Category: Pop

Album Reviews 25/07/31

Tchotchke, Playin’ Dumb (self-released)

So I said to the public relations lady, three cute 23-year-old babes from New York City on a retro 1960s-pop tip, where do I sign, and 10 minutes later there it was, in my emailbox, this, their second album. Their 2022 debut full-length was a little scattershot, a mishmash of everything from the aforementioned era, from beehive-hairdo girl-group to random Dolly Parton/Harry Nilsson-influenced radio stuff, all with too much cheese in its sound, but this is a little more serious, or at least as serious as you’d want from a pop-vocal-oriented trio who think life must have been a lot more fun when Nixon was president (probably was, given that it was merely the beginning of the end for America). This is more 1970s-centric, beginning with “The Game,” in which the group drapes intricate ELO-like harmonies over Randy Newman-style piano-pop lines, and then it’s “Did You Hear,” a listenable but too flatly produced glam-influenced thingamajig that will make your grandparents think of Big Star and Sweet. “Kisses” is twee-ish proto-pop in the manner of Ben Kweller meets Versus, and so on; altogether the effect is like Au Revoir Simone with three singers who don’t suck. Not to be an annoying production-snob, but someone text me when they grow up, stop obsessing over filling the Brooklyn nightclubs and get an actual studio budget, that’d be great. C+

John Yao, Points In Time (See Tao Recordings)

Sorry that I’m a little lost here; I’m informed I gave this elite New York-based trombonist/bandleader a big thumbs-up in your Hippo for one of his recent albums but I can’t find it for the life of me. That’s OK, though, because he and his 17-count-’em accomplices are all about big-band jazz, a genre that’s always guaranteed a glowing review on this page unless I sense the slightest bit of incompetence, which I don’t at all here. This full-length reflects upon what Yao’s learned and experienced (and stars many of the musicians he’s accumulated) over the 20 years that’ve passed since his first big-band album, Flip-Flop, which All About Jazz pronounced, in their inimitable obfuscatory writing style, as heralding the arrival of “a strong compositional voice and effective band-leader able to use his 17-piece band to paint across a wide spectrum and infuse his complex…” blah blah blah (someone needs to introduce AAJ’s writer-nerds to the word “awesome”). So yeah, this is awesome, from the pensive “Early Morning Walk” to the irrepressibly upbeat “Song for Nolan”; if you like big band (and you should, I tell you), you’ll definitely want this. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• This week’s “new CD release Friday” falls on Aug. 1, summer’s just about over and it happened so fast, why did we even bother, and now for a mindless tangent in which I congratulate myself for reviewing Black Sabbath’s second-worst album, Never Say Die, the other week, given that the band’s been a trending internet topic for what feels like 40 years now, between the farewell concert and then the tragic passing of the band’s singer Ozzy Osbourne just a couple-three weeks later. I feel like I deserve a gold sticker for indulging in current-month’s hottest pop-culture-trending thing, which, as you know, I don’t usually do, but in this case, Sabbath was my favorite band during my boyhood days. I’ll have you know I even commented on social media about his passing, which I also never do, considering that everyone does that so I feel like I can’t; as a wise person once said (and I’m editing this quote for consumption by a more general audience), “Every time a celebrity dies, Twitter turns into 5,000 people trying to flush the same gum wrapper down the same toilet.” I mean, it’s not illegal to be the zillionth person to post “thoughts and prayers” about someone they never met even if it should be, but what amazed me was how all sorts of people leapt out of the woodwork five seconds after Ozzy’s death announcement to condemn him for his politics (seriously, go look). I sympathize with his critics for what they were trying to illuminate, but honestly, one would think we’ve got more important fish to fry these days than trying to posthumously cancel a fellow who once bit into an actual fruit bat for the entertainment value of it, but you do you, and meanwhile I digress, because we need to talk about The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life, the second album from Nigerian-Canadian techno artist Debby Friday, who in 2023 won Canada’s Polaris Music Prize, which comes with a lump-sum cash award of $50,000, did you even know what a Polaris Music Prize is, I didn’t either! Arcade Fire won it in 2011, which is something of an unsettling omen for Ms. Friday, but regardless, let me try to get my train back onto its rickety tracks by listening to this album’s new single, “Lipsync.” Hm, I don’t mind it, it’s like a cross between Goldfrapp and some underground goth band — yikes, the more I listen to it, the more it sounds like Birthday Massacre covering a Kylie Minogue song. It’s pretty boring, but the overall feel is okey-dokey.

