"Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?"

Taylor Swift is famous for writing personal, confessional songs, often about old love interests. Because of this, listeners may be inclined to assume that any song of Swift’s that is about a relationship is about one of her own relationships. A close listen to her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department, reveals that many of the songs on this album are written from the perspectives of other people, particularly women in abusive relationships, often from lower class and/or fundamentalist Christian backgrounds. Swift uses her stature to give voice to this underrepresented group.

Some of the songs on TTPD are almost assuredly about old boyfriends. “So Long, London” sounds like it’s about Joe Alwyn. “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is definitely about Matty Healy. “The Manuscript” revisits the subject of Swift’s magnum opus, “All Too Well.” “The Alchemy” might be about Swift’s current love interest, Travis Kelce, with its sports references.

I think it’s assumed that “But Daddy I Love Him” is also about Kelce. However, there are no specific details that point to Kelce in this song. It’s a picaresque pop-country song written in the voice of a young woman who is vilified by her small townsfolk for getting involved with a man they deem to be a bad influence on her. The protagonist of the song decries “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best / Clutching their pearls, sighing ‘What a mess’.” She continues railing against fundamentalist hypocrites, singing, “I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing / God save the most judgmental creeps / Who say they want what’s best for me / Sanctimoniously performing soliloquys I’ll never see.” And she says multiple times, “You ain’t gotta pray for me.” (The nonstandard English further attests to the speaker's social class.)

Swift calls out fundamentalism in other songs on the album. “Guilty As Sin” is about the fundamentalist prohibition against thinking salacious thoughts and self-pleasuring. The speaker sings, “What if he’s written ‘mine’ on my upper thigh / Only in my mind?” and “Without ever touching his skin / How can I be guilty as sin?” She says that as “My bedsheets are ablaze / I’ve screamed his name / Building up like waves.”

The speaker also calls out fundamentalism when she sings, “Someone told me / There’s no such thing as bad thoughts / Only your actions talk.” She sings, “They’re gonna crucify me anyway.” She laments that religious types require of her “long suffering propriety” and avers that her infatuation is a type of natural religion: “What if the way you hold me / Is actually what’s holy?” and “I choose you and me . . . religiously” (her ellipsis). And she asks twice, at the beginning of the song and at the end, “Am I allowed to cry?”

In “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” the protagonist sings, “They shake their heads, saying ‘God help her’ / When I tell ’em he’s my man / But your good Lord doesn’t need to lift a finger / I can fix him. No, really, I can.” Another major theme of the album is depicted in this song: abusive relationships. “Trust me,” she says, “I can handle me a dangerous man.”

When I first bought the album and heard the song “Fresh Out the Slammer,” I was a little dismissive, asking what Taylor Swift knows about partners in prison. It was only after I realized that many of the songs are written from the perspectives of different types of people that I listened more closely and really began to admire this song. The narrative dialogue is written from the perspective of both the man and the woman. The man opens the song with the refrain, singing plaintively in a high-pitched voice, “Now pretty baby I’m running back home to you / Fresh out the slammer I know who my first call will be to.”

The verses have a much more strident cadence, illustrating the woman’s apprehension and giving clues to their relationship prior to the man’s incarceration: “Another summer, taking cover / Rolling thunder he don’t understand me.” She speaks of being “Handcuffed to the spell I was under / For just one hour of sunshine . . . / In the shade of how he was feeling,” and “My friends tried but I wouldn’t hear it / Watched me daily disappearing / For just one glimpse of his smile.”

In “Down Bad,” she sings, “I’ll build you a fort on some planet / Where they can all understand it / How dare you think it’s romantic / Leaving me safe and stranded.” In “So Long, London,” she sings, “How much sad did you / Think I had in me?” and “Just how low did you think I’d go? / Before I'd self-implode / Before I’d have to go to be free.” She continues, “And my friends said it isn’t right to be scared / Every day of a love affair / Every breath feels like rarest air / When you’re not sure if he wants to be there.” And, “You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days / And I’m just getting color back into my face.”

In “loml” (love of my life/loss of my life), she sings, “Who’s gonna tell me the truth / When you blew in with the winds of fate / And told me I reformed you / When your impressionist paintings of heaven / Turned out to be fakes / Well, you took me to hell, too.” Of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” she says, “In public [you] showed me off / Then sank in stoned oblivion.” “I would have died for your sins / Instead I just died inside.” And “You said normal girls were 'boring' / But you were gone by the morning.”

