Lifestyle
For Dry January, we ask a music critic for great songs about not drinking
Pink’s 2009 pop hit “Sober” may be the best known song about sobriety. She’s shown above at The BRIT Awards in London in 2019.
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Pink’s 2009 pop hit “Sober” may be the best known song about sobriety. She’s shown above at The BRIT Awards in London in 2019.
Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
For those who’ve discovered that Dry January has been more excruciating than expected, we have help: a dive into great songs that explore sobriety.
“I’m coming up on five years sober so this is all extremely personal to me,” says music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, who worked at The New Yorker for a decade. His 2023 memoir Earlier reflects on his coming of age in New York City, his trajectory as a writer and musician, his family and his recovery from alcohol abuse.
Even as someone actively working a 12 step program, Frere-Jones says his first instinct was to reject the idea of good songs about not drinking.
“Music sort of makes me drunk, and I don’t want to think about sobriety when I listen to music,” he says. “Don’t preach to me. Don’t tell me what to do. I don’t want that in my music.”
He associated drinking with certain artists he loved, such as Elliott Smith.
“That was my guy,” he says. “I don’t think anyone has ever written about drinking better than Elliott.” In “Between The Bars” Smith appears to be singing to the alcohol itself: “Drink up, baby, look at the stars / I’ll kiss you again, between the bars / When I’m where I’m seeing you there with your hands in the air / Waiting to finally be caught.”
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Elliott Smith, along with musicians such as Amy Winehouse, was known for music that seemed to romanticize abusing alcohol and drugs. It should go without saying that both of them are dead, after years of heartbreaking addiction.
So what are the good sobriety songs?
When asked to identify good songs about not drinking, Frere-Jones was at first stumped. Then he remembered “Straight Edge,” by Minor Threat, the Washington, D.C., punk band founded in 1980 by Ian MacKaye. It mocks the predictability and commercialism of using drugs and alcohol to escape the world.
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“It’s such an amazing piece of music.” Frere-Jones says. “The reason we talk about straight edge punks is because of this song. And I am roughly the age that Ian MacKaye is. He sang it as a teenager and I heard it as a teenager.”
Many years later, during a horrible time of his life, Frere-Jones was in a hospital psychiatric ward when he first heard the song “I’m Blessed,” by Charlie Wilson.
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“We would all get together and they would play us songs,” he remembers. “And it was grim. A lot of people in that room were in extremely bad shape. And this amazing woman kept playing ‘I’m Blessed.’ And the first time I heard it, I was like, ‘Lady, this is a little too cheerful.’”
“But then I fell in love with the song,” he continues. “I had to get over myself and absorb it as a song. I know Charlie’s story and I think it is a sobriety song.”
Charlie Wilson was the successful lead singer of the Gap Band, known for crossover R&B hits in the late 1970s. Then he became addicted to alcohol, cocaine and crack.
“He ended up very unhoused,” Frere-Jones says. “He ended up in really, really dire, dire straits, like no-joke stuff. He suffered greatly when he was using.”
But the singer met a drug counselor he ended up marrying. He has remained sober for decades. “And he’s just so happy. [‘I’m Blessed’] definitely makes being sober sound pretty great,” Frere-Jones says.
Sobriety as a state of mind
He suggests the best known sobriety song may be Pink’s “Sober.” Her 2009 pop hit was also nominated for a Grammy. Pink has been open about her past substance abuse, and the song refers to it, with lyrics such as, “Why do I feel this party’s over / No pain inside/ You’re like perfection/ But how do I feel this good sober?”
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“I don’t think there’s anyone who has gotten sober who doesn’t understand every single word of this song,” Frere-Jones notes. “And it’s also really good because it goes back and forth, from the specific to the general. Also, I just love Pink and I think it’s catchy. I’m inclined to believe anything Pink says.”
Pink is among a surprising number of celebrity musicians, all women, who have written songs entitled “Sober” in the past few years. They include Kelly Clarkson, Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez and Lorde.