• Reneé Rapp is an actress-singer who played the part of Regina George in the 2019 Broadway musical version of Mean Girls and starred in last year’s film adaptation of same, all of which is news to me, why didn’t any of you people inform me about all that nonsense? Bite Me, her second album, spotlights its title track, a drank-addled sleaze-a-thon whose video features scantily clad models having a pillow fight, in case you’ve never seen anything remotely like that in all the years you’ve been online.

• The Armed is an experimental hardcore punk band whose members are anonymous, but they’ve had so many famous guests on their albums (people who are well aware of who they are, obviously) that they might as well drop that whole “anonymous” shtick, don’t you think? The band’s new LP, The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed, includes the single “Well Made Play,” a messy mess of a tune that combines black metal and ad-lib noise just to be weird.

• Lastly it’s Australian hip-hop miscreants Hilltop Hoods with their new album, Fall from the Light. Focus track “Don’t Happy Be Worry” is a fun-enough tune.

Class Clown, by Dave Barry

Class Clown, by Dave Barry (Simon & Schuster, 244 pages)

One thing that has been lost with the decline of newspapers is the syndicated humor columnist that most everyone knew of and read. For three decades, one of those was Dave Barry, whose home base was, and still is, the Miami Herald.

For many people, reading Barry’s “year in review” columns was a December tradition. He’s still writing them; it’s just that with paywalls and such, they seem harder to come by. (“Some readers look forward to it; others view it as an opportunity to inform me that I used to be funnier,” Barry says of the column now.)

At 77, somehow still possessed of a twenty-something head of hair, Barry has written a memoir to add to his oeuvre, which is populated with titles like Dave Barry Turns 40, Dave Barry Turns 50 and I’ll Mature When I’m Dead. It’s hard to imagine that there are any stories he hasn’t told, and sure enough, many make encores here. (Stop him if you already know he’s been in a rock band with Stephen King, but he’ll probably keep going.)

As someone who was reading Barry in the 1980s, when he was new to the Herald and newspapers were still a big deal, I feared this new book would feel overly familiar, like so much tired schtick turned out by long-in-the-tooth authors unwilling to hang up the typewriter. But he surprised me.

Not that there isn’t a certain predictability about Barry’s style and delivery; the surprise was in what he was willing to reveal when he wasn’t working to be funny.

He wallops us in the beginning with a story that promises to be boring — the title is simply “Mom and Dad” and he begins it, “Like so many members of the Baby Boom generation, I started out as a baby.”

Barry recounts his formative years in affluent Armonk, New York, where his own sense of humor was cultivated with decidedly quirky parents. Just when we think this is an idyllic story of shiny happy people having more fun than us, Barry reveals the problems his parents struggled with as they grew older. Juxtaposed with the wholesome upbringing the Barry children were given, the end of the parents’ stories is jarring and deeply poignant, reminiscent of some of the darker family stories told by the humorist David Sedaris. It’s unexpected, and reminds us that so often there is sadness behind the veil that funny people have to try to overcome.

After high school, he studied English at a (then) all-male college founded by Quakers, Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where he says he “read roughly a third of the way through many great literary works.” (When he later escaped the draft during the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector, he says that Society of Friends connection may have benefited his case.) It was at Haverford where he was first published, assigned to write an article about the opening of a Nixon for President office. “As a long-haired, pot-smoking hippie,” he had no interest in the subject and submitted a humor column, which may or may not have been published (he doesn’t remember).

Not knowing what else to do with an English degree, he flirted with straight-up journalism, even working as an intern with Congressional Quarterly, got hired as a reporter for a daily newspaper, and went on to work for the Associated Press, all the while writing humor columns when he could. Unhappy with the constraints of the AP, he quit that job to work at one of the most humorless writing jobs out there: that of a business-writing consultant, but he continued to work as a freelancer, and when a humorous piece he wrote on natural childbirth, focusing on the birth of his son, ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer, his humor writing career really took off. Barry no longer had to pitch his columns; editors were asking him to write for them.

