This is difficult to write about without both trauma dumping and giving away too much IRL info and/or some autobiographical details; but I also wanted to put it here because I know there are other people who’ll read it and “get it” better than others.

(Felt emotional, might delete later.)

1. A friend of mine died about five years ago. Put simply, he was one of the best, kindest humans on the planet. He was the tireless champion of people and things he felt had gone unrecognized or underappreciated. And he was the kind of stalwart believer that would keep gently nudging you until you Got It. He was also an enormous Sparks fan, and had been since the 70s. He saw them play in rooms of 500 to theaters of 7000 and everything in between. He was there for every night of 21x21. When they were in town, he’d buy extra tickets for friends on the promise that they’d attend the show. More than just being stubborn, he had the patience of a ninja.

He died 12 days after I returned home to LA for good, while I was still readjusting to driving and air conditioning and Pacific Standard Time.

He was spared the horrors of the pandemic, and January 6th, and the three days of collective sphincter-clenching before Joe Biden was announced as the winner of the election. He never got to see The Sparks Brothers or Annette, or see his favorite band headline at the Hollywood Bowl- all after a comeback that even he couldn’t have anticipated.

2. I had resisted the charms of Sparks for a long time, in what I can only describe as an Austenesque series of missed steps and false starts. Being enticed by hearing Lil’ Beethoven over the speakers while working at Famous Arthouse Theater but being told I couldn’t borrow it and being given Balls to borrow instead (which probably set me back a decade). The fact that around 2004 the clearance bin at Amoeba was full of copies of both Plagarism and Gratuitous Sax… at between $1 and $5 apiece. The music industry environment that I “grew up in” leading me to mistake their thumbing their noses at genre for dilettantism. Their daunting discography. The fact that I could almost never take him up on one of those free tickets because I was working two jobs to stay afloat and couldn’t afford too many nights off.

Similarly, there was a lot about my grief that I couldn’t process. I had culture shock upon re-entry. Then there was the pandemic. There was processing my ADHD diagnosis at 38 and mourning all the potential lost in those unfocused years. There were family issues and found family struggles. Outlets of joy and creativity either being postponed or canceled altogether. All of it just sort of coalesced into a sort of flavorless blancmange of inertia and ennui.

I would think about him at certain times of the year and feel the most crushing sadness. Not only for his loss, but that of the community he’d built and welcomed so many into. One full of people as passionate and nerdy and pop-culturally omnivorous as he was.

In both cases, there was always something in the way.

3. It took over a decade of his friendship, a two and a half hour documentary that made me say “Huh, so Sparks aren’t just one slammin’ electropop album and then a bunch of new wave dork music?”, and a microdose of a mind-altering substance, but I finally got it. Overnight, even. One could argue it was the drugs, but those wore off a year ago and I still love this damn band. I love that they were able to give me the excitement of discovery again; of finding a new album or artist that wasn’t spat out by an algorithm but by certified word of mouth (even if it had to come via Edgar Wright). I thought I’d lost that somewhere around age 30.

Patient as stone, he’d managed to keep nudging me until I Got It from beyond the grave.

I can’t say how many times in this past year I’ve cried, or how often I wished I could call or email him after listening to an album. I don’t think I’ll ever know his favorite Sparks song. We’ll never get to argue about our top 5 albums and why we ranked them the way we did. (I think if he were still around he might even be able to convince me that Balls is Decent, Actually.)

I held onto that grief for so long without confronting it. And for better or worse, I’ve kinda been forced to. There’s never going to be anything Sparks for me without the echo of him around it. But little by little —album by album or even song by song— I’ve managed to process it. And if I’m lucky, I can transform it.

4. I joke that Sparks are my emotional support septuagenarian art-pop duo, and they are. They’re my bridge to the friend I never got to say Hello to before he was gone. But more than that, they’re also a bridge back to when I was 25 and downloading obscure 60s albums off of newsgroups because the bands were Sunset Strip scenesters. Of educating myself on film through Famous Arthouse and the video store next to it that gave our staff free rentals. Russell mentioning Sky Saxon and reminding me that I haven’t listened to The Seeds’ self-titled album in at least a decade; finding it on the external hard drive I’d downloaded it to and listening to it with new ears. Hearing Ron talk about film and remembering that, for as much Kurosawa as I’ve seen, I’ve never actually sat down to watch all three-plus hours of Seven Samurai. That I actually have a list of movies to see to that I’ve been neglecting for Who Knows How Long that I should probably get to crossing off. Reminding myself to take in more art and less content; consuming more slow media but not being a hifalutin jerk who can’t enjoy something silly or bingeable. Or, put simply: patience.

It is, perhaps, a little bit like joy.