Boo Hewerdine

There's a difference between The Best Album and Your Favorite Album.

It's hard to accept this fact, especially if you're passionate about music. If you love the album so much, it must be objectively better than other albums out there. But then you start explaining why this album is your favorite, and you become a babbling idiot, a bad proselytizer. You start feeling pretty vulnerable. If you can't explain why this is your favorite album, maybe you're just playing wrong.

Well. As Boo Hewerdine said, "Sometimes your drug chooses you." So I will approach it that way. Here's how my drug chose me.

It was 1988 and my life was chaos - or at least chaos for me. I was in grad school, working on an MS in Computer Science. My advisor, who I used to meet with weekly, had started becoming weirdly absent. I found out later he was in the process of simultaneously divorcing and reconnecting with Orthodox Judaism, and he really had no time for mentoring me anymore. It was really hard for me to go forward with my thesis under those conditions.

At the same time my advisor found deep faith, I had just left Christianity. Mostly because I couldn't reconcile a deity that would leave two-thirds of humanity in the dark while bestowing the other third with infinite existence. This didn't sound particularly good to me. But in leaving the faith, I left a lot of certainty behind as well. While it was occasionally nice to be left with a tabla rasa where I could construct my own world view that made sense, ... I had no idea where to begin.

And There It Was

Eureka by The Bible dropped that year. The lead singer and chief songwriter of the band The Bible was Boo Hewerdine, the coolest name for a human being ever.

I picked the album up because Rolling Stone said about it, "Originality isn't their strong suit, but execution is." Ouch. Pretty back-handed compliment. But they had got signed to Ensign, where a couple of my favorite bands The Waterboys, World Party and Sinead O'Connor were signed to, so I pretty much took their word for it.

How does an album connect with you? Maybe a neuroscientist can explain it. It might involve pleasure centers in the brain, dopamine, endorphins. Something in your DNA? I don't know.

I would get up in the morning, and Eureka would be sitting on top of my stack of tapes. In it would go. Or maybe I'd be shuffling through a stack ... or maybe it would be filed religiously under the B section of my tape cases, as is my custom of filing by artist then recording date. But every day I would find this tape at least once and put it in.

When I moved to Utica NY and took my box of tapes with me, and I only had a Walkman with a tiny little pair of speakers - literally 3 inches square ... every day it would go in the player.

That's how an album becomes your favorite. You just keep going back to it over and over. It fulfills a need better than anything else. What need? Who cares? And does it have to be your only need? Of course not. And does it need to be immediately apparent how profoundly it has affected you? Nyuh uh.

About 10 years later, my life was significantly less chaotic. I had a job, a bunch more cassette tapes, even some new compact disks (posh!). One day I thought, "what is my favorite album?" And I would come up with some choices, but could never trust my judgement - did I pick "A Love Supreme" by John Coltrane because I wanted to look cool, smart, intellectual? If you argue about the relative merits of albums, as I did all the time, you've made this job a lot harder on yourself.

What is my favorite album? The Internet (then a pretty new thing) supplied the answer.

To make it as scientific as possible, start with a large pool of compare albums, then compare them in pairs. For each pair of albums ask the simple question, "Would you rather listen to album A or album B?" It's NCAA March Madness applied to records, basically. Granted, this created thousands of sub-problems ... but at least the problems were manageable.

Still, after about a week of painstakingly filling in a huge 50 x 50 grid, the results were clear. Eureka by the Bible is my favorite album.

If you like music and haven't been through an exercise like this, I highly recommend it. You will learn things about yourself, and at the very least, you will dig out some old albums you haven't heard in awhile.

And yet, at the end of the day, I would like to know why I prefer this album to any other. If I had done this exercise and A Dogs' Christmas came out on top, I would want some objective reasons for liking it.

I don't want this exercise to be some AI-like black box where you throw a bunch of facts into a machine and get an answer that makes no sense at all. There must be some reason I like it. I do have 35 years of reflection to draw on.

Eureka is an album about the feeling of longing, and coming to terms with it. It is I Can't Get No Satisfaction with Mick Jagger having grown the f**k up. And having discovered jazz.

Eureka is the perfect album for atheists. It is not marketed as such, nor is there any anti-religious diatribe like Dear God on it.

