Category: Pop

Album Reviews 26/01/08

Alter Bridge, Alter Bridge (Napalm Records)

One could argue that this Orlando, Florida, band amounts to nothing more exciting than Creed 2.0, given that three-fourths of the members were in Creed and Myles Kennedy’s vocal sound is basically the same as Scott Stapp’s, i.e. like Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell but with no soul. One could also argue that releasing an eponymous album after having already put out several others was a phase that should have died out in the Aughts, but bless ’em, there are people who love these guys (and professional wrestling intro songs, which is what this stuff is best suited for), and they do try to thrash it up here, with songs like “What Lies Within,” in which Kennedy’s Cornell karaoke is used to decent effect, despite its failure to evoke the extreme-metal gravitas for which it aims. In case you’re the type that plans ahead: They’ll be at Citizens House of Blues in Boston on May 10. C —Eric W. Saeger

Diane Coll, Strangely In Tune (self-released)

It’s probably hellaciously difficult for an Americana-folkie to get noticed these days without resorting to gimmickry (singing like a lost orphan moonbat/deploying obscure instruments, etc.), but this Atlanta native does make an effort. I’ve covered her before in these pages, which is pure luck of the draw; her releases seem to wiggle to the top of my overstuffed emailbox when I’m actively looking for something to write about). Nothing odd goes on here, I assure you; although she does gravitate to using mellotrons and harmoniums, they never detract from the songs, and her real strength — strumming clever open guitar chords — does a lot of the heavy lifting. This time she offers a bigger, wider sound in tunes like “Better Fly Me Right,” a loping, really pretty jangler that evokes Loreena McKennitt trying ’70s radio-pop on for size. “Carolina Wren”’s from-the-mountaintop vibe is a great fit for her Carla Olson-ish vocal range. Plenty of goodness here. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The new albums of Friday, Jan. 9, are being loaded into your Spotifys as we speak, there oughta be a law, you know? As we embark on the blah blah blah of the upcoming new year, I suppose I could give a nod to some of the albums that touched me in 2025, but to be honest, the albums I actually liked were obscure ones, except for the Hives’ new album The Hives Forever Forever The Hives. Actually, whatever, I’ll be honest, friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny had asked me to contribute to his Substack column on The Best 2025 Albums, so in order to oblige him I did put together a short list (sample: “Idle Heirs, Life Is Violence: What it’d sound like if Deftones, Mogwai and Crowbar threw a party and then promptly headed out to destroy the planet”). Now, Dan wanted to know my favorite metal/punk albums of 2025, which was impossible to do; not that I’ve looked very hard, but to my knowledge we haven’t had any real breakthrough metal band since (spoiler) Meshuggah forever ago (Dan’s favorite, Babymetal, is just a weak imitation of Meshuggah as sung by the Powerpuff Girls in my opinion), so if you really want to know what music I liked last year, there were only two things really: every demo song sent to me by local pop/hard-rocker Kris Montgomery Pedersen, and Wayne Wilkinson’s mellow-jazz holiday album Holly Tunes, which I still have in my car as I pen this super-important missive thingamajig (mostly because I’m not ready to move on to the horrors 2026 is going to bring; like, can’t we just pretend it’s still 2025 and we don’t have to reckon with the final bosses that are coming our way in America’s last days?). Sure, Taylor Swift put out an album, but I still haven’t listened to it, nor have I sampled anything from the KPop Demon Hunters movie, given that I assume it’s just the same entertainment matrix that manufactured Babymetal but they’re singing insanely catchy bubblegum tunes. So what do we have to look forward to in 2026, friends? More nepo babies, I’m sure, reflecting the massive wealth-inequality gap that’s characterized everything about our current era, like maybe the lady who does the voice of Bart Simpson on The Simpsons has another relative who can support her niece Sabrina Carpenter on tour so that American art finally hits rock bottom and we can just reboot rock ’n’ roll entirely, maybe starting with bands of marketing dropouts beating logs with dinosaur bones and playing reed flutes completely off-key. I mean, not to be an intolerable nihilist, but wouldn’t that be sooo good at this point?

