Previous book here.
This book is about Rob's recovery from his first wife's death, which he chalks up to taking up karaoke despite his being a terrible singer/being bad at music in general (that said, there is a lot in here about going to a rock-n-roll camp, which made me sad that his proposed article on it got cut). He has also remarried, something he mentions from the getgo but it takes him quite a while to explain how that came about. Which slightly annoyed me, I wanted to knooooooooow and I wished it was a bit more chronological. Oh well, still pretty good anyway.
I should probably mention that the reason why I'm reading this author this weekend is because he wrote this book on karaoke (and then I found the first one) and I too have become a karaoke addict. This book reminded me of this excellent article I found on the topic recently as well. The author has a lot of fun deep thoughts on the topic that I'll pretty much Quote Corner about here.
We start out meeting his second wife Ally as Rob describes her as also being a very fun, audacious person who loves karaoke and also works in astrophysics and at some point at least had a DJ career as "Astrogrrl." Rob continues to like his type, I see. She also sounds fun to meet if one could meet her. Around the middle of the book, we find out that Rob went back to Charlottesville for a visit, heard her voice on the radio, and then REALLY wanted to swing by the radio station.
Honestly, I feel like just quoting from the rest of the book here, so I'm gonna do that. I made a long list of good quotes.
- “In karaoke, talent means nada; enthusiasm is everything. What I lack in talent, I make up for in passion. Hence my karaoke problem.
If you’re someone like me, a fan who loves music but could never hack it as a musician, karaoke changes everything. It unlocks the door to center stage. It’s a safe and welcoming place where anyone can join in the music. So even if you never summoned the courage or skill to cross that line from fan to participant, karaoke is something anybody can do. Your only limits are emotional. Indeed, it forces you to keep upping your emotional ante, as you voice your innermost feelings out loud. And that’s the weirdest thing about karaoke--something you can feel like you’re experiencing some of the most honest, most intimate moments of your life, while butchering a Hall and Oates song at 2 a.m. in a room full of strangers. That intimacy is what makes it such an addictive vice. With karaoke you’re really putting yourself out there. People are going to watch you and stare. But the whole culture around karaoke creates a temporary environment of total acceptance. When we do karaoke, we sing along with songs we hate. We cheer for the weirdos across the room. We high-five strangers. You dim the lights, crank the volume, and you can get away with anything.” - “I got obsessed with karaoke around the time I got obsessed with Ally. It’s a fact: Getting obsessed with a girl is a good way of getting obsessed with anything.”
- “Every time we get our microphone cords tangled up, I get a little more obsessed with her.
I got into karaoke at a time when I felt like my life was a used firecracker. I was only in my early thirties, but I figured it was all too late for me. I was a miserable widower with no idea how to muddle on. The happy chapter of my life was over, and the world had run out of surprises. But it turned out my life was just beginning. I fell in love, I got married, I found a new life and a new home. Karaoke was just one of those surprises. But for me, it turned out to be a way of finding my voice. Something about it opened up doors for me emotionally. For me, it was part of coming back to life.” - “As soon as I met Ally, I could tell her gravity was going to win. Her nuclear force was something I couldn’t resist. I was drawn into her gravitational pull, and that drew me into my entire future.”
- “What I get out of karaoke is a little weirder than mere musical competence. It’s a love ritual that keeps me coming back, craving more, because this is where the songs are. And the songs are full of stories. Every one we sing is charged up with memories of the past or dreams of the future. Every song reminds me of good times or bad times. Yet they all hold surprises.
When you sign up for a whole night of this, you can’t really predict how the music is going to feel. You begin to sing a song expecting to get one story out of it, then you get another. You pay for this but they give you that. Every tune tells a different tale.” - “There are famous singers I have spent my whole life pondering, but after I pick up the mike to try their songs, I’m more fascinated by them than ever. Some of these singers are legends, yet when I slip into their songs, I feel like they’re helping me figure out some of my own basic questions. Some of these singers mean the world to me; others are just vessels for the song. One is Billy Idol. But their voices are burned into my soul.”
- "I look at this picture, and I know for a fact I look ridiculous when I sing. But I look closer, and I see there is no shame in my eyes. No fear. No trouble at all. I wonder why.”
- “So what turned out to be my Jennie Garth? What was the vixen that chased me off the couch and out into the world? What forced me to say “yikes, this is what and suddenly looks like” and run for my life? Karaoke.”
- “Where does all my good sense go when I sing? Out the window, that’s where. And karaoke rooms don’t even have windows.”
- “It had been a long night. It had been a crazy night. When could I do it again? Where was I going to look for it? Who was going to stop me? Where are all the people singing, and how can I get there? This night has opened my eyes, and I will never sleep again.”
“One night of song had kicked open a few doors for me emotionally--I could tell that already--clueless as I felt about what was hiding on the other side.” - “This was my first time, and other times soon followed. Once I got a taste of what karaoke was, I wanted more, and I began looking into places where this sort of thing happened. Staying out late reminded me how much I loved staying out late.”