Abusive relationships are at the heart of “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” This mesmerizing number is about a formerly institutionalized woman (who may or may not be dead) who is tormented by the people of her neighborhood. The arrangement is ominous, with spooky chords and “ooh ooh” background vocals that suggest Halloween ghosts. “If you wanted me dead,” the protagonist sings to her tormentors, “You should have just said [so] / Nothing makes me feel more alive.” And then the arrangement becomes sprightly, as the speaker appears like a goblin: “So I leap from the gallows / And I levitate down your street / Crash the party like a record scratch / As I scream: ‘Who’s afraid of little old me?!'” 

“You should be,” she intones. This is the story of the toothless woman on the block who is treated as an outcast, as if she were a witch. “So all you kids can sneak into my / House, with all the cobwebs / I’m always drunk on my own tears / Isn’t that what they all said? / That I’ll sue you if you step on my lawn / That I’m fearsome and I’m wretched / And I’m wrong.” 

She says, “They say they didn’t do it to hurt me / But what if they did? / I want to snarl and show you / Just how disturbed this has made me / You wouldn’t last an hour / In the asylum where they raised me.”

She says that it was the institutionalization itself that made her mentally unstable. “'Cause you lured me, and you / Hurt me, and you taught me / You caged me / And then you called me crazy / I am what I am 'cause you trained me.”

The title voices the feelings of many of the protagonists in these songs: Why are you so threatened by someone you clearly feel you have some sort of control over? These songs are deadly serious. Some of the stories are couched in pop arrangements (“Guilty As Sin,” “But Daddy I Love Him,” “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”), but most of them are straight-up ballads (with consistently sparkling arrangements). In her most mature album to date, Swift offers her fellow maturing listeners empathetic stories reflecting their own lives, helping them to see their situations clearly and hopefully to find a way out.

I would note that the relationship in "But Daddy I Love Him" has a happy ending. "But oh my God you should see your faces."

Nedrock 5

This might sound a little navel-gazey, but each of the decades that I've lived through has had its own feel for me. I'm talking about the calendar decades, the '60s, the '70s, and so on. I don't really remember the sixties. We don't really start remembering things until the age of five or six, and I was born in 1964, so I don't remember much from before 1970. In fact, I have a distinct memory of myself walking down Marlboro Avenue in Barnwell on New Year's Day and saying to myself, "1970. How about that." I had an idyllic childhood in Barnwell. I lived in two nice houses and half the time my parents didn't know where I was. I rode my bike around the Circle like it was my own personal racetrack.

Nedrock, Augusta, Georgia, ca. 1975

In 1980, Mom remarried and moved to New York and Dad came back from Wyoming and got a job in Hilton Head, so I moved down there with him. I didn't mind. The eighties were cosmopolitan and academic. I went my last two years of high school on Hilton Head, moved to Charleston upon graduation, and visited my mom in New York as often as I could, usually twice a year. I finished graduate school in 1990.

The nineties were sex, drugs and rock and roll. I worked as an editor at ----------- magazine in Manhattan from spring of 1990 to spring of 1991 and again from 1995 to 1997. Following the first stint at the magazine, I moved back down to South Carolina, initially to start teaching, but I ended up doing what I had deep down wanted to do all along, which was go back to tending bar in downtown Charleston like I had done in college, only without the encumbrance of having to go to class, just to enjoy the lifestyle, which I did for three years.

Even though I went to high school on Hilton Head and hung out with stoners in college, I didn't actually get high until I was 28 years old. It was the summer of '92, I was house-sitting on East Bay Street, and some friends of mine and I went to see Lollapalooza in Charlotte. About twenty miles up the interstate one of my friends pulled out a joint, lit it, took a hit, and passed it around. I was, like, holy shit. I had studied and written about mystical experiences all through college and had always wanted to experience immediate reality, but it turns out all I had to do was smoke some grass. 

I loved it. After learning to play guitar, I spent the last two summers of the '90s "playing out," as we called it, playing cover songs in clubs. And I really enjoyed this lifestyle, fancying myself a veritable John Lennon, using the drugs to expand my mind and enlighten the masses through song.

