una canzone tormentone

ONE DAY IN EARLY APRIL, when there was still fresh snow on the ground, I was walking down the street towards the seamstress’ place when I overheard two school boys singing a song outside the Lõuna-Mulgimaa Puuetega Inimeste Ühing, or the Association of People with Disabilities of South Mulgimaa, as it translates in English. The words of the familiar song they sang together went something like this, “Mi amore, espresso macchiato, macchiato, macchiato, por favore.”

The melody tumbled down into the street like big wet flakes of snow. I already knew it so well. Sometimes I think that “Espresso Macchiato” is always playing somewhere. I only happen to hear it now and then. When I am not hearing it, it is being played somewhere else or it’s replaying itself in someone’s mind. The song is always playing somewhere out in the universe. Maybe it has always existed then, and its creator merely channeled and recorded the song?

“Do you know that I am researching this song,” I told the young lads, who were perhaps 10 years old. They looked up at me with curious eyes, but they were not intimidated by the big stranger in a dark coat. Rather they were friendly and seemed to take me as just another, much larger school boy. One of the boys held his thumb up to me. “Good,” he said. “Because I love that song.” “Well, what else do you think about the song?” I asked the first boy. “It’s my favorite song,” he said. “Mine too,” said the other boy. “‘Espresso Macchiato’ is my favorite song too,” he added. “Very good,” I said. “Enjoy your favorite song.” “Oh, we will,” they said. At that, I left the boys at the corner, but I could hear them singing as they walked the other way.

‘You just have to watch it’

Everyone, I think, has now developed a special relationship with “Espresso Macchiato,” Estonia’s 2025 Eurovision entry, performed by Tommy Cash. For some, like those little Viljandi boys, it has become their new favorite. Seventy-five years from now, when they are living in some South Estonian hooldekodu, or nursing home, they might sit beside each other watching Aktuaalne kaamera and singing the song. “Mi casa very grandioso. Mi money numeroso.”

Everyone has their own story about how they first heard “Espresso Macchiato” and how it began to manifest itself in their lives. Think about it. Where were you when you first heard it? For me, I was sitting in a cafe in Tartu meeting an old friend in winter when she pulled out her phone and told me I just had to watch this video. “You just have to watch it,” she said. I didn’t know what to make of it at first. The friend, an Estonian journalist from Kuressaare, thought it was fantastic. I understood that to Estonians, I am something of an Italian, though not the genuine thing, and for them, it’s interesting how someone like me might respond to these stereotypes. Coffee, spaghetti, mafia. Screens displaying red-and-white checkered tablecloths.

There he stood, the mustachioed Tommy Cash, looking more like Dracula than any mafioso. The thin mustache, the shoulder-length hair, the pale skin. Was he not some kind of caffeinated disco nosferatu? But it was not blood upon the lips of this Estonian musician. It was a coffee drink. There he stood drinking another espresso macchiato. “Life is like spaghetti,” Cash sings. “It’s hard until you make it.” Then he sings, “No stresso, no stresso. It’s gonna be espresso.”

I had to wholeheartedly agree with him. Life is like spaghetti. More coffee is the answer. “Espresso Macchiato” is not just a Eurovision entry. It is a philosophical manifesto on life.

After my first encounter with “Espresso Macchiato,” baristas began to sing it to me. Nobody in Estonia could order an espresso anymore without someone asking if they didn’t want an espresso macchiato. “No stresso, no stresso,” the baristas said. “No need to be depresso!”

Did I really look so depressed?

Italians love to complain

There has also been controversy. An Italian consumer association appealed to the European Broadcasting Union suggesting that it was not fit to be included in the Eurovision competition. Some right-wing lawmakers were indignant and condemned it on social media. Not knowing how to process contrasting feelings of being offended but also honored, Italians dressed up like Estonians and made their own version about eating sprats. “Sööme sprotte!” The song had descended into a kind of transnational food fight, with Estonians throwing coffee cups and spaghetti over the continent at the Italians and the Italians tossing back cans of fish.

Maurizio D’Agapito, an Italian resident in Estonia who is also a musician and performer, has been asked to participate in numerous podcasts and radio programs, such as Spaghetti alla Chitarra, to weigh in on the merits of the song. Maurizio also provided his own analysis on his YouTube Channel, Itaallane Eestis, and so I decided to seek him out, arranging an interview at Fotografiska in Tallinn on a March day. I was intimidated of course, because I would have to do an interview in Italian. Maurizio is a Roman — he even looks like a Roman, with his coarse hair, broad shoulders — and did not mince his words when it came to Cash’s notorious song.

He approves of it. He performs it at his concerts. “Estonians go crazy when I play it,” he said.

“Italians have a word for a song that gets stuck in your head,” Maurizio added. “A tormentone.”

A tormentone torments its listener. Yet this torment is not necessarily bad. One learns to enjoy being tormented by a tormentone. There is something perversely satisfying about the torment. Here I must agree. If “Espresso Macchiato” had been too infectious, too catchy, it might have long ago burned itself out. But the song takes its time. It has a relaxed feel. You start to miss it.

“Mi amore, mi amore …”

Such is the nature of a tormentone. It is a phantom song, attaining a kind of immortality. One must be careful not to invoke the name of a tormentone. Otherwise it will begin to torment again.

And as for the controversy?

“But Espresso Macchiato is not Italian!” protested Maurizio. “It’s a big fucking mix of Spanish, Italian, English. Broccolino, no?” He laughs. The man is correct. Por favore is Spanish, not Italian. “It would be stupid to be offended by it.” He dismissed the idea with a hand gesture.

Some Italians were offended though, mostly by the use of the word ‘mafioso.’ The mafia is a very sensitive topic in Italy. Just three days ago, as I type this while drinking a coffee, the police arrested 24 in Naples for running a parking protection racketing scheme. They were also charged with possessing illegal weapons and drugs. “The mafia is a big issue,” said Maurizio.

The real issue though, as he put it, is that Italians just like to complain about things. If it’s hot, it’s too hot. If it is cold, it’s too cold. No matter the coffee or the meal, it could have been better. He is not the first Italian to acknowledge this national trait for complaining. If the Estonian way is to suffer quietly through real hardships then the Italian way is to complain loudly about imaginary ones. “Italians love to complain,” said Maurizio. “This gave them another reason to complain.”

Mostly, though, Maurizio is a fan of Mr. Cash. He said the marketing around the song, controversy included, had been perfect. “Oh, he was clever,” said Maurizio I imagine with a pinch of envy. “Very, very clever.”

The boy from Kopli

Of the author of this tormentone, I still know very little. He was born in Tallinn a dozen years after I was, and is of mixed ancestry. His home language was Russian and he speaks fluent Estonian having been educated in the Estonian language. He is therefore a multiethnic polyglot. Mr. Cash considers himself a post-Soviet rapper with an Eastern European soul and Scandinavian resume, they say. Perhaps that might be a good way of describing Tallinn to all. That’s the thing about artists, we hold them up as idols to better understand ourselves. Estonia in recent years has been worshipful of homegrown exotic heroes like Stefan, Alika, and Tommy.

I had thought that his birthname was probably “Toomas Sularaha,” or Tommy Cash in Estonian. In fact, it is Tomas — with one ‘o’ — Tammemets. He was raised in Kopli though, which tells me a lot. A long time ago, in the old days, when I was a 24-year-old recent arrival to Tallinn with a wife from Karksi-Nuia and a newborn baby who I would take on wintry excursions to Säästumarket, I also gave some English lessons in Kopli, which was a wooden ghetto of half-burnt buildings. There were no Argentinian steakhouses in those days, no boutiques or seaside breweries. There were characters who looked a lot like, well, Tommy Cash, in puffy jackets drinking vodka. Tommy Cash came out of Kopli, was a creature of its misty alleycat-inhabited back alleyways.

This idea, of a scrappy street performer who hustled his way into high-profile collaborations with Charli xcx and Diplo, has impressed even the most reticent Estonians. “You’ve got to hand it to him,” a bearded, Camus-obsessed Estonian told me on the street. “In a country where nobody wants to stand out, Tommy hasn’t been afraid to draw attention to himself, to stick his neck out.”

Another Estonian who is more aligned with the folk culture that colors Viljandi life, was similarly supportive of Mr. Cash. “I don’t know if I am down with ‘Pussy Money Weed’,” she said, referring to his 2018 single, which has garnered more than 15.4 million YouTube views since its release. “But if he is making fun of that kind of attitude, that lifestyle, then I can be supportive of that.”

It’s hard for me to understand the music world of which Tommy Cash is a character. I’m old school. I come from the world of concept albums, meticulously recorded in studios in the Bahamas or in Stockholm. Think Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Or Björk’s Homogenic. Think of Radiohead’s Kid A. I suppose in the old days, popularity was measured in units shipped, gold records gained. I’m not sure that 15.4 million views means something. What if one person just kept hitting refresh 15.4 million times? I don’t know what to make of these weirdly titled collaborations called “Zuccenberg,” “Ca$h Ready,” and “It’s Crazy, It’s Party.” I don’t know.

