Mad Autumn Babybird Nostalgia Rambles!

I had a couple a days, these last couple of days, that for whatever reason I felt anxious and anguished and not very good about myself.  And it’s better now, but I’m still having a little trouble sleeping.  So when I should have gone to sleep because  tomorrow I 0pen the shop, I instead sat in the darkened living room, getting swept away by youtube music.   And it was during this that I started listening to Babybird, who I’ve listened to before but for whatever reason made sense tonight, and now I write to you about him.

No matter how crappy your day is, you can always end the night by discovering something new.  there is something so amazing and optimistic about that.  Whatever rut I feel i’m in, there is some avenue where I can, at least passively, discover and be inspired by how ridiculously talented everyone else is.

Babybird is the stage name for Stephen Jones, a British Singer Songwriter who’s high point was the mid-90’s.  He is still performing and writing today though.  Youtube creates a poignancy with guys like him, because his latest and his earliest music videos can be watched, so easily, side by side.  So there is him as a 20 year old playing for some music show i’ve never heard of hosted by a british man i’ve never seen since, and he’s standing awkward with 90’s heartthrobb hair and giant sunglasses gaunt and deep voiced.  Then there is him 15 years older, balding stubbly and pudgy, but with still that great deep voice singing, painfully,  about how he’s unloveable and will always be unloveable.  There’s something magic in stumbling accidentally upon the arc of another man’s creative life.

I can’t really go into why he’s good, because i haven’t been able to articulate it.  He reminds me of cake a little, and his lyrics are so exact and disorienting.  but listening to the youtube clips makes me have this welling happiness that feels nostalgic for a fake past, or perhaps a past that I did experience, though don’t remember now but will come back in a flash during some over-oxygenated dream.  Perhaps babybird did the music for a clearasil commercial i overheard as a kid, and though i don’t consciously remember it, it is still lodged in my head permanently and that is why the songs feel so comfortable now.

Maybe that’ll be my new thing, trying to document and describe the stomach to throat happiness I get but can’t understand, that rises and relaxes without me expecting it.  So Babybird music to begin the first October night has a sudden gut happiness that I would classify under “The Feeling you Got when you Heard and Smelled Dinner being made while Staying Over at a Friend’s House.”    When you were over at a friend’s for the afternoon that became the early evening, and  you’re in the living room playing video games, but can hear his parents in the kitchen talking about their days and their kids’ days with groundbeef sizzling on the stove.  And their conversation is alien but it’s structure is familiar, and the dinner is unknown but it’s smell and sound is familiar and the game you’re playing and the carpet you’re sitting on are different but their feel and format are familiar, and there’s a strange comfort in that.

Babybird does that to me.  Gives me an odd 90’s feeling, a wistfulness i hadn’t experienced yet,  but whcih  runs parallel  to the 90’s nostalgia coursing continually through me like signals through my spine.    I don’t want to talk silly and want to share it with you, but don’t know how, except to close this post with a bunch of babybird videos placed side by side with key My So-Called Life Clips.

I’ve done three sets.  Please play the babybird clip simultaneously with the My So-Called Life clip while watching the My So-called Life clip. It works so much better that way.

I don’t know what this post is about either.

but still, enjoy.

First Set

Second Set

Third Set

Goodnight!