Review at Blurt + Audio of Hammer Museum Reading

Blurt Magazine has a review of Shoot Out The Lights online by the Rev. Keith A. Gordon. The good Reverend says:

If all this sounds confusing, well, it is... Childs provides a completely different way of looking at an album from the couple dozen previous 33 1/3 series books that I've read, and the first three or four chapters are difficult to slog through. By the end of the sixth chapter, though, the damn thing begins to make sense, and if you stay on the ride through the end, the insight proffered by Childs is rewarding as well as eye-opening.

Hayden Childs has definitely broken beyond the normal form of rock criticism with his take on Shoot Out The Lights, creating a review of some depth and intelligence, his critique as layered and textured as the album it explores. Whether you're a longtime fan of the Thompsons, or a listener just discovering the brilliant and disturbing Shoot Out The Lights, Childs' book provides the perfect guide to this difficult album.

Thanks! I feel pretty good about that one.

Also, for your pleasure, please take a listen to my reading at the Hammer Museum from October 29 of this year with Scott "If You're Feeling Sinister" Plagenhoef and Kim "In The Aeroplane Over the Sea" Cooper. You can't see the presentation (although maybe I'll figure out a way to put that up here sometime), but you can hear the commentary and music. Scott & Kim were fun co-presenters and the Q&A was a blast.

Edit: I'm unable to embed the player for some reason. The audio is here, though.

2nd edit: I think I worked it out.

More on the KEXP review + reading in LA on Saturday + sad news

After I posted that last review, I had an amicable back & forth with Chris Estey in the comments thread. He had this to say:

I have to say I’ve been struggling a bit in hindsight with my criticism of your fictional aspect to the book. I was actually leery of your combining a fictionalized character with so much story behind such an important record being readily available, but you really did pull that element off well, too. Perhaps much better than I suggest in my final paragraph above. Other 33 1/3 volumes had done it, as had other writers elsewhere, to a less satisfying level of literature. Thinking back on it, you did a really good job of telling a story many of us can identify with — the feeling that the creator of an album (or story, for example) is a twin of ours, creating a disturbing simulation of our own existence. I had bought “Shoot Out The Lights” just before my deep, several-year engagement with a girl fell apart, and the LP didn’t seem to have any lyrics that couldn’t have been written about my own existence. You captured that weird energy between fan/listener and singer/songwriter so well that it’s been more memorable than a lot of other fiction I’ve read this year. So, well, I want to thank you and encourage people even more to check out your analysis of Richard & Linda Thompson’s (arguable tie for best) album, with less hesitation than my review originally stated. You’re a damned good writer!

Man! High praise, indeed. Thanks, Chris! If you're ever in Austin, let me buy you a beer.

Just a reminder: Don't forget I'm reading in LA at Metropolis Books on Saturday, August 30, at 6 pm with Kim Cooper and David Smay. It will be 33 1/3-tastic!

Also, finally with the sad news: Dave Smith, a scholar of Richard Thompson's music, recently passed away at the far-too-young age of 58. His book The Great Valerio, a close analysis of Richard Thompson's themes and inspirations, is a surprising and pleasurable read for all RT fans. And you can download it for free from the Internet. Do the man proud.

Another review + upcoming reading

KEXP read my book! And mostly liked it! I can live surprisingly well with being called "too ambitious" by those guys.

Childs adds a fictional narrator, a philosophical folk rock doppelganger
who assesses the moves of the declining couple as his own life spins out of
control, in mordant comparison to Dante’s Inferno and Virgil’s Descent. I have
to admit that I found this part of the book a little distracting, and a mash-up
of perhaps more personal creative writing with a remarkably solid analysis of
the Thompson’s output ends up feeling too ambitious. (Childs is similar to
conceptually extrapolative Camden Joy, but gives a lot more of the archetypal
solid rock write trivia and insight.) Fortunately, this interwoven subplot is
pulled off enough not to ruin the spot-on observations and criticisms that fuel
the rest of the book. It shouldn’t keep you from reading it, and you should buy
the album Shoot Out The Lights immediately if you haven’t got it.

I have to point out that I don't mind this ambiguity some reviewers feel about the fiction in my story. I knew it would be offputting for some, but it serves the primary thesis ("Shoot Out The Lights is a song-cycle about living in Hell") by giving readers a narrator and arc to mirror the story of the Thompsons, plus it allowed me to revel in certain flavors of darkness that are, happily, not a part of my own life. I suppose one of the common threads in the cricitism is that the story and analysis could have been better integrated. Maybe so, but I should state that the back-and-forth between reality and fiction was intentional and meant to be somewhat comic (the fact that I am explaining this is a sign that maybe I failed at that). I meant Virgil's perpetual confusion and misery and sad-sackist intellectualism to lead him to jumble his honest reflections of the album Shoot Out The Lights with his own position as a fan, an outside observer, and the ultimately flawed guide to the album. He's less a poet from a bygone day than the creepy loner who narrates many of Richard Thompson's songs. But the fact that I am explaining this is another sign of failure. Therefore, by the logic of this paragraph, I can live with failure. QED.

In other news: PEOPLE OF LOS ANGELES! I'm reading with Kim "In The Aeroplane Over the Sea" Cooper and David "Swordfishtrombones" Cooper at Metropolis Books on August 30th at 6 pm! You will notice that all three albums under discussion have the distinct scent of nostalgia for an impossible past. What could be more fun than talking about that?

PLUS, if you have yet to do so, GET ON THE BUS. The "Crawling Down Cahuenga" Tom Waits tour bus, that is. If there's still availability, you owe it to yourself.

Another SOTL review (that may be my favorite ever)

This review is my favorite ever:

“Shoot Out The Lights” by Hayden Childs is a masterful 116-page obsessive’s
factual and fictional paean to the 1982 eight-song album, as well as to Richard
Thompson, and to a lesser degree to Linda Thompson. Ten pages into the book, I
realized that I had little inkling of the musical specifics that Childs was
putting under his microscope. After four successive and attentive listenings of
the entire CD, I was ready to go back to my reading. As Childs pursued his
inventive and slightly mad takes on the significance of each track, of the
context, emotional and musical of every bar, I would go back to my iPod and
listen again to the song under discussion. I finished the book and stood back,
realizing that “Shoot Out the Lights” is now a burned-in part of my interior
landscape, of my internal sound track, and is there in ways that as yet I do not
fully and probably will never fully comprehend.

Inventive and slightly mad! I have to put that on my business cards. Awesome.