Taylor Swift’s 11th original studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was released last week into a world feverishly gripped by anticipation for a Taylor Swift album. Some were primed to adore her latest work, which Swifties broadly expected to be a thorough excavation of her relationship with her ex-partner of six years, actor Joe Alwyn; others were primed to mock and flame it. We, two rather casual Swift fans, were drawn in by the sheer intensity of the gathering discourse — not to mention our own anticipation of another album.

The recent “surprise” death of Logan Roy in Succession and how it was pseudo-telegraphed through the series had me thinking a lot about another TV demise, one from my favorite series of all time: “Wild Bill” Hickok’s assassination in Deadwood. Roy’s death, while sudden in the microcosm of the episode, seems all but inevitable in the grand scheme of the show. After suffering from a nearly fatal stroke in the first episode, the patriarch of the Roy dynasty was essentially living on borrowed time going forward.

“It’s been a complete fucking waste of my space.” It’s three hours since John Entwistle, initially with The Who’s sound engineer Bobby Pridden alongside him, began talking into my tape recorder, the first “major” interview for what was then, in the spring of 1996, my impending Keith Moon biography. (The book – Dear Boy in the UK, Moon in the US, and with various other translated titles  along the way - recently celebrated its 25th Anniversary.

If you do a quick search on the internet for the meaning behind this song you’ll get many different interpretations, some Christian and others not. Some say the song is about the challenges of a relationship or generic hardships of life. Others are quite convinced this it’s meant to be a spiritual journey and is clearly about the second coming of Christ. Mumford said this when asked if this song (and album) was a statement of their faith:

“This thesis is an attempt to show that the aristocratic regime, and aristocratic morality, is the origin of the idea of nature; that, at the point at which a historical aristocracy starts to decline, its defenders, in abstracting and radicalizing the case for aristocracy in the face of its critics, come upon the teaching of nature and the standard of nature in politics. It is precisely this teaching of nature, so corrosive of all convention and all morality, that is politically explosive, and that explains the deep connection between philosophy—the criminal study of nature outside the city and outside the myths and pieties of the regime—and tyranny–the criminal and feral regime of rule outside and above all law and all convention.