August 20, 2016. A national holiday to many. “He made an album better than ‘Channel Orange’” — when I first heard this, it seemed unfathomable, but I sit here 10 years later knowing every word was true. As much as I love the initial offering, the second is just in another stratosphere. We watched a livestream for 30 days of silence and occasional sightings of a man building furniture, and then nothing, and then…. sound bloomed from the speakers in the wee hours of the night. It was not for nought. Then an album comes out of nowhere the next day — the album we didn’t know was the main album, after a visual album we thought was the album. That’s a lot of albums. ‘Blond(e)’ is the reason we don’t have exclusives anymore, no one album tied to a distributor for a week or weeks before everyone else gets it. Guess we should say thank you.

Thoughts ...