Another Thought

That Abernethy song put me in mind of this Arthur Russell one.

• Arthur Russell, “A Little Lost” (buy here)

And no offence to Joseph Abernethy, but more than any meditation on arrogant angels, this is the kind of lyrical refrain that gets me like a warm palm pressed to my boom-booming chest:

I’m so busy, so busy thinking ’bout kissing you
And now I want to do that
Without entertaining
Another thought

But that’s just me.

Russell reissues have been practically falling from the sky over the past few years, and he’s mostly celebrated for the disco stuff, and maybe that’s as it should be since the disco stuff is pretty great. But this is not a nightclub song, it’s one of his cello folk-pop songs. It’s an alone song, a song for pacing at four in the morning, all jittery, feeling scraped-out & exhausted, maybe happy too but that’s flickering, flickering.

Goes without saying that I think it’s fucking beautiful, I guess. Russell himself sounds so fragile & needy that it’s hard to listen to this without inferring a doomed-and-knows-it vibe (he was killed by AIDS at the age of 40, in 1992), but that’s probably just a trick of the psychological light.

(The song can be found on the excellent Soul Jazz comp The World of Arthur Russell, which nicely balances dance workouts & ballads. And read this, this is nice.)