“I did not expect there to be so many songs simply called, ‘Sober,’ ” Frere-Jones admits. “A lot of them are using sober or sobriety as a metaphor or state of mind. It’s interesting, the gender divide. I mean, I don’t think we have that many male pop stars, to be frank. But the men don’t have songs called ‘Sober.’ “
Frere-Jones suggests these musicians may be staring down the shame and stigma of addiction. “I feel like women are just, in general, stronger and more honest,” he says. “I’m not surprised that the women are more like, ‘Yeah, I got sober, here’s my song,’ and the guys have to be like, ‘What’s a clever way of saying this?’ “
“The Demi Lovato one is really pretty raw,” he adds. “It almost isn’t a song. It’s like a Tumblr post, and I mean that in the most admiring way. I feel like her public [struggles] have been very agonized, really agitated and touching. And in some ways, [the song is] one of the most important because if it’s too euphemistic, people ignore it. Demi Lovato is just like saying it out loud, in plain language. And I think that’s really powerful.”
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Songs of recovery
If you want to hear both men and women singing about sobriety, you will find that in country music. “Rap and country are two great American genres in that they contain the most evidence of daily life, and they often are where things show up the fastest,” Frere-Jones says. He describes Kenny Chesney’s 1998 hit, “That’s Why I’m Here,” as “the single most AA meeting song I’ve ever heard,” a joyful song about recovery.
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Aerosmith’s “Amazing,” by Steven Tyler, is another buoyant song about how sobriety feels.
“We say it in meetings and we don’t say it in the world enough,” Frere-Jones observes. “Like, bro, you’re not going to be white knuckling. You’re not thinking about what you’re missing. You’re living this incredibly juicy, pleasurable, amazing life.”
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Maybe, he adds, sober musicians should be writing more songs about that.
“There should be like, songs about having sex sober. There should be songs about ‘… and then I had all my money when I woke up in the morning ’cause I didn’t spend it.’ And complete gratitude.”
There is one sober song Sasha Frere-Jones especially wishes he could hear — the one Elliott Smith did not live long enough to write, about how good it feels to be sober and alive.
Edited for the radio and web by Rose Friedman, produced for the web by Beth Novey.
Jane Austen ready to party for her 250th birthday at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting in Baltimore.
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In her six completed novels, Jane Austen excelled at love stories: Elinor and Edward, Lizzie and Darcy, Fanny and Edmund, Emma and Knightley, Anne and Wentworth, heck even Catherine and Tilney. As her fans celebrate the 250th anniversary of her birth, they’d like you to know it’s a mistake to simply dismiss her work as light, frothy romances. It’s full of intricate plots, class satire and biting wit, along with all the timeless drama of human foibles, frailties and resolve.
Tessa Harings (left) learns English country dance at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s 2025 Annual General Meeting
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“The basic reason why Austen is still popular today is because all of her characters are people we know in the world,” says Tessa Harings. She’s a high school teacher from Phoenix and one of the more than 900 attendees at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting, held in Baltimore this year. “We all know of someone who’s shy and aloof and needs to be brought into the crowd. We all know someone who’s quite witty, naturally. We all know someone who is a bit silly and always looking for attention.”
Colin Firth, properly memed from the 1995 BBC miniseries. His Darcy is a big favorite with the JASNA crowd.
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Shy and aloof? That could be Darcy. Naturally witty? Lizzie Bennet. Silly and looking for attention? Take your pick: baby sister Lydia or maybe the haughty Caroline Bingley or the unctuous Mr. Collins, all creations from what might be Austen’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice.
Her characters have permeated modern pop culture, even among people who’ve never opened her books. Harings says that’s one reason her students want to read these Regency-era novels. They want to understand the jokes in all those short videos and memes, like Mr. Collins making awkward dinner conversation.
He wants a wife, he compliments the potatoes. In Mr. Collin’s head, it makes sense.