My old analog world of artistry did colide with Mr. Cash’s world of being a digital provocateur. That was the day when Kristiina Ehin, who writes paper books and paper poems, found herself in the Ankrusaal of Kopli unable to pay for a coffee, but rescued by a swashbuckling Mr. Cash. He promptly paid for the lady’s drink and informed her that, having already won Eurovision, at least in spirit, he had little better to do than to mill about Kopli cafes rescuing distressed poets.

“It did not change my life,” Kristiina later confided. “But it was fun and it was nice to see him.”

Kristiina’s husband, the esteemed musician Silver Sepp, also did not come away emptyhanded. Author of his own song about coffee, called “Kohvi,” in which he beat boxes using a microphone and coffee cup, Silver said he was not at all jealous of Mr. Cash after he rescued his wife in a Kopli cafe. “On the contrary,” he said. “After all, I got a coffee cup for myself,” he said. “A new instrument!”

The Kristiina Ehin Coffee Incident has been added to the lore around “Espresso Macchiato.” It is part of the story of the song, as much a part of it as the Italians who did a cover version about eating sprats. Such stories are as important as the songs, I think. All good songs have stories.

A parting drink

All across Estonia, espresso macchiato has either been added to the menu, or has risen to the top. At Sumi, young patrons from Kalamaja ask for it with a morning donut or pastry. At the Cafe Gustav in Solaris, they have even underlined the drink to make it more apparent to their clients.

“We’ve always offered it,” the barista said. “After the song came out, well, there was a wave.”

And at my local drinking establishment in Viljandi the drink, while not on the menu, is available upon request. I have been told to be careful. “It’s quite strong,” the barista warned me. “It’s just an espresso with just a little bit of milk.” The cup of espresso macchiato arrives and I sip it. It’s frothy and does have a certain kick. So this is the famed drink, I think. This tormenting coffee is the one that rules them all. This is the drink that could deliver Estonia a great Eurovision victory. One could get seriously addicted to a drink like this.

An Estonian version of this article appeared in the magazine Edasi in April 2025.

skiing with the dead

I WAS TRYING to find some laundry detergent. That’s really how that whole story started. Someone had, after many years, returned to me a box of clothes, including precious and once-prized pairs of pajamas. The light blue ones with little golden anchors on them that reminded me of Popeye, and the rougher-textured wool ones, with the polar bear print. At the supermarket at the Baltic Station, where the dead-eyed cashier ladies never even so much as acknowledge your very existence, I searched the aisles. While I was trying to make up my mind between Mulieres and Mayeri I passed the media stand. And that’s where I saw it, gleaming to me among the tabloids, newspapers, and glossy magazines about the USSR.

Skiing with the Dead: Stavanger ’72.

What the hell was this? Its cover was a color photograph of the Grateful Dead with the cool, clean and white Scandinavian mountains beyond them. There were some ski chalets in the distance, a period lift. Mickey Hart the drummer was out in front with his headband and dark mustache. Jerry Garcia was behind him. Jerry had on a big wool hat that was incapable of covering all of his bushy black hair. He was smiling. Of course, he was smiling. Why wouldn’t Jerry be smiling while he was skiing at one of the Norwegian resorts. I knew that the Dead had gone on tour in Europe in ’72 and had even recorded an album called Europe ’72. But I didn’t know that the Grateful Dead had ventured as far north as Norway or that they even skied.

This was a strange new discovery. A new chapter in Dead lore. Did Jeff Tamarkin know about this? I beheld this fascinating magazine and skimmed its contents. There was an article about how Phil Lesh dosed the band before they got to the to the famed Bjorli Ski Center, and a recent interview with the other drummer Bill Kreutzman about a long-sought after bootleg recording they did up in the mountains called Trippin’ on the Slopes: the Bjorli Sessions. I shook my head. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the Dead. I was very wrong.

At that moment, an older hippie with gray hair and sunglasses happened to walk past me in the Baltic Station supermarket. You know the type, a watered down version of George Carlin in his black sweater years. He had a basket full of produce. He said, “What are you looking at there, young man?” I showed him the glossy magazine. “Did you know that the Dead played shows in Norway in ’72?” I told the hippie. “They went skiing! Can you imagine? Jerry on skis!” “Of course,” the hippie told me. “I was there, man. Skiing. LSD. Norwegians. It was far out.”

purgatory by the mystery lights

WHEN THE TOPIC is psychedelic or garage rock, then the dangerous word “retro” is always lurking in the background. People hear it and immediately start to compare it to what came before. “It sounds like 1968!” Are modern musicians really incapable of creating something that’s better than the original?

I should acknowledge that I often like today’s music more, because it was composed, recorded, and performed today, and echoes contemporary issues. I have my favorite groups but one of these is certainly The Mystery Lights, a California band that now resides in New York, but is in its bones and soul a California creation. They’re from Salinas originally, John Steinbeck country, where there are harbors and grassy hills. Something more laidback than your average, anxious worrisome East Coast music.

Their newest LP Purgatory (Daptone Records) was released last fall. The songs are fast, energetic, satisfying, creative. The guitars are wonderful. But the themes? “Ascend to heaven/or descend to hell,” they sing in the song “Purgatory.” The video for the title track shows Satan roaming around Manhattan in a Hawaiian shirt, and the band bedecked in red horns. I have some religious friends, so I’d hesitate to share my new favorite group with them, but at the same time, I feel the themes reflect a lot of what is going on in the modern world as well as in myself. I’m reminded that it doesn’t always pay to be good. Sometimes it feels just heavenly to be the devil. The Mystery Lights still haven’t come to Estonia, but they will be performing at Vega in Copenhagen on 27 May.

An Estonian-language version of this review appears in the magazine Edasi this month.

ole, lihtsalt ole. hull. by metslind

I’VE BEEN WAITING to write about this new Metslind record, because I am not sure how to approach it. In the early morning hours, as I began slurping down my first coffee of the day, I still had the somewhat jangly sounds of her guitar ringing between my ears. “She’s like The Smiths crossed with Fleetwood Mac,” I think. “As if Morrissey and Stevie Nicks had a baby.” Then I am somewhat terrified of the idea of a child with Morrissey’s face and Stevie Nicks’ hair and body. I don’t want anyone else to have that image pop into their heads. But maybe if Johnny Marr and Christine McVie had collaborated on an album in Estonian it might have sounded like this one. Maybe, but not really. Metslind is her own phenomenon. It’s a pitfall of Western and Estonian journalists alike that we look for these equivalents. Estonia must have its own Elvis, its own Michael Jackson, and its own Nokia, but there is only one Metslind. Not everything can be translated over.

Metslind’s record is two EPs combined. It arrived to me by Smartpost more than a month ago. I now have it on vinyl, but I gave my record player away, because it wasn’t very good. So now I just have an LP I cannot play. The album though is a kind of shrine, a shrine to the record player I will someday acquire. Then I will be able to play the album as intended. I will wake up and listen to Metslind at 7 am. In the meantime, I will listen to its conjoined EPs on Spotify. One is called Ole, lihtsalt ole (Be, just be) and the other one is called Hull (Crazy). The song titles paint a somber image. Other than the title tracks, there’s “Valu, Sa Oled Mul Jalus” (“Pain, You’re in My Way”), “Ära Sõdi” (“Don’t Fight”), and “Päris Inimesed” (“Real People”), along with “Rabalumm” (“Bog Enchantment”). There’s also “Tahan Olla Hea” (“I Want to Be Good”), “Ma Ei Tea Mis Saab” (“I Don’t Know What Will Happen”), “Mina Võin Ja Sina Võid Ka” (“I Can and So Can You”) and one more called “Elupuu Elab Mind Üle” (“The Tree of Life Will Outlive Me”).

This last title is the most puzzling one. Elupuu in Estonian refers to evergreens, but in my mind the name conjures up Yggdrasil, the tree of life in Norse mythology and the world tree of Estonian and Finnish mythology, which has stars in its branches and snakes at its roots. According to Metslind, the lyrics toy with Estonian trees like the evergreen (elupuu) and aspen (haavapuu, literally “wound tree”). “In the song, the Tree of Life outlives me,” says Metslind, “and the Wound Tree heals before I do. I say that it’s so good that I am no longer so young and that I don’t know what awaits me in life, though of course I would like to be younger and I would like to know what will happen. It’s about trying to have faith in the way things are.”

This is the Metslind musical universe. It’s a world of bogs, trees, and introspection. Her pop-infused indie guitar rock is expressed in dreamy tapestries of haunting vocals and layers of carefully selected sounds, but masks a kind of slow-burning inner torment.

*Girl with guitar, photo by David Evardone*

According to Metslind, whose family calls her Maarja, a lot of this music came out of her separation from her long-time partner. In fact, “Hull” is about playing dumb when people would ask her uncomfortable questions about the split. “I started to give strange answers to their questions, so they wouldn’t know what to say or ask me about it anymore,” she says.

To this I have to agree. There are never satisfying answers to explain away life’s irrationality.

Metslind is fond of her name, which means “Wild Bird” in Estonian. “Every bird has its own song,” she says. “And I like it when a performer has a different name. They can be a different person.” Maarja also happens to be the name of a singer in Estonia, one that is trademarked.

