nineties called The White Room. It didn't last all that long. I mean, it lasted an hour, I think, when it was on. There were only a couple of seasons, that's what I'm getting at. It was pretty much all music as I recall. There were plenty of youth-oriented shows in the nineties that had bands on to break up the chat and tomfoolery but The White Room was nothing but bands, one after another.

I have no memory of who else was on that show, if indeed I saw any of the rest of it. It may be that I switched on right as My Life Story launched into 12 Reasons Why. That's how I remember it. That's all I remember, really. They did Sparkle, too, but I don't think I saw it. I only know from seeing it on YouTube fifteen years later.

It was one of those moments. I've only had a few of them in fifty years of listening to music. The first time I heard Heroin by the Velvet Underground.  The first time I heard Land by the Patti Smith Group. The first time I heard Frankie Teardrop by Suicide. The first time I heard Upside Down by the Jesus and Mary Chain. The first time I heard Virginia Plain by Roxy Music. Even, in a very different way, the first time I heard Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen on Rosko's Round Table and said "That's going to be a Number One record". Hmm. It's more than I thought and I keep thinking of new ones, too. I should do a post.

Topping them all, the time I asked to hear Lou Reed's latest LP in the old Virgin record shop, long before it was a Megastore, where they gave you headphones and you sat on a sofa like one of the hippies Richard Branson wanted you to think he was and the LP in question turned out to be Metal Machine Music and I lasted about two and a half minutes before I had a panic attack and ran out of the shop.

In those TV days I also had a VCR that was always cued up and ready to go in case anything worth recording popped up unexpectedly. I managed to hit Record to save the moment for posterity and next day I watched it again, when I was able to take it in properly. At the time, I was too stunned. I just sat there in a state of inebriated disbelief as the power and wonder of it all coursed through me like a class-A drug.

That VHS tape is long lost but now, of course, I've seen the clip countless times on YouTube. I watched it last night. Like most things that hit with that kind of impact when they take you unawares the effect fades with repeated exposure. It's still bloody amazing all the same.

In the mid-nineties I wasn't just still going out, I was still going to gigs. I don't think that stopped until the early 2000s. Over the next year, year and a half, I saw My Life Story three times and each time they were superb. Then I saw them a fourth time, a little later, that we won't mention, when they weren't. 

I bought all of their singles and the album, The Golden Mile, on which several of those singles also appear. Without exception, every track on the album and all the extra tracks on the singles were great. If you like overblown, hyper-dramatic, glam-inflected art rock, that is.  

Obviously I do. I also love rock songs with string arrangements and I have a long-held theory that trumpet is the most rock and roll of all the instruments that aren't guitar, bass and drums. My Life Story have every bit of that going on all at once and with the most aggressive attitude you can bring to playing the violin or blowing the trumpet.

If you watch the video of 12 Reasons Why, which you very definitely should, you'll see one of the band (the keyboard player, I think it is) stalking across the front of the stage like she's at some kind of coked-up fight club, holding up sheets of paper in sync with the lyrics with the numbers 1 to 12 written on them, tearing them in half and throwing them into the crowd. Well, as much as you can throw a flat sheet of paper.

I have one of those sheets, framed, on the wall over the fireplace in the front room downstairs. Not literally one from that White Room performance. Better. I caught it at one of those gigs I went to and let me tell you there was some heavy competition for it. I'd already missed several of the earlier numbers but I damn well wasn't going to miss the last one. Ripped down the middle, it's the best number. The title number: 12. 

There's also a card on the mantlepiece itself. It's from the band, wishing me a Happy Christmas. Sadly, it's not a personalised card. I got it because I filled out the slip that came with the CD, where you give your name and address and send it to the record company and they put you on a mailing list and tell you when you can next give them more money.

I was in my late thirties when I did all this. I'm not proud of it. Oh, okay, yes I am. I'm getting to the age now where i'm wondering if maybe I ought to do it again.

I was watching Starcrawler on YouTube for another of these posts the other night and I found myself wishing I'd gone to see them a few years back, when I would have been in my late fifties. They played not ten miles from here and I thought about it then I didn't go. I'd like to be able to say it's because I had some self-awareness or even a sense of shame but actually it's because it seemed like too much bother. That's really not a good enough reason.

My Life Story were never going to be big. Well, not commercially. They were big in another way, of course - too big. There were fifteen of them. Try trucking that around the clubs and town halls on the back of four or five singles that scraped the low end of the top forty and see how long you last.

They play reunion gigs quite often. They do all the songs everyone knows and the audience yells along. I wouldn't go to see anyone doing that, least of all someone I loved, once. Then again, I'm the one who refused to go see the Rolling Stones in 1981 because "they're too old and it'll just be embarrassing".

If I ever do start going to see live music again it won't be to see the Stones or My Life Story, long past their prime. It'll be to see someone who's at the stage MLS were when they made The Golden Mile. Someone just getting started, hitting their stride. Someone young, brash, arrogant, confident. Someone who still believes.

Waste of time, otherwise, theirs and mine.

Lessons Will Be Learned

And so another Blaugust drifts by, fading slowly into the gathering mists of autumn, shrouded in a cloak of bittersweet longing and tender regret. Or something. It's over, anyway.

So, how did you do? Belghast, like a proud coach at the end of a long season, has the final stats. Thanks, Coach! 

Is that even a thing coaches do? Schools didn't really have sports coaches in my day so I have no real idea what they do or how they talk except what I've seen in movies and TV shows. We had sports masters and my scool had what used to be called a "cricket professional", meaning someone who used to play professionally and parlayed that into a few decades of oiling the bats and shouting at people for running on the pitch. 

