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Songs of 2024: Kate Pierson, Michigander, Lemonheads

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“Evil Love,” Kate Pierson

Fans of the B-52s have known for years that Kate Pierson is a world-class belter, but here she is at age 76, still singing like she has something to prove. “Evil Love” was one of the leadoff singles from her second solo album, and it’s a miniature pop gothic mansion of passion and intrigue. It’s a theatrical song; there’s real feeling here, but Pierson’s also playing a role, occupying an emotional space like any great singer would. 

“Giving Up,” Michigander 

Michigander is the nom-de-project of singer-songwriter Jason Singer; his specialty is spacious, catchy pop-rock, constructed around his distinctive, yearning vocals. There’s a distance in how Singer arranges the pieces of his musical constructions; you can imagine yourself climbing into the song and wandering through for a while, but there are clear boundaries, and you’ll eventually make it home okay. Here he interpolates an opening riff from Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll To Me” and points his band straight toward the sun for 3 minutes and fifteen seconds of big hooky heartbreak. Like all those who came before, he’s able to make it sound committed and careless, an off-hand kiss-off that masks the usual bitter sorrow. 

“Seven Out,” The Lemonheads 

If Michigander is an artist chomping at the bit to claim his corner of the modern pop landscape, then Evan Dando is perennially lost around the fringe, wandering through the wilderness as he assembles twigs and berries into something that resembles a song. He can’t help but craft catchy guitar-driven alternative tunes, even when there’s little lyrical clarity and the vocal borders on exhausted. “Seven Out” is a compelling listen because of those aforementioned hooks, but also because you can almost hear Dando losing interest in his own song as he plays it. 

In recent years, Dando has performed at varying levels of coherence as he plays his way through his own never-ending tour. His last album came out in 2020, and he’s spent most of the past few years trying to capitalize on the recent anniversaries of some of the Lemonheads’ iconic 90s releases. It’s hard to understand why a single like this exists–scratch that, why a “b-side” like this exists; it’s not even the A-side. (The A-side, “Fear of Living,” has more of a pulse but also feels like more of a failed attempt to capture old lightning in a bottle.) “Seven Out” gives one pause, if you give it a few minutes, because the same indie nonchalance that made Dando a 90s alternative darling now reads as outright exhaustion.

Songs of 2024: “Please Please Please,” Sabrina Carpenter

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I don’t know of any elegant way to say this: I find myself really enjoying music that I am probably too old and too male to enjoy. 

I know, I know: We can all love what we love. But artists like Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo are most certainly Not For Me. They’re for my daughters, and I appreciate that, because they’re making good music with good messages and I’m glad my kids have that in their lives. 

When I personally crank “Vampire” or “Good Luck, Babe” in the car by myself as I drive to pick up Chipotle and I just happen to know all the words…I’m not sure what to make of that. Perhaps the less examined, the better. 

Honestly, I just like the songs. There’s a passel of young female artists who have emerged in the past few years that are making honest, smart, popular music that hits in a way that is both broadly appealing and specific enough to be meaningful. The themes may not relate directly to my life, but I can’t deny the craft and I’m drawn in by how great the songs are. 

Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” might seem easy to dismiss. It has that soft-focus synth sound that is dominating the pop charts right now, the kind of stuff I could have done on my Casio SK-1 keyboard back in the late 80s. Who knows, maybe that’s what they’re using; it’s probably worth $10K now and we probably pitched one in the trash a few summers ago when we cleaned out the basement of my parents’ house. 

That melody, though! Sturdy as a brick shithouse. There are seven versions of the song on the single released earlier this year, including a sped-up and slowed-down version, which are exactly what you’d expect. But the “acoustic” version takes all of Carpenter’s original vocals and puts a simple fiddle, strings and guitar arrangement behind them. You strip away the bleeps and bloops, and the song still shines; the vulnerability of the vocal is exposed, along with the sly toughness. 

