Hello, my sweets. I appreciate you being here for the 19th installment of my Substack: Duchess of Rock, in which I use a song-of-the-week as inspiration for reflecting on how the music we love is woven through our lives as a touchstone for connecting to and parsing vital moments. This last week, I’ve been spending time with my best friend while she recovers from surgery, and it got me reflecting on our weekends up in Annandale (in the Hudson Valley of N.Y.) among our many shared adventures — both transcendent and absurd — during our 33-year friendship.
Today’s pick: “My Old School,” by Steely Dan, from their 1973 album, “Countdown to Ecstasy”
Do you have a friend who knows every person you have ever been in love with, especially the secret ones, including the one for whom you got a tattoo? (Oops!) The friend who decorated your 16th-birthday cake, lived with you in your first apartment (a haunted farmhouse in Tivoli, N.Y.) and was there the last time you took LSD (well, at least not in a medicinal context). She was the first person to feed you Veuve Clicquot and a fresh truffle. But you also used to pool your scant funds when you saw concerts at the Middle East in Cambridge, Mass., so you could go across the street to buy $2 beers and a slice of pizza, everything split exactly equal. The friend you once fought passionately with (over multiple nights) about whether “Astral Weeks” or “T.B. Sheets” was the superior Van Morrison song. The friend who bought you flowers when you finished your first novel in the apartment you shared in a historic brownstone, which she was paying more rent for, so you could have the better room, where you wrote fiction and music reviews.
If you have such a friend, I’m sure you consider yourself lucky, as I very much do.
I met my best friend when I was 15. We had rooms on the same hallway in our first dorm at early college in Great Barrington, Mass. The next year, we survived a school shooting together. And then, we both transferred to Bard College in Annandale, N.Y., where a clerical error made us roommates. Several years younger than our classmates and marked by our shooting, a tragedy everyone on campus was aware of, we tried to puzzle out how to be teenaged transfer students at this gorgeous, rarified place. Our professors were brilliant; our classmates, the children of actors and art stars, could drape a scarf like nobody’s business. They pursued their nascent creative pursuits with an insouciance that awed me. I got an incredible education in writing and critical thinking, and more importantly, copped enough of the bravado of our peers to declare myself a writer when I graduated at 19.
During our time at Bard, I had access to my best friend’s truly encyclopedic CD collection, which got me into Billie Holiday and David Bowie. (I had been a teen goth and punk with a limited musical palate.) We listened to music for hours in her room in Tivoli, dancing, and drinking Carlo Rossi on ice. She played a lot of Nirvana and Nick Cave, plus Jimmy Buffett (maybe too much?), and enough Steely Dan to get me (grudgingly) hooked. Founding members Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (and first drummer Chevy Chase) were then among the most famous Bard alumni. At the time, I was more impressed that the Beastie Boys’ Ad-Roc had attended not long before us. But my best friend is one of those next level music obsessives who can get you to reconsider any artist (did I mention Jimmy Buffett?) with her passion for and deep understanding of their catalogue.
In Steely Dan’s “My Old School” an off-kilter piano lopes along under bleating horns, arch vocals, and barbed guitar solos, made resplendent by brassy soul singers on the chorus. There’s even a breakdown with cowbell. It’s musically accomplished rock with the sophisticated swing of jazz. I suppose my appreciation for Steely Dan was a bit ironic, but that’s only fitting, as their sly, light-rock bon mots dripped with ironic observations about our college. Listening to them at Bard made me feel a kind of pre-nostalgia, and listening to them now makes me think back fondly to a place where I didn’t exactly feel like I belonged. But I learned how to act like I did, which has taken me further than the deep knowledge of Jane Austen I picked up there. More movingly, Steely Dan’s music takes me back to those endless summer days up in Annandale, thunderstorms rolling in across the Hudson River every afternoon, our whole lives spread before us. Some people get lucky in love as teenagers. I’d have to argue I was even luckier because I met the person who got me through all of the unlucky moments and provided so much of the soundtrack to our shared life.
Please sing along to a song you once listened to with your best friend. Love, the Duchess
In book news:
My debut novel, “The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers,” is out now from Flatiron Books. The first leg of my tour is in the books — thanks to everyone who turned up in support! Next, come see me in Seattle and Nashville. (Book tour details here.)
Do you, your mom, or your mom’s cat have a book club?! Please consider reading “The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers.” Email me at sarah@sarahtomlinson.com, and I’d be happy to send you some discussion questions or stop by / Zoom in for a conversation about ghostwriting, crime writing, and the book’s musical inspirations.
Many friends have asked what they can do to support me and my book, and here’s a big one: whether you purchased my novel through Amazon, please log on and leave it a rating (I’d recommend 5 stars, but you do you!) and even a one-line review. Without enough reviews, my book won’t come up as a recommended title when readers search for related books. Thank you!
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