Private Property

Soul For Sale, $6 a Month

Why Trouble Man Premium?  Why now? 

“I’m a mess,” sang Nick Lowe. “I should be filling rooms with the sweet smell of success.” I’m a mess, too—the first step to admitting you are one.  It doesn’t do me any good to create more of a mess out of the chaos of my life.  I can hear the emotion of music, but I also have perfect pitch.  I know how it’s made; I know what goes into it.  And I also know how to bring just enough myself into the experience.  I have been called an author of “prose poetry” by a poet and my near namesake David Yezzi in the paywalled pages of the Wall Street Journal.  I did not set out to be one, but I will not refuse the title. Wordsworth is well known for defining poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” but I think the earlier part of that sentence is more what I’m talking about: “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”  I create a work of prose with music, autobiography, messy emotions, character studies, and enough to make you a little uncomfortable, while giving you a lot more pleasure.  I spend every day aware that everything is falling apart.  There’s good wine in every generation, but the endeavor keeps shrinking.  Am I going to spend my remaining months of my 40s complaining about it?  Of course, but I am also taking action.  I am the Trouble Man of Trouble Man.  I feel it all, then observe and report.  Music affects all of us, and over time, we become an old and new version of ourselves every time we press play.  I am offering you a portal into that experience, where you listen again, think again, feel again, and laugh and cry about it all again.  Support Trouble Man and Trouble Man will be able to support you, with an experience you will not find anywhere else. 

Lou Reed wrote these words when very few were paying attention:

Jenny said when she was just 5 years old
There was nothing happening at all
Every time she puts on the radio
There was nothing going down at all, not at all
Then one fine morning, she puts on a New York station
You know, she don't believe what she heard at all
She started shaking to that fine, fine music
You know, her life was saved by rock and roll

Not that Lou Reed would care, but he spoke for many of us.  One minute, there’s nothing happening at all, then we tune in a frequency, and it’s suddenly everything.  We love, we hate, we age, we grieve, we celebrate, we mope, we suffer, we yearn, we admire, we desire--we love and hate the same person sometimes--we have the last party, and remember when it was real and we want it to be real again. 

Most people are unsatisfied.  That, said Willie Nelson, is what makes the juke boxes play.  Yet our lives were saved by rock and roll—and that holds for all genres that matter.  I am here to share that with you.  I started out as a critic and became a writer.  I am still a critic, but that’s just where it starts.  Start losing farther, losing faster, and that’s where things start to get interesting.  This is your New York station.  Tune in.  When you support Trouble Man, you are saving your life with rock and roll, and I will be here with you, with what Joni Mitchell called private passions and secret storms.  For the price of a latte or a round trip on the subway, you will get a private look at the trouble behind the man and the man behind the trouble.  You just spent $6 tipping the delivery man. 

In a certain light he looked like Elvis
In a certain way he seemed like Jesus
He said "Why can't you be kind to me like you were meant to be?
When they let me out, I had a brand new identity
Now everyone dreams of me just as they can
I want to be your Delivery Man"

Declan McManus envisioned Elvis Costello and made it so.  He had a brand new identity.  I am passing it on.  I want to be your Delivery Man.   

Trouble Man has been building up readership for the past four months, private thoughts made public.  But there is another door, and with a backstage pass, you can see the Trouble Man of Trouble Man—songs, manifestos, secrets too deep for the free subscribers.  Some of you want it darker.  I have musical creations you can’t find in any other media. $6 a month gives you access to the inspiration behind the inspiration, the notes toward a supreme fiction, the outtakes that are too good for this world.  They reveal something that is a little too tender.  “Save something for yourself,” said Kris Kristofferson to Joni Mitchell after he heard Blue.  I’ve been saving something for myself, for the people who can handle the truth.  Cue the floodgates.  

The stuff I’ve got will bust your brains out, baby.  Robert Johnson said that.  He was singing metaphorically, but he meant it.  He allegedly sold his soul, and even if it was around 100 years ago, I bet it was for more than $6.  I am selling my soul for six bucks a month, and for that modest price, you’ll get something no one else can have.  Every day, the assault of the news comes in.  Everywhere we look, it's a massacre.  Things are so bad out there; that is why we need music, and we need to feel it all. Look around, and you’ll find the display of artifice and marketplace worship. Trouble Man will give you something much deeper, more lasting, as serious as your life.

"I've seen the future, baby, it is murder," sang Leonard Cohen.  He also wrote this: 

O, gather up the brokenness
Bring it to me now
The fragrance of those promises
You never dared to vow

The splinters that you carried
The cross you left behind
Come healing of the body
Come healing of the mind

Thank you, Leonard.  We are living in brokenness. And yet there were true poets who had the hunger to write and share it with us. The world was still broken. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. I still believe in it. It gives us succor, and I share it with you here.  Once a week, you can come healing.  To be played at maximum volume.