I literally spent the entire decade of the ohs, as I call them, in a dilapidated mobile home on Johns Island. This was a transitional period for me, as I finally began to learn how to behave like an adult. The decade parameters are not as neat here, as I taught at the College of Charleston for one year, 2005-06, and then taught at Trident Tech from 2008 to 2012, so there's a little bit of overlap here and I can't really say that the ohs were all about finally teaching. The ohs were really about exile in the wilderness and the teens would turn out to be the decade when I truly began adulting. The teens also roughly coincided with my move to Staunton.

Unfortunately, the teens were also about the onset of diseases, but I'm not talking about that here.

Even before they came along, I had been thinking that the twenties might be my decade to be an artist, when I would finally break through into the culture. Four years in, I'm beginning to think that this might be the case. When people ask me if I'm an artist, my first response, of course, is to say, "What is art?" But I have spent my entire life trying to be some sort of artist or another. I played with colored pens as a kid. I wanted to be either a priest, a teacher, or an entertainer when I grew up. After a while I realized that I basically just wanted to be the one standing up in front of a roomful of people. Teaching in the classroom is a sort of stand-up routine.

In the '90s, I did a series of crayon drawings and in the ohs I participated in a few group shows in photography. I've become a songwriter and I have joined a sketch group. And there is the Regarding series of art photographs. (What is art?)

Today, I consider myself to be a conceptual artist. In 2020, I started sending note cards of my own design to a core group of friends at various times throughout the year. We send Christmas cards, I reasoned, why not send Vernal Equinox cards and Labor Day cards? In 2021, I transitioned to postcards and over the past three years I have mailed over 400 postcards to friends and family, usually in dedicated series. I hit upon this idea of telling a story through a series of postcards. You can call it mail art. It's also some sort of performance art.

Giving the Van Gogh lecture was definitely performance art. The PowerPoint slide show is a work of visual art. There's also the Werner Trittleiter Affair. In a way, you could say my whole life is performance art. Those postcards might be worth something.

Nedrock, Staunton, Virginia, 2024

Werner Trittleiter

One of my recent art projects has been uploading some of my original photographs to various Wikipedia pages. It started with the Folly Boat, whose Wikipedia page I was surprised to find did not have an accompanying photo. Then I uploaded one of my sketches to the Staunton Wikipedia page. This was a little risky, since sketches are typically seen as personal expression and Wikipedia only wants you to upload pictures that impart factual information. But my drawing is an objective depiction of the traffic lights at the intersection of Churchville and Central Avenues in Staunton, and I placed the image in the Infrastructure section, next to the paragraph identifying the major highways that pass through Staunton. Churchville Avenue is coterminous with U.S. 250. This drawing was uploaded on July 24, and it is still there.

Next I posted one of my photographs of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty to that sculpture's page. This one was also tricky, since Spiral Jetty is somehow owned by the Dia Art Foundation, and they supposedly own the copyright to images of the work. But the Wikipedia entry itself said it was okay, and the image has remained up since I posted it on July 29.

I have since added five more photographs to the Staunton page, as well as photos to pages for Jackson Pollock, the Brandywine River Museum of Art, Bubblegum Alley, Cadillac Ranch, and more. It got to the point where I created two pages—Folly Mills Creek and the old Staunton Coca-Cola bottling plant—just to be able to place my photos on them! 

I have some pictures taken at the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and with these I decided to get a little mischievous. The pictures were taken before I was informed that interior photography was prohibited at the gallery, so even though a Wikipedia page is not an official website, I figured there might be people associated with the gallery watching the page who might delete photos of the interior. The first picture I added was a really nice pic I got of Peggy observing some large-scale photographs by Andreas Gursky. For the caption, I wrote, "Installation view, Gagosian Gallery, Madison Ave., featuring the work of Andreas Gursksy," including a wikilink to Gursky's page. Nothing snarky here. 

Click on image to enlarge it.

But then I added a picture of an empty gallery, a space where artworks are usually displayed that just happened to be empty at the time. In the world of "contemporary art," this room could be perceived as a work of art in itself, which is a little snarky as it mildly sends up Conceptualism. And I placed it in the section on Legal Issues, subsection Tax Evasion, as in, "If you don't get your affairs with the IRS in order, this is what your galleries could look like." A little snarky.