Lemme explain it this way. Religion is about having found what that you were looking for, revelling in it. It considers desire as failure on all levels. Buddhists are, in fact, very insistent on this point. I know this is extremely reductive, but I'm just trying to review an album here, after all.

Eureka is about accepting the itchy little un-fulfillments of life with grace, dignity and humor. It accepts desire and stops there. It is perfectly fine with not having the answers, and it is very unreligious in that respect. Kind of ironic for a band named The Bible - that fact is not lost on me.

Or maybe it means something completely different. I dunno.

Gaah. I am now reduced to babbling. I have the vocabulary to effectively and concisely critique music, and it does me no damn good here.

It would've been better if A Dog's Christmas was my favorite album.

35 Years Go By

What happened to The Bible? They broke up, but since there was no Internet, I had no way of knowing. I scanned the music stores for a follow-up to Eureka for years and it never showed up.

Then I moved on to all this other music. African, R &B, Boss Nova, Salsa, Shoegaze, Psychedelic, etc. These fulfilled other needs in me, and that was good.

But I never stopped listening to Eureka.

Boo Hewerdine went on making music. He was a steadfastly UK artist, and when he came to America it was mostly to the large population centers. It was very hard for me to find until the Internet era. And he became pretty successful, actually ... as a songwriter. So you may not have heard him, but you may hear a song of his pop up in a film or TV show. Songs like "Bell, Book and Candle" or "The Patience of Angels" or "Dragonflies".

Eureka has a great style. There wasn't a name for its style back in the late 80's, but it has since been christened sophistapop. The idea was to embrace popular music, its production values and synthesizers and emphasis on melody, and smarten-it up a bit. The most successful sophistapop artist was Sade, but others like Level 42, Simply Red, Deacon Blue, Prefab Sprout, early Everything But The Girl, The Blow Monkeys, Scritti Politti ... they all crossed my radar over the years. Camera Obscura and Marden Hill carry on the tradition in the 2010's. I still love the sound of it.

But listening to Boo Hewerdine these days without all the sophistapop trappings, I realize how important songwriting is to this formula. If you don't get that part right, your music devolves into throwaway pop.

He's a songwriter of the highest order. It's because his songs sound straightforward, but upon examination, unlock little puzzles about human existence. I'll just pick a lyric from "Dragonflies" here:

On the surface, nothing in this lyric is intellectually challenging, you are not sent running to the dictionary. But seemingly simple lyrics get under your skin and lurk there, and you find yourself at 3 AM waking up and asking, "But what does that really mean?" Because life itself can look simple until you start dissecting it.

I'm no songwriter, but it seems like a really tough hat trick to pull off.

It is 2024 and my wife and I are hunting around for music in Scotland. And there it is. Boo Hewerdine is playing on May 5 at a small Scottish coastal town named Tayport, near Dundee just a train ride away. Amy and I score some tickets.

It's a quiet Sunday afternoon. The venue is small and nice, and there are about 300 people there. Boo Hewerdine walks out and sits down and starts playing.

You get some preconceived notions about Boo Hewerdine from his songs. He is gracious and quiet. He is grateful. He notices small details. And he's got a wicked sense of humor. And here's the thing. He is all of these things in person too. There is no bait and switch here.

He is well-received, and he says, "There's one thing I've always wanted and never received before, and that's a standing ovation." And we give him one. We would've given him one anyway if he hadn't asked. Because he's really good.

I meet Boo Hewerdine at the merch table, give him a handshake, and he asks me where I'm from. I said "Nebraska, in the States" A deliberate misrepresentation, and one I never use - I'm usually proud to tell people I'm from New York. But for some reason, at this moment, it is as if 35 years had never happened, and I'm still this screwed-up college kid.

I'm incredibly lucky. I mean, how many of us actually meet one of the architects of our favorite album? And then to find he's just a really good guy? Wow. Just wow.

One of the great mysteries is the infinite supply of good music. You think you've heard it all, and some album comes along and punches you in the gut. There's no telling where it will come from.

As such I never make predictions about music anymore. I cannot say for certain that Eureka will be my favorite album in five years. Maybe there will be something new.

Meh. I doubt it.