Morning Commute Soundtrack: Pink Martini

Oh, hello! My lengthy absence can be explained in a few simple words: I was busy with life and editing the final proofs of my Queen: Complete Works book, an announcement of which will be forthcoming imminently. (Knowing me, I’ll end up announcing it two months too late.) But I’d like to return to the Morning Commute Soundtrack, which has been met with positive encouragement from more than one person, indicating that people do, in fact, read this blog!

Pink Martini is one of those bands that I discovered by way of a former coworker, who, once upon a time, sent me a comprehensive and overwhelming list of bands and musicians he was then interested in. Their musical diversity – it’s hard to categorize them, though their band leader, Thomas Lauderdale, describes their sound as “music of the world without being world music” – was an immediate hit with me, and I invested in their back catalog post haste. There’s a ton of great music on their most recent studio album (not counting the seasonal Joy To The World, released last year), Splendor In The Grass, and I was tempted to pick the sweeping, grandiloquent title track, but the playfulness of the two-parter ‘And Now You’re Gone’ and ‘But Now I’m Back’, the latter with NPR White House correspondent Ari Shapiro taking the role of an inconsiderate, possibly two-timing boyfriend, was too good to not showcase.