 

I let these two pictures stand for a week to see if anybody would delete them. Nobody did. So then I got real snarky and uploaded a photo I had taken of a utility space in the gallery that was visible to the public with a stepladder leaning against a wall.

For the caption I used the same format I had used for the first picture: "Installation view, Gagosian Gallery, Madison Ave., featuring the work of Werner Trittleiter." Sounds like a real artist's name, right? Werner is the worldwide leader in the manufacture and sale of stepladders, and "trittleiter" is the German word for "stepladder."

Of course, this is an homage to the pioneering example of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. Duchamp inaugurated the idea of the "readymade," the idea that any man-made object can be perceived as a work of "art" if it is placed in an "art gallery." This is an early commentary on the absurdity of the idea that "art" is an order or class separate from all other man-made objects, and that the "art world" is the sole arbiter of what qualifies as "art." 

So, I wanted to see if art world types would automatically assume that the stepladder is a work of "contemporary art" and/or to see if they would be too embarrassed to admit that they were unfamiliar with the work of Werner Trittleiter. The picture was posted on October 23, and it's still there. So maybe I got 'em. Or maybe it's just Wikipedia and nobody cares.

Nedrock 4

One of the toughest things about playing music for a living, especially playing covers in bars and at tiki huts, was the lack of applause. Even when I was killing it, I would get little to no response. I attributed this to a number of factors. First, in such settings, the guy or gal with the guitar (as I refer to this type of performer) is generally considered background music. And I made things a little harder on myself by refusing to play the old canon. It was customary, even into the '90s and probably still today, to play classics from the '60s and '70s—"Brown Eyed Girl," "Margaritaville," "American Pie," and so on. As I have written about before, coming out of the great rock renaissance of the early '90s I was determined to play what I called the new canon—songs by Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Nirvana, R.E.M., U2, etc. I felt like the herd mentality prevented people from responding to these songs because they were unsure if everybody else was liking them and they didn't want to be the only ones clapping.

Of course, the possibility must be entertained that maybe I just wasn't that good. While I was at the height of my powers in terms of vocal strength and range, it is true that my guitar-playing skills were rudimentary at best, having only just learned to play a few years before. (This is another reason why I didn't have a large repertoire of the classics. If I had played guitar as a kid, I probably would have had the entire Beatles catalogue at my fingertips.) 

I also have to admit that I didn't have the best stage presence. A fellow performer years before had told me that this job is as much stand-up as it is singer. I never really got good at bantering with the audience. One of my recurring lines was, "I take requests, I just don't play them"!

And it didn't help that I fancied myself a rock star. In largely family environments, I sprinkled my set list with drug songs—"Sister Morphine," "Running to Stand Still," "Not an Addict," to name a few—and smoked a joint between sets, sometimes right on stage. To say nothing of my long hair and dangling earrings.

The gold standard in Charleston in those days were the Futch Brothers, particularly my old friend from summer camp, Hank Futch. Hank and Hal would pack TBonz to the rafters every Tuesday night—Tuesday night!—and the crowd would applaud uproariously after every song. Of course, they mostly played the old canon, but they also had their secret weapon, a mien it never occurred to me to try to emulate: Hank's beaming smile.

The most genuine and memorable round of applause I ever received came many years later, in a very different setting. Exactly ten years ago, in November of 2014, out of money and out of favor, I had to move into the homeless shelter here in Staunton. This is actually when I started going by Edward up here. I was still on social media at the time (as Ned Hartley) and, not knowing what type of people I would be rubbing elbows with in the shelter, I didn't want people I knew nothing about trying to find out about me on Facebook. All my life, particularly in college, whenever "Edward Hartley" was called, I would always say, "Here. It's Ned." But now, when the staff at the shelter called me Edward, I left it at that.

Well, it turns out the people in the shelter were just fine, most of them simply in a similar situation as mine, caught a little short. Still, after one weekend I knew I had to get out of there, and the Monday after checking in on the previous Thursday I walked down to the Food Lion exactly one mile from the shelter and asked for a job. Knowing that I would probably run into people from the shelter there and not wanting them to see "Ned" on my name tag and wonder what the fuck, I introduced myself to the manager as Edward, and the rest is history.

