Is there anything more humbling and defeating to a struggling writer than getting your first royalty reporting from an underperforming book? Probably. But this sucks, too.

Anyway.

Song of the Week: “Drinking In L.A.” - Bran Van 3000

The first time I heard this song, soon after its release in early 1997, I thought “wow, P.M. Dawn got sadder!” Which wasn’t necessarily a condemnation on my part. “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” was easily in the top 25% of songs featured on the X-Tendamix Dance Mix ’92 compilation. And the ’92 edition was the second best edition of the X-Tendamix Dance Mix series, as far as I was concerned. Second only the the KLF-containing X-Tendamix Dance Mix ‘93. But I genuinely thought that I was listening P.M. Dawn doubling down on the melancholy. 

It took me a while to figure out that “Drinking In L.A.” was not, in fact, by the New Jersey hip hop and R&B act from New Jersey and was actually by some new weirdo art/alternative rock and hip hop collective from Montreal. It took me a little longer to appreciate the song on its own merits. But once I got there, I never stopped.

I wouldn’t call it my favourite Bran Van song. (If you asked me to rank them, I’d probably say it was my 18th favourite BV3000 track. Right behind the 17 songs featured on their perfect sophomore album, Discosis.) But it holds a special place in my heart.

There are songs that you outgrow, for various reasons including but not limited to the fact that most popular songs are written by baby men whose worldview no longer suits you after the age of, say, seventeen. There are songs that stick with you because they uniquely capture a specific time or feeling in your life. There are songs that grow with you, revealing new layers to themselves as you gain more experience and insight into the world and what the artist was saying. 

And then there’s whatever the hell I have going on with “Drinking In L.A.” 

When I first fell in love with the song, I thought it was a horror story. The idea that someone could be so adrift at the age of twenty-six horrified my type A fifteen-year-old self. Revisiting it at twenty-six, I was like “yeah, dude, I get it.” A decade later, I heard the track drifting out of coffee cup-shaped DJ booth in the middle of the Toronto International Film Festival. Waiting in line for a press screening across the street from this spectacle, exhausted, underpaid, demoralized, and tipsy from whatever open bar event I’d just come from, I thought “what the fuck are you complaining about? You’re a child! You have your whole life ahead of you! You want to know sad? What the hell am I doing drinking in Toronto at thirty-six?”

And yesterday I somehow drifted back to it after getting my first royalty report on the book and feeling terribly sorry for myself.

I went searching for “Drinking In L.A” because I wanted to wallow in career angst, but I wound up noticing something else about it that made it even more appropriate for my mood. After twenty-three years of thinking of the song as an anthem for feeling directionless in life, I shifted my focus from the chorus to verses. And it turns out that part isn’t just about feeling directionless in your career. It’s also about feeling lost in the work itself. The narrator keeps grasping for inspiration — or even a modicum of focus — but it eludes him. 

Which… fuck. What the hell am I doing drinking in Toronto at thirty-eight, indeed. 

And what I wouldn’t give to feel rudderless at twenty-six instead.