Barry sails through the rest of his career with stories studded with famous people and irate readers and snippets of his columns and articles. There have been so many that unless you’re a 30-year subscriber to theHerald, many are fresh and riotously funny, despite their age. There is, for example, an excerpt of an “interview” Barry did with then Florida Gov. Bob Graham, in which the governor, as Barry puts it, “flipped a switch and went into Zany Mode,” and the two bantered as if they were on a late-night show.
“Barry: What can the state do about harmonica safety? I don’t know if you have any idea how many Floridians die every year in harmonica accidents….

Graham: Well last year we actually made some substantial improvement. In 1981, there were four people who died of harmonica accidents. Now actually, I think it’s only fair to count three of them, because the fourth one was actually, I would say it was more of a swimming pool accident.”

It goes on, gloriously, and it makes you long for the day — of what, I’m not sure. Newspapers? Politicians taking themselves less seriously? There is something in Barry’s career that hasn’t been replaced by a newcomer, let’s just say. The same when we lost Erma Bombeck, Lewis Grizzard, Art Buchwald and so many others.

Barry subtitles this book “the memoirs of a professional wiseass,” drawing on his mission in high school, which he says was wiseassery. He had a friend with whom he basically pranked his way through school without serious consequence. He recalls life events with the nostalgia of the Boomer he is, and sometimes he almost seems Forrest Gump-like as he romps his way through historic events, growing ever more famous, writing screenplays and novels, and even winning a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Class Clown is unlikely to win any elite literary prizes, but Barry proves that on the cusp of 80 he can still make America laugh. B

Featured Photo: Class Clown by Dave Barry

Album Reviews 25/07/24

Jens Kuross, Crooked Songs (Woodsist Records)

The first time musician/politician Hayden Pedigo heard this folkie’s music he pronounced it a cross between Arthur Russell and Harry Nilsson, but that was before Kuross, a Los Angeles-to-Idaho refugee, put aside his synthesizer and followed Pedigo’s advice to make this minimalist, ambient half-plugged-guitar record. The short description of this one is Jeff Buckley with Chris Martin’s Marvin The Martian-esque voice, unhurried slices of life that’ll be perfect for sipping scotch in quietude by your end-of-summer campfire. What’s great about this is that Kuross had all but given up on ever making any splash in the music business prior to running into Pedigo; he’d retreated to Boise and become a cabinet maker. Ironically enough, that’s precisely the sort of authenticity any L.A. music scout would max out a few AmExes to find, so one can’t help wishing this guy the best when this record streets at the end of August. I mean, Bonnaroo types who are always bemoaning Buckley’s loss really need to put this on their radar. A+

Gayle Young and Robert Wheeler, From Grimsby To Milan (Farpoint Recordings)