Ironically, just a couple of weeks after I checked in, I received an email from SNHU offering me a job interview. I mean, if I had gotten the email a couple of weeks earlier I still probably would have had to move into the shelter, since it turned out I wouldn't actually start working for them until the following spring, but who knows? Anyway, when I was hired, obviously I was hired as Edward Hartley, my university email identified me as Edward, and so I continued with this new handle. Again, I didn't want my students and superiors searching for me on social media.

Now, I have been a proud Ned my whole life, but I'd always wondered what it would be like to go by my Christian name. There was this dude in Charleston when I was in college named Edward with long hair who had a dog and rode around town on a bicycle, and I always wanted to be that guy. One thing I haven't done, however, is demand that all my old friends start calling me Edward. I don't want to be that guy.

I mostly kept to myself in the shelter. I had learned from Cool Hand Luke how to keep my mouth shut and stay out of other people's business. At meals I mostly sat by myself, solving crossword puzzles. In the weeks before Christmas, they brought in members of choirs and praise groups from local churches to sing Christmas carols during supper. They were mostly okay. As with the volunteers who brought in dinner on Friday nights, they figured as homeless people we would be grateful for anything.

One such group consisted of three older ladies and a guy with a guitar. They weren't bad, exactly, just uninspired. The guy had said at the beginning that if anyone wanted to come up and join them they should feel free to do so. After a few lifeless numbers, I went up to offer my services. When I asked the guy for his guitar he was hesitant at first but did hand it to me. As I started playing, the women were still standing and wondering if they were expected to sing with me. I told them they could take a break, and the three of them immediately fell back into their chairs like rapidly deflated balloons, grateful looks on their faces.

I opened with "For the Summer" by Ray LaMontagne. I had randomly learned this song in the months before I moved up here, but I had always been struck by its aptness when I played it after I moved up here. "Rollin' through these hills I've known I'd be comin' / Ain't a man alive who likes to be alone / It's been years since I've seen my lady smiling / Have I been, have I been away so long?" 

I have always prided myself on being able to fill a space with my voice. When I played in subway stations, people would hear me first as they were buying their tickets and then would be surprised when they walked to the platform and saw that I wasn't using an amplifier. The dining hall in the shelter was the size of a small elementary school cafeteria, with probably 60 or 70 people in it, men women and children, and many of them turned to look as I played. When I was finished they gave me a hearty and sincere round of applause.

Next I played Springsteen's "My Hometown," which they loved. I'm telling you, of all the gigs I've played over the years, this performance was by far the most gratifying. We were all in the same boat, in a sea of apathy, and I think we all appreciated a moment of authenticity, from their perspective and from mine.

Afterward, one of my fellow residents—a young woman with curly blonde locks and a spectacular ass (everybody could see it)—came up to me and said, "Well, Edward, you have many hidden talents."

I'll briefly mention two other memorable performances. My regular barber was on Beverley Street between the shelter and the Food Lion, and when I went in for a haircut and told him where I was living and told him about the Christmas performance, he said he had a policy (which of course he had just made up) where he would give a free haircut in exchange for a song. He was kind of an interesting dude, sort of a local impresario, and his barber shop was filled with musical instruments. I picked up a guitar (which he said had once been played by Dave Matthews; who knows?) and played "My Hometown." The people waiting gave me a nice round of applause.

(This was the guy who organized the parking-lot concert in front of his shop that I played in May of 2015, after moving out of the shelter.)

When I played in the subways, I usually played for only a couple of hours during evening rush hour, but on Fridays I would often play longer. One Friday night, in my favorite station at 23d and Broadway, right underneath the Flatiron Building, I played for, like, five hours. I seem to remember seeing some people skipping trains to listen. For my last song, around 10 p.m., I played Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," which resonated throughout the cavernous underground, the trains coming less frequently now. When I finished, one man who had been listening said quietly, "That was awesome."

Nedrock, 23d Street Station, NR Line, Manhattan, summer 1997

I'm still alive (or, Nedrock 3)

A few years ago, as my various diseases began to pile up, my aunt—my dad's sister—asked if I would text her every morning to let her know that I was still alive. I said no. A few months later she asked again. I reminded her that I had already said no, and she said, "You could change your mind." Shortly thereafter I did change my mind. I figured, what could it cost me? Plus, I've come to learn in this world that when someone offers you their love, you consider yourself lucky and accept it.

