Good morning good morning. Hello. Happy Monday. How are you? All well? Excellent weekend? I had an excellent weekend, thanks for asking. Just lovely. I even felt, dare I say it, a few moments of perfect happiness. That hasn’t happened in years. It was great.

Also just read as I sat down to my computer that Kier Starmer resigned. Honestly didn’t see that coming. Some sexy Mancunian Mayor gets some votes and the whole house of cards collapses. Man sometimes it’s hard not be jealous of England. I have never seen Keir Starmer speak, but I feel like I know him from SNL UK and I will be sad not to see those funny impressions anymore.

SNL UK. Pretty good!

Let’s see… where did we leave off int he GMHHAY chronicles. Ahh yes. Friday Morning. Well, I don’t remember much about Friday, really. I did not work on the studio at all this weekend. I’m not even sad about it. I hung out with friends. I chilled. Sean and I thought about going to Robyn Hitchcock but we did not muster up the energy. We all watched Project Hail Mary in the evening. ‘Twas a lovely, relaxed day.

Saturday I got some very rapid gardening in in the morning — got the Roma tomatoes pegged to some poles so they weren’t growing into a lumpy pile. Harvested about 20 cucumbers. Trellised the indeterminates a little higher, trellissed the grapes, harvested the radishes, but i had waited too long and they were not good. Not that any of this matters because a parent of a client of the neurodivergent pediatric speech therapists taco’d my gate and now the deer can get into the garden so I am going to lose everything anyway. Whole thing is causing me anxiety. The parent said they’d pay for it, but the estimate says four thousand dollars. Feels like someone is going to have to use insurance. I don’t want the speech therapists, who are angels, to lose a client. I don’t want to put anyone out but I also don’t want to pay for it or go to my insurance and raise my rates. Ugh.

Nick and I are gonna try and fix it today.

After this all five of — Emma, Jane, Sean, Jussi and I — piled into the truck and drove through the beautiful North Carolina countryside on a gorgeous day for two and a half hours to a weird-ass corporate office park on the south side of Charlotte called Ballantyne and checked into a Courtyard Marriot. An hour later we all walked across the street to a charmingly small amphitheater called TD Amp and watched an 80’s package bill will Soft Cell, Allison Moyet and the Human League.

Oh my god what a perfect day I am now a convert and giant fan of 80’s package bills. Yes. Give me 7-10 songs tops from a bunch of bands. Give me all the hits along with a few deep cuts. Give me families and middle aged people in great band t-shirts. Give me scattered pockets of goths who compliment me on my Pale Saints shirt and awesome drunk hispanic couples who notice Jane jumping up and dancing to “Tainted Love” and “Only You” and “Situation” and commenting me on our great parenting. Give me good friends and sunshine and shockingly delicious tacos and $20 signature drinks that come in plastic mason jars. Everything was so great. The weather was perfect, there was a cool breeze and sun and a gorgeous sunset. There were friends and did I say tacos? Just the best.

Soft Cell started it, Marc’s voice is a little shot and there is no Dave anymore and Sean and Jussi had previously flown to England to see “the last Soft Cell show ever” so there’s a bit of an LCD Soundsystem thing going on but I had never seen them and I was happy to finally see them. They did not play “Sex Dwarf” to this family-friendly audience but played everything else you’d want to hear. Their visuals were a projector with a bunch of AI videos and that part was a real bummer but I did not think about it till afterwards.

Allison Moyet was amazing, she is amazing, she looked marvelous, she sounded amazing, she wore this amazing black goth ballroom dress and she sang “Winter Kills” which was just awesome. She was like “look there will be a dancey disco set in a minute but I am dark at heart and I am going to play Winter Kills in this verdant paradise” and it ruled.

I had never seen Allison or Soft Cell before, which is pretty crazy since I’ve been a Soft Cell and Yaz fan… since high school? I did get tickets to see Yaz once but a) it was at Terminal 5 and b) it was in my years as a Very Important Man and I was hanging out before the show with some Angels at a Victoria Secret party and you know what? I judged it prudent to keep hanging out with models and not go see Yaz. What can I say I was not always a great person.

Human League I have seen before but it was 20+ years ago and I have zero recollection of it. Phil Oakey’s voice is solid, man. Only thing he didn’t try and hit were the incredibly high notes during the “no one else can ever take your place” line in “Human.” Everything else he nailed. Not too bad for freakin seventy years old. The girls were wonderful, the song selection was great. I experienced my only moment of sadness the whole day when they sang their anti-war song “Lebanon” and it is as fucking timely today in 2026 as the day they wrote it in 1984 and they were not shy about letting you know that with its cruise missile and war imagery video. Jesus. That hurt. But my god. Great song. I had forgotten all about it.

