Cindy Lee released a new 2 hour long album Diamond Jubilee. Interacts in my brain with all of the music I’ve heard from her, and the interviews I’ve read. I don’t think I’ll ever understand their work.

I tweeted in response to a popular music writer’s fan fiction:

i hear it as a two hour album with motifs that come and go throughout the entire 2 hours, like classical music. your break down is definitely “sections” but it sounds like a unified work to me

Here is my art interpretation, which I believe is fan fiction. I mean, goddamn, every single piece of music that has ever been made in the past 500 years might have a note included in this album. That’s an exaggeration, but if you listen to the entire 2 hour album, multiple times, like at least a 10 hour commitment, you will find a unified work with musical motifs/themes/rhythms/grooves/melodies that weave in and out throughout the entire piece of work. It’s like a melodic or rhythmic or poetic fingerprint. This is most obvious with the outro loop that appears prominently near the beginning with “All I Want Is You”, “Wild One”, “Flesh Blood” (with the speed up that might be one of the album’s major shifts?), middle with “Realistik Heaven”, and very end with “24/7 Heaven”, and I know I’m missing some. My god, fuck!, this does not need to be separated. There is even an 18th century seeming choral thing with “Le Machiniste Fantome” bridging the gap into modernity (cannot think of where this comes from right now but it’s deep in my choir boy self who learned to sing at a church). These shifts that feel like different albums are the elements of storytelling and mood. “Dallas” sounds like Elvis btw. And I haven’t hardly listened to the lyrics, will probably get into that in a couple of years after I’ve heard all of the notes and silence.

This is similar to the movements in a Beethoven symphony etc. It’s like a play or film with multiple acts and themes weaved throughout. Cindy Lee is doing it with pop music in a 2 hour album. Diamond Jubilee is classical like that, with the awareness of the symphonic movements and maybe even Tin Pan Alley or maybe I’m wrong but certainly Elvis and the girl groups and no wave and everything in between, then after the 90s nothing is original, yet she combined all of these different influences to make something unique, especially with the exploration of gender identity. You can even hear the transitions throughout the music. A 60 year old girl pop artist who mixes hits, noise, and classical-like movements, and this is her diamond jubilee magnum opus from 1964, but it feels futuristic and hopeful, fallen out of time and Cindy Lee’s history, an angel, a timeless narrative, and not nostalgic.

This is my fan fiction. If she wanted the album to be delineated, then she would’ve released it like that. But she released a two hour album without singles. Reminds me of the lore about “Chaos of the Galaxy/Happy Man” by Sparklehorse. Mark Linkous didn’t want a radio song, so he went back into the studio and deconstructed the song so they wouldn’t put it on the radio.