Pardon the setup, there’s some unpacking to do here before we drill too deep into this experimental album. First item to note with regard to this duo is the presence of Robert Wheeler, the great-great-grandnephew of Thomas Alva Edison, as well as a member of 50-year-old Cleveland-based art-punk band Pere Ubu since 1994 (that band has been somewhat obscure through the decades, only charting once with 1989’s “Waiting For Mary,” a Joy Division-meets-Captain Beefheart-sounding tune). Meanwhile, in her spare time, Canadian concert musician Gayle Young builds her own instruments, including the “amaranth,” a complicated-looking stringed instrument that vaguely resembles a bongo drum that’s been sawed in half; that’s the thing she noodles around with here whilst Wheeler makes a bunch of flatulent noises with a vintage ElectroComp 101 (made by EML during the late 1960s). The twosome probably got some therapy out of making this record; most of it is like ASMR for mud-dwelling snapping turtles, as in one can practically smell the skunk cabbage. A curiosity for noise wonks. B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, July 25, will see a jumble of new music releases dumped upon humanity, not that we aren’t still traumatized by the last jumble, you folks had better toughen up, let me see your war face! Now surely all you older Americans reading this remember Madonna, but for those of you who are younger, just think of Lady Gaga wearing stripper outfits from the 1930s, or if you don’t even know who Lady Gaga is because you’re really young, maybe just imagine a cross between a non-funny Chappell Roan and Cardi B. Are you with me so far, good, I’d hoped not, but anyway, in the ’90s, Madonna stopped doing normal 1980s techno-pop songs in order to become a trance-techno diva, which resulted in the album Ray Of Light, cementing her as, you know, the next Cher. Now, if you’ve never heard of Cher, ask your grandmother, because like all boomers, she owned a copy of Cher’s early-1970s vinyl single “Gypsies Tramps And Thieves” and she’ll be glad to explain Cher to all you young 4channers, since I don’t want to. I apologize for that, since I know for a fact that people get a kick out of my reporting on the doings of really super-old pop stars. How do I know that? Because a local-to-Manchester Jehovah’s Witness pastor showed up at my house to give me pamphlets and tell me about the fast-approaching Apocalypse (which, duh, it’s already here isn’t it) but anyway — and this is a true story — he asked me excitedly if I was indeed “that Eric Saeger,” and when I told him I was, he started giggling schoolgirlishly and telling me how much he loved this column because it cracks him up when I make fun of prehistoric arena bands and mummified pop stars who are somehow still around despite spending most of their days bathing in formaldehyde. And so this section of this week’s multiple-award-winning column is dedicated to that pastor, let’s go see what on Earth Madonna is even doing on her brand new album, Veronica Electronica! By the title I assumed it’s got AutoTune on it, but nope, it’s composed of previously unreleased remixes from Ray Of Light, doesn’t that sound unnecessary? I have to pick a tune; how about Johnny Madder’s “Oriental Hindu Mix” of “Shanti/Ashtangi,” since I haven’t been to a yoga class in forever and kind of miss it (I’m lying of course). Yes, it’s even more yogic than the original, but the vibe is ruined; it sounds like there’s a sample of a jaw harp in the beginning. In the trash it goes.

• My new pastor bro will also be delighted to know that famous performing Halloween clown Alice Cooper has a new album coming out this week, The Revenge Of Alice Cooper, I assume this’ll be absolutely dreadful, except maybe during some of the parts where Alice isn’t singing. But wait, this is the first album in 51 years from the original Alice Cooper band (the four who are still alive I mean)! Features the tune “Black Mamba,” wherein Alice does his creepy guy shtick and the band sounds like 1960s-era Traffic with a wah wah pedal. Apocalypse, take me away!

• Chicago-based psychedelic rockers Post Animal’s fourth LP, IRON, includes the tune “What’s A Good Life.” This doesn’t sound psychedelic at all, more like a throwaway demo from José González singing over a 1982 Casio keyboard. Hitting “Delete” now before I forget.

• We’ll wrap up this apocalyptic week in music with underrated folk-rocker Patty Griffin, whom some of you know as “Not Shawn Colvin, The Other One, Whatsername.” Crown Of Roses is her new album; its single is “Back at the Start,” a KT Tunstall-ish number that’s very nice but packs all the excitement of a Home Depot paint-swatch book.

The Ghost Lab, by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Quirky isn’t usually my thing, and Annie Hartnett’s latest novel, The Road to Tender Hearts, is most decidedly quirky (just ask Pancakes, the death-predicting cat). The events are bizarre and often tragic, and the characters are eccentric. But at the core of this novel, there is a warmth and genuineness that breaks through its comically dark outer layer.

The story starts with a slew of those bizarre events that ultimately unite main character PJ Halliday, a 63-year-old lottery winner with a long history of drinking and letting people down, with his estranged brother’s young grandchildren, Luna and Ollie.

PJ is not about to let their sudden existence in his life stop him from his latest endeavor, a road trip from his home in Massachusetts to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona, where he plans to woo his high-school crush, recently single again after losing her spouse. (PJ learns about that in the newspaper obits, not because he’s been in contact with her, so this visit will be a fun surprise for her.)

Also joining the trip, begrudgingly, is PJ’s 20-something daughter, Sophie, who is simmering with decades’ worth of anger toward her often absent alcoholic father. She has been tasked by her mother — PJ’s ex-wife, Ivy — to take care of him while she is away in Alaska with her fiance, Fred. So Sophie feels obligated to act as babysitter, for Ollie and Luna, and also for her dad.

