Wow! Big Star are putting out their first album in 27 years this fall. Insane! I just finished reading Nick Hornby’s latest book, and one of the characters in there puts forth the proposition that everybody should get back together… Old bands, old friends, old lovers. Of course, he gets shot down on that idea in pretty short order, because if that were the case, all of the greatest musicians would be stuck with their first garage bands, everyone would be dating their high-school girlfriend forever, and people would just never grow or change in general. (An aside: It’s really good, Hornby’s new book. Sort of a summing up of his first three, if you go with the assumption that High Fidelity was a book about 20-year-olds, About a Boy was about (simultaneously) teenagers and 30-year-olds, and How to be Good was about 40-year-olds. So in A Long Way Down then, these sort of characters all meet up and hang out together. It’s sort of a Coupland trick yeah, but it works.) But anyway, back to Big Star. Somehow I think it’s OK them getting back together at this point. It doesn’t just seem like a cash grab, and it probably won’t be the hippy-dippy love fest that Brian Wilson’s latest projects have been. Alex Chilton’s lived and grown and been a star at 15 and washed dishes for a living at 30 and I think now it’s just time for him to just rock the hell out of it and get what he deserves. And the wrong shall fail, and the right prevail. =)