But Maarja didn’t want to just be another singer named Maarja. Her Metslind persona was born. When she is not on stage, she is a music teacher, mostly of voice with some guitar teaching. She started attending music school at the age of seven in Kohila, and at her own instigation. Her family has supported her music, for which she considers herself lucky.

Other than the emotional tumult that led to sings like Ära Sõdi, which literally means “Don’t Wage War” and only coincidentally came out when the Ukrainian-Russian War intensified, Metslind is also somewhat unique in that she has chosen to sing in Estonian, rather than try to approach the international market with English-language songs. In fact, she used to write and compose her songs in English, but an encounter with Estonian musician Vaiko Eplik, who like Metslind is from Rapla, a town in North Estonia, encouraged her to switch back.

“You know, I have always listened to a lot of English-language music and singer songwriters,” she says. “I didn’t have a plan to write in Estonian, but then these songs just started to come.”

I would say it’s a welcome addition to the world of Estonian music. While listening to this record, I started to think about where Estonians listen to music, or where I hear Estonian music. Estonian-language music is played sometimes in major supermarkets, so that Estonian songs remind me of perusing produce, looking for good quality bell peppers. Estonian music is played at summer festivals, so that Estonian songs remind me of sitting outside in some amphitheater. And Estonian music is played during family get-togethers. So Estonian music reminds me of grilling šašlõkk while Kihnu Virve and Anne Veski’s golden hits are played.

*Solitary songsmith. Photo by Meeli Viljaste.*

Metslind’s music is not the soundtrack for supermarkets, summer festivals, or grilling šašlõkk. It’s more for long walks alone while you are trying to sort out various unresolved past issues. That, at least, was my experience of it. I don’t have a favorite song on the record, but I remember liking “Rabalumm” the most on the first listen. A good bog is medicine to the heart.

She herself mentions Joni Mitchell when asked about her approach. She uses Joni’s Open D tuning on her semi-acoustic Ibanez, which is as much a part of her look as her whiteblonde hair. She plays it with a chorus pedal which gives it that lovely atmospheric sound that almost reminds one of Peter Buck from REM. These are my own musical references, so bear with me.

The album was recorded in the studio at Linnahall in Tallinn, a sprawling stone monster of a building once called the VI Lenin Palace of Culture that was constructed for the 1980 Olympic Games (which the US boycotted on account of the then recent Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan).

“This is one of the last things that’s still functioning in that ruined old building,” says Metslind.

Metslind is an admirable character, I must conclude. She composes, she performs, she travels the roads with her Ibanez. She sings of the Tree of Life, bogs, and heartbreak. I find her to be an honest, direct artist. The Estonian word is siiras, but it doesn’t have an exact English-language equivalent either. And she will continue. “It would make more sense not to be a musician,” she says, “and I have tried many times to not be one. But when I tried, I started this new project That I called Metslind. What else can you do when your heart starts to sing?”

notas rotas by tomás del real

WHAT IS WRONG with the youth of today? The world’s on fire, the clock is ticking, and Tomás del Real is hanging in backyards from Canada to Estonia, tinkering with his guitar, jamming with fellow travelers and otherwise observing the downfall of civilization coolly from behind his sunglasses. Even the cover photograph for his single “Prólogo,” released last August, shows the chill Chilean in media res, as if he was caught off guard while he was contemplating something more profound. He looks like a Latin Sigmund Freud, I think, one who just survived a natural disaster because there are broken couches around. Maybe that’s exactly who he is.

*It’s the end of the world as we know it, but Tomás feels mostly fine.* *The cover to the album’s single ‘Prólogo.*‘

While listening to the entirety of the album Notas Rotas, I hear many interesting things. Released in the dreariest days of late November, it has a warmth to it. The opening song “Prólogo” is a burst of warm air, propelled by the violin of Alan Mackie and flute of Katariina Tirmaste. Right up front, this record promises something that food critics might call fusion cuisine. There’s del Real’s contemplative, Tropicalia-laced meditative poetry and innovative melodies coupled with what sound like North American and Estonian influences and driven forward by a thunderstorm rhythm section of percussionists Magnus Heebøll Jacobsen and Steven Foster: the former from Denmark and the latter du Canada.

On the cover of the album, they all look like a bunch of farmers who took some time off from the harvest to fashion 10 incredible songs, and then went back to messing around with a tractor or something. But there was a method to this folk madness for del Real is the consummate artiste.

*The album cover. From left to right, del Real, Foster, Mackie, Tirmaste, and Heebøll Jacobsen.*

“In every album, we try to shape and find the reason and the language in which the songs exist,” remarks del Real. “There were a couple of musical languages that were present in the picture.” In the case of ‘Prólogo,’ Alan Mackie, who also played bass on the record, was a co-composer and co-producer of the single, as he was on many of the album’s songs, bringing along his own sentiment (Mackie is from Prince Edward Island). In combining with del Real’s own Latin American folk, they have created a blend of music they jokingly refer to as LatinAmericana. But there are Old World influences too.

“There are a lot of European folk influences, such as Eastern European uneven time signatures,” says del Real, “which we tried to implement in a very organic way, and some Scandinavian influences, both in the percussion and in different colours in the instrumentation and arrangement.”

While del Real wrote the songs on the album and the record is credited to his solo project, it is very much an ensemble effort and grew out of an ongoing collaboration with Mackie and Tirmaste. Mackie and del Real even hit the road and toured Asia at the beginning of their co-sojourn, with dates in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. “I had a bunch of songs waiting to be something and we decided that could be a good place to try them out,” says del Real. “From that experience we started to shape where the sound was going and it felt very natural to start working on this.”

Katariina Tirmaste was “another fundamental pillar” in the creation of Notas Rotas, helping to flesh out the compositions and to arrange them. Del Real credits her as a “creative and emotional performer,” one of who provided sensitive, flexible parts to the different songs that eventually made up the new record. “She’s incredibly versatile and also without taking up more space than needed, which is a very humble and Estonian approach in my opinion,” he says.

*LatinAmericanaEstoniana on stage: Mackie, del Real, and Tirmaste.*

The record itself was put down in home studios in Toronto, the south of France, the west coast of Sweden, not to mention a multitude of closets in apartments in Estonia. From this pastiche of on-the-fly audio recordings, a sound engineer of fortune called Jorge Fortune in Patagonia mastered the sonic tapestry of Notas Rotas, which is that rare record that sounds good whether it’s been played in the car, through headphones, or on your smartphone.

I know because I have tried listening to it in all three environments. These recordings hold up.

Del Real I have known as a musician for years and have attended his shows, including some with Tirmaste and Mackie. While I hesitate to say anything about his songcraft, I can say that some of the melodies on this album challenged me and required multiple listens to fully digest, which for me, as a listener, is the mark of the very best music. Having a minimal knowledge of Spanish, even after years of instruction in high school, his lyrical intent remains a mystery to me. In his own words, it reflected the transient nature of his life as he moved around as well as the emotional winds blowing through. “It had a lot of reflections around inconclusive situations, self-awareness, letting go, and letting life take its course,” del Real says.

He was also demoing the material on the road and in front of his fellow musicians, which took him out of the more introverted, isolated settings that fueled the creation of his last album, Principios de Declaración. Solo albums can be complicated territory for any musician, though del Real is a singer songwriter and thus a solo artist by default. With Notas Rotas I am reminded of David Crosby’s solo outings, particularly his first venture, If I Could Only Remember My Name, recorded at the very dawn of the singer-songwriter era in 1971, which saw a whole cast of characters join Croz in the studio (there’s even a cut with Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead paired with Neil Young and Santana drummer Michael Shrieve).

While Croz’s musical influence might not be immediately apparent on Notas Rotas, his spiritual influence is everywhere and I think, might he have lived a little longer and heard the record, he would have approved. The kind of camaraderie that fueled Croz’s effort can be seen here, because these fellow musicians are del Real’s confidantes and he trusted them with this music.

*A band apart or, for you non-Godard aficionados, a band of outsiders*.

When this album was first released, del Real encouraged listeners to post their favorite songs. But what I have found upon multiple listenings is that my favorite track changes with each listen. Today, on a snowy January day, it is the sixth track, “Distracciones” with its vibrant fiddle parts. Any one of these tracks is sticky enough and interesting enough to catch a listener in its web. Perhaps “La Primera Nieve” or “The First Snow” is the most appropriate for this colder season. And then there is the finale, “Los Sueños” (which can be translated as ‘Dreams’ or ‘Visions’) which is carried along by lovely backing vocals like a ball being carried away upon the waves.

There is, whether it exists or not, and whether intended or not, a maritime fluidity to this music.

For del Real who, like the writer of this review, calls Estonia home, it was this seabound country that most manifested itself in this latest work. It found its ways into its lyrics, its melodies, its colors and moods. “Personally I think it’s very inspired by Estonia, its pace and imagery,” del Real says. He also sees in it a breakage with his past, or the path he was once on, and a fresh intimacy that he credits with producing its raw, unfiltered, and, I would add, touching result.