- “We’re all just strangers wandering through the night, with nothing except the song to bring us together. But we’ve got each other, and that’s a lot.”
- “Somewhere in your town, tonight, right about now, there is a karaoke dump that stays open far too late....Find that place. Breathe in the air. It’s where those songs belong, and it’s probably where you belong, too. Journey and the Jove, on repeat. They offer sanctuary to us all.”
- “That’s the essence of karaoke if anything is: never for money, always for love.”
- “Clearly, you have to have the performer thing. The showgirl thing. The flair that separates a star from the rest of us. You have to be able to turn it on at will.”
- “He said, “You just have to work tomorrow. I gotta be somebody!”
And that totally nails the difference between performers and the rest of us. We need them to be somebody. And occasionally, we need to be them so we can be somebody, too.”
“There’s a specific kind of personality, or maybe just some kind of genetic mutation, that these people have. People in bands call it LSD, or Lead Singer’s Disease.” - “That buzz separates performers from the rest of the human race. It’s a special mentality that requires you to give yourself to the audience, in a theatrically overstated way, despite the fact that they know it’s a performance.”
- “It’s a place where no-talents and low-talents and too-low-for-zero talents tolerate each other, even enjoy each other, as we commit brutal crimes of love against music. We’re all free to turn and walk the other way at any time, yet we stay to applaud each other.
I can’t think of any other forum like this in our culture. There’s no acting equivalent of karaoke, where an amateur thespian can get up on a public stage after shotgunning a few tall boys and perform the trial of Hermione from The Winter’s Tale.”... “There is simply no other American ritual that rewards people for doing things they suck at doing.
Yet we stick around, before and after our song, cheering each other’s flaws. The only real bores in a karaoke bar are the ringers who can sing... In a karaoke bar, the closest you can come to unforgivably bad taste is competence.
The community created around karaoke is a sacred thing. It’s a universally supportive environment--nobody goes to scoff or judge.... It’s a temporary but intense bond between strangers, a shipboard romance, a republic we create where we gladly consent to treat the other people around us like rock stars. How does music bring all this out of us?” - “But it was a different kind of trouble I found that weekend, the sort that turns things upside down and then makes you wonder why you haven’t been standing on your head so things could have gotten this way sooner.
I flipped for Ally’s voice about twenty minutes before I met the rest of her....But as soon as I heard the DJ’s voice, my priorities for the weekend began to shift.” - “So right, this is trouble, I thought. God, I missed you, trouble.”
- “I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to happen. I wasn’t sure what I was ready for. But I knew I needed to learn a lot more about this woman.”
- “Every karaoke singer has a vocal doppelganger, and mine is Neil Diamond. When you start singing, you find out whose voice suits yours and who doesn’t, and you don’t always get to make the decision.”
- “But whoever it is, you find your voice by reaching for theirs. The voice gets into your soul and this guy means more to you than he ever did before. Your doppelganger becomes your spiritual mentor.”
- “Sometimes you can only confess the truth about yourself when you’re pretending to be somebody else.”
- “Nobody truly understands her except the song that she’s singing. And for a couple of minutes, it’s all she needs.”
- “In the karaoke universe, we can be whoever we want. We express ourselves by turning into colorful and disastrous appalling parodies of human beings, and somehow that’s how we ended up as our most sincere version of ourselves. When you step into the song, you’re not sure who you’re going to be on the other side.”
- “I see Mr. Bowie as the patron saint of karaoke singers, because he had no business ever attempting to be a real vocalist. He had nothing special in the natural-talent department: He just decided to be somebody. Dozens of somebodies, and by listening and singing along, we can turn into those somebodies too.”
- (Ziggy Stardust) “This was the song where he turned into a real-life rock star, by pretending to be a fictional one. Pretending to be a singer was his first grand scam, the one from which all the others followed. He makes it seem simple, because it is. He’s the only rock start who ever pretended to be from outer space in order to seem less weird.”
- “When I was a kid I thought my pop-star heroes came from outer space. I didn’t think they were like me.”
- “That’s part of the reason Bowie is the ultimate karaoke-friendly rock star: He understood how being a music fan means dreaming of being somebody else. He showed how easy it was to slip into other people’s disguises.”
- “It’s not my voice, but it’s a voice I can steal, a voice big enough to crawl into and disappear inside for a while.”
- “It feels strange to remember how I used to think it was too late for me. I thought I’d had my shot. Maybe I would be able to re-create some of the things in my life that had been lost, but the surprise, the urgency of being that happy would be gone for good. Now, I have the experience of being a husband, at a different time, as an adult. And yet everything seems new.”
- “I was lucky to get a second chance. I thought I was too late, but it turns out I was just in time.”
- “But music is greedy and wants more of your heart than that. It demands the future, your future. Music wants the rest of your life. So you can’t rest easy. At any moment, a song can come out of nowhere to shake you up, jump-start your emotions, ruin your life.
You might be tempted to feel it’s too late for you. But ultimately, that’s what karaoke is there to remind us. It’s never too late to let a song ruin your life.”
Four stars. And if you have any, even a vague, desire to do karaoke, try it. It's my crack these days.
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