Maybe it was May, or early June, I think the roses were still blooming, fists of red against the dark brick of Federation houses. I was listening to Roberta Flack, specifically, to “Ballad of the Sad Young Men”, which ends her album First Take. The song is luxurious in its sorrow, now despairing, now tranquil, its minor seventh chords hung between bitterness and resolution. “All the news is bad again”, which suggests it always will be; still, the ear hopes to hear the minor seventh make it back to the root note of the scale, like the body wants to rest after a night spent in a smoke-filled bar, among the sad young men with their “glasses full of rye”. And though it’s spring now as I write this, and the roses have given way to thick sweet clusters of jasmine, Flack’s album still cuts through to me as little has, of late. It gives me the sense of a real time that once was...