‘like a dream you don’t want to wake up from’

AT SOME MOMENT on Sunday evening I find myself in the grand hall of Viljandi’s Folk Music Center or Pärimusmuusika Ait looking for a good spot to rest a while and write. The hall is full of people, some standing, others gathering, talking and telling jokes. There are all kinds of people here, people with shaved faces and hairy chins, hippies, squares – but let’s be honest, most of them are a decade or more younger than I am. Beside the stage, three wonderfully light-haired girls are seated, one with shiny hoop earrings. I don’t know how old they are and don’t want to know. Two of them are looking at their phones, one has her head to her knees, apparently to just catch her breath. I watch them a moment more and then hoist myself up onto the edge of the stage. Every part of my body hurts: my legs, arms, back, and heart. My trustworthy satchel is wet from the rain, but my notebook is still dry. With a black pen, I begin to write. A few seconds later, a man appears before me, one with short hair and a brown sports jacket. He says he used to be my first daughter’s zoology teacher at the Viljandi Hobby School. That must have been a long time ago. His name is somewhat familiar, though I don’t recognize him. He has something in hand.

It’s a button. The kind you’d find on a jacket. There’s a trick too. There is something behind the button. This man goes around Viljandi installing these buttons on walls. When you tug the button, it pulls a piece of string behind it, and when the string goes back into the wall, the magic button plays beautiful music. “You just have to pull the button,” the man says. I don’t understand if I’m dreaming or not. I am at this moment so tired, that it all could be a hallucination. “That’s genius!” I say. The music is the same you would hear from a music box. “Why are you putting these buttons up?” I ask the man. “I wanted to bring a little more joy to the world,” he answers with a smile. Then the button man disappears into the crowds.

When the man is gone, I take some more time to unwind. The three girls are still sitting in the corner, looking half dead. It’s dark outside now. I actually have no idea what time it is, and only know, in a foggy way, that it is Sunday, which means that it’s the last day of Viljandi Folk. The concerts are still ongoing somewhere. And I promised Arno Tamm earlier that I would go see him during the final concert.

During one concert, I saw the American guitarist Jed Clark, who is from Arkansas and plays with the bluegrass band Midnight Ride, look out with tired eyes on Käevumägi, or the Well Hill, and a thousand or so beautiful people and say, “This festival is like a dream I don’t want to wake up from.” In the great hall of the Ait, I think that Jed is right. Earlier in the festival, I had a chat with him at the Green House Cafe. Jed told me in his soft Arkansas accent that Viljandi Folk was “just like paradise.”

I wasn’t so sure it was paradise. But a strange dream nonetheless.

***

“PEOPLE COME HERE from the US, from Canada, and they have a hard time believing that this is all real,” Tomás del Real, a Chilean musician, tells me the day after his concert was well received at the Jaak Johanson Stage. He performed on Saturday night, and people praised his performance the following morning. “It was all so intimate and cosy and yet so grand and so global,” some gushed to me. I had planned to go there, but somehow got lost along the way, and must admit that I don’t know exactly where I was when Tomás played that night. I allowed myself to live a little that evening and so everything from that evening has already faded into the mist. But I survived and supposedly the music was good.

“They see the lake, the castle ruins, and they think, what place is this?” Tomás continued his story. “For a festival, it’s a really great place, and the way the festival uses the surroundings, the aesthetics, are done with incredible taste. Nothing is overdone, everything is very natural, and they simply fill out the environment,” he said. Tomás is in some ways like me. A foreigner who came to Viljandi and got stuck here. Years before we came, Ruslan Trochynskyi, the trombonist from Svjata Vatra, arrived here from Ukraine and was similarly seduced. We are now like one big Folk family and not just us, who have come from abroad. Estonians have arrived here the same way. They come to Folk, go for a swim, and stay.

There is some kind of invisible pull. Even Tomás del Real, who is as clearheaded as they come, acknowledges this: “It is magnetic,” he admits.

I have of course heard criticism, that Estonian folk music is mostly fake and mostly synthetic, that the prices are too high, that this year’s Folk isn’t as good as last year’s, and so on. “These Folks are not like they used to be,” some say.

It is true that before there were fences and passes, folk was an anarchic experience and all kinds of weird people turned up in town. I called them the “zombie army” at the time, the drunks, Nazis, and rednecks. But all was permitted and the people enjoyed that anarchy. At some point, it was decided that Folk would be a bit safer and those days drew to a close. But the magic continued. Gates or no gates, the spirit of Folk cannot be contained. And the security staff are only looking for alcohol, really. They give your bag a squeeze and then wave you through with a grin. You have been examined. Go on your merry way.

I wanted to say, in response to this criticism, that whatever they have, people never seem to be satisfied with it. Something’s always missing from the picture. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is too familiar to me. I find myself on a train south, staring from a window. I think, what am I doing here in Viljandimaa? My heart is full of disappointment and melancholy. Other people, such as those from Tallinn, have said to me, “Why are you wasting your life in some hole in Estonia?”

Viljandi indeed is an odd place, one you can only reach intentionally. No one shows up here by accident. Folk does offer a lot of reasons for people to come here. It is a rich and deep event. For those who are never satisfied, I would say, take a look around. There is some value here. There is something different at least. I had these thoughts as I hid myself away in the press room in the cellar of the Pärimusmuusika Ait. Outside there was rain and thunder, and the Ait was full of soaking wet people. In the corner of the press room sat my one true love, the object of my affection. But who is this quiet girl? What’s her name?

She’s a coffee machine, naturally.

***

THERE ARE ALL KINDS of stories shared in the press room during the folk music festival. One day, after a concert by Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, I found myself seated again beside my beloved coffee machine listening to her purr. I must acknowledge that Folk is an exhausting experience. Even after just a few hours at Folk, a person is squeezed dry. All of that noise, all of those conversations and songs. Espressos are needed for a quick pick-me-up, so that one can still walk and write. The Italian group CGS is from Puglia, the province in Italy from which my mother’s family originates. One of their songs was about love, of course. This melancholic song describes a lovestruck man who sits beneath a woman’s window night after night, until the woman closes the window. But there he continues to wait until death, so devoted is he to the woman he loves. For me, this song was somehow refreshing. I have never heard of an Estonian who would do such a thing. Estonians are too practical for that. They wouldn’t waste their time in the name of Mediterranean love. But Mediterranean love is just like that. Passionate. Full of devotion.

“But in Estonia,” I tell a colleague in the press room, “if you sat underneath that window, the woman would call the police.” “Well, yeah,” she answered. “That could be really annoying.”

“But what do Estonians do when they fall in love?” I ask. “Does someone gift the other some potatoes? Or a bucket full of chanterelles?”

“No, no, they just enjoy their time together,” the woman explained.

“So that they are in the forest somewhere and one says to the other, ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ Is that how they do it?”

The woman looked at me with her clear blue eyes. “If it’s love, then there’s no need to talk. You just have to feel it.” Simple. So, sitting underneath someone’s window isn’t especially welcome here in Estonia. But I have definitely wanted to sit beneath some women’s windows, at least a few times, whether I am allowed to or not.

***

LOVE WASN’T THE ONLY SUBJECT haunting me at Folk. Another was age, certainly. Not that I really needed to think about age so badly, but when most of the people around you are at least 20 years younger than you at least, and three of them are your own daughters, then it comes to mind. At some moment, Uncle Justin wound up in the company of some young ladies in their early-twenties and forgot for a while whether he was a responsible parent or just another one of the pack. So I went along with them. It was a good feeling. I started to feel like one of those older Beatniks, like the poet Allen Ginsberg or wild man Neal Cassady, when they joined forces with the young hippies of the 1960s. If things are moving in that direction, then why not go with it? Why not? Beautiful kids with beautiful eyes. Students who aren’t yet jaded or embittered. They still have hope. They go to sleep listening to music. They don’t make the sarcastic jokes of our generation. With them I am gentler, I listen more, and I’m supportive.

As I told a friend at Folk, we are some kind of bridge generation. There are those important icons from the days of the Singing Revolution: Mart Laar, Edgar Savisaar, Siim Kallas, Tiit Vähi, and the others. And then there are these fresh young people who know nothing about that era and for whom it’s all just history. We are in between them, people like Margus Tsahkna or Jüri Ratas, who were both at Folk. We know where the bodies are buried, metaphorically, but we don’t want to share that information with the kids. Let them enjoy their youth. Let them run around holding hands when it’s raining and the Zetod are rocking. When someone comes by and reaches out, we take their hand in ours and run along together.

The Puuluup concert was a truly strange sight though. Their music is one that really does haunt you. The Hiiu kannel has the kind of sound that makes it hard to determine where it’s coming from. It sounds as if someone is playing with time. If I could ever play the sky and the clouds, it might just sound like the sound of a Hiiu kannel. There were so many people at the concert, it looked like a sea or bubbling soup. I watched and listened. Afterwards, I arrived at the idea that I no longer had an age. Age was just a number. But I felt in that moment, standing on that hilltop looking down, that I was more like some kind of Hindu deity. The embodiment of Shiva or Kali. Even when I was a child I knew it. The world told me what my age was, but inside myself I couldn’t tell the difference whether I was three or four years old.

“I don’t feel old,” said the American folk musician David Crosby shortly before his death last year. “I feel the same way I have always felt. It’s just my body that has aged.”

