The Border Between Paradise And The Fall

Mark Ronson featuring Kevin Parker “Leaving Los Feliz”

There’s a point in “Leaving Los Feliz” where Tame Impala singer Kevin Parker – in character as a jaded guy hanging out at a party for rich hipsters in Los Angeles – says that he’s pretending to shoot a documentary in his head of what’s going on around him. And to some extent, that’s what a lot of the Uptown Special record feels like – all these wealthy, cool, glamorous dudes reporting on what it’s like in their world. The lyrics for this song, and most everything else on the record, were written by Michael Chabon, and he does a great job of balancing out a novelist’s instinct for evocative detail with the economy necessary to get across an idea in the limited space of a pop song. We get just enough information to have a very specific idea of who this guy is and who he’s with, and just enough to understand that he’s being an unreliable narrator, and deluding himself if he thinks he’s ever going to willfully abandon this lifestyle.

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