Maybe schools over here do have sports coaches these days. They have proms now, after all. 

God, that would have been weird - a prom. I kind of wish we had had them but I went to an all boys school and same-sex relationships were definitely not sanctioned by the authorities back then. Then again, half my friends ended up going out with girls from the same all girls school  that we seemed to have some kind of link-up with, even though it was on the other side of town. 

And so did I, come to that. And married one of them. The girls, that is, not one of my friends. Although we were friends then and still are now even though we divorced in the 1980s and haven't seen each other face-to-face for decades.

Ahem. Shall we get back to Blaugust? Should have done all this in "Getting To Know You Week" I guess, not "Lessons Learned". Lesson learned, then.

Congratulations to everyone who hit their targets and to everyone who didn't. Thanks to everyone who commented or contributed or read along in silence. Every eyeball matters. It takes a village to raise a blog, so they say. Okay, no-one says that but you know what I mean.

My own plan was to post every day and I did. It wasn't hard but then I do this for fun and anyway I don't work as much as I used to (even less, now I've had my requested reduction in hours to two days a week confirmed). Looking back to Blaugusts gone, I have no idea how I managed the full thirty-one posts when I was working almost full-time. I couldn't do it now.

Another Lesson : Random Pictures Break Up Text

Well, I guess I could. I could have done it this time but I'd have had to set up for it. Which I did. Even though I probably could have winged it.

This is Lessons Learned Week and for once I can confidently say I did learn at least one thing this time around: writing ahead really pays off. Also, another thing, so does finding a hook on which you can hang a whole bunch of similar posts.

I've often thought about doing series or features on the blog but until now it's always seemed like it would be more trouble than it was worth. I've done a few odds and ends over the years but only in a very ad hoc, fractured fashion. I've never given anything a specific name or made a separate section for it or allocated a particular day for the posts.

I didn't do any of those things this time, either, but the Pitchfork 25 series did have the benefit of a clear framework and a very specific remit, both of which made it exceptionally easy to knock out posts very quickly. Where the average time from blank page to published post here is probably no less than three hours, most of those P25 posts took less than an hour, start to end.

They were also so much fun to put together I sometimes banged out two or three on the same day because I was enjoying myself so much. At one point I had ten pre-written and ready to go. That really takes the pressure off.

My plan was always to use them only on days when I was working and to write "normal" posts every other day, so I was well aware I'd have more than I'd need to fill the gaps for Blaugust but I couldn't resist doing them. Music posts are so moreish.

As I write, I still have three completed P25 posts in the bank, which takes us to the Top Ten. I haven't quite decided how I'm going to go on from there. I might keep the rest back for days when I wouldn't otherwise post or I might just get bang them out and put them up as they come.

They Don't Need To Be Relevant - Just Pretty.

One thing's for certain: I will finish the whole twenty-five. It would be crazy not to. And there'll be another post on the final, official twenty-five, when it comes. I have no real idea when that's going to be. Entries closed nearly two weeks ago but all it says on the website is "check back later in the year for the results". 

I was hoping when I trailed the series that a few Blaugustians might join in and do 25s of their own (or 10s or 5s) but although I got more comments than I expected on my P25 posts the only one who came up with a list of their own was Mailvaltar. 

If anyone else fancies doing one it's not too late, you know. That's another lesson I learned from Blaugust. It's never too late to join in. I watched from the sidelines for several years before took the plunge. 

Actually, I didn't dive right in even then. My first year I shadowed Blaugust without signing up. Someone did that this year, I believe, although I forget who it was. It's a bit like when I play World vs World in Guild Wars 2 and run alongside a zerg without joining the squad. Sometimes that just feels freer, somehow.

There's no perfect way to blog and no perfect way to do Blaugust. That's another lesson. Do it your way. It's a platform and an opportunity and a club with no real entrance requirements other than a modicum of interest in blogging.

When it ends a lot of people feel a bit burned out or if not that then a little singed at edges. Others still feel the fire to write burning within. One incendiary metaphor too far? Thought so. 

No matter how we feel when it's over, next year most of us will be back for another round. Good old Blaugust! Good old Belghast! 

See you all back here, Summer 2022. Let's make it a date!

August Songs

And so we come to the end. Can't say it hasn't been fun.

Naming every single post after a song or a fragment of a song. I'd say it seemed like a good idea at the time but it wasn't my idea at all. It just happened, the way running jokes or habits happen, how they build up until it seems like they were always there, like they're laws of nature. They're not.

It's like the way now, when I go downstairs and make two coffees or two teas or two of any drink, really, the drink doesn't matter, it's not about the drink, don't confuse me. It's like the way I have to clink the two mugs together every time before I carry them upstairs, even though they don't clink, they don't make a good sound, sometimes, just a dull noise.

If I didn't do it, though, bad things would happen. What bad things? I don't know. Mrs Bhagpuss asked me that yesterday and I said I don't know, maybe we'd have black snow. Then we both thought how cool would that be? So maybe it wouldn't be so bad. I still do it, though, and I can't tell you when it started or why.

Habits. They break. This one's breaking now. Stopping. Oh, not the songs and lyrics for titles. That's never going to stop. Just the having to be those. I've wasted too many good titles already I could have used because they weren't songs. A title should be able to be just a title and now it will.

Okay, that's all clear, then. Let's crack on.

July Song - Kah - Oh, that's good, isn't it? Kah, though. Who are they? No idea. The things you find when you look, eh?

