Compulsive Reader

Conversational, direct, lively, rhythmic, with an intelligent deployment of varied tones: that is Sinatra in Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” (What is it about Porter that liberates? The sophistication? The sexiness? Everything?)

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The fact is that there’s not much consistently intelligent political comment in popular music, and I do like much of what I hear in her work. She remembers things that others forget, even though those things are very important. She reads her own poetry, which contain significant perceptions and well-known politically progressive ideas, and she also reads the poetry of Judy Grahn.

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Corinne Bailey Rae’s songs have an infectious romanticism. One recognizes the romanticism—the dreamy lack of realism—and still feels seduced by Rae’s hopeful emotions and evocative situations.

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There’s a calculated roughness to “Rooftops and Invitations.” It’s interesting that the first songs on the album are fast and loud, and the later songs begin to be slower, more quiet, as if a point was being made with the first songs (the point?—the proof of masculinity).

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Steven Patrick Morrissey is now middle-age. In a culture that does not worship youth so much as pander to it—with all the contempt and desperation and envy that suggests—it is interesting to observe people who are aging well: still feeling, still thinking, still creating, still growing.

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