I recently turned 60. I can't believe it; I still feel like a kid. Maybe it's because I never had children or owned a house. But my body is definitely aging. I have to constantly remind myself that people don't see a child when they see me. I have to be particularly careful around the sketch group, where all the ladies look like mother figures to me before I remind myself that we're all basically the same age.

Still, whenever I start to feel old, I remind myself that Brad Pitt and I are the same age. That Johnny Depp and I are the same age. That Eddie Vedder and I are the same age.

I've seen Pearl Jam twice. The first time, I only caught one song. We were going to Lollapalooza in the summer of '92, which featured Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ministry, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and Pearl Jam. One asshole who went with us made us wait in the car for nearly an hour while he got ready. Then when we got to Charlotte we had to check into our hotel rooms. We figured there was no way a band as big as Pearl Jam would be the opening act. Well, they were. We got there as they were playing their final encore: Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World." 

Some ten years later I got atonement of a sort when a friend in Charlotte called to see if I wanted to see Pearl Jam. It was actually at the same outdoor venue and it was awesome. We got high and sang along to every song. I learned later that Pearl Jam didn't play "Jeremy" at every show. They played "Alive," "Black," "Even Flow," "Better Man" at pretty much every show, but "Jeremy" was special. They hadn't played it in Raleigh, but they played it for us. Eddie implored us to sing with him, and when we got to the "aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye" part I got goose bumps, as twenty thousand souls all hit it right on cue. It was a communal, cathartic experience, and I still get goose bumps just thinking about it. They also closed this show with "Rockin' in the Free World," which I'd seen Young, another of my heroes, premiere live on SNL years before. 

This was around the time that I got my first computer, and when I got home I purchased my first download: the soundboard recording of the show, the show I'd just seen a couple of nights before, from Pearl Jam's website. I still have it on both my iPods. 

As I've written before, "Alive" was the song that convinced me we were listening to the wrong radio station at the sports bar. It was all happening—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, grunge, alternative rock—but we were listening to the "classic rock" station. This morning a live video recording of Pearl Jam performing recently in a Seattle arena came up on my YouTube feed, and there were Eddie and Stone and Mike and Jeff and Matt still rocking. It was "Alive," and I cried a little as I watched and listened. Cried for time gone by, cried for memories of those magical days in the Nineties, cried for these old compatriots still bringing down the house.

And I texted my aunt the same three words I send to her every morning: "I'm still alive."

Nedrock, Pitt Street, Charleston, 1994

The cedar waxwing

I have not retained a whole lot from my childhood. Maybe it's because I was undiagnosed ADHD. I also think it might be the result of being from a broken home. Going back and forth each week between two households hindered continuity. Many of the things that I do remember are murky. But they're in there, and they pop up from the depths of my brain from time to time. 

One day I was chilling in my car in the parking lot of Bert's Market on Folly Beach, enjoying my then-favorite snack: Cool Ranch Doritos, Jack Link's teriyaki beef stick, and a Dr. Pepper. I don't think I was feeding the birds, but many birds were scavenging in the parking lot, brown birds I had seen a million times but whose species I couldn't identify. And then suddenly I said, "Those are grackles." When I got home and looked them up that's exactly what they were. I don't know where the name came from, but it was clearly in there somewhere from my past. (I call this sort of experience "mental archaeology.")

Around this time I was seeing a woman in an ill-fated relationship based primarily on a mutual fondness for marijuana and sex. One afternoon, in the afterglow of a particularly satisfying assignation, we lay on the bed in silence with nothing but birdsong audible, wafting in through the windows. It sounded like a bunch of different birds, each with its own distinctive call, but the more I listened, the more I began to sense that it was only one bird, and I figured it had to be a mockingbird.

Obviously, I had heard of the mockingbird, but to my mind this was the first time I'd ever really heard one singing. When I got home and looked up "mockingbird" in my trusty Concise Columbia Encyclopedia (this was in the early ohs, before I owned a computer, much less a smartphone), the entry sounded like it was addressed directly to me: "The mockingbird, the preeminent North American songbird, may mimic some 30 calls in succession, Ned."  

The mockingbird quickly became my favorite bird. I especially liked its Linnaean nomenclature: Mimus polyglottos, which sounded like a fake name coined by Chuck Jones. I found this name in a bird book I bought to support my newfound interest. There were a bunch of birds in this book that I hoped to see one day: the red-winged blackbird, the indigo bunting, the painted bunting, the Eastern bluebird, the American kestrel, and the cedar waxwing.

