Day 22
I struggled with this. There are a hundred different covers that would easily pop to mind any other day. Not sure why it was a struggle today. I think maybe because I wanted it to be the cover that I actually think is the best.
Some of you might call foul… it’s your favorite album by your favorite working band… well that would make sense in some ways too, but it’s not that simple.
This cover isn’t even an original piece of art connected to the album. It’s a painting by René Magritte. It’s entitled
The Lovers and it’s from 1928. That’s part of why it’s the best.
Punch Brothers are an extremely progressive bluegrass band, for those not familiar. They can cover Radiohead with no irony, no crass commercial goal, and absolute reverence. They are talented enough to do the song justice.
This album is a concept album that takes on our post society age - the other side of social media where many of us relate to others from the tiny lights we carry in our hand. Many of us here struggle with that very reality in this space. There’s folks like me who are more social here than they are in real life for various reasons. Or those, also like me, who have logged out of social media for their own sanity and because they see what it’s doing to our discourse, our politics, our health. This album is all about that and it does it through an old timey idiom. One that itself was a progression of an earlier old timey idiom.
Everything about this album seems to be said in that picture that predates the music by 86 years. The artist couldn’t conceive the devices we all take for granted much less struggle with the onset of AI. Yet this picture speaks to all of it. Even the music itself does this when they spin in a piece by Debussy or a traditional piece about the devil.
Now that time stands still
We can drink our fill
Out of silver
That will never
Tarnish like we will
Punch Brothers - The Phosphorescent Blues
The Lovers by René Migrette
And for the record, it’s still my album of the century.
P.S. several years ago my eldest and my wife conspired to create a “battle” jacket for me. A patch of this piece was created by my daughter for the project.