August Song - The Autumn Defense - Yes, cheating. Ought to be at the end or in the next roundup only there won't be a next roundup and I don't want the last one ever to end on something as bland as this. It's very sixties. Not a patch on Kah but nice enough, I guess. Let's just get it out of the way now and get to the good stuff.

Blaugust Backup Plan - Backup Plan -  Lysa May - Back on track! Oh, and isn't this gorgeous? Can you believe the first three songs I've used can barely scrape a hundred views between them? This one has twenty-eight. Twenty-eight! What's wrong with the world? Don't anyone go thinking just because this is the last of these title posts we won't be doing something else like this every month. More than. I'm just freeing up some headroom so I can share the best finds not just the ones that fit...

 

... or just whatever I feel like sharing, like this by Plested. Good video, good tune. Why leave it out?

Let's Go Round Again - Bull By The Horns - kd lang and the Reclines -Not fond of a capital letter, that kd lang. She and ee cummings both. Is it just me or is this Chuck Berry's Brown Eyed Handsome Man with different words?

Baby, You're Far Too Clean - No Blue Skies - Lloyd Cole - So many of Lloyd's songs sound like he wrote them the day after a bad break-up that was all his fault. Too many for his peace of mind but never enough for ours. Never enough. But can he really have had that bad a time, romantically? I kind of doubt it. Not with that hair.

Hurry Up And Wait - Little Charlie and the Nightcats - I was, of course, thinking of Blondie's Sunday Girl when this popped into my head but that's a lyric and this is a song. Also a blues jam of colossal proportions. I used to lap this stuff up when I was in my late teens, only I liked it double speed.

Launch Day Brownout - Brownout - Xmas Emo - I'd be lying if I said I knew what this was. Lofi hip-hop? My best guess. The lyric calls out D&D at one point. What's that about? And what's with the name? Xmas Emo? Excuse me? Comments are turned off on YouTube so no help there. Haunting, isn't it? I do like a mystery.

We Are Explorers - Cut Copy - I think "We Are Explorers" would make a much better band name than "Cut Copy". Pretty much anything would. They should swap. 

How's That For First Impressions? - Depreston - Courtney Barnett - I think that's the official video for Depreston, which might have been the first Courtney Barnett song I ever heard, but I'm certain sure it's not the video I saw then. I think that was a live show somewhere, maybe a TV recording. Whatever it was, it was way less annoying. Australia looks really boring , doesn't it? So flat. I guess that's kind of the point but still. Who wants to watch that?.

 

Hubble Bubble - Manfred Mann - I left a note to myself about this one. It said "gonna need to edit it to get rid of the first song and intro". So I have. Only thing is, I couldn't be bothered to download the whole thing, load it into Movie Maker, trim it, upload it to my YouTube channel and link to that. So I tried a few online YouTube editors. The first two didn't work but this one did. Or it looks like it did. It's greyed out in draft but looks okay in Preview but you can't run video in Preview so who knows? I guess I'll find out when l I publish.

Weekenders On Our Own (It's Such Fun) - Perfect Day - Lou Reed - It's cover time! Everyone thinks they can do this one and hardly anyone can. I love Caro Emerald's version. The boopy-doop jazz arrangement coupled with her over-articulated accent is mesmerically inappropriate. The ending is demented for a given, exceptionally low, value of mania.

Perfect Day is a love song. A love song to heroin. Not everyone seems to get that but St Vincent does, although she makes a better case here for it being a love song to valium and creme de menthe, which was my late night tipple of choice once upon a time. What with that dress and whatever it is the piano player is wearing, this wins the prize for most distracting visuals in live performance by two people basically doing not anything odd at all. That guy coughing at the end needs to think about his life choices, too.

Andrew Bird, fast becoming a friend of this blog, manages to render the whole thing virtually unrecognizeable, always a win with a cover. That's Matt Berninger of the National on vocals. He seems to turn up here a lot too. Maybe I should listen to one of his records one day.

Somewhat surprisingly, Lou's favorite cover of this song was by Duran Duran. Given his famously contrarian nature you might guess that was some kind of ironic joke but no, he totally meant it. Lou said Simon Le Bon sang the lyric the way he would have, if only he'd been able. I love Duran Duran's covers, of which there are many, although some of them don't really work. *Ahem* 911 Is A Joke *Ahem*. This is genuinely magnificent, though. Lou was right, as usual..

There's also a version by Pavarotti but I haven't worked up the nerve to listen to it yet.

Cause Me Confusion - Confusion - Nouvelle Vague - If it's covers you want (It is covers you want, isn't it? I did hear that right?) you could do a lot worse than Nouvelle Vague. Their brand of smoky bossa nova jive doesn't seem to inspire the outrage it once did, when they were working their way thgrough the post-punk songbook back in the nineties. I guess we're used to that kind of thing, now.

Inconvenience Regretted - Jaggy - Alright, this is first for the blog. Punjabi rap. Enough with the Eastern European hip-hop. Let's go somewhere fresh. I can't even remember what I put into Lyrics.com to get this. It's really 90s. I like it. I have no clue what he's rapping about but he does say "inconveniences" in English right at the end.

Level Up - Interlunium feat. Anette Chanel - You would be amazed how many songs there are called "Level Up" but none of the ones I listened to were as totally on point as this one:

"Inside this world of fantasy
We can all level up, yeah, we can all level up!
We're gonna get to where we wanna be
We can all level up, yeah, we can level, level up! Up!"

Seriously, that has to be our theme tune, doesn't it?

Black Cat Moan - Clara Smith & Her Five Black Kittens - There are countless versions of this on YouTube but who's going to pass up a chance to link Clara Smith and Her Five Black Kittens? Not me, that's for sure.

