Musical Boyfriend AA Bondy

I have a lot of musical boyfriends. The downside to this, aside from the obvious one-sidedness of the romance, is that you cannot slowdance with a man who is already playing a mournful guitar and lead singing.

My boyfriend AA Bondy will be in Vancouver next month, at a small venue where the performers are so close to the audience, you can smell the smoke on their clothes if you stand up front. This man could sing pages from the phone book and you would love it. The phone book itself would pucker its pages together in shy delight to hear the way he can sound meaning into anything.

I’ve seen him before, and he is no Sufjan Stevens all wide eyed and bedazzled. He is slim, his adam’s apple as bulgy as his eyes. His skin is pale and his eyes are dark. What makes him so attractive is the stillness he is capable of, even in front of the eyes of the audience.

In his previous work, he has sung a lot about god, and vampires, and all the other fearful creatures they conjure in the South to keep children honest and get full grown men off the bottle. His new record, just now on NPR’s first listen page, is called Believers. It will officially release next week. I will buy it promptly, and memorize the words. And on Oct 7^th when he plays at the Media Club, I will likely take my lesbro, and hold his loving, platonic hand, and there will be no slowdancing. But I won’t mind.