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Her students enjoy the tension between Darcy and Lizzie: he’s very rich, so besotted by her against his will that he can hardly dance, glower and talk at the same time. Lizzie initially cannot stand him and refuses his first proposal, as shown in this soggy scene from the 2005 movie adaptation.
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Harings says Lizzie is her favorite Austen character. “She has such sharp, sarcastic wit and she’s so self-confident, despite the fact that she’s constantly being put down by the people around her for her supposedly lower position in life as the slightly less pretty of the mother’s two oldest daughters.”
Milliner Dannielle Perry (right) and her assistant Mia Berg of Timely Tresses in their Regency-era togs.
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“When I was a teenager, I loved Lizzie and I wanted to be Lizzie,” says milliner Dannielle Perry of Oxford, N.C. She’s read and reread all of Jane Austen’s books and she loves how they change for her as she’s gotten older. She’s now more sympathetic toward Mrs. Bennet, Lizzie’s mom: a woman desperate to get her five daughters married, least they be penniless since they can’t inherit their father’s estate. “I feel sorry for her in a way I never did before,” Perry says. “She is sort of silly, but she’s lived with a man for 20 years who largely dismisses her and thinks she’s frivolous.”
Doctoral student Katie Yu, of Dallas, has this analysis of Mrs. Bennett and her husband, who seems mentally checked-out at best: “He’s not a great father. He’s always putting his wife down in front of his daughters, he’s putting his daughters down in front of his daughters.” Yu says Mr. Bennet married Mrs. Bennet because she was pretty, treats her as an inferior, and often ignores her. This is why Mrs. Bennet goes on about her nerves and “has the vapors” whenever she’s stressed: she’s trying to get his attention.
“But,” says Tessa Harings, “she still has a level of street smarts that she has to get her daughters married. And yes, she’s sincerely concerned about their future … she actually, of the two of them, is the more concerned and involved parent.”
Tom Tumbusch explains 19th century dance moves to JASNA members.
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Dance instructor Tom Tumbusch, of Cincinnati, says men can learn a lot from Austen. “Modern men struggle to find good role models,” he says. “Reading Austen’s works can help them see the places where men can go wrong.” Mr. Bennet, for example. Or the libertine George Wickham who lies and runs off with the flighty Bennet sister, Lydia. Or maybe Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility, who leads Marianne Dashwood on, ghosts her and is later revealed to have abandoned an unmarried woman who gave birth to his child.
Oh, Marianne, he’s so not worth it!
On the other hand, Tumbusch says Jane Austen’s heroes can show men “how to be masculine in a constructive way,” like owning mistakes, taking responsibility and treating women with respect. It’s not just Darcy, who works behind the scenes getting Wickham to marry Lydia, it’s also Captain Wentworth from Persuasion. Tombusch says Wentworth does what men of his station should: he uses his own resources to help someone less fortunate, the poor, partially disabled widow Mrs. Smith. And in Sense and Sensibility, there’s the steadfast Col. Brandon. Hoping to make Willoughby’s rejection of Marianne less devastating to her, he exposes the libertine’s behavior. He rides hours to retrieve her mother when Marianne is near death. He patiently, oh-so-patiently, waits for her young, broken heart to mend.
All this while wearing a flannel waistcoat because he’s on the “wrong side of five and thirty” and needs to keep those ancient bones warm.
Before he rocked worlds as Snape, Alan Rickman made the earth move for viewers of the 1995 movie adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.
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JASNA president Mary Mintz, of McLean, Va., says though Jane Austen is largely known for her marriage plots, it’s really the human need for connection that grounds her stories. “She writes about the relationships between parents and children, between siblings or among siblings, she writes about relationships with friends. And she is really insightful. When you combine that with her knowledge of human psychology, it’s a great formula for success.”