Thirty-Six Hours - John Cooper-Clarke - JCC, always a favorite around here. Mrs Bhagpuss quotes something by him almost daily. Usually something sweary. This is a roiling, swaggering, spitting tirade with the Doctor on a rolling boil throughout. JCC was always at his best with Martin Hannett although he's matured nicely in latter years. He's settled for being a national treasure and he deserves it, just for still being alive after the amount of drugs he's taken. Allegedly. Do we still need to say that?

Get It Right! - Charlotte Jane -This is modern pop, isn't it? Do I hear a little Laura Marling in there, somewhere? Does that make it folk-pop? Is there any such thing? Oh, who cares. It's good.

Words - the Monkees/the Leaves - I prefer the Monkees version, which is kind of a cover and kind of not. It was written, I believe specifically for them, by their regular writers, Boyce and Hart, but it was recorded and released first by the Leaves, the garage band that also beat Jimi Hendrix to Hey Joe. How exactly that all came about I haven't been able (or tried) to find out. I own an album by the Leaves, though, if that helps. On vinyl.

That's Motivation - David Bowie - Look, I love Bowie as much as the next person (unless the next person happens to be Mrs Bhagpuss) but he didn't get everything right, did he? 

Tell Me Where To Go - I am not a woman, I’m a god - Halsey - I just fucking love it when I can get something absolutely brand new into one of these things. From Halsey's new album, video posted to YouTube just the day before I grabbed it for the title of a post about DCUO. Probably not what Halsey would have ch9osen but who knows? Maybe they play. They're getting better and better, too. I should get the album. I think I'll wishlist it.

The Lonely Financial Zone - Lonely Financial Zone - Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers - I thought this was supremely weird when I first heard it while I was still at school. This and the one about the Government Center. I didn't realize he was literally just writing about what he saw every day, wandering around his home town, Boston. I'm not sure it doesn't make it even weirder, now I know.

Have Horse, Will Travel - Have Love Will Travel - the Sonics /thee Headcoatees- A fantastic double-header to end this long-running series with a bang. Nothing beats the Sonics but thee Headcoatees version is storming. Also, I loved that moment when everyone was putting a few extra "Es" on everything. It literally just occured to me to wonder if it was a drug pun but then I remembered Leee Black Childers. He came before all that lovey-dovey stuff.

And so we leave them, the song titles dressed up as post titles. Make no mistake, they will be back. They're not going anywhere. They're just going to pick their moments from now on.

As for big, portmanteau music posts. Oh, yes, there will be more of those.

Have Horse, Will Travel

 

I am still playing Bless Unleashed. According to Steam I've racked up almost fifty-two hours since the game launched three weeks ago. That's quite a long way short of how many hours I'd like to have played.

For some reason, even though I want to play, I keep finding myself doing other things instead. This isn't some kind of self-negating avoidance strategy or an indication that while I think I want to play I don't really. It's just that there's a lot going on right now and other stuff keeps getting in the way.

Even so, I have managed to play every day, even if it's only been for an hour or two. And I really have been playing. That Steam tally includes very little time spent idling at character select or tabbed out afk. 

There's a lot to do in Bless Unleashed and I don't mean busy work. I mean good, solid levelling and character progression. Levelling is as slow as I've seen in a new mmorpg for quite a while, although in part that's because I've declined to use any of the multiple xp boosts and buffs the game's been throwing at me. 

This is not to say it's poorly-paced; quite the opposite in fact. Levels in BU feel meaningful in a way that harks back to a much older style of mmorpg design. Each level matters. 

 

As a Priest, my spells are spaced out enticingly, with new abilities I very much want to earn sitting temptingly next to levels I have yet to reach. Other features and opportunities unlock as character level hits various markers. 

New dungeons and arenas open up every two or three levels. So far I've only tried a few but that already makes this one of the very, very few mmorpgs I've played in the last decade where I've willingly used a matchmaking system to pug a dungeon. And it's been... okay.

Since I've mentioned it, let's talk about my grouping experience so far. I've had one! That's unusual in itself, especially in a game that doesn't specifically require it. 

Actually, that's not wholly accurate. There have been a couple of quests that required me to complete an arena or a dungeon. I'm not sure the Campaigns in Bless Unleashed are quite as central to the game design as the MSQ in Final Fantasy XIV but I suspect you'd have problems if you tried to skip them entirely.

Even before the Campaign sent me there, though, I tried the matchmaking facility a couple of times out of curiosity. I was interested to see what my role in a group might be. 

 

I'm playing a Priest, supposedly a healing class, but I have almost no healing spells at all. Priests get one spell early on that summons a glowing ball of light about a meter away. It took me a while to figure out you have to go stand in it for a second or two, at which point it pops, gives you a big heal and puts a regen buff on you that lasts for a few seconds.

As you might imagine, that's awkward as hell to use in action combat, where half the time you're rolling and dodging and leaping about. I tend to cast mine inbetween kills to heal back up or ahead of time so I can run into it during a fight. 

In the couple of five-person dungeons I did I tried casting the heal bubble near other people as they were fighting or next to people who were low on health but only one person ever intentionally went into one to get a heal. I've seen people complaining in chat about how no-one in their dungeons understands how to use the bubbles and that's been my limited experience, too.

On the other hand, unlike most mmorpgs I can think of other than Guild Wars 2, back when people actually did dungeons there, Bless Unleashed doesn't care which classes make up a group. You don't need a tank or a healer. The matchmaker just slams the first five people it finds together without reference to levels or classes and lets you get on with it. Healing, at least up to the mid-twenties, does not seem to be a priority.

