Emersonmania

Well, I certainly don’t think anyone’s going to be very happy with me this week, since I’ve once again failed to cough up even the faintest scent of anything remotely reportable. That is to say, Greetings! It is the news once again I don’t have.

I don’t mean to make excuses, but sometimes I get a little depressed around this time of year from both mourning the summer and dreading the winter, which this year seemed to descend even more abruptly than usual on the dot of Labor Day, instantly making things cold, gray, and gloomy.

Sometimes it’s quite impressive how on schedule life can be. One minute I’m surfin’ in the sun with my wahini baby, and the next, I’m a drone, intermittently punching keys in the glow of the cathode ray, too dead to dream, a burned-out zombie at the end of the line. Which, I hope, somewhat explains if not altogether mitigates the frustratingly low quality of my writing in the winter months (roughly, September through June), not to mention the subsequent dull, muffling effect it has on my, uh, personality.

I do try harder to write good in the summer, the better to attract the attention of many more rich white people/prospective patrons. Many of them has complement me on my writing two or three time. While my writing, I think, at its best, has never really been about winning awards so much as not winning them (which it has done more of), it is my writing that is here, now, and thus most likely to be read by you at this time!

And with that, let’s check our top (only, really) story: the new Chris Emerson record is out, and he might be from Cape Cod!

The reasons I think he might be local are: I just started getting his emails out of nowhere, and my editor got his debut CD, “Tourist” somehow, and it’s on Monomoy Records. All the evidence screams Cape Cod.

Except that he sounds like Bryan Adams. In one of the reviews (from the electronic press kit someone emailed me), my Boston Globe colleague Steve Morse compared him to Richard Marx; and, while I don’t think I’ve ever heard or would like Richard Marx, I’ll bet he sounds just like Bryan Adams. Chris is very slick, competent, arena-ready, and bland -maybe even a guy who actually likes arenas. All in all, I guess I’d say no great shakes in the music department. I have not seen the future of rock and roll, but I’ll bet it’s not Chris Emerson.

It being the first week after Labor Day, though, the Chris Emerson phenomenon demanded further investigation (my thinking being, basically, so what if he’s boring, he’s the biggest story to hit this sleepy burg all week, and let’s dig up all the dirt we can, without actually working on it much.) I have to admit, the result in the office has been a veritable explosion of Emersonmania that almost raged out of control for a good twenty, twenty-five minutes, as I furiously sped from one internet dead end to another.

First, I went to his website, www.chrisemersonmusic.com. For about ten seconds, it flashed the word “loading”; then it types out the words "chrisemersonmusic.com”, accompanied even by synchronized typing sounds, and then the computer crashes.

Or, at least, my computer did a couple of times; but then, I have a very old computer, actually a 1965 Hoover Flashtalk 4000, one of the great vacuum companies’ last steam-powered versions. I’m thinking of getting a new one, as it’s getting harder and harder to find parts and re-fills, etc., but I love the old, wood-cabinet look.

Then I went back to the electronic press kit and was amused to find a line about his being like “a young Darryl Hall!” and also having had one of his songs used on “Dawson’s Creek”, and then remembered how much I had disliked Aerosmith and the Doobie Brothers when I first heard them and then considered the possibility that Chris Emerson might someday be a very rich man, the kind of man who could buy or sell a little maggot like myself any day of the week.

Then I noticed that someone had emailed me a “Chris Emerson E Card”, and I didn’t even know what an E Card was! It turned out to have links to four of the songs I’d already disliked from the album, and then, all on its own, it typed out the words “chrisemersonmusic.com”, accompanied again by synchronized typing sounds, and by another crash of my computer.

So I was not really able to find out all that much about Chris Emerson, and still don’t know, for instance, if he’s even from Cape Cod or not. He strikes me as an enigma, a man who makes the sounds I don’t need to hear much of; but from where?
 

Reprinted with permission of the Cape Codder, Orleans, MA.