I’ve kicked this around for nearly two weeks, so I suppose it’s time to finally convert the thoughts into text. I would not call this an album review proper, but rather a few musings about Ryan Adams’ cover of Taylor Swift’s 1989. Ryan Adams is no stranger to covering other people’s music. His set lists are peppered with songs from other artists. He recorded one of the greatest covers of all time, a song so good even the man who wrote it affirmed that it now belongs to Adams.
(As I prefer to focus on the many positives, I’ll save my thoughts on the Royals’ September and prospects for October until next week.) I had a bit of a rough weekend. Some stomach issues. A couple late nights and early mornings. Mid-day naps to counter those. Everything felt a bit off. And I guess it all started Thursday night, when the Royals clinched their first division title since 1985.
In reverse order of age this time, your periodic Kid Sports Update. L., and her whole soccer team, rebounded nicely from their rough first week. Playing against teams that have not been full of second graders like their first opponent, they’ve won two-straight games in shutouts. She scored three goals last week and two yesterday. Most impressively, her team is playing pretty, team soccer. Most of the kids are learning how to pass out of traffic and then run to space.
Time to finish clearing out the Links To Share queue. Kicking things off, two posts about Kansas City. First, The Midwestival traveled to KC for an epic weekend of eating and seeing the sites. Kansas City has really evolved over the past 10–15 years. Kansas City: The Paris of the Plains As a bit of a counter-point, Robert Trussell wrote about how Kansas City’s downtown was once a wasteland of blowing garbage and dark streets when the workday crowd cleared out.
Two videos that have nothing to do with each other this week. youtu.be/IxkJHX7uk… “No Myth” - Michael Penn It’s National One Hit Wonder day! What actually constitutes a one-hit wonder can often be a little murky. Does it mean cracking the Billboard Top 40? Or does it mean songs that get into our pop culture memories regardless of chart position? Regardless, this is one of my favorites. Just a perfect pop song, and one that everyone seemed to love my freshman year of college.
So I’m obviously way behind on sharing interesting links with all ya’ll. Thus, I’m breaking them up a bit to clear out the queue. This edition focuses on the great Joe Posnanski. Boy did I love this one. In My Favorite Year (Redux), Joe went through the entire sports calendar of 1986 and broke down, month-by-month, why it is his favorite sports year ever. That was indeed a pretty good year, even if my teams were different than his at the time.
I’m loving a lot of things right now, pop culturally. I took a long bike ride this morning and mentally wrote at least 10,000 words about the new Ryan Adams album. We’ll see if I can make something coherent out of those thoughts to share here. I just finished an amazing, if flawed, book that took me nearly a month to get through. I also finally started watching Veep, which is fantastic.
A super-busy start to the week. I’m attempting to wrap up the four basketball previews I’m writing. I was minutes away from submitting one earlier this morning when I realized I worked off two different files yesterday rather than putting all my updates into my final draft. So I spent two stressful hours today combing through to find what belonged in the final draft, what did not, and then rewriting the whole thing.
youtu.be/N1Hs2AQwD… “Major Tom” - Peter Schilling I have a bad habit of loading up our DVR with shows that I either take months to watch, or eventually delete without ever viewing them. Even for a show like The Americans, that I absolutely adore, I was a month behind. I still have the entire first season of Better Call Saul to begin.[1] I have countless Anthony Bourdain shows tucked away. And I believe I still have a couple episodes of Louie in there somewhere.
With the late holiday, our kid fall sports calendars are a little odd this year. Kickball always starts just after school begins and runs for only three weeks. And soccer did not start until after Labor Day. But as of Sunday, we finally have all three girls on the fields each week. Kickball It’s been a fantastic season for M’s team. Last night they wrapped up a perfect regular season with their fifth run-ruled win in seven games.
Mondays are perfect days for Hot Sports Takes! Colts Yeesh. Once Rex Ryan took the Bills head coaching job, this officially became the dreaded tough road opener against a team with a great defense and something to prove. Which is an actual NFL game description. A loss wasn’t out of the question, but getting worked over, totally owned, and blown out was unexpected. I only saw the first quarter because of soccer so can’t make any broad assessments.
Yes! It is that time of year: time for fearless football predictions! I admit up front that my predictions are even more half-assed than normal this year. That’s because my regular disdain for preseason football was combined with the Royals leading the division this year. So I’ve been able to spend even less time than normal avoiding NFL news as I’ve been fully immersed in all things Royal. More than likely there have been half-a-dozen season ending injuries I know nothing about that will affect some of the teams I’m picking to do good things.
youtu.be/ASFSjjbD_… “Ride On” - Rocky Nti Good grief this song is catchy!
Many errands and household chores got crammed into Tuesday, so a belated look back at the final weekend of the summer. It was very good, but also kind of crappy. The good parts were: The girls getting a four-day weekend. It was nice to sleep in a bit Friday before all our other activities for the weekend. Our KC friends the B’s were in town, staying with local pals the H’s.
Music for the last weekend of summer. youtu.be/qh4nVj8g4… “The Boys Of Summer” - Don Henley Say what you want about Henley, and there’s plenty of negative things to say about the guy, but this is a great song. Even if he’s not really singing about the end of summer, its place in pop culture is as an end of summer song. “Don’t look back, you can never look back…” youtu.be/n9ENhIyV4…
A bit of a slower, more relaxed reading month in August. Part of that is simply because I’m roughly halfway through a fairly massive novel that locked down the last couple weeks of the month. But still on book-a-week pace for the year overall. 100 Things Royals Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die - Matt Fulks My step-dad brought me this book, which was a fun little thing to flip through between innings while watching games.
As I mentioned in last week’s Friday Links, I watched Real Genius a week ago. Then, this past Sunday, I watched Fletch. As with Real Genius, it had been a long, long time since I had watched Fletch, a movie which has to be in my top five most-watched non-Christmas movies of all time list.[1] So A), yes I’m on a bit of a classic 80s movie run. Sunday nights seem to be the most convenient to watch them right now, since the Royals generally play during the afternoon on Sundays.
Two weeks of the Indiana high school football season are in the books. Throw in a few previews I’ve written, and it’s been a busy couple of weeks. The previews were largely uneventful. I’ve been doing those long enough where I have a pretty solid formula in place. Every now and then I run into a coach who is difficult to reach on the phone, which is frustrating and causes delays.
Another music-heavy list this week. Including the promised articles about the 40th anniversary of Born To Run. Rolling Stone shared the full transcript of an interview they did with Springsteen 10 years ago for the 30th anniversary of BTR. Of course, the mythology of the album is that his career may have been over had it not been a success. I think my biggest admiration for the album is how rather than playing it safe while operating under that kind of pressure, he completely went for it, making the biggest, boldest album he could imagine.
youtu.be/-OZV5i_6R… “She’s The One” - Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street Band Born To Run turned 40 this week. You may have read something about that somewhere.[1] The song “Born To Run” is one I remember from way back in, likely, it’s earliest days. It wasn’t a song for me, or about my life. But it was one that got heavy play on the stations my parents listened to. So it was already in my rock ’n roll DNA before I rediscovered it many years later and learned to love it on my own.