I was and I am.

When Midnight Ride played on Kaevumägi, they called themselves the sons of Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs. But I thought instead that nobody is actually the son of anybody. There is no before and there is no after. Music doesn’t age, just like souls do not age. Music is undying, as they say and exists at all times. All you have to do is to play it. I exist. In this way, we are all like music, undying, immortal. These were the thoughts I had during the Puuluup concert.

***

A DAY AFTER THE CONCERT, I met up with Ramo Teder, half of Puuluup, who with his long white hair looks like he could be the managing director of Santa Claus’ elf toy factory at the North Pole. Maybe because he lived in Finland for so many years. Ramo is actually from Viljandi. On social media, one can see a photo of Ramo when he was a punk at the end of the 1980s. He looks quite stylish, a combination of Johnny Rotten and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Puuluup is certainly not a punk group. There’s no “Anarchy in the UK” here, or in Estonia for that matter. But Ramo discussed how punk had influenced the ideas behind Puuluup.

“The idea that you have to overcome boundaries,” he said. The idea that all archetypes are tossed out the window. Estonian punk was different from American or British punk. Estonian punks were more like intellectuals. Most of the people in the Estonian SSR were standard issue. They wore the same clothes and had the same hairstyles. That some young man was walking around Viljandi with such hair was against the system. Hair, in this way, can be dangerous. There he now stands on stage, with a kannel in hand, age 53, singing about small birch trees. He also belongs to the tribe. Ramo is another brick in the Folk castle.

After the interview with Ramo, I found myself at the Eesti Etno concert. There were all kinds of musicians there, and they looked so happy. Were they too happy? I was dealing that week with the death of a high school friend. News about a friend’s suicide arrives slowly, even nowadays. Nobody talks about it on social media, only when you are famous. It took time to understand why this 43-year-old man had died “tragically and unexpectedly” as it said in a news article. But I eventually found out. So those Eesti Etno singers were singing and I was thinking about death and suicide.

One song did lift my mood. A young Indian was singing and the other sang along with him. At that point, I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing. Their clothes were so colorful. The music was so good. As sweet and satisfying as a mango lassi. It all looked like some kind of pajama party or Indian cult. Maybe some ashram had come to Estonia? Anyway, that was the right song for me at that moment, a person who was destabilized. Tragedy is like a little black cloud that follows you around everywhere. A song can help. Music can save lives. I would have liked to save my friend’s life the same way.

One night on the First Cherry Hill, as it is called, I thought I saw him, standing beneath a tree. But it was someone else.

***

DURING THE FESTIVAL, it becomes difficult to put one’s thoughts together. Looking through my notebook, I can find these kinds of scattered sentences and half-memories. “I left my journal in the press room, but Peeter the Estonian Swede came after me to tell me, and I ran back to get it, because my journal is full of kompromat that could make my life really difficult.” Or, “Some pharmacist from Tartu came up to me and started to talk about Paavo Matsin.” And, “Lauri Räpp was talking about resilience.”

The days melted together. There were a lot of concerts, for sure. The Italians. The Mexicans. The 6hunesseq-ians. Now that was a powerful concert, held in St. John’s Church at midnight. I fell asleep multiple times, because I was so tired, but the music was soft, warm, and enveloping, like a comfortable blanket. The musicians were out of view, because they were on the second floor, where the church’s orel is located. After they came down and people applauded. I guess I went home after that. I don’t quite remember. My friend found a rabbit in a park in Viljandi around the same time and took it into her tent. Later, she found the rabbit’s owner. These kinds of things happen during Folk. The mind no longer works. There is too much information, too much stimulation.

Then one day I met a man who told me that Lennart Meri’s book Silver White is the Bible of the Estonians, and how the Estonians, or rather the Baltic Finns, are very special people, and how Meri, Uku Masing, and Valdur Mikita had written “philosophical diamonds!” The man is working with a project called Valge Laev, or White Ship, to develop the higher intellect of the Baltic Finns. “But if the Estonians are so smart,” I told him, “then why do you need me for your project?” “Because you can help us bring it to the wider world!” came the answer. He had a fur hat and a green shirt. A beard. Sparkling blue eyes. Like a photo from the collection of Johannes Pääsuke. The green shirt was inside out. Of course, I agreed to help. When the Land of Mary calls you, you heed that call.

The following morning I have a slight hangover, because I thought the prior evening that I would allow myself to live a little. I asked myself, what would your favorite writer Scott Fitzgerald do if he was at Viljandi Folk? The answer arrived at once: start drinking wine! Life is for living! That night I wound up at the Untsakad concert at midnight. This was really like Anarchy in Estonia. I have never seen so many happy young people before. Untsakad are old men. They played at the first festival 31 years ago. But their fans are teenagers, or at university. I’m not sure what’s the attraction. Waltzes? Polkas? I like the Mexican band Kumbia Boruka more. They brought every cell in their bodies alive with their rhythms. They also appealed to writer Gert Kiiler, who said they reminded him of the show Miami Vice. “You know, they always have that kind of music playing somewhere in the background.” My friend, a Tallinn businesswoman who attends Folk regularly, recalled how she once had Don Johnson’s picture in her bathroom, so she could see him while she was taking a shower.

But Untsakad won over people’s hearts in the end. Even my 17-year-old daughter awoke the next morning and started to sing the “The Forest Brothers’ Song.” Ai-tsih, ai-tsah, ai velled, me metsavennad oleme! Which means something like, “we are the forest brothers, we are.” It really got inside her. For her the experience was also something like a dream. I received her rendition joyfully. “You’re a good forest brother’s daughter,” I thought, “even if your father is not a forest brother.”

***

SOME PEOPLE COME and go during Folk, but then there are people like me who are folk soldiers and stay until the last concert. We gather in the rain as Ando and Friends sing. Ando Kiviberg is the founder of Folk and the festival usually falls on his birthday. This year, he’s 55! Ando and Friends is some kind of variety show. Every kind of band performs there. The man himself is a Leo, naturally. He is the king of the jungle. There he is with his fuzzy face in his white suit and white hat, looking like some kind of Latin American drug dealer. He plays the bass and sings along. It’s nice to see the king in his element. The leader role suits him well. Ando is neither arrogant nor pretentious. He doesn’t think that he’s better than the others, no. But still they come, like small house cats, with their offerings to the Great Lion! Neither dead birds or mice, but songs. Silver Sepp has taken Tony Rennis’ 1962 Italian pop song, “Quando, Quando, Quando,” and made it over. The song’s new name is “Ando, Ando, Ando.”

At some moment, I get tired of all those bagpipes and fiddles and go to the other side of the Second Cherry Hill. There I stand beneath an umbrella and put on my headphones. I’d like to hear a little Led Zeppelin now. I am done with all of this folk music! I’d rather listen to “When the Levee Breaks.” To my surprise, these two things suit each other surprisingly well. I look up at the big screen and see Ando singing. But instead I hear Robert Plant’s voice. Ando is singing, “Crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good!” It’s still raining. We are all soaked. Soon the levee really will break. An incredible combination. Ando and Zeppelin. My own levee really has broken. Then I realize that I have really lost it by now. I march over to the Ait. I look for a comfortable corner inside where a burned out writer can relax a little. Then that stranger appears with his magic button in hand. The three girls are in the corner and I am sitting on the edge of the stage. The man is showing me his button.

“That’s genius,” I say. My voice sounds distant, as if it belongs to someone else. “Just genius.”

An Estonian version of this article appears in Edasi, and the original was written by the author in Estonian and rewritten into English. The English and Estonian versions have some differences, so do read both!

Bury the Hackett: A Review of the Bern Band’s New EP No One Wins, Part III

IT’S KIND OF FITTING that we finally get to the fifth track on this six-track EP in this third and final installation of the review, because in my opinion, “Only Lonely” is the most Seattle-sounding song in the set. Seattle plays a big role in Bern Band lore. Bassist Dave Trump lives there, and drummer Cody Rahn is a self-described “West Coast person.” I’ve been to Seattle plenty of times myself, and can’t yet describe myself as a devotee or not. I’m not in love with the place, but I don’t hate it. I did find it amusing when, on an overcast cold day, I saw people there beaming about the “sunshine.” Seattle continues to filter into musical culture. Some people swear by Seattle, and want to parade you down to the original Starbucks, or even show you some club where Kurt Cobain took a dump back before Nirvana got big. The scene, man.

The scene!

There used to be more West Coast people in my life, with starry utopias in their eyes.

Plus all that weed.

I actually don’t know if the Bern Band used drugs in the making of this record.

D. TRUMP: The difference in Seattle-New York or the East-West sound is tough for me to pinpoint. My perspective is a bit diluted by now, but I still think I know it when I hear it. One aspect would be the sense of urgency that comes out of NY music — deciding on the direction then making the groove happen. Whereas the Seattle sound might be more inclined to let the direction and sound develop. Of course, there are exceptions that could blow that concept out of the water.

C. RAHN: For me being a West Coast person my whole life until moving to New York City in 2010, the energy in rock music out there when I was growing up had a powerful groove that always felt comfortable and laid back even when the music was exploding with intensity. Slower, never frantic. Always space to think in between the notes.

