Culture

THE TRUTH WAS OUT THERE:

People have been searching for this song from ‘The X-Files’ for 25 years. Until now (Erika Ryan, DECEMBER 13, 2023, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED)

It was in an episode from 1998 — season 6, episode 5, titled Dreamland II — that was the second part of a storyline where special agent Fox Mulder swaps bodies with an Area 51 employee. The scene in question takes place at a bar in Nevada where a country-western love song plays in the background.

Ancona said the lyrics were what grabbed her attention.

“The lyrics were so specific that, you know, they could obviously be interpreted as if they were singing to or about an alien or some extraterrestrial life or something that isn’t human,” she said.

Ancona tried an app on her phone to identify it. Nothing. When she looked up the lyrics, she came across other X-Files fans who had been searching for the same song – a mystery that had gone unsolved for 25 years.

She posed the question on X (formerly known as Twitter) and it exploded. Within days, Ancona got her answer.

just had the weirdest experience

was watching an X-files episode & there’s this country song playing in the background of the bar they’re in

& it’s so good it jars me out of my idle multitasking to Shazam it

except

— auntie cistamine (@laurenancona) December 5, 2023

Composer Rob Cairns came across the viral post and reached out to his friend who just so happened to be the co-writer behind that song, Dan Marfisi.

“He said, ‘You might want to check out this Twitter thread, and if you jump in, you will be a hero,'” Marfisi told NPR. “So I went and got my cape, and I logged on, and it was a party.”

NOW THAT’S A FUNERAL (profanity alert):

WHITE NIGHTS:

GO EAST, YOUNG MEN:

REVIEW: of Play All Night! by Bob Beatty (Charles Caramello, December 3, 2023, Washington Independent Review of Books)

Play All Night! instead weaves a complex story about Allman as a visionary “musician and band leader,” ABB as the vehicle and incarnation of his vision, and ABB’s performances at Fillmore East in March 1971 and the resulting live album At Fillmore East “the truest fulfillment” of it.

Beatty first tracks Duane through his apprenticeship with cover bands on the Southern circuit; his journeyman work with his band Hour Glass; his return to the South after a rough year in California; and his creation of the Allman Brothers Band. Beatty then tracks ABB through two years of fruitful touring and two studio albums (critical successes but commercial failures), to the seminal gig at Fillmore East and Duane’s death, on its heels, in a motorcycle accident. An epilogue traces ABB from its peak in the early 1970s through a low point in the 1980s and revival in 1989, to a second peak, with a fine new line-up, from 2001 to 2014.

In Duane’s vision, as Beatty portrays it, ABB would focus on “musical virtuosity” and on “individual expression through live improvisational music,” not on “chasing pop hits.” It would play countless (often free) concerts, using the stage, rather than the studio, as rehearsal space, and making “audiences an important part of the music.” And it would be egalitarian, each member having license in playing style and access to playing time, with Duane as “leader” but not frontman — “allies working together,” as Duane put it, “sharing a mutual love.”

As time has proven, ABB realized Duane’s vision of profoundly organic and communal music; “six musicians in deep, constant musical conversation in front of an appreciative audience,” in Beatty’s words. As Gregg Allman put it:

“We played for each other, we played to each other, and we played off each other.”

Such demanding, rigorous, and bold improvising, with each musician “staying in the moment while simultaneously anticipating where the music is headed,” when done right, resulted in “hittin’ the note,” the band’s term for the elusive moment, musical and spiritual, when all elements perfectly align.