Sometime in the mid-2000s, I was living in New York and commuting home from work when a man came on the subway with a boom box and proceeded to play, at near-earsplitting volume, “Everybody Is a Star,” the exquisite double-A-side to “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” that’s on the very short list of my favorite Sly recordings ever. It’s a work haunted by a weary melancholy that still manages to wrap you in a warm embrace, a record that feels like the last gasp of a worldview that, by the dawn of the 1970s, Sly was already well aware that he was losing. The song’s three minutes unfolded between stops as the whole car sat silently, our world frozen, until it ended and the boom-box-toting man got off the train as nonchalantly as he arrived. I don’t know who that man was, where he came from or where he went, or really anything about his circumstances, but I hope he’s well, and I’m thinking about him today. We’ve got to live together.
Of course I wanna do a "hey that was me!" joke here but even I know to not ruin this moment. 🥲
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