 

That's presumably why, even though there's an automated matchmaking system, general chat is full of people trying to put a group together the old-fashioned way. One person yesterday was offering his services repeatedly with the attention-grabbing tagline "I'm done grouping with matchmaking APES!"

For my money, the matchmaking is fine. Most of the two-person Arenas I've done have gone smoothly enough. There seem to be various incentives and reasons for higher levels to do lower level content so I'm always hoping to get matched with someone ten levels above me. 

All I have to do when that happens is stand back and press LMB while they kill everything, then pick up my loot and leave. Of course, now I'm in my twenties, sometimes I'm the higher level, so I have to do a bit more of the heavy lifting but that's fine, too. 

In the five-person dungeons it's a bit more nuanced. The wide spread of levels can mean someone's often dying a lot and someone else is doing all the hard work but mostly it's been a good team effort. No-one ever speaks, of course. And I mean no-one and ever. Okay, maybe once or twice, just a couple of words.

And yet, despite the apparent lack of social skills, a couple of the runs I've done have shown solid teamwork. People rez each other when they can, try to trade aggro, generally behave with a degree of attantion that goes beyond focusing only on what they're doing themselves.

I did one five-person arena where we had to fight a very large, very tough ogre. On the first attempt I loaded into the instance so late the gate had come down and I had to stand and watch through the wooden bars as the rest of my team tried and failed to beat the boss with just four. 

No-one yelled at me. No-one quit. When the last of them died they all respawned, the boss reset, the gate opened and we all went in, five of us this time. And wiped, after a long and arduous battle. Again, no-one complained, although one person left without saying anything. The matchmaker replaced them almost instantly and off we went again.

Aaand... wiped a third time. No-one spoke. I was sure the group would fall apart. I was about ready to call it myself. I didn't think we were going to get any further than we'd managed so far. We hadn't been able to get the Ogre down before he enraged and when that happened it looked like we had no hope at all. 

No-one else seemed to be giving up, though, so I went another round. And we won. People seemed to have learned from the failures. I know I had. We avoided some of the bad stuff, were more ready for the big attacks, more mindful of each other. And we all poured on the damage in the phases when it mattered. Nothing was discussed, people just observed, learned and acted. 

It was... good. Not as good as grouping with people who chat and discuss tactics and get to know each other, like we did back in the olden days. But still... good. I enjoyed it. I'll do some more. 

Going back to what I was saying, before I interrupted myself with tales of teamwork and the unexpected pleasures of pugging, levelling in Bless Unleashed has direction and purpose. It doesn't just feel like a makeshift way to keep people hanging around. It feels both absorbing and satisfying, in and of itself. 

When levelling matters, outlevelling becomes a viable option for circumventing obstacles. At level twenty-three I ran up against another solo instance in the Campaign involving a fight I didn't feel entirely confident I could win. It might have been possible but rather than bang my head against it to find out, I opted to carry on levelling. I'm hoping that another two or three levels should tip the balance in my favor. 

If not, I can always get a couple more but first I'll need to find some new quest hubs. In pursuit of those and other sources of xp, I've been exploring, ranging further and further across what's turning out to be an extremely large map. We're talking Black Desert distances here. 

I finished all three of the introductory questlines for the three NPC "Unions" (aka factions), all of which conclude in the immense, imposing and very beautiful city of Sperios. I thought about it as I rode through the broad avenues, opening teleport stations and taking in the sights, then I decided to throw my lot in with the crafters union, the Artisan's Society. 

 

They immediately sent me on an initiation quest that took me deep into unknown territory, opening up huge swathes of uncharted countryside and any number of villages, towns and settlements, in several of which NPCs were just waiting for me to come along and sort out their problems with spiders, wolves, errant girlfriends, over-protective boyfriends and the like. 

By the time I got to the third part of the Union quest I was facing mobs four or five levels above me. Once again I had to withdraw to more appropriate territories to hone my skills and add a couple more levels.

My immediate goal is to get to twenty-six when, if my sources are correct, I should come into possession of an Estate. I don't know just how Bless Unleashed's "housing" works but I've heard it comes with a significant amount of storage and that's more than incentive enough.

As for this post, I'm going to leave it at that for now. I'm very conscious still of just how much about the game I don't know, let alone understand. I don't want to sound as though I have it all figured out when I absolutely do not.

I will say, though, that I think Bless Unleashed is the most satisfying levelling mmorpg I've played for a quite a while. It feels very old school in that respect, without feeling at all old-fashioned. I suspect I'll be levelling a couple more characters of different classes before I'm done with it. 

For once, it feels as though that wouldn't be a complete waste of time.

The Lonely Financial Zone

Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob has an excellent post up about the latest in the seemingly never-ending cavalcade of weirdness that trails along behind Daybreak Games wherever they may go. 

Back in the winter we learned that a company called EG7, of which I feel safe in saying no-one reading this had previously heard, had acquired DBG's entire catalog, including, to no-one's entire surprise, the games formerly believed to be independently owned by Standing Stone and only published by Daybreak. 

Almost before we had time to work out whether we thought this was a good thing or not the new owners released a slew of information about game profitability, income and player numbers such as we'd never seen in almost twenty years. The openness and transparency was refreshing but not as much as the bright, optimistic, confident personality of the EG7's youthful CEO, Robin Flodin. 

Since then, anyone who reads MassivelyOP can't help but have noticed a marked change in the tone in which news items relating to the Daybreak Games portfolio are reported. The snark, which used to be both extreme and perpetual, has softened to no more than the occasional raised eyebrow and with good reason.

