Together Alone with Crowded House and talking About Ghosts with Mary Halvorson
Together Alone is not Crowded House's most famous album, but for Barnaby Smith, it's their best. Recorded in the wild reaches of Karekare Beach in Aotearoa New Zealand, its sound and stories emerge directly from that place. Barnaby, who is the writer of 33 1/3: Together Alone, travelled to Karekare to absorb the atmosphere that precipitated the album joins Andy to make the case for this album in the output of one of Australasia's most successful bands.
Title: Full of Neon
Artist: Mary Halvorson & Amaryllis
Composer: Mary Halvorson
Album: About Ghosts
Label: Nonesuch
Title: Together Alone, Kare Kare, Skin Feeling, Catherine Wheels
Artist: Crowded House
Composer: Neil Finn, Mark Hart, Nick Seymour, Paul Hester, Ngapo 'Bub' Wehi
Album: Together Alone
Label: Capitol
Title: Carved From, Eventidal, Full of Neon, About Ghosts
Artist: Mary Halvorson & Amaryllis
Composer: Mary Halvorson
Album: About Ghosts
Label: Nonesuch
Title: Tedesca dita la proficia
Artist: The Renaissance Players
Composer: Marco Facoli
Album: The Cat's Fiddlestick
Label: Cherrypie
The Music Show is produced on Gadigal and Gundungurra Country
Technical production by Simon Branthwaite
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It concludes an auto-fictional trilogy Debré began in 2018, but you don't need to read the other two novels to fall in love with this one. Name opens as the narrator, having watched over her ailing father for weeks, confronts his death. An avatar of Debré, she is a former (disillusioned) lawyer, born into an illustrious Parisian family trying to maintain "their illusions about nobility, family, France, with their alcoholism, which they pretend not to notice". We delve into Debré's upbringing during the 1970s and 80s. She is ferocious toward the bourgeoisie, castigating a world of children who live with nannies before being shipped off to boarding school. By the time we reach the present day and her life as a lawyer for whom "justice is pointless", Debré has transformed into a woman in radical pursuit of her own story, happily disposing of everything superfluous ("family, marriage, work, apartments, belongings, people"). Debré's prose is a rush. Her voice grabs you by the lapels, hauls you up, and makes you do a double and then a triple-take. Alert, jagged, deadpan, she wakes you. Debré writes with the kind of immediacy you find in authors like Helen Garner, Édouard Louis and Chris Kraus. A paean to the joys of refusal, of realising and accepting there are no gods and no masters, Name is rip-your-hair-out brilliant. — Declan Fry Brazen (Hachette Australia) Maggie; Or, A Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar, is a deeply funny little novel that tells the story of what happens after the set-up to so many jokes. An unnamed narrator begins the story facing two things that threaten to change her life: her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie, and she's just found a lump in her breast. She hides her anguish in humour. As she recounts how her husband revealed his affair at an Indian restaurant, she glibly notes it was "a total naan-sequitur". Being playful and flippant is her way of processing the hurt. 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