The motley road-trip crew is rounded out by Pancakes, who has recently wandered into PJ’s life after a stint as a therapy cat at a nursing home.

If PJ were written in any other way, I think I would have hated him as a character. But somehow Hartnett makes me want to root for him. He, pitifully, thinks of Ivy and Fred as his best friends. He goes to their house for breakfast every morning, and he’s devastated when they don’t invite him on their trip.

When Ivy and Fred leave, PJ decides to quit drinking, again.

“PJ had never had a detox as bad as that one, not even when he had to go to prison for six weeks for the drunk driving, but once the detoxing was over, PJ had a new outlook. … When Ivy and Fred got home in September, he could be a new man. He wanted to be a man who was worthy of being their best man. Without the booze, PJ started feeling hopeful.”

It’s kind of hard not to feel for an old man who is so lonely and accepting of his own faults that he settles for being the third wheel in his ex-wife’s relationship. He’s lived his fair share of tragic events, too, which we start to learn more about as the road trip gets underway.

But for every moment or memory of darkness, there is also light, in the form of sweet moments between characters, hope for better things to come and the perfect amount of well-placed fatalistic humor.

Take, for instance, when Pancakes jumps out of a window of the moving car as Sophie and the kids try to track down a missing PJ. Ollie comments that Pancakes is “suicidal without Uncle PJ.” In fact, Pancakes is pulling a Lassie, leading the crew to PJ, who had been hit by a car while walking back to the motel from a bar after having just one drink and deciding he needed to go back to his family. The car was driven, ironically, by the man he’d been chatting with in the bar whose sad story was that he’d killed his wife when driving drunk. PJ survives the accident with minor injuries, but the man does not.

Emotions run high throughout the trip, as PJ battles his own inner demons, Sophie grapples with her dad’s still-not-great behavior and the kids adjust to their new reality as orphans — although Luna is having none of that. She is convinced her real dad is a famous actor who used to live in their town and whom her mom had always said she’d briefly dated. Luna wants to track him down and make him take a paternity test. This would get PJ off the hook as guardian, so he agrees to veer off course for Luna’s heartbreaking endeavor to find a family.

It’s all very sad, but also funny and genuine. The story could have been depressing, but it’s not. The characters are all well-developed and unique, and PJ’s growth feels honest and real. He’s somehow a loveable underdog, despite his constant lapses in judgment.

The Tender Hearts the title is referring to, presumably, is Tender Hearts Retirement Community, as they are literally on the road driving to that destination. But The Road to Tender Hearts could also describe the path PJ is taking to rebuild his heart with compassion and empathy. It could be the softening of Sophie’s heart as she sees her dad trying to be better and do better. It could be the unwitting journey PJ is taking into Ollie and Luna’s tender hearts.

I’m glad I didn’t let my thoughts of “this is so weird” as I read the first few pages stop me from taking this journey with them. A-

Featured Photo: The Ghost Lab by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Album Reviews 25/07/17

Dawn of Ashes, Infecting the Scars (Metropolis Records)

Back on my goth-rock tip again (for as long as it lasts), bringing you one from a Denmark-by-way-of-Los Angeles-based artist who unironically calls himself Krystof Bathory, a fellow whose wardrobe comes courtesy of VampireFreaks.com and who chooses only the finest gross-out makeup for that fresh-from-The Grudge look. Spooky character, this guy. He was a lot more aggressive in his earlier days (he’s been around since the early Aughts), but he’s mellowed some, I’d say; this LP is quite palatable if you’re into, you know, music as opposed to Hot Topic fashion statements. The best point of reference here would be mid-Aughts-era Wumpscut, and that raspy-growls-and-cheesy-tech sonic verisimilitude is what compels me to recommend this album. There’s some jackboot-stomping stuff on here that’ll please the Rammstein crowd but more than enough dedication to haunting melody that keeps it from being anything close to disposable. It’s for a Halloween-obsessed mindset, then, and does the job nicely. A

Honeymoon Suite, Wake Me Up When The Sun Goes Down (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

