I know I said I’d update this blog on Sundays, and I have every intention of doing so. But indulge me a necessary aside, circumstances being what they are. A certain album was released this past Friday, the 21st, and I have some frenzied, half-cooked thoughts to get off my chest.

I have listened to Random Desire too many times, and not enough. The point at which I understand any of Greg Dulli’s works, and the shape of the space they have all come to occupy within my chest, is when I can draw on them from memory. I know every Whigs and Twilight Singers album like the back of my hand. There’s excitement in novelty, but magic in familiarity. The songs become fully real when they become a part of me, and that is when I am able to internalize their teachings.

I am at the waypoint where I can sing some of the verses back haphazardly. I’m chasing the moment when I realize I can conjure them at will. I live for that moment. It never gets old.

I’m also waiting for the moment where I can sing to him, singing to us. There’s magic there, too: the tour is when the familiar becomes novel again. I have not weighed in with the Congregation just yet – for those of you not in the know, the listserv-turned-Facebook group which serves as a digital coffeehouse for Dulli Diehards – but I have been monitoring the response to the album. What is said in the Congregation stays in the Congregation, but I think I can offer up a generalized observation without violating the cardinal rule: we are all anxiously eager to hear these songs within the context of a live set.

On that note, I am going to be deliberately reticent here, maybe more abstract than brief, as I don’t like to repeat myself even though I can never shut up. I also don’t want to show my hand in its entirety. I have a project in the works for May, which is when I will spend a week and change following Mr. Dulli around the east coast for a succession of tour dates, capped off by a weekend gig in Seattle. If I’m going to spend that much of my time on Amtrak trains, I may as well crank a zine out of the experience. It will be plenty of time to write, and arrange the fragments that have been rattling around in my head for many years.

Here is what I will say, cautiously, and with the promise that this will all lead somewhere much more coherent once summer graces us with its breeze again: I have noticed that the music press paints a few relatively consistent archetypes of Greg Dulli the Author. I was not around for the superficial misreadings of Gentlemen in the nineties, so I can’t comment on that particular caricature, although I do still catch journalists pointing to the album as self-evident representation of the Male Psyche (TM), which makes my blood boil. (These guys listened to “Be Sweet” and the title track a few times and decided that a record about anguish, helplessness, vulnerability, self-medication, self-flagellation, and the joys and perils of playing the villain necessarily described a gendered interiority. I digress: my argument is that Gentlemen is a tale best told from the perspective of a woman. But that is another post for another day.) So there was the construct of the author as tormented Lothario (cheap, stupid, whatever), and more recently the author as poet laureate of darkness and lust and vice, grunge outlier and cult figurehead for intelligent indie rockers in-the-know.

These latter constructs I can at least appreciate and understand. Happily do I hoist the flag for our underdog savior of misbehavior. I love getting into trouble, and I love when the critics praise my obscure and excellent tastes. But I think I want to court a slightly different angle. I’ve been along for the ride going on 14 years now, and as I get older, my interest is in the author as hopeless – or hopeful – romantic.

Romance, believe it or not, is the thread that connects the carnage of Gentlemen to the contrition of Twilight…, and the chaos of Powder Burns to the cautionary wisdom of Dynamite Steps. It is stitched into the lining of Black Love’s dark foreboding, Blackberry Belle’s bloodletting, even the carnal revelries of 1965.

Pull at the seams of Random Desire and it is everywhere.

By romance I do not mean the literal chemistry between lovers, though Dulli’s chronology depicts no shortage of relationships, usually in the form of autopsies. Rather I am talking about a Byronesque poetic sensibility, or a Turneresque rendering of a storm at sea, the mechanism through which we turn experience into art. Romance as the purpose we conjure out of pain, even as we’re writhing on the floor, allowing us to scrounge up some dignity from the debasements of addiction or heartbreak. Romance as the substance of love marked by absence – desire, after all, evidences lack – and longing for that which is out of reach. We romanticize the memory of what we had, and have no longer; or we project its yearning forward, into the fantasy of possibility. Romance as the stretch of open highway between could-be and never-was. A realm of surrender, where logic relents and emotion reigns supreme.

At its most dangerous, romance is intoxicating self-delusion. (Ask me how I know.) At its best, it is beauty’s antidote to nihilism. I think our author has run the gamut over the years, and it is with Random Desire that we locate romance’s most galvanizing strengths, its fierce commitment to hope. We’ve come a long way from playing with knives on the floor, from lyrics like forensic photographs – literal crime scenes – to impressionistic paintings. The difference is as between a wound and a scar; pain versus the memory of pain. We can be injured and still heal; we can remember what it felt like and risk the same all over again.

In other words, we have learned to surf the tidal wave.

See you all in May.

-Bux