It happened when Cindy Lee and I were on the road to Sudbury.
I know that probably raises a question for some, and it’s a fair one, and so I won’t sidestep it.
Who the hell would be on the road to Sudbury?
Well, we were, because Sudbury has a Costco and North Bay doesn’t, but none of this is relevant and matters little to the story.
It happened just before Sturgeon Falls. Cindy became the first person ever to ask that I turn up a song that had been playing really low on my 12-speaker Beats system. That never happens, but Cindy Lee’s my girl, and so it was awesome that she’d let me air it out out for any reason. The song happened to be that little ditty currently making the rounds featuring Elton John and Dua Lipa, called Cold Heart, where two of Elton’s songs from yesteryear are incorporated into the tune that was recorded during a pandemic collaboration album. As an Elton John fan from the beginning, I assumed she was responding to the carve-ins from Rocket Man and Kiss The Bride, but I was wrong on that. The reason Cindy wanted the volume boost was because she wanted to sing along with the other artist, Dua Lipa, a British/Albanian singer-songwriter.
I was vaguely familiar with this artist, had seen her name, knew she was part of the song, but for me it was all Elton. Apparently I’m the only person in the entire world who doesn’t know who Dua Lipa is. That’s now changed.
In my defence, I never saw the movie Barbie, so didn’t know she was Mermaid Barbie, nor did I know that the main song from the movie, Dance The Night, was hers.
Cindy tells me this is her new favourite artist, and when she says stuff like this, I listen, because she’s directed me to all kinds of artists I’ve not really spent any time paying attention to. So you could say that she’s broadened my musical horizons to a degree. With Dua Lipa, she’s done it again.
I downloaded Dua’s — her real name — latest album, Radical Optimism, to play as background to my morning get-pretty routine, with a generous perspective needed on what constitutes prettiness to properly capture what that moment looks like in the mind’s eye. Anyways, it wasn’t just good, it was really good. The music I mean. I figured I had really stumbled upon something exciting and new here.
I couldn’t wait to show off how cool I was as a sixty-five year old by recommending a really good, can’t-miss new artist to some people in my life. I captured the share information and fired it off to my daughter, then to my son, then to a buddy in Kingston. Then sat back waiting for the accolades to come flooding in.
My daughter was first, saying she had two songs from that album already on her phone. My son checked in with a simple “Yeah, she’s great!.” Then Kingston weighed in with “That’s a fun album.” So much for being Mr. Cool. So much for being at the top of the curve.
It turns out that this girl, Dua, who was told she couldn’t sing while trying out for a school choir, has managed to sing and dance her way to several prominent awards and chart-topping hits, including what appears to be the start of an impressive Grammy collection. I guess sometimes teachers get it wrong.
On top of all this, she happens to be a successful model, but then again, of course she is. She appears intent on accomplishing more professionally before the age of 30 than I could manage in four-hundred years of determined effort, although she only has three Grammys more than I do at present, something I consider to be within legitimate striking distance if I really bear down starting right now.
Then there’s that whole Time Magazine thing that has her included in the Most 100 Influential People of 2024, a list I’m sure I just narrowly missed out on making.
She’s also a social activist, which I have to admire. Someone who takes a moment or two to leverage her fame towards the betterment of others is somebody to respect as far as I’m concerned. She’s not a commie, or a too-woke, or raging out-of-control feminist. Dua is, instead, a person with the ability to think outside herself, and lend herself to the advancement and inclusion of others. In Albanian, her native language, her name means “love.” Again, of course it does.
So yeah, I like her. Sorry it took me so long to catch up to everybody else.
PHOTO CREDIT: By Raph_PH – Glasto24_28_300624 (259 of 545), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=150083172
NEWSMAGRENFREW 