One day, while giving a carriage tour, I was stopped before a house on Limehouse Street when a slew of birds swooped in and alit on a holly tree full of berries, then just as quickly swooped away. I recognized the cedar waxwing from my book and I was ecstatic. "Oh, my god," I said to my bewildered passengers, "cedar waxwings! I've been hoping to see those for forever!" 

The other morning I went out to my car to find it absolutely plastered with bird droppings. I have parked in the same spot since I moved to my new apartment, underneath a tall deciduous tree of uncertain species where birds sometimes perch. There has been the occasional dropping, but nothing like this. When I got home later that day, I saw scores of cedar waxwings swooping back and forth between the big tree and the two holly trees that front my apartment building. (When I first moved here and saw the holly trees, I wondered if I would see cedar waxwings.) This was the first time I'd seen them since that day on Limehouse Street, and I watched them at intervals all afternoon from my balcony. They are gorgeous birds: a smooth back and red tips on the wings that resemble wax (hence the name); yellow belly; crested head with a black mask; and a bright yellow marking on the very tip of the tail. They must be in the process of migrating. I wonder how long they'll be here.

Nedrock 2

This post originated as an email to Julie Unruh. She had plans to jam with some friends and asked me to recommend a song or two that she could take with her, preferably post-2000.

Here's the thing about me and new music. Since the collapse of radio, I haven't really listened to new music much. I've never had a subscription to Sirius, and the times I've been on Spotify there's just been too much to sift through. I really miss the days of shared cultural experiences. As I've written about before, the last great heyday of rock music was the nineties, and in Charleston we had one of the best rock stations in the country. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Screaming Trees, Counting Crows, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Radiohead, U2, R.E.M., Kristin Hersh, Natalie Merchant, Matthew Sweet, Hole, Beck, Indigo Girls, Elliott Smith, the list goes on and on, were "alternative" artists who broke through on the national level. (Eddie Vedder was on the cover of Time magazine.) I mean, if you look at the pop charts from those days, very few of these artists appear, and yet they were well-known by the broader culture. And this is the reason many of them are still able to tour to this day, because they still have a sizeable fan base. Today, I can't name a single rock band, much less a song by one. 

A few years ago I had to work at the local Food Lion as a side hustle. The satellite radio they played was mostly pop—every once in a while you'd hear a song by Dave Matthews or Edwin McCain or Muse or even U2—but mostly it was pop music that I had never heard. In fact, some of it was so bad, so generic sounding, that I seriously thought that it was the modern-day equivalent of Muzak: pop-sounding music that was created by studio musicians. Then I heard a song that I thought might be by Katy Perry, and when I got home and Googled the lyrics I found that I was right. Gradually I began to recognize that these were all top pop songs of the day. (Thank god the manager chose this "station"; other stores played the country station, or the oldies station.) There began to be a few songs that I really liked, and when I asked one of the kids working at the store who they were by, they looked at me like I was from Mars (not really; they all liked me, they just knew I was old); most of these songs that I found I liked turned out to be by the same artist, Taylor Swift. "Trouble When You Walked In"; "22"; "Love Story"; "You Belong With Me"; "Red"; "Shake It Off"; and "Blank Space," which is my favorite TS song and one of the best songs of the decade. There's a version of her playing it on acoustic guitar at a Grammy event. For those who might think Swift doesn't have a real singing voice, this performance puts that to rest. Also, there's a D chord in the chorus that she left out of the studio recording, and the first time I heard it it knocked me out.

Of course, my favorite songs from the last couple of decades are my own! A good one for you and your mates to jam on might be "You Know What?" The verse is just two chords. The first chord is A. The second chord is the D confinguration (see what I did there!) on the seventh fret (the second dot on the neck; the note is actually something on the G scale). The chorus is D and A, finishing on E. Then back to A. I'll give you the lyrics in a Word document attached. Sorry, the video cuts off at the very end, but that's the end of the song anyway. As you'll see in the lyrics, I substitute "but it's too late" for "a little sooner." There's a live version with this ending, but I like my home version better; there's an extra couple of bars between the verses in the live version that I don't care for.