Of course, we have to mention Pearl Jam. The Bern Band’s last record, Just Not Today, was recorded in Seattle in the final days of 2019, before the pandemic reared its head. They recorded at Stone Gossard’s studio, which was once Pearl Jam’s rehearsal studio. Soundgarden’s Down on the Upside was also recorded there, guitarist Hackett recalls.

B. HACKETT: There was just a real Seattle feel to the whole recording. We recorded all the basic tracks ‘live, live,’ meaning there was no click track and we were all playing live in a big room, baffling was the only isolation we used. So they are all one take, live. Which adds such an amazing feel to that album. However, the downside to that recording was that we had a small window to capture everything in the studio, not much time to think through all that we would have liked.

One thing that’s come up with Hackett in talking about the guitar distortion on this record is the weather where we grew up on Long Island, and how the distortion reminds me of the fog that rolls in off the inlet where we used to hang out, known as Conscience Bay.

A more writerly name could not have been selected for a body of water adjacent to such introspective, philosophical lads as ourselves. Most of the houses in the area were built postwar, and in dialogue with a local historian, I learned that the area where we lived had once hosted a hospital during a smallpox outbreak in the 1770s. This rather melancholy detail has only made the guitar distortion seem more ghostly and ominous. Perhaps soldiers during the conflict with Britain had bathed their pox sores in the bay. The same bay we would frequent in our youth, when Pearl Jam and Soundgarden ruled. There’s definitely some “Fell on Black Days” in “Only Lonely.”

Which brings us to the final number, “Another Birthday Before Christmas.”

This one is more like a Hackett solo number, I have to admit. The acoustic guitar, the festive chorus. Even his voice sounds more like him here. This is him, with no masks or shields. Just him. I have to think, it got me wondering about how I even met Hackett. There is a class photo of us together in second grade, but I barely remember him from those years. We definitely were in band — school band — in fifth grade. He was also in my class from fourth through sixth grade. There was a particularly raucous sleepover party which must have been in 1990, because I gifted Hackett a cassette of Vanilla Ice’s hip hop masterpiece, To the Extreme, and we were so animated and sugar high that Hackett’s dad, “Jim,” took us all out jogging.

Later, I remember Jim being taken aback by listening to Vanilla Ice rap about “handcuffs and chains” on “Stop That Train.”

Things probably started to mesh around this point.

But Hackett is a Sagittarius. His birthday is before Christmas, as this festive number informs. What that means is something like this. You go to visit Hackett, but he’s not there, because he’s somewhere else. You go to Point B, but he’s also not there, because he’s too busy smoking something with Jimmy Buffett at an Allman Brothers concert. You go to the concert, but it’s over already. Jimi Hendrix was a Sagittarius. Remember that tune, “Highway Chile”?

“His guitar slung across his back. His dusty boots is his Cadillac. A flamin’ hair just a blowin’ in the wind. Ain’t seen a bed in so long, it’s a sin.” That’s him.

They call him the breeze, he keeps blowing down the road.

I like to think of Hackett as sort of an early breezy guitar hero. He was just that kind of kid. But his guitar heroics earned him enemies. And so one day, while I was standing in the auditorium of Paul J. Gelinas junior high school, someone pressed into my hand a cassette recorded by some Primus devotees — the kinds of kids who wore baggy pants, with expansive “wallet chains” — that was called “Bury the Hackett.” Whose side was I going to be on?

This was the circa 1995 musical equivalent of the Drake-Kendrick feud.

A whole cassette full of diss tracks.

Or at least Nirvana-Pearl Jam.

The hand-drawn cover of the Hackett diss project showed a guitar neck sticking out of some grass.

Not all was well on Long Island. Evil was lurking along those muddy inlets.

Would I betray my lifelong friend, and come over to the dark side, the sinister Primus side? Would I disavow jeans that fit, and a wallet I trusted enough to stay put in my pocket, or would I get those big pants and keep my wallet on a chain? Could I strike some kind of balance between these packs of musical rogues emerging in my midst? Danger, danger. No, it wasn’t always easy being loyal to the Breeze. But he’s still out playing his guitar, ain’t he? And those snotty Primus kids are accountants or something. Their wallet chains have gone crusty.

To borrow a line from Good Will Hunting, “How do you like them apples?”

The Trump Files: A Review of the Bern Band’s New EP No One Wins, Part II

No, not that Trump.

If I had to pinpoint one moment when the ’90s began for me, it might have been seeing Jesus Jones’ “Right Here, Right Now” on MTV before heading off to play outfield in Little League. And if I had to pinpoint another moment, it was probably watching the introduction to the first episode of The X-Files on Fox, which debuted on 10 September 1993. A more unremarkable moment was probably watching Dave Trump and a friend storming into the locker room at Paul J. Gelinas Junior High School one morning wearing Soundgarden t-shirts and singing “Spoonman.”

This was probably the first time I even became aware of Dave Trump’s existence. He sort of stumbled through the door of my life like Kramer on Seinfeld and would always lurk after that. I do not know the provenance of this branch of the Trump family. I assumed some Irish or Scottish connection because of his remarkable orange afro, which has since either fallen out, been shaved away, or remains hidden beneath a series of ‘Jimmy the Newsboy’-style flat caps.

Trump was mostly soft spoken, observant and intelligent. He had an older brother who also lurked. He was there, at the edge of the 7/11 parking lot in his red truck, listening to The Clash. The older brother was supposedly responsible for introducing many younger kids in the community to good music. According to lore, students even older than him had given him crackly cassettes of groups like The Specials. There might have been a chain of musical command stretching back deep into the 1980s. Remember, as I said before, the internet at this time was nascent. These kinds of personal connections helped to guide one’s development.

How else would you hear The Specials in the early-ish ’90s? Those were the Ace of Base days. The Specials never guest starred on The X-Files. Or did they? Did Terry Hall get abducted?

“A Message to you, E.T.”?

I must have missed that episode.

Trump was even the bassist for a ska band. But on the new Bern Band EP he is solidly rock.

D. TRUMP: “Why rock as a genre? It allows us to pull from all our interests, leaving space for interpretation while giving us common ground to land on. There is an opportunity for each instrument to shine. For me, variety of genres has always been key and if you do choose to work in one specific genre, the challenge is to keep it interesting without being too frenetic. I want to find a contrast of tone or rhythm or emotion to enhance a song’s starting position. Sometimes it works, other times we circle back to the original idea. At a minimum, hopefully this pushes us to find the core of the song. That tension has been a central part of writing music with Brendan through the years: we can push each other in a direction that the other might not have initially intended.

Trump has been playing with Brendan Hackett more or less forever. They are bonded by common experiences, lots of them, and a near perfect ability to recall any line from Top Secret. In the early Oh-Ohs, they were in a rock group called Runna Muck, which made a rather dirty form of rock music. Later, Trump was in a group called War Pigeon with drummer Cody Rahn.

They specialized in songs about birds and conflicts.

According to Hackett, the trio actually cut some tracks between 2006 and 2008 called the Brendan and the Bandolero Sessions. Rahn and Hackett also worked together with Wendy Johnson in the Wendy Hackett Band, which was an alt-country outfit. The Bern Band developed out of a desire amongst Hackett and Rahn to rock out smelly dive bars on the Upper West Side. “Bern” was a nickname bestowed upon Hackett by Microsoft, which autocorrects his nickname “Bren” to Bern. The first Bern Band EP, Just Not Today, was recorded by the trio back in 2020. As you can see, their relationship and indeed its chemistry goes back much longer than that.

I actually filled in for Trump on some shows in the late ’90s with Hackett. We played the Allman Brothers’ “Statesboro Blues” and drunk Class of ’97 high school grads even danced on a deck. That’s about all I remember. I also remember that Trump was reading Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut when we all went skiing back in ’96, and that was the moment when I first learned about Vonnegut. Like I said, those Trump brothers could turn you on to new things.

D. TRUMP: I’ve spent countless hours digesting records with these guys. Driving in vans, sitting in dorm rooms, hanging by train tracks — we shared songs that informed each other’s passions and what drives our creative engines. I hesitate to get more specific as influence lists can be be too on the nose, meant to impress, or simply buried too deeply to be clearly heard in the music.

Trump lives in Seattle these days, having moved to the City of Spoonmen long ago. This has presented recording challenges for the bicoastal Bern Band, but ones that have not been insurmountable and, indeed, may have led to unexpected bursts of creativity in the studio.

In the previous part of this review, I remarked on the first two tracks on the EP. Now we shall explore the next two songs, “Slow Siren” and “Only Alright.” “Slow Siren” has foggy atmospherics. As I told Hackett, it reminded me of the autumn mist that wraps itself around the trees and inlets of Long Island where we all grew up, but might as well be inspired by the rainy weather at Trump’s newer home on Puget Sound. Trump was mostly responsible for this tune, I’ve heard. The song’s structure is familiar, but the Wall of Sound created is really inspiring. The tune trails off with what could be a wail of feedback, like a wind carrying the music away with it.