Almost from the moment EG7 took over there appears to have been a loosening of the bonds that held the individual studios within Daybreak Games back. There's been readjustment, alteration and innovation within the games themselves and within their interactions with the players and the press. 

 

Just yesterday I posted on the latest changes to DCUO, a game that seems to be thriving under the recently enhanced authority of Jack Emmert, the man now leading Dimensional Ink. Planetside 2 is restructuring, adding content, looking refreshed. The EverQuest titles appear solid, albeit more so the elder than the younger. New expansions for 2021 have been confirmed.

Everything looked altogether rosy in the EG7 garden. And then this happened:

"The Board of Enad Global 7 AB (publ) and Robin Flodin have agreed that effective immediately Robin will transition away from his current role as CEO of EG7 and will be replaced by the current CEO of Daybreak Game Company, EG7’s largest subsidiary, Ji Ham. During this transition Robin will stay on for six months to assist Ji as he assumes his new role within the EG7 family of companies. Ji will be appointed acting CEO of EG7 as a search for a permanent CEO has been initiated. Ji has an extensive background in both gaming and finance and has for the last six years been the CEO of Daybreak. During his tenure at Daybreak Ji has overseen extensive growth and profitability of the company."

Wilhelm covers the backstory and the event brilliantly and his post led a commenter on the thread to point to the following piece of information, essential to a full understanding of what might be going on:

“The news that Robin Flodin is leaving the CEO position came after an interview with Dagens Industri on Thursday, in which Robin Flodin has difficulty answering questions about the difference between total revenues and net sales during the quarter. The answer is that the company has capitalized development costs for new games of approximately SEK 36 million in the quarter, something that turns into an income in the accounts, something Robin Flodin failed to explain.”

That's Google Translate's version of a paragraph from this Swedish article. The piece states that after the release of EG7's second quarter figures the share price dropped by 25% although in the translated version it's ambiguous whether that happened before or after Flodin's interview. 

 

Either way, having the CEO unable to explain why there appeared to be more money coming in than the sales could account for would not have done anything to help. Precisely the reverse, I'd imagine, since the two logical explanations for the discrepancy would be either that something was going on that shouldn't be or that the CEO didn't understand the finances of the company he was leading.

In that light his sudden departure is not so surprising. It does however, still beg the question why replace him with the ex-CEO of Daybreak Games? Or wait, no! The present CEO of DBG. Because of course, even though EG7 bought the company, Ji Ham retained his place as Daybreak's CEO.

I confess I'd completely forgotten about Ji Ham. It's not hard to do. He never says anything. He never does interviews. He never releases PR statements. I have never even been able to find a photograph of him. If you wanted to throw this hot potato into the safe hands of someone guaranteed not to say something unfortunate to the press, now or ever, you could not hope to find a person better suited for the task than Ji Ham. Potato? What potato?

What does all this mean for the games? If I had to guess, and I'm going to, whether I have to or not, very little. Whatever plan there was, whoever was making it, whoever was implementing it (and we have no real answers to any of those questions) I would bet nothing much has changed. Robin Flodin may have founded the company (and I notice his two co-founders have both cashed out already) but, like one of those over-ambitious, expansionist rulers from the history books, in attempting to assimilate a more powerful neighbor he has himself been assimilated.

 

Daybreak and Standing Stone carry on. Jason Epstein remains on the board at EG7, where he holds a very significant 8.335% of the shares. Another 11.732% is held by the founder of Innova, which, as Wilhelm pointed out to me in an email, is a name that has certain similarities with Columbus Nova and Renova. Remember them? No? Good. That's working as intended, then.

Whatever is going on is most likely not of much concern to any of us as players. As the revelations from the time of the EG7 acquisition told us, these games are making money. Who they're making money for is less important. So long as they continue to be profitable, chances are the servers will remain up and running. Maybe the games will even be given the chance to grow a little. That does seem to be happening.

And I am on record as saying that I've found Daybreak's tenure to be largely favorable as a player. It hasn't seen spectacular growth or innovation but neither has it seen the kind of self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing, borderline crazy behavior SOE turned into some kind of manic trademark in their latter years. I think some of us tend to forget just how derided and despised SOE was for most of its existence.

There is one curious thing (One? Hah!!) that comes out of all of this. The "revenue" Flodin was unable to explain supposedly derives from some arcane accounting procedure regarding the spend of 36 million Swedish Krona in a single quarter on "development costs for new games". That's about $5m.

What, as Tom Waits would say, are they building in there? We have a right to know.

Actually, we don't. But we'd like to all the same.

Tell Me Where To Go - DCUO's House of Legends

My plan for the morning, if you could call it a plan, was to write something about DCUO's latest update, the potentially game-changing House of Legends. I wasn't going to go into all that much detail, partly because Tipa already did that but mostly because I don't have much in the way of detail to offer. Just what I read in Tipa's post and what's in the official press release, update notes and forum post, really. There's a trailer, too. I've embedded it below.

I probably should have read the update notes before I logged in but I was in a hurry. I wanted to run around, take a few screenshots, check out the new systems and mechanics, maybe do a couple of missions to see what the xp and the rewards were like. 

I thought I'd take some screenshots, get a general impression, be out of there in a couple of hours, tops. Then I'd come here, bang out a quick thousand words or so and get back to what I really wanted to do today, namely play Bless Unleashed until my fingers bleed.

None of that happened. Okay, a some of it happened but not how I'd hoped. First, I had to get the update. I set DCUO patching, went to make a coffee, came back and it was done. That was fast. Then I logged in to character select to choose who'd get to check out the new stuff first.

