I graduated college in December 2003 and a bachelor’s degree in Theatre Performance. As such, just about all of my college friends were theatre majors. Though I can’t sing, just about everyone else in could, and this was one of the staple songs that was performed at karaoke night by the women in the department.
So, besides the fact that this song gets easily stuck in my head, it also reminds me of smoked fill bars over run with theatre majors clogging up the waiting, hoping to get a chance to sing this, and “Come On Eileen.”
(The short story “Stories” by Annie Ernaux, which was translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer, appeared in the June 8th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)
Photograph by Jet Swan for The New Yorker
You know what I like most about Annie Ernaux’s “Stories”? Well, besides the language, and tone, and ethereal feeling of the loss of a past childhood, or how it feels innocent and menacing at the same time, or the power of words and storytelling, or how the protagonist/narrator doesn’t seem to be a very nice person because she sort of traumatizes a five-year-old. No, my appreciation for this story began to form when I finished reading it, as I was left wondering how fictional was this piece? I know full well that the overwhelming majority of Ernaux’s work is autobiographical, but I was still left wondering, to what degree is this fictional, or factual? For the sake of writing this, I’m going to come down on the side of fiction, as it is in the “Fiction” issue of The New Yorker, but I feel that for this story to work on all levels, Ernaux needs us the believe that this really happened. And not a portion of it; all of it. Even though I am sure this story is based on an event which has been fictionalized.
See, it’s that last paragraph which might well be the best, and correctly used version of the “Dead chick in the basket” trick. (To explain, “Dead Chick in the Basket” refers to a writing device where the final paragraph of a short story contains new information about a character which is meant to make the reader view the actions, statements, or feelings of that character in a different light. This device was effectively used in J.D. Salinger’s short story “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” where the name of the device comes from.) We go through this whole story, and then are given this last paragraph which seems to explain that this is all real. Or is it? She is a character in her own story? She wrote this to understand herself, but ended up writing another story? (You know, this just might be an unreliable narrator.)
I will die on this hill of a fictional interpretation, because wasn’t Ernaux trying to tell us in this story that she discovered she had the ability to create a fiction so powerful that the audience accepted it as reality and had an honest emotional reaction to it? It’s like it’s meta on meta on meta. And we will never figure out what the truth is because only Ernaux knows that.
Somewhere around 1998 or 1999, I friend of mine gifted me a very, very bootleg copy of a bunch of Radiohead singles that weren’t on any of their albums. I love Radiohead, and I like how their music just doesn’t fit in any one box, and same goes for their fans, to be honest.
All of the singles on the bootleg were awesome, but one stood out to me as being the most melancholic of a downer song imaginable, and I loved it! What hooks me is the very beginning of the song – it’s just hypnotic.
Oh, and I can only listen to this song a hand full of times in a week, or it starts to make me depressed. So, you have been warned and handle with care.
I wasn’t the biggest Blind Melon fan when they were around, but I didn’t have a problem with them. It was a tragedy when their lead singer Shannon Hoon died of an overdose, as I think the band still had years of good work ahead of them.
A little treasure of a song they recorded for the “Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks!” tribute album was “Three is a Magic Number,” which has been played in my home since the day we brought our daughter home from the hospital. There are lots of ear hooks in this song, but for me, it’s the drums that get stuck in my head.
I had a friend, who fancied himself the end all be all final word which was handed down from God on everything music, and to that end, the disco/New York Rolling Stones were the worst, according to him. What were the New York Rolling Stones, you ask? He would claim three albums made up this period; Some Girls, Emotional Rescue, and Tattoo You. Sure, he’s say, there were a couple of good songs in there, but on the whole, they sucked.
I disagreed. In fact, I loved this period for the Stones. “Miss You” is one of my favorite songs of their’s and the reason is Bill Wyman’s disco bass. His playing is iconic, and a little gem of disco bass that just grooves into your head and won’t leave.
