Prestige TV's secret superpower is pop music; Remembering Burt Bacharach

Plus, the Indigo Girls at the Tiny Desk.

View this email online Feb. 11, 2023 by Marissa Lorusso This week, we’re sharing thoughts on a recent music moment from the HBO show The Last Of Us; plus, a Tiny Desk from the Indigo Girls. Courtesy of HBO Max I asked my colleagues this week about memorable music moments they’d recently seen on TV, and critic Ann Powers had a lot of thoughts about the use of a Linda Ronstadt song in the HBO show The Last Of Us. I asked her to tell me why it stood out, and here’s what she said: What’s most powerful about music in “prestige” television right now, as more cinematic streaming series challenge the rules of episodic broadcast TV, is the way it’s becoming not only central to the atmosphere of our favorite shows but elemental within their plotlines. In shows ranging from Stranger Things to Steve McQueen’s Lovers’ Rock, a well-deployed song becomes a catalyst, if not a character — especially an older song, carrying all the golden baggage packed in by many decades’ worth of listeners. The instant-classic third episode of HBO’s videogame-turned-dystopian-epic The Last of Us offers the latest example of a classic tune providing essential plot and character advancement while generating millions of weeping-face emojis across the social universe. Linda Ronstadt’s “Long Long Time” went viral the moment the soon-to-be lovers Bill and Frank, played by Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett, pulled out its dusty sheet music from Bill’s mother’s piano bench. (The fact that the baby grand was still in tune proves this show’s a fantasy.) In the show’s revision of the game, the itinerant hustler Frank has stumbled into Bill’s prepper paradise — the well-stocked home he presumably grew up in, in a now otherwise abandoned Massachusetts town — and the two men warily circle each other over a gourmet meal Bill prepares. Then to the parlor, where Frank continues to violate Bill’s space, but in that disarmingly sweet way Bartlett renders so convincing. At first he offers a jaunty take on the Gary White-penned ballad, reminiscent of Texas troubadour Jerry Jeff Walker’s existentialist reading from 1989: a last-call tip of the whisky glass. Bill, moving from the doorway where he cautiously stands, makes him stop.That’s when the heartbreak begins to pour over the scene.  Bill takes Frank’s place on the bench, where he’s almost certainly sat many times, playing to no one. He caresses the keys slowly, intoning the song’s lament as if to himself, the way Ronstadt did when she recorded the song that would become her first hit in 1970. For him, this confession of undying, unrequited passion can’t be reduced to nostalgia. Its sorrow is ever-present, a defining element of his (until now) closeted life. Offerman’s rusted vocality is poignant, but the key to this scene is Bartlett’s changing face as Frank watches Bill. He is realizing something, many things that he must try to reconcile: the opportunity for shelter this lonely man may offer; the truth of Bill’s damaged, opening heart; the potential for an encounter that might bring back the intimacy that once came easily to him. What Frank hears in Bill’s voice is the kind of queer longing that has, in many other stories, has become a kind of cliché — not only desire for one person, but the need for an open life and the community and safety that comes with it in a tolerant world. By the end of the song, Frank is thinking, I can help him make peace with the world. Just the two of us: our world. I can fix that much. The opportunist becomes the lover as the song comes to a close.  Ronstadt herself made a journey while laying down the previously unrecorded “Long Long Time.” It mirrors the one we see on Bartlett’s face. Not a morning person, Ronstadt felt that her phrasing was horrible when she began her take at 10:30 a.m. in Nashville’s Woodland Sound studio. But something “in those chords” — a sequence shifting back and forth from major to minor — lifted her into the kind of melancholia that makes the song so effective in capturing the unresolved nature of grief. That’s what Bill lives with, what Frank suddenly finds himself challenged to approach.  The late, great theorist José Esteban Muñoz defined the melancholia Bill’s rendition expresses as an aspect of queer survival, and it permeates the episode as we watch him and Frank deepen their relationship over the years. I’ll end with Muñoz’s words, in tribute to the bittersweetness of their connection, enhanced by the aura of Ronstadt’s yearning: “It is this melancholia that is part of our process of dealing with all the catastrophes that occur in the lives of people of color, lesbians, and gay men.” In a show about generalized catastrophe, one man’s version of a 1970s chestnut not only personalizes the bloodied landscape but queers it, deepening the connection that then plays out for the rest of the episode. In many ways “The Ballad of Bill and Frank” is as corny as a Hallmark movie, with as many well-placed accouterments of comfortable middle-class life — another cliché afflicting queer depictions in the mainstream. Yet the ache in it makes it meaningful, extending from its first interpreter to the last of them. That ache wouldn’t hit so hard without “Long Long Time.” Newsletter continues after sponsor message More to read, watch and hear: Burt Bacharach died this week due to natural causes at age 94. Over many decades, the visionary pop composer was responsible for an astonishing number of hit songs, including "Say A Little Prayer," "Walk On By," "What The World Needs Now" and "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head." “Burt Bacharach's melodies,” writes NPR’s Elizabeth Blair, “are seared in the memories of generations of listeners.” This week, conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who has served as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 2009, announced he is leaving LA to become the new music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic. "He was the only one on our list,”  New York Philharmonic president and CEO Deborah Borda told Morning Edition. “This will be the Dudamel era.” If you’re new to the charismatic Venezuelan conductor’s work, NPR Classical has you covered: This week’s playlist is filled with Dudamel essentials, including Beethoven, John Adams, Debussy, Nielsen, Ives and Márquez. Multidisciplinary artist and musician Samora Pinderhughes has explored mass incarceration in his work for the last eight years. This week, the artist was awarded a rare $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund his work on The Healing Project. If you’ve ever wanted to perform behind the Tiny Desk — or know someone who does — I’ve got good news: The Tiny Desk Contest is back! You can now submit your entry on the Tiny Desk Contest site. And if you need some inspiration, check out the very first entry the Tiny Desk Contest team saw this year.  This week on New Music Friday from All Songs Considered: the return of Paramore, plus new albums by Kelela, Liv.e, Yo La Tengo and more. Remember “Friday,” the viral pop song whose music video and grating chorus were inescapable in 2011? So does Rebecca Black, the song’s oft-memed singer who was only 13 when the song was released. Now 25, Black has left “Friday” (far) behind, focusing in the years since on coming to terms with the experience of teen virality while working toward the dream of pop stardom on her own terms. She spoke with Morning Edition about that process and her new debut album, Let Her Burn. This month’s edition of Jazz Night in America’s On the List playlist includes new music from Lakecia Benjamin, Brad Allen Williams, Marcus Strickland and Bill Laurance & Michael League. This week, our friends at WXPN shared a video of Sunny War performing "New Day" live for a WXPN Free At Noon concert. Tiny Desk NPR I no longer work out of NPR’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., which means I experience Tiny Desk concerts like most the rest of the world: through a screen. Thanks to our talented video and audio teams, it’s a worthy next-best-thing. But every once in a while, I feel especially envious of my colleagues back in DC — like when the Indigo Girls recently came to HQ and performed a Tiny Desk set of stone-cold classics that kicked off with “Closer to Fine.” Plus, our Black History Month series continued this week with a performance by Lee Fields. One More Thing I’m only watching for the halftime show. Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WUFT 89.1 (edit station). Need a new playlist? Follow NPR Music on Spotify and Apple Music What do you think of today's email? 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