Driving home last night through Rathmines, I stop at the lights near Ardagh House and there’s a kid in a third-floor bathroom, giant text on a t-shirt, going through an elaborate routine to get his hair to flop just so, and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ comes on the radio, and I am delighted by the scene and also totally full of envy.

Some part of me, some large part, is a complete asshole who hears some songs and thinks they’re obvious, it’s the thousand time, that was new to me fifteen years ago and really, it was barely new to people fifteen years before that. This is probably the same part that’s just relearning the feeling of my heart pounding and my stomach flipping during a really good song, and the same part that faces a mirror and comb with resignation instead of a mission.

Julien Temple’s Oil City Confidential, a documentary about Dr. Feelgood that combines a reasonably linear narrative of the original band’s career with archival footage and gangster film clips, is awesome. I saw it earlier this week at a slightly peculiar live-via-satellite premiere thing, and while I’ve rarely met a music documentary I didn’t like, this one was kind of thrilling the whole way through.

In particular, Canvey Island and its gas and oil terminals were used to great effect, the story of the band’s interpersonal career was paced really well, She Does It Right was played enough to get fully under my skin, the ‘Thames Delta’ tenuous but heartfelt linking to blues’ lineage,  and the scene with Wilko “For wealth, fame and power, I’d eat shit” Johnson and his screensaver reminded me of Brian Eno’s screensaver piece from his diary in a compare/contrast sort of way.

So I’m reading and writing about popular music with a sort of a game plan, something that finally brings it and words about buildings together, and the consequence of going from a bit obsessive to locked onto a target is that I am going to end up with an individual fixation on every. song. ever.

Rosanne Cash with Bruce Springsteen, Sea of Heartbreak. I have been shuffling through her dad’s version with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Don Gibson’s and realising that (a) I like this song by pretty much anyone, and (b) Rosanne’s contemporary country disadvantage doesn’t stop her from winning, because holy fucking wow, Bruce Springsteen is doing a perfect Roy Orbison there (breaking at the “oh what I’d give to sail back to shore…”) and it’s so delightful that it seems like he’s missing in the other versions now.

But then, Gibson’s backing vocals are a total delight too and it’s whiskey by a neon sign at 3am, and the Heartbreakers’ frenetic energy infecting Johnny is compelling too. I need to combine all of these in Roy Orbison Cover Project: The Resurrectioning.