According to Hackett, Trump has become quite the producer since his orange afro, singing Soundgarden in the junior high locker room whilst reading Kurt Vonnegut days, and has become a sound chemist, sort of like the Beastie Boys were in their peak, Hello Nasty late ’90s period.

“Slow Siren” is just one potion from the lab.

“Only Alright” follows it right up with this really lovely slow number. I don’t want to overemphasize the Petty influence here — after all Tom was stealing left and right from Roger McGuinn of The Byrds — but man, it makes me sad to hear anything that sounds like Petty these days. “Sometimes the worst it gets is only alright,” well yeah, but that ain’t going to bring back Petty, Hackett. “And in the end, no one wins, we all lose …” Thanks a lot. Are you reading my mind? And the solo is just what you need, as sugartasty as a slice of pie at an Oklahoma truck stop diner.

Not like I have ever had one of those, but I have read about them.

B. HACKETT: (For) the album No One Wins, because it was started in COVID, we had nothing but time. I would demo the songs on a Roland 8-track (because I loathe computers) and send them to Dave, he would make comments and we would go from there. He would do the same, send me something he was working on and so forth. Then Cody and I would go to the studio (The Bunker, in Brooklyn) and record the drums and basic guitars together and then bounce the track to Dave who would add bass, or guitar or synth, et cetera. It was not an ideal way to work but we were able to really craft the songs. I have never been prouder of a group of songs we have done than this last endeavor.

C. RAHN: This music takes me back to late 60s and 70s rock sounds and everything from Deep Purple to The Doors to Led Zeppelin and that kind of energy informs the sounds I go for with the drums as well as how hard I hit, what embellishments I choose, and where I consider leaving space for the other guys to get out front and play. I want the performance to harken back to the music that influenced us as kids and display how it informed the music we make today.

D. TRUMP: I think we all get pretty introspective about our parts to a degree that people outside the project might not care about or notice. We talk about adding a bit of Nashville lead before the lyrics take us to Texas. What about if Lemmy played bass on an AC/DC song? Is the giant cowbell too big? Early Sabbath…but Ozzy was from Long Island. Is that backing vocal too Lennon-y? Yes, the big purple drum kit is essential to the sound. Was that too much or too little? I feel like we do this for ourselves. We’ve built a catalog of music going back about 18 years. That’s gotta be worth something.

SIDE NOTE: If you are a bass guitarist, you’ll need to hear Trump’s lines on this record. There is not one misplaced note. Those of you from the Jack Bruce “I’ll play what I want and clean it up later” school, take note. This guy knows what he’s doing. I do not say this lightly, or out of eternal gratitude for Vonnegut. Honest.

the trumpet player from barcelona

AT THE START OF MARCH, our cat Kurru started behaving strangely. Kurru is a striped female cat, aged about 17 years. She’s thinned out in her elderhood and doesn’t eat with the same enthusiasm she once had, but she is still quite active, when she’s not sleeping the day away on the kitchen table. From time to time, I’d find her staring out the window. The winter was ferocious and long, but with the warmer weather, she’d become less intimidated by the idea of going outside.

She would usually sleep through the night, but when March began, she became more active in the early mornings. At about six, she would start to make odd noises that are difficult to transcribe. Let’s just say that all of Estonian’s lovely vowels were represented, such as ä, ö, ü, and õ. “Äöüõ! Äöüõ!” This wasn’t your usual “meow.” It was different. Naturally, it got on my nerves and I would have preferred to slumber on in silence beneath my warm blanket. A few times I shouted at her to be quiet, and even threw a pillow at her. The cat Kurru then ran to the other window and continued with her cat’s lament. Then one morning I looked out the window and saw who she was talking to. There was a beautiful black male cat there, who was saying the same things to her in that same strange voice.

Our cat isn’t of child-, or kitten-, bearing age anymore. I think. She’s an old lady. Seventeen! This would be as if Meryl Streep or Helen Mirren got pregnant. Maybe it’s still possible, but it just doesn’t happen every day. But this reality doesn’t seem to make a difference to the other cats. Someone in the cat community has apparently spread the news that in this apartment — our apartment — lives a female cat. And so those male cats arrive at six in the morning and line up beneath our Kurru’s window. I can hear their agony through the glass. Cats apparently can’t masturbate. Or can they?

I don’t really want to know, but anyway, our cat has had to live with this constant torment, that the neighbor boys just won’t give up. Sometimes I think she even enjoys this little mating season drama. She is more waiting for it than fearing it. Sometimes the black cat is beneath the window, but other times there is a fat orange cat with a flat face that looks like Boris Yeltsin. These cavaliers are waiting, steadfast. They want Kurru to come away with them. They don’t seem to be ready to give up any time soon.

How come they never give up?

***

But enough about cats! I actually wanted to talk about music today and Barcelona. And not just about music, but about a certain musician. At the edge of our town dwells a certain family of considerable means, they are nouveau riche — as far as I know they lack an aristocratic pedigree — but they have learned to live like the old rich live, to sleep in the best hotels, to drink the best wines, to appreciate fine art, travel, and the good life. Some time ago, these travels brought the mother and daughter of the family to Barcelona, where they stayed in an exclusive hotel suite. From the windows, one could look out on all that Barcelona had to offer.

The mother of the family is a little older than me, a mature, beautiful and intelligent woman, who wears wonderful clothes. Her daughter is about 20 and is studying international affairs in Geneva. She has blond hair and has a good sense of humor. She’s also quite playful and likes to make jokes, like a puppy, I guess. It’s always fun to pal around with her. For me though she has always just been my friend’s youngest daughter. She has never been anything more.

This is an important fact, because one night she met a man who is about the same age as me. A little younger, but not much. This happened when they decided to visit a Barcelona jazz club called “Tony’s Swing Club.” In the band, there was an American who sang and played the trumpet. I don’t know where he really was from, but I like to think he came from New Orleans.

“I’m sorry,” my friend’s daughter said some time ago when she told me about him, “but that trumpet player looked a lot younger than you.” “Does he have three daughters,” I asked in response. “No, he has no children,” she answered and added, “and he’s never been married either.”

“Well, that’s why he looks so young,” I said. “Give him three daughters and a rough divorce and let’s see how young he looks.” “Yes, it’s hard to say what he’s done in his life,” the young lady agreed. “Apparently he’s just been playing the trumpet.”

He definitely played the trumpet and quite well. So well that my friend, the young lady’s mother, invited him to their hotel for a private concert. And that almost 40-year-old musician from New Orleans went along, of course. I don’t know what he looks like, but I imagine something like Harry Connick, Jr. At the hotel, he serenaded them. Maybe he performed something from the Louis Armstrong songbook. “And I say to myself, what a wonderful world …” The woman and her daughter sat and watched and listened. When the concert was over, they applauded.

Later they all drank some good Spanish red wine.

“I thought that musician was interested in me,” the mother of the family acknowledged to me later. She really is an attractive woman and charismatic, and these kinds of women are known to often drive men crazy. “But then I understood that he was actually in love with my daughter.”

I don’t know if this revelation disappointed her. The woman will soon turn 50. The daughter is in her early twenties. But, to borrow a line from the American President John F. Kennedy, “the torch was passed to a new generation, a generation born in this century.” Unfortunately, the musician’s young muse wasn’t interested in him. The trumpet player was sad about it, but he still didn’t give up.

***

Quite the opposite. A few weeks later he arrived to Estonia. Officially, he was here to attend a music festival, but he really came for the young lady. I have a hard time understanding just what exactly he was after. Love? That this young lady — half girl, half woman — would respond to his interests? But what would become of the young lady’s career in international affairs? Or did he want to marry her? Or maybe just to steal a kiss?

Here, I admit that I’ve had similar experiences. Because of that, I can tell you that he had no idea what he wanted. Sometimes a woman’s spirit gets so deep inside of you, it’s hard to exist without it. It takes over your whole body and soul. It’s even hard to breathe. It’s hard to think. It’s hard to be. It makes men do stupid things, not on purpose, but because if they don’t buy those plane tickets or send that love letter, they will go insane or explode. It’s such a big ball of energy, like crashing waves on a stormy ocean.

The waves will flow, whether you like it or not. The only question is how to navigate them.

This time, when my friend’s daughter’s musical suitor appeared in Estonia, she was quite direct with him. She told him all kinds of nasty things and then blocked him on every channel.

“I told him that I was sad that he was so old and had accomplished so little in his life,” the young lady told me. “I didn’t mean it, of course. I just wanted him to leave me alone.”

With a broken heart, the trumpet player dragged himself back to Barcelona. Maybe he even cried, as I have cried. Maybe he wrote to her, as I have written to women. Maybe he even lied to himself, as I have lied to myself.

“She was too young.” “She wasn’t the right one.” “Who wants to be with a woman who is still in college?” the trumpet player lied to himself. He went back to his jazz club, met some Spanish woman named Maria, got drunk and wound up in bed with her. But all through the night he spent with Maria, he was haunted by a tiny Estonian plika.

It’s not so easy to free yourself from a woman’s spirit.

In the morning, he grabbed his smartphone and tapped out some sentences to her and pressed send.

“Does he still write to you?” I asked the young lady recently. “No,” she answered but then whispered, “actually, he does, but I don’t respond. But, yes, he still writes.”