• English post-punk band Dry Cleaning is mostly known for employing a semi-famous producer, and their newest album Secret Love is no different, because it was produced by Cate Le Bon, who’s famous for — OK, nothing any of you nice people would know. The single “Cruise Ship Designer” is stupid but not annoying, featuring a catchy early Rolling Stones guitar line while some lady, probably Le Bon, whisper-speaks some fashionable nonsense over it.

• Let’s Eat Grandma’s Jenny Hollingsworth’s solo project Jenny On Holiday releases its debut album Quicksand Heart this Friday. “Good Intentions” starts out as a shoegaze tune, then turns into a Belinda Carlisle synthpop song that’s totally ’80s. I liked it well enough.

• Finally it’s U.K.-based pub-indie band The Cribs, with their newest LP, Selling A Vibe. The single, “A Point Too Hard To Make,” is as tuneless as anything you’ve ever heard from Kaiser Chiefs but even worse than that (use your imagination). —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Alter Bridge, Alter Bridge (Napalm Records) & Diane Coll, Strangely In Tune (self-released)

Album Reviews 26/01/01

W.E.B., Darkness Alive (Metal Blade Records)

Oh boy, could there be anything more important than making symphonic metal even more “extreme?” That’s what this Athens, Greece-based fivesome is doing, plastering synth-crafted orchestral maneuverings with Cookie Monster vocals from (apparently) a guy and a girl who’re both equally capable of pulling off an exquisite twin-punch karaoke of Bathory and Cannibal Corpse at a kid’s birthday party. This is a live set, just so you know, and thankfully the synthesizer making all the super-epic symphonic sounds didn’t melt down to ruin everyone’s vibe; essentially it’s a barrage of slightly out-of-date thrash metal ravings with bursts of faux-John Williams soundtracking doing epic things here and there. I was promised that “Into Hell Fire We Burn” has a chorus that “will make you want to sing along,” but there’s no melody to it, just demonic chanting over some bonk-bonk-bonk power chords, occasionally interrupted by [place name of literally any thrash band here] hamster-wheel shredding. And people are worried about AI barfing out hilariously disposable music (eyeroll). C —Eric W. Saeger

genCab, “Open Graves” (Metropolis Records)

I can’t come up with a single reason why any self-respecting goth shouldn’t give this dark-techno trio’s new extended single a listen. The driving force behind it is Bucks County, Pennsylvania’s (fine, he obviously wants me to say he’s a Philadelphia-based act, so whatever) own Dave Dutton, a big Elden Ring player who sure loves him some Trent Reznor, at least the harder, more rock-based, Gravity Kills-type stuff. He’s working his way up the ladder, having spent some time in Los Angeles working on various projects and refining his art, which required getting a new computer when his old one kept running out of memory when he was putting tunes together. With regard to the music, yeah, we’re definitely in Trent territory, but he’s an ’80s kid who’s obviously been exposed to tons of synthpop and has a decent sense of song structure; the tune does slap pretty hard in the manner of KMFDM but with much less sampling. Plus he likes Wumpscut, which earned him my rubber stamp from the jump. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• OMG no way, it’s a new year, are we even still standing, holy crow. Jan. 2 is the first new-CD-Friday of 2026, so, as we all try to remember to date our work-email messages with 2026 instead of 2025, it’s a good idea to think about what monstrosities are heading music’s way in the coming — you know, year. Most importantly, it will be a year in which music turns to artificial intelligence (AI) to produce new hit songs and full albums, and many are already complaining about the situation, declaring it somehow bad or “wrong.” In an interview with the Jacobin podcast, overexposed nincompoop and registered mediocre bass player Anthony Fantano, aka “Needle Drop,” professed concern that the “owners” (corporations like Disney and such) of machine-generated music will issue licenses to platforms like Spotify so that said platforms will have the right to use computer-generated voices and songwriting styles at will (which I’m sure will lead to a period when people start rejecting anything AI-generated). As well, like most people who don’t get the point of something, Fantano dismissed last year’s AI-generated song “Walk My Walk” (by the fictitious country-rock artist Breaking Rust, the creation of Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, a semi-anonymous, Burial-like content creator) as having “not actually broken big” because the tune “only” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, a chart that would be “very easy” for bots to mess with. I’ll let you finish your Fritos while you think about how stupid that is (hint: YouTube used to — and probably still does — count views of commercials for Lady Gaga’s singles as actual listens, and we’ve all seen bot-like behavior in YouTube comments sections for disposable divas like Sabrina Carpenter), but in the meantime, yes, the song was digitally created, which Fantano knew, so he knew automatically to write it off as “terrible” and “the most reductive parody of a popular genre you could imagine.” Personally, I’d say T Bone Burnett had already cornered that particular market (the song has a mud-blues sound a la Howlin’ Wolf), but it’s not any more “reductive” or redundant than Burnett’s depleted soil output, especially when he was trying to barf out as much music as he could to capitalize on his Aughts-era period of popularity. So no, we could argue these points all day, but the fact is that AI is coming to replace a lot of workers, including debatably original artists, but what I’m more concerned about is the fact that established rock stars are definitely going to deploy AI themselves to save time producing albums. But that might actually be good in some ways: Lady Gaga ran out of ideas after The Fame Monster, so why wouldn’t she program a robot to produce “something that Cher would sing but that would appeal to fans of Lorde” instead of stealing directly from Madonna like she did on “Born This Way?” Interesting times, eh?

