#603: A is for Aurora

It’s Halloween
and next up
in this October listening
ritual is one
of the least frightening
famous human beings
on the planet.
But she is kind of
other-worldly, sprite-like,
impish, adorable, and
monstrously talented.
Watching her interviews
and clips of her stage banter
has become a favorite
pastime. She’s funny, personable,
almost awkwardly honest,
a kind of personality
that is winning, irresistible.
It happens, doesn’t it,
with famous people?
We get the sense that if
we could meet them,
we would be fast friends.
If we could be so lucky.
She might
be the silliest rock
star ever, despite the
fact that her music
is anything but silly
and her activism
for the climate and
for human rights
is dead serious.
This record is a beauty,
her voice powerful,
intimate, her range,
prodigious, the music
hard to pin down,
stylistically varied,
electronic, but warm,
rhythmically intense,
lyrically smart, devoid
of pop cliché, and melodically,
memorable, sophisticated.
I came to her music late,
more than a decade after
her first recordings.
A friend of mine, this year,
sent me the recommendation
knowing, I suppose, that she
would float my boat.
Consider my boat sufficiently floated.
I look forward to paddling backwards
into her catalog.

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Notes on the vinyl edition: What Happened to the Heart, Glassnote Music, 2024, translucent blue double vinyl.

Postscript in Bullets

• I’m listening to all of my records, from A to Z. Writing a “poem” about each artist. It may take me a long-ass time to complete this project.
• I’m trying to write poems, not reviews. It’s not always gonna work out that way. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be working out very often. Put these babies in paragraph form and I think hardly anything would be different. But I am giving myself permission to be digressive, autobiographical, discursive, associative, and actually prefer that, when it occurs.
• I will only “cheat” when I come to a record that I have listened to recently. That has not happened yet. I mean, I listened to this Aurora album last week, but I had to hear it again.