“See,” I said. “Some people just don’t give up.”

***

There are a lot of stories like this and I hear them all the time. Most women are tired of these characters. A real man should be like a Cleveron robot who goes where you want him to go and then says something when you press a button. When you say, ‘Don’t write to me,’ he won’t write because he’s a good robot.

But some still write. And not just men. Women too. This has become my strange hobby. I ask friends if their suitors are still writing them, or if they have given up. I am trying to understand their psychology and my own. I have a friend who left her partner long ago because he was smoking too much pot. She blocked him everywhere and told him she never wanted to see him again. The reasons for the split were clear. But the man kept on calling, until his number was blocked too. “I don’t understand what his problem is,” the woman said. “Do I really have to spend my whole life with my ex-boyfriend haunting me?” That guy just won’t give up though. He is stuck inside a prison he built for himself, where his thoughts spin round in circles. With all channels blocked, maybe he might send a message by carrier pigeon?

“Sometimes it seems to me that when a woman falls in love, it’s nice, but when a man falls in love, it can be catastrophic,” a famous Estonian singer once told me, who is considered to be something of a love expert.

One of my male friends though said that it’s programmed into the culture. “Women play hard to get. Are they flirting or not? In films we often see how the main characters hate each other at first but become lovers in the end.” This happens in many old and new movies, he noted.

“What else do people have left, when they can’t even believe in love?” asked another friend rhetorically, who has become a well-known actress. “People like to believe that they know what’s best for them. And if this good thing is this girl who tells you no all the time, they still believe that she will say yes in the end. That she will finally see the same things that you see, and that a happy ending still awaits.

“For me, the most interesting thing is that we still think we know what’s best for us,” the actress went on. “I certainly don’t think that I know what’s best for me. Life knows best. And if life doesn’t offer me that boy I want, then naturally he’s not the right one for me. That’s why I don’t pursue people in such a way.”

According to this actress, some people just don’t listen to life, but she acknowledged the game of love can be confusing. “Especially when all women supposedly want you to compete for their hearts,” she said. “Then you have to figure out if you should still compete for her love or just leave her alone.”

***

I don’t know what became of that trumpet player from Barcelona. It’s possible that he’s still performing in the same club. Or maybe he’s moved on, to Madrid or Paris. Maybe his heart was so broken that he moved back home to New Orleans. Maybe he met a nice person along the way and they’re now married and expecting a daughter. Maybe he doesn’t look so young anymore. If he still thinks of that Estonian girl, maybe she has inspired him to play the blues only better. Maybe his solos are more emotive now, more intense, richer and deeper. Maybe when he sings, his voice cracks as if he’s about to cry. Maybe it was necessary for him to get his heart broken, so that he would get to the next level.

In this way, pain can be a blessing. As I have found with my own pain. I could of course write about the person who broke my heart. I could write about her until the end of my days. Novels, short stories, and poems. Some part of this experience won’t ever leave me, no. Part of my heart just won’t give up on her.

I find myself still thinking of her, especially in those early mornings at first light, when the cat goes to the window to give her cat’s concert. Our sturdy, mature feline awaits her suitors on the other side of the glass. It’s terrifying sure, but also a little thrilling.

And there she sits. She sits and she waits and she never gives up.

An Estonian-language version of this piece recently appeared in Edasi.

‘How Silly Can You Get?’ A Review of The Bern Band’s New EP, No One Wins, Part I

A scene from 1984’s *Top Secret*, starring Val Kilmer as Nick Rivers, an endless source of inspiration.

I WAS PLANNING to write something beautiful and majestic but I ran out of time. I’m thinking about that Zelda Fitzgerald comment, how Scott’s progress on Tender is the Night was being anthologized in Encyclopaedia Britannica. In this case, I can’t afford to wait nine years. The Bern Band will have come out with several EPs or albums by then.

What is this then? A loose attempt to review The Bern Band’s latest EP No One Wins. Free jazz. For some reason, each time I try to write about this EP, I start thinking about the movie Top Secret. According to Bern Band singer, guitarist, everyman Brendan Hackett, this film introduced him to adult silliness, but there is just so much more to it. I feel like this film defines our philosophy toward life. I cannot yet articulate how though, but it’s all there in the “How Silly Can You Get?” or “Skeet Surfing,” or, “What? Do I have to hear again what a great cause you and Nigel are fighting for? My only cause is my music.”

… is my music, is my music, is my music.

There is something haunting about that film, if only I know that I can repeat any line of it to Brendan, or bassist Dave Trump, and maybe even the drummer Cody, and I will get the following line repeated back.

“They’d have enough salt to last forever.”

“What phoney dog poo?”

Thirty-one summers ago, at a time when Billy Joel ruled the airwaves with “The River of Dreams,” which was his Long Island take on “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” Brendan and I lived probably our last summer as non-musicians. We spent that summer watching goofy movies like Top Secret or Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Essential learning for teenage boys. We made ridiculous movies with a camcorder that I hope have long been lost and will never be found. He might have had an acoustic guitar by then. I’m not sure. But by that fall, I had my bass guitar and we were playing. That might have been our last boyhood summer. Ninety-three. In those days, ahem, you heard music on the radio or in movies, or maybe your older sibling might have hipped you to some groups (which is how I wound up with Led Zeppelin IV). I remember working for Brendan’s uncle and hearing “A Day in the Life” on the radio. This was the only place you might hear it, unless your parents had some vinyls lying around, or you could scrape together some money to get a CD. This was a deluxe investment, because CDs were supposed to survive everything.

Even nuclear war.

That $11.99 or whatever at The Wiz on Long Island in 1993 went far.

So that is the sort of technological and musical milieu from which we emerged. After that we were musicians and half-men. We started playing music at a tender age, 13-14. You can’t really start bands any younger unless you go to one of those camps, or you’re a four-year-old guitar virtuoso on YouTube. This is important, because it shows that we got the bug so early. I say we, but Brendan of course took it as far as a person can go with it, and he’s still taking it there. He is in his car, driving to that musical future. I do find it kind of funny, because one aim of this group is to make the kinds of songs we heard on the radio growing up. But not “The River of Dreams”. No. Other tunes that might become apparent upon listening.

***

The first song on No One Wins is called WTLF. I don’t know what that stands for. Maybe, “What the living fuck?” Or is it loving fuck? A living, loving fuck? It could be, but it also seems too easy. It also looks at first glance like the name of a Long Island radio station. WBLI. WALK. WTLF. The kind of station that used to play the so-called classic rock that has served as the raw material for this musical project. For the Bern Band are definitely recyclers, but they make something new. They are up-cyclers. They are digging through the trash, spinning gold from memories of old Heartbreakers, Cheap Trick and Thin Lizzy records.

They take the banana leaves of 1970s rock and press them into exquisite high end 2020s musical goods.

Years ago when I was toying with the idea of becoming a music journalist, like David Fricke or Lester Bangs, god forbid, I remember someone saying that the riffs on a Weezer record were “hot dog plump.” But here, I would say the guitars are “peanut butter chunky.” This is the nuttiest, chunkiest, thickest variety of peanut butter rock guitar there is on the shelves. The song itself feels a bit off balance or disjointed, but in a good way. There are these tunes like WTLF that you need to listen to 25 times just to fully “get.”

The second track on the new Rolling Stones album is like that, “Get Close to You.” Every time I listen to it, I hear something new. But what does WTLF stand for anyway? Maybe these are weird chord names. I think Jefferson Airplane had a track called DCBA-25, which was a make of LSD on the streets of the Haight, but Paul Kantner also used to inform his chord changes. Or was it the other way around? Is there a variety of WTLF acid? Winnipeg Toronto Laval Fredericton. Were these stops on a Canadian tour? WTLF, indeed.

The next tune on the record is called “Misery.” This one could have had its own MTV Buzz Clip back in 1994. The chord changes are that familiar, but in a comfortable way, and the vocals are perfect. It’s one of those songs you already know, just from the first few seconds. It’s as if Soul Asylum and the Wallflowers decided to jam and invite Mike Campbell to play lead. In a way, and I am not afraid to say it, but that’s what this album reminds me of at times. It’s as if it’s a lost Heartbreakers project, but without Tom.

I know how much Brendan worshipped Petty. I used to play “Last Dance with Mary Jane” in a band with him in junior high school. That was probably one of the songs we learned to play so long ago. Did I have to sing? Maybe not. Maybe it was “King” Jim O’Rourke doing the singing on that joint? I remember playing that tune on a deck somewhere and kids coming through the woods to listen to us, somewhere on Long Island. But, anyway, King Petty is dead, and someone needs to step into the vacuum. There is just a hole there. Someone needs to pick up the flag and take this thing forward. Who better than Brendan to feel that hole and to try to fill it with his own music? That’s what music is anyway. Torches are passed. We pick them up and carry them forward in our own ways. The ending of this song is memorable. What I like about this EP is that there’s so much to explore. But I’m not done exploring this subject. There is more to come. We need to talk about Dave Trump, ska, Kurt Vonnegut, Seattle versus New York, and other things.

We’ve only talked about two tracks on the EP!

There is more to write about. But we shall get there. You will see.