That’s what makes the song really special; it is honest, and funny, and tackles a relatable subject with the kind of detail that suggests lived-in experience, whether it’s “true” or imagined for the sake of a lyric. Springsteen has this interview in an old Chuck Berry documentary where he talks about the specificity of a lyric like “She couldn’t unfasten her safety belt” and how it puts you in the car with that character in that moment, right there with his struggle.

“Please Please Please” has that too; the fear of staining makeup with unnecessary tears, encouraging your doofus boyfriend to settle for the ceiling fan’s fresh air so you don’t have to deal with his bullshit. It’s this mix of firm defiance and an attempt at gentle understanding that says the singer is sick of his bullshit but what the hell, she’ll give it another try. Either she just loves him that much or she’s just trying to get out the door without drama. 

I’ve been playing at an open mic here in town, and I was bullshitting with a guy there who was remembering how he dropped acid and listened to The White Album on repeat for fifteen hours. “You really get a lot out of an album when you listen to it over and over like that,” he said. 

I thought back to the last time I did that with music and I realized it was this song. “Please Please Please” on repeat for an afternoon by myself while I pecked away at work. I did get a lot out of it, thanks for asking. 

On Grant Morrison’s Batman, A Decade Late

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Batman never dies.

That’s not to say he will live forever. Comparatively speaking, “never dying” is a far more intense proposition. Cheating death, dodging the reaper, time and again–that takes something special. 

One of the many things Grant Morrison’s Batman run is “about” is this idea–that Batman never dies. It’s there in the opening pages of Batman #676 (June 2008), and it’s there in the closing pages of Batman Incorporated #13 (September 2013). 

There’s plenty of ways to “read” that idea, from the beautiful to the profane. Batman never dies because that spirit of justice in the dark can never be allowed to die. Kill a Batman and another rises to take his place. The concept is too powerful. 

Or “Batman” is just an aging container of IP that can never stop but must always somehow stand still. Should this Batman really die, he would take whole corporations with him, revenue, jobs–he’s his own economy. Batman never dies because he can’t; his movies, comic books, video games, TV shows, bath towels and action figures are too lucrative. 

Interpret it as you will; it remains true regardless. Batman never dies. 

I have really fond memories of Grant Morrison’s Batman run, but I lost the thread around the start of Batman, Incorporated. Those early to middle days of the sprawling storyline were heady with speculation and chatter, which felt like part of the point; like Lost, a TV show where the stories that sprang up around it became part of its reason to exist, Morrison’s Batman tale invited deep examination. He had staked a claim on a powerful central idea–all Batman stories are true–and that made it seem as though anything was possible. 

This weekend, I finally caught up with the end of the story, eight years too late, and that concept continues to shine on–in those pages, anything is possible. It all happened. Everything is true.  

(Of course, the only reason everything can be true for Batman is that none of it is true; it’s all stories. This is an imaginary tale…but then again, aren’t they all?) 

Morrison has been exploring the “meta” surrounding comics for decades, since back when he himself peered out from the pages of his Animal Man run. The speculation about his Batman stories–experienced mostly by me online, although I’m sure there were heady conversations that sprung up at plenty of comic shops and convention bar scenes–it all drew inspiration from Morrison’s work but became its own network of references and possibilities, built up around the books, dependant upon them to exist but not to grow. 

It became another way for everything to be true, although Morrison wasn’t so coy as to suggest that every possible theory from a small army of brilliant annotators and speculators was theoretically possible. He put stakes in the ground throughout his saga; beats and ideas from the earliest issues impossibly gained fresh relevance five or six years after their introduction. There’s a plot in the middle of it all, and although it’s rarely a straight line, you can recognize it. 

But it’s not always easy. Later-era Morrison superbooks have this puzzling habit of…missing plot chunks? I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s like every scene that feels like it should explain something starts right after the explanation happened. Answers to unasked questions surface as asides in scenes ostensibly about something else. Villains monologue but only to eloquently overstate their commitment to Morrison’s overarching ideas. 