• Devon Allman is the son of Greg Allman, so he’s automatically relevant and I’ll just leave it at that rather than whine about nepo babies again. His new album, Nightvision, is said to be an “alt-rock” album, but it’s actually a prog-rock album, going by advance single “Dead Sea Scrolls,” which is like boring-era Rush but with better guitar shredding.

• Paleface Swiss is a “beatdown hardcore” band from Switzerland with a new EP titled The Wilted. Basically like Fields Of The Nephilim meets Killing Time, it’s OK.

• We’ll wrap it up with Los Angeles-based indie-folk singer Miya Folick, whose new album Erotica Veronica reminds me of Oceanlab and Lisa Loeb: gentle, waifish singing over ambient niceness and strummy ’90s-pop that don’t mix all that well together. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: W.E.B., Darkness Alive and genCab, “Open Graves”

Favorite books of ’25

Our reviewers read a lot of books this year; these are the ones they gave A grades to.

Fiction

The Magnificent Ruins, by Nayantara Roy, is “a beautiful, messy journey as Lila searches for her identity among two very different cultures and within a family defined by each other in the best and worst of ways.” A- —Meghan Siegler

Run for the Hills, by Kevin Wilson, is “a genuinely fun novel that strikes the right balance between poignancy and comedy…. If Hollywood options this … I’ll be at the theater on opening day.” A- —Jennifer Graham

The Road to Tender Hearts, by Annie Hartnett: “…at the core of this novel, there is a warmth and genuineness that breaks through its comically dark outer layer.” A- —M.S.

Culpability, by Bruce Holsinger, has “a deeply intelligent storyline that blends technology, philosophy and ethics…. Culpability moves slowly at times … [but] Holsinger, as it turns out, knows exactly what he’s doing, and his ending is nothing short of genius. A —J.G.

We Do Not Part, by Han Kang, translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, is “an achingly beautiful story that will send readers to Kang’s previous novels, which include 2017’s Human Acts and The Vegetarian, published in the U.S. in 2016. Bring on the K-lit.” A —J.G.

Heartwood, by Amity Gaige: “In simple and sparse narration that blooms with lyrical descriptions of New England landscapes, Heartwood manages to be part mystery, part thriller, part how-to-hike-the-Appalachian-Trail guidebook — or it might convince you to never set foot in the woods again. Either way, start Heartwood and you’ll likely be a thru-reader, all the way to the end.” A —J.G.

Tilt, by Emma Pattee, “is a novel about the end of the world as we know it, a species of the so-called ‘apocalypse genre,’ [but] it’s also about coming to grips with your life when your life has not turned out as you planned, when you are so dissatisfied with your lot that even an earthquake doesn’t mess up your plans.” The book “thrums with tension and is gorgeously written, with scenes and phrases that will long remain with the reader. … Tilt is a remarkable literary debut.” A —J.G.