I figured if I was going to do some levelling to see how the xp curve goes it ought to be a lower-level character. I have two or three of those. Of course, by DCUO standards, all my characters are low level. As is well known by now, or should be, levelling in DCUO is nothing more than an extended tutorial. 

That's a tad unfair. The levelling game in DCUO is more involving and interesting than that makes it sound but, as with Guild Wars 2, almost all of the game happens after you hit the cap. And in DCUO the cap is only level thirty.  

The character I usually play is level twenty-eight. That seemed a bit high for what I wanted. I had a feeling the update also included some kind of new New Player Experience, so I knew what I probably ought to do was make a completely new character, but I also knew that if I did I'd be an hour in character creation. Who ever got through character creation in a superhero mmorpg any faster than that?

Given I didn't want to spend much more than a couple of hours playing DCUO today anyway, that seemed a bit much. Plus, unless they've dropped the old "get off the exploding spaceship" tutorial at the start, that's another ten or fifteen minutes gone. 

I plumped for playing Cassie Praxis, level eight, ranged DPS, hero. Pretty much  all I could remember about her. I made her to test some other update ages ago and haven't played her since. 

I had no idea where I'd left her but she turned out to be idling on a rooftop in Metropolis. Par for the course for a minor hero, I'd say. Absolutely nothing related to the update popped when I logged her in. No introductory cut scene, no voice message from Oracle, nothing in the mail. If I hadn't known there was an update I wouldn't have known there was an update.

It occured to me I had not the least idea what Cassie's powers were. I had a vague idea she could fly so I ran her off the edge of the roof to see if I was right. I was. Lucky Cassie.

 

It looked like she'd been doing something in the immediate area last time she was awake so I got her to carry on with that just while I acclimatized. We took another mission from someone with a question mark hat we happened to pass. Cassie killed some killer bees. I helped by pressing left mouse button over and over. It seemed to work. They died, She didn't.

After that we followed the marker on the map to hand in a quest she'd done earlier and between those two missions she made a full level. That seemed like an awful lot from what I remembered. I was going to pursue it further but then I remembered why I was supposed to be there: House of Legends.

The House of Legends isn't just an update title. It's a new game hub for both heroes and villains. There's some backstory about how the Monitor, one of DC's numerous god-level entities, has called all heroes and villains to "train, coordinate, and prepare for a looming multiversal threat", to which end he's thrown open his own home base in somewhere called The Bleed.

The last time I was up to date with DC continuity was somewhere around 1989. I really did know my stuff for about fifteen years but by now that's on a level with having studied Classics at university. Actually, less relevant than that. I do roughly know who the Monitor is but The Bleed is a new one on me. Visually, it appears to be one of those liminal, metaversal interstices, a space between spaces. You can see it out of the windows from the House of Legends. It's red. Well, the parts that aren't green. Maybe that's why they call it The Bleed.

The HoL itself is a vast improvement on the two previous hubs, both of which, I believe, are still available should you prefer, although you'd have to be as crazy as the Joker to go there instead of the House of Legends. The new hub is, by DCUO standards, tight, organized and manageable. You can see all of it on the map without having to scroll, there are only three main rooms and they're all on roughly the same vertical plane. You can find what you're looking for in seconds not hours. It's astounding!

All the vendors are there and they're all clearly marked. Some of them have been consolidated. For possibly the first time since the game launched over a decade ago I feel I could go shopping without losing my patience or my mind. The teleports are also clearly marked and go where you'd expect, which is a huge innovation.

At this point I should probably have started to be suspicious at the complete lack of hints, nudges or basic acknowledgments from the game that anything had changed. It's very much not like DCUO to let a new update drop without having someone you're supposed to recognize pop up and lecture you about what's changed.

That didn't happen. What did was I got unreasonably involved in collecting blue exclamation points and yellow question marks from around the halls and corridors of the House of Legends. 

DCUO has always had an extensive collection system. Just about all SOE/Daybreak games have them. It's something of a trademark. For some reason I've never really bothered much with them in DCUO but this time I happened to notice when I picked up the first blue exclamation mark that it was a collection of just five items. 

Even I ought to be able to find five collects in a smallish, enclosed area like the HoL. You'd think. And you'd be right. I could and I did. After I'd gone and looked it up on YouTube.

The yellow collection needed twelve items. There were many possible spawns with a fast respwn time but the collects were not unique. You could pick up the same ones over and over. The blue ones were in five, fixed spots and each was different. All you had to do was find all five.

By the time I finally gave up and went searching for a solution I had 11/12 yellows plus a bag full of duplicates. I'd been around and around the HoL, methodically, and I'd found 3/5 blue spawns. It turned out that one of the missing ones was way up at roof level on a support beam, impossible to spot from below. The other one was behind a machine on the floor. I should have seen that one, at least.

There are several different types of collection in DCUO these days. This one seems to be a Briefing. It comes with a nice reward. I think most of them do. I don't know when that changed. One of the reasons I never really bothered with them in the past was that they mostly filled out a lot of lore, much of which, as a DC fan, I already knew. I'll be doing more of them in future, I think. I enjoyed these and it was profitable, too.

When I got the final one I stopped to have lunch. I'd already been playing about as long as I'd budgeted for but I hadn't gotten much done. I'd seen the new hub and taken some screenshots (most of which I later lost when Paint.net crashed) but as for the other features of the update I'd done nothing.

After I'd eaten I logged back in and chose a different character. I did that because although I could look at what was on all the vendors there was literally nothing on any of them my level nine could buy. I thought my regular character, who's done a few of the events and has some of the various currencies, might have more choice.

