The unmagnificent lives of adults - 5-19-10

"....but your kisses aren't enough

to keep your kids in line

so you better straighten out yourself

and give your baby time

cause if you don't give her what she needs

she'll get it where she can

she's lonely man"

Sad songs, sad moments, sad sack. The range of emotions evoked by music, movies, books, stories all, range from the elation of smiles and laughs to the throat catching, the tears stuttering out and smearing vision. The depth and response to the emotion is amplified and fueled by wine, that perfect late night moment of listening to the troubadour’s tale after that one glass too true. You know that moment when you play that song again and louder and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, and its always a song that takes several listens to get under your skin. The perfect auteur of these sad songs for dirty lovers is Matt Berninger and his band of brothers, The National.

Intense, brooding songs of broken promises and lost loves are the canon of these guys and as they have aged the concerns and causes have matured and aged. As the corners have been knocked off, life has been chiseling away at their youthful heart of hearts, tugging on their sleeve of sleeves. Wars taking place behind doors in squalor and apartments in Brooklyn, being mistaken for strangers and getting lit up, this is the urban cowboy’s new pasture. The girls have grown up from wistful teens, the lust has moved on from trophy wives looking for a younger man, the relationships have life-cycled through mix tape to brutal break up, settling down and growing up.  Matt’s baritone is the perfect tone and pitched as half spoken half sung, these are the standard for the late night soliloquy. He is always leaving us with a last line thrown away, being consigned for ever as a middle brow screw up, losing his breath, cause he is evil.

Matt exhorts us “Dear, we better get a drink in you,” before we start to bore him. So what do we drink while we toast the fake empire, while we raise our glass to the mansions on the hill and the life that could have been but that never was? Something big enough for an emotional crutch, something mature enough to have stood the test of time’s changes, something that we have grown used to, watched develop and deepen with each passing vintage. T-Vine’s Gregg Brown has been hand making wines quietly in Napa since the mid 90’s and I was lucky to be introduced to them back then by John Rittmaster at Prima Vini in Walnut Creek. Gregg’s wines are hand made in the true sense with a preference for gut feel over technological tricks and his T Blend is as lush and seductive as a Napa Valley cab can be without the pretension, and being a blend it changes every vintage. T Blend ’06 has Primativo blended in and its fruit caresses the palate and the finish will encourage you to keep drinking, this is not a dapper sipper. This will get your good mix on and listening to the High Violet you will quickly enter the dark but never drab world of the National, sing, cry, smile; the whole unmagnificent life of us adults is there for the submerging.