Nonfiction

cover for The Ghost Lab, which has a green cover with illustrated scientific beakers
The Ghost Lab, by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

The Ghost Lab, by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, resulted from “a years-long investigation into paranormal enthusiasts and their work” and is “a fascinating book …. Regardless of how you feel about the paranormal, Hongoltz-Hetling is a first-rate reporter and storyteller, and The Ghost Lab is easy to love — as long as you’re not one of its subjects.” A+ —J.G.

Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp, is “a sobering story that’s being compared to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which in 1962 launched the environmental movement with its examination of the devastating effects of pesticides. But Waste Wars is not so much about how America’s garbage is destroying us, but about how it’s trashing other countries. A —J.G.

Everything is Tuberculosis, by John Green: “We remember things not by memorizing facts but by hearing stories, and Green has amassed a medicine chest full of stories about tuberculosis, and about the evolution of medicine in general.” A —J.G.

All the Way to the River, by Elizabeth Gilbert, “is … a strange and often unsettling book that upends the myth of Elizabeth Gilbert given to us by Eat, Pray, Love.” A —J.G.

Aflame, by Pico Iyer: “In Aflame … Iyer writes lyrically and movingly about the gifts of solitude and quiet and why they matter, especially in a culture that seems determined to deprive us of them. And yes, he also writes about wildfires, inevitable because the setting is California, and death and suffering. But the title is a metaphor for burning in the heart, as well.” A —J.G.

Featured Photo: The Magnificent Ruins, by Nayantara Roy

Best Offer Wins, by Marisa Kashino

(Celadon, 269 pages)

As possibly the only person on the planet who hasn’t read Gone Girl, I am unqualified to compare Gillian Flynn’s 2014 novel to any other book, but I know enough about it to know what it means when other people do this. The comparison promises multiple twists that will knock you out of your chair, your perception of the events and characters totally skewed.

Best Offer Wins is the latest novel to pulsate with the Gone Girl vibe, earning Marisa Kashino the kind of buzz that rarely accompanies a first-time author. It has an entirely relatable premise: a young woman is shut out of the housing market because of too many buyers (and hedge funds) flush with cash and becomes caught up in her quest to be the winning bidder on a suburban D.C. house she wants to raise a family in.

Margo Miyake and her husband, Ian, don’t have children yet, but they’re trying. They’re living in an apartment “so small you can vacuum almost all of it from a single outlet,” having sold their modest starter home planning to upgrade with the profits. But then they find out that the housing market has changed in terrible ways since they’d bought their first house.

Every house they want is getting dozens of offers, many well over the asking price and all cash. Margo and Ian are well off compared to most Americans — she’s in PR, he’s a government lawyer — and they are prepared to spend more than a million on their forever home. But even that’s not enough, and so when Margo gets an insider tip that a four-bedroom home in a desirable neighborhood in Bethesda will soon come on the market, she decides to pull out all the stops, sneakily befriending one of the homeowners and snagging an invitation to dinner at the house.

Friends, the cringe doesn’t come in on little cat feet; it bursts in like a golden retriever left too long outside in the cold.

But the cringe turns into something darker as Margo, the narrator throughout, becomes more and more obsessed with the house. She’s mentally moving in, imagining her new, perfect life within its walls so vividly that she even orders new house numbers to replace the current ones that she doesn’t like. When the homeowners, a gay couple with an adorable adopted daughter, grow suspicious and Margo realizes that her Plan A isn’t going to work, she recalculates and embarks on another scheme, and then another, even as her obsession begins to negatively impact her work and her marriage. It’s not at all clear whether, if she somehow places a winning bid when the house formally comes on the market, she and her husband will still have the income to qualify for a mortgage, or even if they will still be together at all.

As Margo plunges deeper into her quest, we learn, in bits and drabs, why this particular house matters so much to her, and what the life she imagines living there represents. We learn that she had a deeply insecure childhood, that her parents once lost a house to foreclosure, that she once lost a dog to which she was deeply attached. She may or may not be mentally unstable; she may or may not be justified in the increasingly bizarre ways in which she tries to obtain the house.

