It's the call from upstairs everybody dreads. You never think it can happen to you but it can strike at any time. "Dad.. can you come upstairs now please!"
Figuring the worst - a smoking plug socket maybe or a flooded bathroom - I tore up the stairs (after ignoring the first cry for help just to make sure it really was important) to find Rhiannon sitting on her bed crying her eyes out.
"What's happened, honey?"
"I'm sorry! I've accidentally shaved my eyebrows off. I didn't mean to - I didn't know that your razor was turned on all the time..."
Do you know how hard it is to keep a straight face while trying to explain that a razor isn't actually turned on, it's just sharp all the time? She made me promise not to tell anybody but then went and told all her friends one by one anyway, so I don't feel bad about doing the same. Every time I think about how you can possibly shave your eyebrows off by accident, it makes me properly laugh out loud. Not in the text way... Laurel & Hardy laugh out loud. Was it wrong to tell her they will probably grow back in a few days?
•••
I don’t know why they do it. It’s probably to keep jobs when there is no need to keep jobs but when an artist is marketed in his home country when, given half the chance, the rest of the world would be interested as well, well it’s a waste. No, not a waste - it’s a crying shame.
In this instance, I’m talking about Matt Nathanson and wondering why I’ve only this weekend discovered him. For the record, it wasn’t a spoon-fed link, that’s for sure. I’ve stopped looking at all that data driven garbage. It was something I read. If I can remember where I saw it, I’ll add it later.
Anyway, here’s this guy - largely undiscovered by me and I assume many others - who has seven albums of the most glorious acoustic based material under his belt and I’m totally knocked out by him. You can find his back catalogue and anything you might need to know at his site if you find yourself in a similar boat (new album out now and a tour with Kelly Clarkson currently ongoing) but what I’m thinking as I look harder is how long it took him to do it his own way. The first album is almost twenty years old now but I adore the journey he has been on. It probably hasn’t been easy - if I know songwriters at all, he’s probably thought of throwing in the towel more than once but from a listening perspective, I’d like to let him know, I’m stoked that he didn’t.
This weekend has been a genuine pleasure to work my way through with Matt hanging around in the kitchen - figuratively speaking of course, although he's quite welcome to come and write here any time he wants. It’s not very often I find new material that I know will last. If you like acoustic based material, Matt’s the very guy to call on.
Still on the subject of not knowing ‘why they do it’, I was going to take the kids to check out John Carter this evening but I couldn’t find one single screening of it in a 40 mile radius that wasn’t still flogging the dead horse of 3D. Can’t we just go and see a movie because it’s great and not because things might appear to be ‘coming towards us’? All that’s happened in this scenario is that four people who would have gone to see it, didn’t - and for all the batterings it’s gotten in the press, I still think it looked pretty hot, so by my calculations, they really needed some people on their side.
Meantime, I leave you with a video clip of a song that I can't quite believe came out as long ago as it appears. 1990 I believe. Where on earth did all the time go?
Currently reading: Denise Mina, The Last Breath