Mintz is fascinated by Emma’s pivotal character, Miss Bates. She’s a spinster and member of the gentry class who lives with her elderly mother on an extremely limited income. She’s also a nervous chatterbox, “someone who can’t stop talking,” says Mintz. “I’ve known a lot of Misses Bates in my lifetime… people who seem insecure and feel as though they have to fill up silence, but are really good-hearted people.”
When Emma is rude to Miss Bates, she’s firmly chastised by her neighbor, Mr. Knightley. It becomes a turn-around moment in the story. Humbled, Emma apologizes. She also sees how she’s been wrong to meddle in the love life of Harriet Smith, a pretty teenager whose parents are unknown.
Mintz says there’s an interesting link between Bates and Harriet, if you put two and two together.
“In Jane Austen’s actual life, mothers and daughters often share the same name,” she explains. That pattern can be seen in many of her novels. “We don’t know who Harriet Smith’s natural mother is, but at one point Miss Bates is referred to as ‘Hetty,’ which could be a diminutive for ‘Harriet.’ “
That’s the first clue. The second clue occurs during that scene where Knightley sets Emma right. He says of Miss Bates, “she has sunk from the comforts she was born to.” He then draws a contrast between the spinster’s current station and her former one: “You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour…”
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Emma’s father is quite wealthy, so why would Miss Bates’ notice have once been so esteemed? Mary Mintz asks, “Is because she had a child out of wedlock?”
And could that child be… Harriet Smith?
The mind: it boggles! A Jane Austen Easter egg! It’s just one example of how multi-dimensional her novels are and why so many people will continue loving, analyzing and discussing her work well into the next 250 years.
Jacob Fenston and Danny Hensel edited and produced this report.
Rob Reiner And Wife Michele
Throats Slit By Family Member
Published
|
Updated
Rob Reiner and his wife Michele had their throats slit by a family member, possibly after an argument inside their Los Angeles home, leading to their tragic deaths … TMZ has learned
It’s unclear what exactly triggered the violence, which went down Sunday afternoon in Brentwood … but we’re told one of Rob’s daughters found her parents dead and told police a family member had killed them. PEOPLE reports the couple’s son, Nick, is being questioned in connection with the murders.
Our sources also say the daughter told police the family member “should be a suspect” because they’re “dangerous.”
TMZ broke the story … Rob and Michele suffered lacerations consistent with knife wounds and LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division is investigating the case.
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Dispatch audio captures a firefighter calling for backup to the Brentwood mansion around 3:30 PM … though it doesn’t provide any further information about the circumstances in the abode.
Rob was 78. Michele was 68.
Sunday Puzzle
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On-air challenge
I’m going to read you some sentences. Each sentence conceals the name of a major U.S. city in consecutive letters. As a hint, the answer’s state also appears in the sentence. Every answer has at least six letters. (Ex. The Kentucky bodybuilders will be flexing tonight. –> LEXINGTON)
1. Space enthusiasts in Oregon support landing on Mars.
2. Contact your insurance branch or agent in Alaska.
3. The Ohio company has a sale from today to next Sunday.
4. The Colorado trial ended in a sudden verdict.
5. Fans voted the Virginia tennis matches a peak experience.
6. I bought a shamrock for decorating my house in Illinois.
7. All the Connecticut things they knew have now changed.
8. Can you help a software developer in Texas?
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Mike Reiss, who’s a showrunner, writer, and producer for “The Simpsons.” Think of a famous living singer. The last two letters of his first name and the first two letters of his last name spell a bird. Change the first letter of the singer’s first name. Then the first three letters of that first name and the last five letters of his last name together spell another bird. What singer is this?
Challenge answer
Placido Domingo
Winner
Brock Hammill of Corvallis, Montana.
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Robert Flood, of Allen, Texas. Name a famous female singer of the past (five letters in the first name, seven letters in the last name). Remove the last letter of her first name and you can rearrange all the remaining letters to name the capital of a country (six letters) and a food product that its nation is famous for (five letters).
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, December 18 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
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