We’re also not so sure about her husband, Ian, who at first seems devoted to Margo and undeserving of the derision she casts on him. Later events call his devotion into question, but that’s par for the course; it’s unclear if anyone in this story is who they initially seem to be, except for a neighbor’s dog, Fritter, with whom Margo is infatuated.

Margo moves in and out of our sympathy, as she botches important work assignments, comes to the brink of losing her job and takes advantage of good-hearted friends who help when she asks. Yet she is also surrounded by people who have what she wants — to include great homes and children. At times she is even envious of her husband, who had a stable upbringing: “He grew up with a dad who coached his little league teams and a mom who sent him to school with homemade cupcakes on his birthdays. Two loving parents who call us at least once a week to check in,” Margo tells us. “But my childhood, erratic as it was, gave me something even more valuable, something I have come to accept that Ian will never have: hunger.”

There is a dark humor that underpins the narrative, and the story moves swiftly; except for the backstory, the events happen within a couple of weeks. The answers to the two questions that power the book — will Margo get the house, and if so, at what cost? — are impossible to to guess, right up to the final pages of the book, making Best Offer Wins the proverbial page-turner.

But making it to the end of a book doesn’t necessarily mean the reader will like it once they get there, and the ending raises other questions. Is a book enjoyable just because it is engrossing, because it distracts us so effectively from the real world? Sometimes that seems to be the case. But what if we rush to the end of a book, caught in its current like a fast-moving river, and once there, the ending turns out to be deeply unsettling? Is the book still enjoyable then? Those are the unexpected questions that Best Offer Wins presents, ones that I’m still mulling. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Best Offer Wins, by Marisa Kashino

Album Reviews 25/12/25

Kris Davis and Lutosławski Quartet, The Solastalgia Suite (Pyroclastic Records)

Canadian pianist/composer Davis won the Best Jazz Instrumental Album Grammy in 2023; she’s known for “intricate, rhythmically complex yet connected compositions” that touch on many genres, including improv, modern jazz, rock and techno. She’s joined here by Poland’s Lutoslawski (string) Quartet, which has no problem keeping up with and elaborating on Davis’ busy-pensive-busy pieces, so much so that busier, more intricate, time-change-riddled pieces like opener “Interlude” would sound mechanical if they weren’t so obviously heartfelt. “Towards No Earthly Pole” is wonderfully unearthly, desolate in spots (recall we’ve got Eastern Europeans on board here) and eerily alien in others; “The Known End” sounds like something that was considered for the edgier scenes of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But wait, folks, it gets more unsettling, with the appropriately titled “Ghost Reefs,” and then the tumultuous “Degrees of Separation,” which demands that the listener acknowledge its presence. Here there be serious, mathematically ambitious stuff, appropriate for absorptive vegging or summoning a creative brainstorm. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Gavial, Thanks, I Hate It. (Exile On Mainstream Records)

Instantly compelling band here from Germany; oddly enough it was sent to me by a public relations crew that usually specializes in thrash metal, and after reading the one-sheet — which promised “minimalism” and things like that — I was expecting something like Boris or even retro like Zodiac Mindwarp, but nothing could be further from the fact. It’s a massive curveball, starting with leadoff track “Control,” comprosed of grunge/noise sounds futzing with a roots-bluesy Moby idea, and yes, I mean like “Honey,” but quite a bit dirtier, in the vein of All Them Witches meets Fantastic Negrito’s Last Days Of Oakland (those references won’t be on the test, no worries, you’ll have to give me a second to compose myself; this is a thousand times more cool than I was expecting). “Koru Mindset” comes next, and it’s even more impressive, combining Trail Of Dead and Nick Cave. As if it wasn’t already pegged enough, the reverb goes to Jerry Lee Lewis level on “Pretender,” the longest tune here, which exposes these guys as Pink Floyd/Spacemen 3 fans. Lot of filthy fun, this one. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• Ho ho ho, it’s the least wonderful time of the year for us music journalists with columns to fill, because I’m sure there are no new albums coming out this Friday, Dec. 26, the day after Christmas, that would be like trying to sell gaily colored eggs on the day after Easter, you know? No, I know I whined about all that last week, but this week’s the worst one of all, let me go on my fool’s mission, armed only with my new best friend, Google’s AI bot, to find new albums! Well look at that, the new album from Busta Rhymes, Dragon Season, will be out on the 26th, I can’t even believe someone who’s that renowned would ever — oh wait, I see, it’s the follow-up to two Dragon Season EPs from back in January, which received some pretty stinky reviews, because boring, so he’s releasing this full-length on the day that everyone’s returning stuff and not buying anything. But you know what, in the spirit of Saint Nick, I will go listen to a track from this probably uneventful album and tell all you nice people about it, eeny meeny miny whatnot, let’s try listening to — OK, it’s all top secret, so there are no advance tracks, and I don’t blame him, because the critics all fell asleep during the two advance EPs, both of which sounded OK to me, except for there being too much Auto-Tune here and there. Have fun discovering the wonders of this boring album, and if you go to one of his shows, don’t say anything about how he looks exactly like Tracy Morgan, because he really doesn’t like that, so don’t.