Other than that? Brilliant night all around. I was so happy. Emma asked me if I was on drugs. I saw a dude in a dead shirt in the hotel lobby when we were checking in, and I asked him if he was going to the show and he said yes but was not super conversational. Later on, during the show, I saw him again and waved and he gave a giant smile and a thumbs up. 80’s package tours make people happy, man. More of that. Henry got really good at throwing his water bottle in the air, flipping it a few times, and having it land upright. One time he did it five times in a row. Magic in the air, man, magic in the air.

Magic ran out when we got back to the hotel and there was a power outage. At the hotel. Pitch black. Total mess. Glow sticks and emergency lights illuminating the hallways. Keys still worked so we went up to the room and got Jane settled. It was well after 10, her bedtime is 8. She conked right out. But I could not sleep in a room with other people and no CPAP machine. So I left. Did a little tailgating in the parking lot with Nick for a while then realized I could charge my truck when things are not busy so went to the nearest high-speed charger and charged up. Spent a little time in a party McDonald’s at midnight on a saturday in Charlotte. People were having a good time.

Magic in the air.

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We’re listening to Mirror Revelations this morning. I love this band. They’re a drone krautrock band from Mexico. This is their second album, Ígnea. Came out this week. It’s lovely. I was a giant fan of their 2023 debut Aura. Been listening to it pretty constantly for about a year now. This is more of that fine, fine, drone. Alan Vega would be impressed. I hope the drone never ends.

Lovely ride home on Sunday. I took a three-hour nap Sunday afternoon, since I got like no good sleep Saturday night. And then we were off to Saxapahaw for more 80’s bands live. This one was the Church. They are one of Jussi’s favorite bands. It was Jussi’s birthday. So we went to see the Church. I have seen the Church with Jussi maybe 5 times over the decades. Maybe more. Lost count. This is the second time this decade I’ve seen the Church with Jussi on her birthday. I have seen the Church so many times.

I said in the car on the way home that I really need to examine my relationship with the Church. Loved them in high school. Love the hits, of course: Under the Milky Way, Reptile, Metropolis and the like. Did not particularly like them live for the first few decades Jussi dragged me to Church shows. Weirdly I like them a lot better now, both live and on record. Love the new psych rock stuff on Hypnogogue and the like. They are just amazing live now, my god, they sound so good.

But also it was a seated show and I felt kind of compelled to read my novel through a lot of it. Which is a weird thing to do at a rock show if you are not a sexy goth girl with glasses. If you’re a sexy goth girl with glasses, of course, reading a novel at a rock show is sexy. For me it is… well, I don’t know. A weird thing to do? Especially when you like the band? I would read for a while then the band would start doing a big rock finish on a song and I’d put my book down and watch the amazing big rock finish. I would not read through the hits that I loved from high school. And I liked all the other songs a lot! Arguably more!

But I still read through portions of all of them. No idea, man. It just needed to happen.

Also Steve loves telling stories and jokes in his banter. Last time we went all the banter was about the fictional titular character of the concept album Hypnogogue and it was tedious AF. But this was “the singles” tour and most of the banter was about the history of the band (though studiously avoiding talking about Marty). So that was more tolerable.

This time there was even banter with sound effects.

The set was long — more than two hours. I am very torn about this. On the one hand, I’d love to see the Church on an 80’s package tour where he had to keep it to an hour. But on the other hand I get why he avoids all that so he can play his long self-indulgent expansive sets.

We had taken two cars to the show to get all seven of us there. And because of the length and the Sunday night-ness of the set, Emma drove the first wave of tired people home about two hours into the set. It was unfortunately right after “Under the Milky Way” and Steve saw Emma leaving and begged her not to go and then played an imprompty Chicago cover of “Baby, Please Don’t Go” just for Emma. Unfortunately he does not know my wife and such things do not sway her.

And then he called my wife a “fucking philistine.”

After sitting through two hours of his post-rock psych on a Sunday night.

Grr.

Also we saw Steve walking into the show and Sean said something banal and kind like “have a good show” and Steve didn’t even acknowledge our existence.

So, you know, like I said. Complicated relationship with the Church.

Jane was great this weekend. She had so much fun at the show. I have so many pictures and videos of her dancing. It was just the best. And how excited she’d get during songs she knew like “Situation” and “Don’t You Want Me” and “Tainted Love.”

I swear to god, man. I wept, I wept.

What a weekend.

I got a meeting in seven minutes, so no playlist for you today but here is Jane dancing to Tainted Love.