So here it is.
I wish everyone a New Year that brings you closer to realising the dreams you can't afford to lose if you stick to your own "music sheet"!
Today the "magic finger" wasn't allowed to decide, instead I scrolled the iPod to find a few songs that particularly lingered with me throughout last year. They made up for missing my morning meditation because I slept through both the alarm clock and a phone call, to wake up almost an hour after I should have been at work.
"Buy a new alarm clock," somebody said. The one I've got is bad enough. Maybe I should use an iPod, but if it's music, especially with words, it fills my mind too much for the meditative hour to begin empty of anything but the last dreams.
To a bloke who dismissed meditation as a "something waste of time", I suggested he wait until he reaches my venerable age. Granted, it might have had more effect without the cigarette waiting to be lit.
One of the songs was by the tough Martha Wainwright, whose cracks aren't always wise. She encouraged me to open a chat with the woman I sat down next to on the M since she moved an acoustic guitar to make room for me. The soft black leather carry-case was unzipped enough to show a classy instrument.
"Is that," I began, "for your life or a luxury?"
"What do you mean?" she said, after a habitual hesitation, in her case too short to count in seconds.
"Professional or pleasure?"
At best, it's hard to tell anyway. And now you know how easily some of those chats in the Métro start, though being able to have one with such an obvious musician is a rare delight. This one had long dark brown hair, a very brown tan, deep brown eyes and smiled a lot. She wore a black jacket and one of the most colourful floral skirts I've seen in a while.
It turned out to be "pleasure", but she opened up fast in 10 minutes and by the time she got off we were talking about how difficult it is to make a career of music when you write and perform "intimate folk-pop" songs, which is what she does. I wanted to know what she meant by "folk-pop" and found her answer a very good omen for the coming year.
 It proved to be the "etiquette" she has had to slap on her style and no more. She's a nice, lively girl in her late 20s. I didn't mention Martha Wainwright's debut album, her melancholy in some songs or say you can scarcely get more intimate than that record.
Of late I've read some more fuss about that song, 'B.M.F.A.', an acronym she spells out about her dad though Martha says he "inspired" it. Before hearing her do that again, since the singer who in November released the more extensive special edition of the album was still going while I shopped, I wondered whether she'd really needed to be public with such language and sentiments, but there's no doubt she had to get it off her chest somehow.
It's not my favourite song on a tough album full of strong writing and feelings. Nor, on the whole, were the Wainwright revelations one of the highest points of my year, since she has the balls, all right, but empties a barrel of bile. A phrase new to me makes sense in the Pitchfork review by Stephen M. Duesner: "romantic masochism".
That's extremely well put for an often excessive practice. Martha took music to transcend bitterness, she sure is sly and grabs the ear by sometimes slurring the delivery of her lyrics in a distinctive voice, cigarettes and honey maybe, dosed with bleach. It's still a relief that nobody could follow such a cathartic debut, where her strength and confidence win an inner battle she largely puts in the mouths of those who put her down, with more of the same.
In the notorious song, she sings,
"Oh I wish I wish I wish I was born a man
So I could learn how to stand up for myself
Like those guys with guitars
I've been watching in bars
Who've been stamping their feet to a different beat
To a different beat (...),"
but she's done it now.
There's less of the family -- in which other members have had a musical go at her father, Loudon III, who had very long hair and didn't seem tyrannical when I saw and enjoyed him in concert maybe 30 years ago and he was a lad himself -- and more of the poetry in the ballads that give Martha's first album real staying power for me.
As a woman who should remain one, she's got a gentle side and she does "folk-pop", but you could invent all kinds of other influences, from church to country, and she can sing in French. I'd hate to pin her down, like the love lyrics that speak for everyone and she's one of the many people to whom I'd wish a less stormy 2006.
The picture by Gary Porter comes from a Wisconsin concert last June and has enough man in it to remind you this site isn't and won't be exclusive. Several fellers had their say on today's musical selection.
When I turned Martha down to pay, the cashier was talking in Danish to people a way behind me in the store queue. Other people together nattered in French, some in Arabic or Tamazight, there were smatterings of African languages, a bit of Vietnamese and I wished the woman who took my money a happy new year in English, which she did back.
Nearly all of those voices belonged to women.
If the slender guitarist from the M should one day stumble on herself here, well: I saw how your eyes lit up, so if ever you try, I hope you make it.
The weekly Les Inrocks starts each new year with a good idea. Having selected from any number of new voices who sent in music, its reviewers give the readers the hard job, choosing 'CQFD' (Fr). On this year's sampler, there are a score of them.
I count six women songwriters or females up front in bands among "Ceux Qu'Il Faut Découvrir", and shan't vote myself, just listen, but if I chose to cast a ballot for a touch of wit without listening, I was amused to see a boy's "garage punk" band call themselves 'Second Sex'.
Here's a silly question to which the answer's rhetorical, not among those you've got to discover: will it never cease to be a very touchy subject?
11:17:35 PM link 
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