Meanwhile, back at Frontiers Mercy Hospital, where former and would-be arena-rock bands go to receive emergency transfusions of actual record contracts, look who’s getting wheeled in on a gurney, it’s this Canadian hard rock/glam band, established in (good lord guys, look at the time) 1981 and which hasn’t charted in the U.S. since 1988’s “Love Changes Everything.” On this release, the band’s vibe isn’t ’80s hair-metal at all, more like a mutant cellular fusion of Buckcherry and Dashboard Confessional — actually, scratch that, I’ll say it, Weezer. That automatically lends them a nice fat stack of cred points, almost negating the Bon Jovi-meets-Bryan Adams robbery they committed with “Love Changes Everything,” and yes, I’m being serious, they’ve made a real effort to be 2020s- (or 2010s-) (OK, fine, Aughts-) relevant here, and that counts for something, folks, it really does. There’s some shredding for you Flying V disciples out there, and that’s really the only thing that one might say “sounds dated” (funny that, isn’t it). It’s perfectly fine, folks, and if you’re not convinced, “Way Too Fast” sounds quite a bit like Taking Back Sunday covering a Taylor Swift song, I’m not kidding, go listen for yourself. A valiant effort, really. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• As per tradition, all the “important” new albums are being released this Friday, July 18, which, by the way, is the 12th anniversary of the City of Detroit’s declaring bankruptcy, which is probably prophetic. But what all my older readers want to know is whether or not Chicago-based arena-rock band Styx is promoting a new album, given that they’re playing at the Bank Of NH Pavilion in Gilford this Friday (this time without support from REO Speedwagon, because they’re basically broken up these days, or they might as well be, seeing as how singer Kevin Cronin isn’t speaking to them, probably for good reason). To that I reply with an emphatic “yes”: Their new full-length, Circling From Above, is out this Friday, which, by my calculations, means that the Gilford show is actually a record release party of sorts! Now, I know Styx is sort of a meme band at this point in the eyes of anyone younger than 60, but you should stop it, “The Grand Illusion” was/is a cool song, can’t you just admit it you guys, that’d be great, all you kids should go see this show if you want to be aware of ’70s-era rock music (OK, enough kissing butt so I can mooch free tickets next year, let me go see if this album is any good). Right, so “Circling From Above” opens the album as a two-minute intro thingie; it sounds exactly like something from Close To The Edge-era Yes (I hope there’s at least one person reading this who knows what that even means), and then it goes into “Build And Destroy,” which is even more Yes-ish but also borrows heavily from “Sheep,” Pink Floyd’s only decent song. So, to review, even at the age of 112 or however old those guys are, they’re even better musicians than they were during the 1970s, an admirable thing, which I also mentioned in my review of their previous album. So what’s the upshot, you ask? Well, given that good musicianship doesn’t matter in the Golden Age Of Twerking And Fake Beefs, it doesn’t actually matter all that much, but if you’re a serious musician you might be impressed with some of this stuff; it’s quite decent (you’d be better served buying an old Return To Forever album if you want to hear some serious prog-rock, but you’d be doing so at your own risk, just saying). (Actually, just forget it, don’t.)

• Speaking of music for guitar nerds and other people who can’t maintain normal relationships, blues-rocker Joe Bonamassa is back in the emailboxes of us professional music journalists again, hawking his new LP, Breakthrough! I punched up the YouTube for the title track, and holy cultural appropriation, Batman, this is the most Willie Dixon-sounding tune I’ve heard from a white dude since the last five Willie Dixon-sounding white dudes, like is he this generation’s Ry Cooder maybe? I don’t know, so one of you people can message me the deets if you’d like, given that I don’t care about such things.

• Florida punk band Against Me! has basically been kaput since 2016, but the band’s trans frontperson Laura Jane Grace is still making albums for her wildly devoted LGBTQ+ fan base! Her new one, titled Adventure Club, includes the single “Wearing Black,” a semi-speedy, aggressive tune that combines angular Gang Of Four guitars and Exene-level brattiness. It’s an anthem intended for pride parades, and I’d love to tell you some of the lyrics but I’d get in trouble, so never you mind.

• And finally we have New York City’s We Are Scientists, an indie band that’s never impressed me, but who knows, maybe the 500th time is the charm. Their new LP, Qualifying Miles, features the tune “Please Don’t Say It,” a shapeless meatloaf of goth/pseudo-industrial sentiments that has an emo aftertaste, hard pass on this.

