Good morning John
Wow! That's what my voice sounds like.
(Imitating Don LaFontaine) In a world...
...Where a guy...
...Has to make a video blog even though he was up quite late
and then his baby was up quite early...
(Normal voice) He makes a video blog.
Earlier this week, Lauren Lapkus, uh, tweeted the following:
"Older siblings are the original influencers. When I was little,
my brother said sausage pizza was gross and I didn't eat it again for 20 years."
Which was apparently,
'hashtag relatable' for a lot of people, including me.
I quote-tweeted this, and I said,
"My older brother thought that it was a good idea to make video blogs!"
and,
Like, I wanna emphasize that that's not an exaggeration.
There's this thing about older siblings,
and I don't know if this is always the case, but it seems—
—Lauren's tweet and my experience combined—Like, there's something about this relationship
that creates this absolute clarity and confidence
in the correctness of, like, the taste-making ability
of this child. And it's kind of a remarkable responsibility for a child to have.
I don't expect children to live up to this responsibility.
Of course, sometimes your older sibling is into super weird or dumb stuff, like smoking cigarettes
and reading Ulysses for fun
John, for the most part, and especially when it comes to music—which, I find
this weird, 'cause you're not... particularly musical.
That's okay to say, I think—
You have extremely good taste in music.
Like, all of the bands you have gotten me into over the years
have been way better than, like, what would be sort of a random selection.
I can literally remember the first time that you and Matt Brown brought
Flood, the They Might Be Giants album, into the house and put it in Dad's, like,
giganto CD player. But, like, if that had been a
Chumbawumba CD, I probably
would have learned every word to every song in the album,
and I would have like, plumbed the depths of Chumbawumba's
backlog of stuff—I don't know if that exists.
I don't know anything, maybe Chumbawumba's great.
I apologize to Chumbawumba fans and also to Chumbawumba.
But my sense is that I probably wouldn't have been able to
cultivate like a decades-long love affair
with Chumbawumba if that's what you'd brought into my life.
I'm in Portland, Oregon right now,
where I have traveled with my wife and child to go see
probably the 12th They Might Be Giants show of my life. For those who don't know,
They Might Be Giants is a weird, artsy, nerdy
rock band with generally opaque
but like, still meaningful lyrics, and the musical style
that is somehow extremely cohesive without hardly
ever sounding like itself. So part of me thinks
that I am super into They Might Be Giants because it's what
nerdy guys my age are supposed to be into? Like it's just
sort of the thing that happens to people like me?
But I'm honestly more interested in listening to my gut here,
and my gut tells me that there's something good about this band!
And the more and deeper I listen to any song or album,
I just keep finding layers of interestingness there.
It gives me this music with the goal of
like, creating something simple to enjoy that
has a lot of complexity within it. And they are
still releasing new, very good albums.
They're in their late fifties, and I'm sure financially stable,
but they're still learning new instruments, and
creating new ways of doing the thing that they do,
still touring, still making people happy.
There's something in it that lacks pretension, that leans into
enthusiasm and effort,
that's kinda—maybe infected my entire life?
And that infection started with something you brought into our house.
I think the self-awareness and honesty of this music and the
persona of this band is what gives it such longevity.
It was never trying to be anything but what it was,
but it was always trying to be interesting and good, which has allowed
it to be a lifelong gift for me to enjoy.
And also to be inspired by.
I know that you didn't know, that you were giving me that, but thank you anyway.
I wish everyone was so lucky to have such good
and nerdy tastemakers in their lives when they were growing up.
John, I'll see you on Tuesday.
(clapping and drumbeat, crowd singing to Chumbawumba's "Tubthumping")