![]() Of six, married to his high school sweetheart until his very recent and very sad death. James Ingram was, I learned this week, a Dad. But it does mean that I hunt for something slightly different in the records I scan as adult now, and treasure it when I find it – relaxed tolerance, unguarded goofiness, the moments (rare though they honest are) of being genuinely unafraid of what others think. The mood and feeling of a pop record is as real as we need it to be when we’re playing it. My judgement is better – I know better how to spot a folly, how to let an urge die away – but even so I know enough now to understand how much of the “adulthood” I heard on old records is a projection, their rueful poise well-tailored and well-lit. The problem is, my inner life as an adult isn’t much less emotionally incontinent than it was as a teenager. You can hear it in a lot of places, though – one reason I like ABBA so much is that despite having such proven cross-age appeal, mostly they’re singing and writing from the perspective of people who’ve been around the block a few times, even before the frost of divorce starts to creep in. And it’s always threatened, as an idea, by the biz deciding that actually, nostalgia and repurchases and high-ticket reunion tours are better ways to extract that value. This obviously overlaps with particular styles at particular moments when the record biz decided there was money to be made out of grown-ups: easy listening in the 50s, soul in the 70s and 80s. Something I’ve kept on coming back to as a listener is the idea of “adult” pop, pop which seems to assume a certain level of life experience in its audience. ![]() #41 Zadig The Jasp – In The Reflect Of The Sky (2018) #40 Various Artists – A Day In The Life: Impressions Of Pepper (2018) #38 Julie London – Julie Is Her Name (1955) #37 James Ingram – It’s Your Night (1983) When a new letter goes out, the previous letter goes up here. Each entry originally comes out as a tinyletter and subscribers to that get framing content and non-music miscellanea as well as the LP reviews. This is a document of my album-a-day listening project. ![]()
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