Sitting Here In Limbo
On Dallas Hotel Rooms, Deep Data Dives & Brazilian Mysteries
I am sitting in a worn hotel room in the middle of Nowheresville, Dallas, TX with my boys, waiting to board a flight to Australia that we had to disembark last night after over an hour because of something wrong with the wing. That’s ok by me, I’d far rather be cosy here than in an upturned plane on a runway as happened the day after we arrived in Toronto a few weeks ago. I love it when they take plane safety very seriously.
However I have to admit its a weird-discombobulating-brain-dead-limbo inducing feeling being neither here nor there and not even really in-between.
I was going to write my usual Loose Connections but my mental synapses weren’t synapsing enough to make it worthwhile for you there reading on the other end and I don’t want to waste anybody’s time with half written rubbish so I thought I’d just take care of some of the more tedious things that come with releasing music independently and check my stats and my receipts and make sure everything was running smoothly behind the scenes.
That’s when I discovered that I’m being charged annually for all kinds of little things I didn’t realise like and sent out some emails to sort that shit out and then far more interestingly, I also discovered that on two seperate days over the last couple of months my streams have surged way higher than usual!
After clicking away trying to get to the bottom of why, I managed to find out that the popular song in question is the duet I recorded with Bonnie Prince Billy, ‘Sometimes Its Hard’ and its BIG IN BRAZIL!
Well, it was for those two days anyway, and I’ve always wanted to say that, so now I’m happy. Mission accomplished. Dreams do come true.
But still - the mystery of why and how remains.
My streams are generally from far more predictable places like Brooklyn or Nashville or Adelaide or sometimes Paris or Poland so Brazil seems fabulously out of the blue!
I recall my dad’s friend Chris Bailey (from The Angels, not the one from the Saints) telling me way back in the late 80s that his band Gangajang became BIG IN BRAZIL without them having any understanding of how it happened. Strangely it was their song ‘Sounds of Then (This Is Australia)’ that did it. He said the country had a terrible reputation for bootlegging and would just press their own Brazilian CDs of Gangagjang’s music without official licenses etc, which means Gangajang and their record label never saw any money for those sales, but the unexpected upshot of it was that the band had hit after hit and would be flown to Brazil all expenses paid to play huge sold out concerts, put up in fancy hotels and wined and dined and paid a fortune and generally be treated like rockstars, so they didn’t fuss about the illegal exploitation of their recorded music.
That’s our friend Chris Bailey in the red striped tshirt on the right.
So in my travel addled miasma, I’m going to let myself dream of a similarly golden outcome on a surreal Brazilian tv show in my near future.
If you happen to have any insights into why this mysterious musical occurrence might have happened, I’m all ears.
I’ll write something more scintillating soon, for now, please send good vibes that our plane departs the airport and deposits us home soon….
Lo x
I love 'Sometimes It's Hard' :-)
I know what you mean Lo. I did an overnight in a multistorey motel on a highway in Fort Worth. The tiny bloodstains on the bathroom tiles matched the deep red of the 80s drapes (it was 2011). Being kicked out of Billy Bob’s at closing later that night - sober - with no help from the barstaff to call a taxi - and walking about 2kms to a Whataburger past midnight - was the perfect end to the experience. In Texas or not, those times are a foray into a parallel universe you’ll never forget.