Tinted Windows
Tinted Windows
Week 65: April 26-May 2, 2020
I started the week (in the Sunday write-up) claiming that I was tired of writing about COVID and that we should all make a conscious effort to move away from filtering all our blogging thoughts through the idea of COVID. We ended the week (in three reviews, from me and Sunny and Sean) filtering all our thoughts about Tinted Windows through the idea of COVID.
In a tortured metaphor about cookies (foreshadowing darker obsessions in the future), I found myself finding too little satisfaction in being cooped up inside the house and being forced to act like everything was normal and that we could just listen to a little Hanson-all-grown-up supergroup and just enjoy it for what it was instead of what it meant in the grand scheme of things (or didn't, which was the problem). Sunny was missing social interactions and found himself yearning for an experience like the boys of Tinted Windows had, just fucking around and creating something while hanging out in person. Sean wanted an escape, and had visions of himself driving down NJ highways, using this current album as his soundtrack in those dreams. And I'm assuming that 50+ people consciously or unconsciously chose to ignore the RC album of the week in favor of listening to algorithmic comfort food music during their stressful weeks in quarantine.
I guess COVID has something to do with the fact I'm still stuck on Adam Schlesinger's death after all these years. It's strange, mostly because (as documented in an early-pandemic blog post) I didn't even know who that was until he died. I didn't know him, didn't mourn him, mostly just used his death as an excuse to explore some of his work (and, in the case of "That Thing You Do!", fall permanently in love). Maybe it's just a coincidence that he died the way he did, in the early days of a pandemic that we were still figuring out, from a disease that killed so many and yet exists in our culture still as this sort of half-joke, not to be taken seriously, less we remember the mountains of body bags. Maybe if I had lost a close family member to COVID, I wouldn't think about Schlesinger as much. As it stands now, I think about his death a weird amount.
I'll defend the idea of exploring a supergroup that he was an integral member of via our music club, even if the results fell a little flat, both in quality of album and quantity of reviews. For the record, I like this album a lot, and totally underrated it at that time. But that's me talking from a safe space. I can totally understand how that lack of safety at the time might fuck with one's head. I mean, the Tinted Windows guy fucking died, and who knew who was gonna be next?
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