• Not a lot else going on, but I suppose we could look at the vinyl re-release of John Williams Conducts The Star Wars Trilogy, because these new vinyl versions come in colors, for your favorite Star Wars geek, who will of course never listen to them, because colored vinyl is more valuable than — OK, most everything, but you know how Star Wars geeks roll. The original album was released in 1990, and all the tunes are from the first three movies, which had interesting music but not as cool as the music in 1998’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, there, I said it. Wait, don’t leave, hear me out, nerds: Remember the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when the giant “asteroid beast” (the “Exogorth”) tries to chomp on the Millennium Falcon but misses, and the music is kind of epic but not really? Well, in The Phantom Menace, Williams had 20 years to make that same piece definitely epic, so that’s what he did during the “There’s always a bigger fish” scene. Shut up, it’s the same tuneage, just a million times better, so give me the soundtrack to The Phantom Menace, not the first trilogy, I will delete any hate mail on sight, just saying.

• Next it’s Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso, a hip-hop-EDM singing duo from Argentina, whose new album Top of the Hills actually came out on Saturday, Dec. 20, but I’m including it because I’m desperate it’s interesting maybe, oh whatever just let me watch my shows and eat chocolate Santas. So, at least they’re serious musicians who studied music, and moreover their October 2024 Tiny Desk Concert for NPR went viral, and most importantly, they opened a show for Kendrick Lamar this year. The new album’s teaser track “Gimme More” is a lot of fun, a Latin-infused pop thingamajig with some calliope emulation and plenty of mindless boasts about their decadence.

• We’ll wrap it up with literally the only thing left, the split EP featuring the bands Tsunami Bomb and Hammerbombs, titled Bombs Away! “Things Aren’t Going Well” is a no-wave/oi-infused tune that would’ve slapped harder if Tsunami Bomb’s singer weren’t so vanilla, she sounds like my fifth-grade music teacher. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Kris Davis and Lutosławski Quartet, The Solastalgia Suite and Gavial, Thanks, I Hate It.

We Did OK, Kid, by Anthony Hopkins

(Summit Books, 352 pages)

Is there anyone over the age of 20 who hasn’t seen an Anthony Hopkins film, or 20? It’s hard to imagine. As he approaches his 88th birthday on New Year’s Eve, the Welsh actor best known for his Academy Award-winning performance in The Silence of the Lambs has amassed a formidable body of work, and became the oldest actor to win the Oscar for best actor for The Father in 2021.

Talent on the silver screen, however, doesn’t always translate to talent on the printed page, as any number of Hollywood memoirs attests.

But Hopkins’ new memoir, We Did OK, Kid, is surprisingly compelling and will be of interest to even people who aren’t especially enthralled with cinema. Like all good celebrity memoirs, it is strongest in reflecting the experiences of a human being, not a star. Hopkins’ luminous career is almost incidental to the lessons learned over the course of a lifetime as someone who was underestimated in his youth and had to overcome parenting that was, let’s just say, not always ideal.

The title comes from Hopkins’s own message to the child that he was, at age 3, in a photo that appears on the jacket of the book. He had a slightly enlarged head that worried his parents and elicited teasing from cruel peers who called him “elephant head.” Making things worse, he was not much of a student. A pivotal moment came when he was sent to boarding school by his parents, against his will.