It’s a feature, not a bug. It’s a form of misdirection, for one thing; it’s amazing the creative twists he can get up to when you’re distracted by a tactical bit of story business. 

It’s also a clever way for Morrison to have his cake and eat it too, which is ultimately the point. While everything may have happened to Batman, only some of it matters.

As a writer, he makes those choices with every panel; as readers, we do too. Within the story itself, Batman has to face this challenge throughout Morrison’s run–almost as though Morrison is the metavillain behind it all, pulling these old tales out of back issue bins and shoving them into Batman’s face. Almost every plot twist, story arc, or new character demands that Batman reach back through his infinite library of case files and uncover some unexpected connection. 

Everything has happened to Batman, and he never dies. But he decides what matters, and he chooses to live. Every time. That’s the animating force of Batman as a superhero and a person, and it’s what brings us back to the character, time and again. He is in a constant state of preparation and reaction, but through it all, he has a center–helping others and protecting his chosen family. This may have started for him with a hole in things, and maybe that hole will always gape in his deepest self. Ultimately, in Morrison’s run, he learns he’s at his best when he’s not focused on that hole in himself but on how he can help others. 

Batman never dies, but we do. We’re dying now, and we will die someday. For us, it’s even more important to choose what matters. That’s our straitjacket, and that’s our open door. 

Batman: The Detective #1-3 (Review)

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It was probably an accident of publishing circumstance that resulted in Batman making his debut in a title called Detective Comics, but since that first appearance in 1939, Batman has been synonymous with detective work–investigation, interrogation, tracking clues and suspects, and then fitting all those pieces together into a complete picture. 

Those are some of my favorite Batman stories, because they underscore Batman’s humanity and brilliance. He can’t use X-ray vision to see through walls and spot things; he can’t race across town in an instant to catch a criminal in the act. He can observe and deduce, just like any of us could, and he’s very good at it. 

Tom Taylor and Andy Kubert have served up a decent Bat-mystery so far in their Batman: The Detective miniseries (issue 4 hits stands today, July 13). The six-issue mini takes place in what appears to be a future state moving toward Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. That’s a bit of conjecture on my part, but the way Kubert draws Bruce Wayne seems to indicate this is a character moving toward the hunched, sinewy Batman that Miller envisioned for his take on the character’s last adventures. 

And Kubert…well, Kubert draws the hell out of it. I’m not sure what got us here, to Andy Kubert drawing a six-issue mini set in a possible future that has no great stakes for the wider DC Universe. But I am glad we’re here. Every issue has at least one drop-dead moment of kinetic glory–in issue 1, it’s this full-page rendering of Batman confronting a fully demonic Gentleman Ghost. 

Kubert is first and foremost a visual storyteller, so this isn’t just a showy moment; paired with tight scripting from Taylor, this is an essential beat in the issue. I love the lead-in dialogue from Batman on the preceding page: “Squire, I want you to walk toward me, and whatever you do…” It cleverly sets up the reveal and the stakes at the same time; Batman’s going to be fighting for his own life, but he’s also got to keep Squire safe. And give those squared-off blocky Bat-fingers a gander; that is very Miller by way of Jack Kirby. (In the story, they’re ghost-boxing gloves gifted to Batman by John Constantine, who won them in a poker game with a demon. That’s the DC universe I want to spend more time in–the one where Constantine wins ghost-boxing gloves in card games with demons, and gifts them to the Caped Crusader.) 

Taylor and Kubert succeed with Detective by layering on a series of subtle twists to the expected modern Batman detective storyline. It’s an older Batman; he’s transported to Europe so he’s out of his element; the mystery he’s wrapped into becomes as much about his earliest past as it is about his immediate present. I won’t spoil the central conceit of the story’s new villain but again, it’s a very clever scenario. 

There are tens of thousands of Batman stories and there will be tens of thousands more. This is a good one.