The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett

Quirky isn’t usually my thing, and Annie Hartnett’s latest novel, The Road to Tender Hearts, is most decidedly quirky (just ask Pancakes, the death-predicting cat). The events are bizarre and often tragic, and the characters are eccentric. But at the core of this novel, there is a warmth and genuineness that breaks through its comically dark outer layer.

The story starts with a slew of those bizarre events that ultimately unite main character PJ Halliday, a 63-year-old lottery winner with a long history of drinking and letting people down, with his estranged brother’s young grandchildren, Luna and Ollie.

PJ is not about to let their sudden existence in his life stop him from his latest endeavor, a road trip from his home in Massachusetts to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona, where he plans to woo his high-school crush, recently single again after losing her spouse. (PJ learns about that in the newspaper obits, not because he’s been in contact with her, so this visit will be a fun surprise for her.)

Also joining the trip, begrudgingly, is PJ’s 20-something daughter, Sophie, who is simmering with decades’ worth of anger toward her often absent alcoholic father. She has been tasked by her mother — PJ’s ex-wife, Ivy — to take care of him while she is away in Alaska with her fiance, Fred. So Sophie feels obligated to act as babysitter, for Ollie and Luna, and also for her dad.

The motley road-trip crew is rounded out by Pancakes, who has recently wandered into PJ’s life after a stint as a therapy cat at a nursing home.

If PJ were written in any other way, I think I would have hated him as a character. But somehow Hartnett makes me want to root for him. He, pitifully, thinks of Ivy and Fred as his best friends. He goes to their house for breakfast every morning, and he’s devastated when they don’t invite him on their trip.

When Ivy and Fred leave, PJ decides to quit drinking, again.

“PJ had never had a detox as bad as that one, not even when he had to go to prison for six weeks for the drunk driving, but once the detoxing was over, PJ had a new outlook. … When Ivy and Fred got home in September, he could be a new man. He wanted to be a man who was worthy of being their best man. Without the booze, PJ started feeling hopeful.”

It’s kind of hard not to feel for an old man who is so lonely and accepting of his own faults that he settles for being the third wheel in his ex-wife’s relationship. He’s lived his fair share of tragic events, too, which we start to learn more about as the road trip gets underway.

But for every moment or memory of darkness, there is also light, in the form of sweet moments between characters, hope for better things to come and the perfect amount of well-placed fatalistic humor.

Take, for instance, when Pancakes jumps out of a window of the moving car as Sophie and the kids try to track down a missing PJ. Ollie comments that Pancakes is “suicidal without Uncle PJ.” In fact, Pancakes is pulling a Lassie, leading the crew to PJ, who had been hit by a car while walking back to the motel from a bar after having just one drink and deciding he needed to go back to his family. The car was driven, ironically, by the man he’d been chatting with in the bar whose sad story was that he’d killed his wife when driving drunk. PJ survives the accident with minor injuries, but the man does not.

Emotions run high throughout the trip, as PJ battles his own inner demons, Sophie grapples with her dad’s still-not-great behavior and the kids adjust to their new reality as orphans — although Luna is having none of that. She is convinced her real dad is a famous actor who used to live in their town and whom her mom had always said she’d briefly dated. Luna wants to track him down and make him take a paternity test. This would get PJ off the hook as guardian, so he agrees to veer off course for Luna’s heartbreaking endeavor to find a family.

It’s all very sad, but also funny and genuine. The story could have been depressing, but it’s not. The characters are all well-developed and unique, and PJ’s growth feels honest and real. He’s somehow a loveable underdog, despite his constant lapses in judgment.

The Tender Hearts the title is referring to, presumably, is Tender Hearts Retirement Community, as they are literally on the road driving to that destination. But The Road to Tender Hearts could also describe the path PJ is taking to rebuild his heart with compassion and empathy. It could be the softening of Sophie’s heart as she sees her dad trying to be better and do better. It could be the unwitting journey PJ is taking into Ollie and Luna’s tender hearts.

I’m glad I didn’t let my thoughts of “this is so weird” as I read the first few pages stop me from taking this journey with them. A-

Featured Photo: The Road To Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett

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