As soon as I logged her in all those things I'd been missing appeared. There were splash screens introducing the House of Legends update and some of its features. The Monitor appeared and started lecturing me about my responsibilities as a hero. Harbinger (no idea who she is although I'm fairly sure I've met her before) kept projecting herself in front of me as a hologram to tell me about all the things I could do in the new base. Someone called Tempus Fuginaut, of whom I'm sure I never heard before (I'd remember a name as bad as that) tried to explain how the new gearing system works.

Why none of this happened for Cassie Praxis I have no idea. Well, I suppose I can guess. She's too low level I imagine. Or maybe it's a bug. Something must need fixing because there was a red warning in chat telling everyone the servers were coming down in fifteen minutes for a patch.

I ran around trying to get as much done in a quarter of an hour as I could but with about eight minutes to go I disconnected and the server kicked me back to desktop. I tried to log back in but although I was able to connect what I got next was the original launch cinematic, something I haven't seen for years.

I escaped out of that and it took me to character creation. It had to because I didn't have any characters. I'm guessing someone took the account management software offline before closing the game down. Either that or Brainiac has finally managed to kill everyone and we all have to start over from scratch.

Either way, that's me done with DCUO for today. I have this week off work so with luck I'll have time to delve a bit further into the new update and report back with something a little more meaningful. It definitely looks very promising. DCUO is getting stronger and stronger, I think. Maybe people are finally beginning to notice just how solid an mmorpg it is. Clearing away some of the more confusing legacy systems can only accelerate that process.

And let's hope so. We're going to need as many heroes (and villains) as we can get if we're going to be ready for that "looming multiversal threat."

#14 Folklore - Taylor Swift

Original release date : July 2020

At last! At number fourteen, an album everyone's heard of! Not before time, eh? 

As I mentioned in the set-up post for this series, I played Folklore several times at high volume in the car on the way back from London and had I done it before I put the list together the album would very likely have placed higher. For some reason (I'd love to be able to pretend this is an isolated incident but of course it's not) even though I've owned Folklore since Christmas, that drive was only the second time I'd played it all the way through.

That said, the first and only time I played Folklore before then I'd been stunned by how good it was. I mean, I'd expected it would be good or else I wouldn't have put it on my wishlist for someone to buy it for me but this good? I wasn't expecting that.

I wanted to hear it again but you'd be surprised how few opportunities I get to listen to music alone and loud. The reason I took it on the London trip was specifically so I could hear it at high volume with no distractions. (Okay, yes, controlling a vehicle at seventy miles an hour in heavy traffic should probably count as a distraction but you know what I mean.)

Even prepared and knowing what to expect, though, listening to Folklore again was revelatory. I was talking to Mrs Bhagpuss about it afterwards and she mentioned something I hadn't noticed for myself: listening to music loud in the car makes the lyrics pop. It really does. And Taylor's lyrics are very, very fine.

I knew that a long time ago. My first introduction to Taylor Swift was through the video for We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together, upon which I eventually deigned to click after YouTube had suggested it countless times. As usual, the YouTube algorithm knows what's best for me.

That song has a whip-smart lyric that's funny and true but it's funny and true on the level of Bowling For Soup. No small achievement in itself but not quite the same thing as being funny and true on the level of Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, the kind of company Swift's lyrics keep nowadays.

It came out as a single in 2012, by which time Taylor had already been a singing star for more than half a decade. I have not made any great effort to acquaint myself with her back catalog, something I most definitely should do at some point. 

I did start paying attention to her new stuff, if it happened to drift in front of me, but even then it was pure chance if I noticed any particular song or performance. I liked everything I heard but kind of in the way I like everything I've heard by Avril Lavigne, not so I was going to go out and buy any of it.

I only really started to pay full attention when Reputation appeared. She was in the news a lot around then and I kept reading about her on Pitchfork and she had her first #1 UK single and I began to appreciate, belatedly, just how big a star she was. And how good.

Reputation was the first Taylor Swift album I bought. It didn't make the list and I couldn't honestly tell you why other than when I came to look at the cover I couldn't really remember what any of the songs sounded like. That's almost certainly because I'd hardly ever played it. I have a tendency to not play albums I've asked for when I get them just like I don't watch movies I own on DVD. I'm getting better at not not doing that but I still need to work on it.

Despite having barely played Folklore either, I knew right away it was going on the list, based wholly on two things: the videos for Cardigan and Willow, both of which I'd watched many times, and my visceral memory of how strongly I'd reacted to the whole album the one time I did listen to it all the way through. (That does beg the question "If so, why only once?" for which you'd have to be me to understand. Not that I understand...)

Having now listened to all of Folklore properly and with full attention and several times I can categorically say it is one of my favorite albums of the last quarter-century and I am reasonably certain that with repeated listenings it will stand a fair chance of placing in an all-time twenty-five. It's rich, weathered and a little frightening and it will age very well.

Every track is excellent but the best are sublime. The aforementioned Cardigan and Willow, of course, but also the magnificent companion pieces to Cardigan, August and Betty. The three make a tryptych to equal anything I've ever heard in narrative songwriting. I played Betty three times in a row in the car at some risk to my life because I couldn't quite believe just how good it was.

I hear that Taylor's follow-up to Folklore, Evermore, is even better. That's hard to imagine. I'll find out if it's true as soon as someone gives it to me. It's on my wishlist. Too late for Pitchfork, though. 

The thing about songwriting is, it's a craft as much as it's an art. Artists and performers have peaks and troughs but crafters tend to improve steadily with age and experience, at least until their physical faculties let them down.

It might be too early to say for sure but I suspect Taylor Swift will just keep getting better. She knows her craft. I'm just glad that now I know it, too.