He writes: “I vowed, I’ll take my chances and never get close to my mother and father again — or anyone else for that matter. I no longer cared. I decided to live life on my terms, to open my eyes to the future. Forget the past. Childhood over. Copy that. Over and out. The ghost had entered the machine.”

He was 11 at the time.

Despite this steely girding of adolescent loins, Hopkins continued to perform poorly in school. He recounts the dreaded opening of the envelope containing his grades that would arrive at his home. On one such occasion, his father exploded, saying, “Honestly, you’re bloody hopeless. You’ll never get anywhere, amount to anything in life, the way you’re going on. … Can’t you do anything useful?”

Young Hopkins, who had been cultivating a demeanor of “dumb insolence,” listened to the rant coolly and then told his parents, “One day, I’ll show you. I’ll show both of you.”

It wasn’t a relationship-ending exchange — father, mother and son then went out to see a movie — but something changed again that day, in Hopkins and in the way that his father viewed him. It is one in a series of memorable scenes that the actor recounts throughout the book, like his first encounter with a young Richard Burton (another legendary Welsh actor, who died in 1984), and having drinks with Laurence Olivier, to name a few.

The first indication that young Hopkins had the seeds of an extraordinary orator within him came when he was asked to read a poem before his class at the boarding school. (His teacher’s response was “Thank you. Rather good.”) The poem was “The West Wind” by John Masefield, and it’s among the meaningful verses and monologues he shares in an appendix of the book — a nice touch.

Bumbling his way through his first stage-related jobs, Hopkins was told more than once that he wasn’t careful or attentive enough; he was fired from one job. But everyone he encountered seemed to recognize a raw talent in him despite the rough edges. He earned a scholarship to an acting school on the strength of an interview. One woman recommended him for a job after briefly interacting with him in a restaurant. His capacity for memorization is legendary, and it was a skill he developed as a child when he repeated words and phrases over and over. His current wife, Stella, believes he has some form of Asperger’s syndrome, “given my proclivity for memorization and repetition … and my lack of emotionality.”

“But,” he writes, “like any stoic man from the British Isles, I’m allergic to therapeutic jargon. Even if the world might prefer I accept the Asperger’s label, I’ve chosen to stick with what I see as a more meaningful designation: cold fish.”

The “lack of emotionality” comes across on the page in stark, clipped prose. No one will ever accuse Hopkins of overwriting. He tells what needs to be told, nothing more, and yet the book sometimes feels like a confessional. He writes, for example, of his failures as a father to his only child, Abigail, after leaving her mother when she was a toddler “after the worst two years of my life.” Although he went on to marry again twice, he vowed not to have more children. “I knew I was too selfish. I couldn’t do to another child what I’d done to her,” he says. Performing in a production of Lear, “the line that hit me harder than perhaps any I’ve ever spoken was ‘I did her wrong.’”

He wonders if his failure to connect with his daughter was in some way connected to his experiences in his own parents’ house, even though his father turned out to be a complicated person. Despite his harshness to his son, he also cried when young Hopkins delivered his first line in a play at a local YMCA (it was a beatitude: “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the world.”) And he asks his son to recite lines from Hamlet when he is on his death bed.

Like father, like son, Hopkins grew up to drink heavily, which contributed to the abrupt end of his first marriage. After a doctor warned him that he was drinking his way into the grave, he started attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

At the first one, “I was moved by the speaker’s story. He’s just like me, I thought. He was a truck driver, not an actor, but we were the same.”

Sitting in that room, Hopkins thought, “They’re all misfits like me. Like all of us. We feel we never belong. We feel self-hatred. All of us are the same. I’m not alone.”

It is that sort of revelation that makes this more a human story than a celebrity memoir. Yes, there are big names in this book, but coming as they do from Sir Anthony Hopkins (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1993), they never feel like name-dropping; how could they? In most cases, he is the bigger star. He did far more than OK. And yet in the deeply human memoir, Hopkins plays an ordinary man, perhaps his most extraordinary role of all. B+

Featured Photo: We Did Ok, Kid by Anthony Hopkins

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