Work is its own award

                           Kevin Winter/Getty Images for the Recording Academy

     "Do you want to watch the Grammys?" my wife asked, several times over the weekend, leading up to the broadcast Sunday night.
     Honestly? I'm not sure I've ever watched the Grammys. They were always kinda vanilla, mainstream, pop treacle. Making news only for how woefully wrong and out-of-step the winners were. Year after year. 
     But why not? They're music, right? I like music.
     We tuned in late, just in time to hear Billie Eilish singing "What Was I Made For?" the  Grammy-winning — eventually — theme song from the "Barbie" movie.
     A melancholy tune that — Eilish said — took her and her brother a full 30 minutes to compose. I enjoyed it. I like Eilish — nice voice, arresting lyrics, weird in a good way.
     X told me we'd missed the show-stopping duet between Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs, the country singer who revived her 1988 hit "Fast Car" and sent it to the top of the charts — making Chapman to be the first Black woman to write a No. 1 country song, which is sad bordering on shocking. We caught the lovely performance on social media. I admired Combs for respecting the song and not changing the lyrics — like John Prine singing, "I am an old woman" in "Angel from Montgomery." The respect he had for Chapman was obvious, and it was encouraging to see these two people from different generations, races, areas of the country and orientations, making beautiful music together onstage.
     What I remember most about that album, when it came out, is it was one of the first CD's you bought to go with your new CD player — that, or Paul Simon's "Graceland." The pride of Cleveland, Chapman's career never developed much beyond the initial fully-formed talent she arrived on the scene with. But that was enough. To expect more seems ungrateful; though I do wonder what she's been up to for the past 36 years.
     I was glad to be passingly familiar with some of the artists — Lizzo, Olivia Rodrigo. I'd played the song she sang on the show, "Vampire" for my wife, pointing out the lyrics I admired — "You sold me for parts." She didn't much care for it. What intrigued me in the Grammy performance is there was a bit of business where she smeared some blood on her face — this was before the walls started bleeding. But only a bit. At first I thought she'd actually cut herself — it was just a little blood — then realized it was part of the performance. But the blood didn't quite work, and on such a vast stage, there's something refreshing in a bit of show business that goes awry. 

      I was excited to see Joni Mitchell perform. Ahead of time. When the moment came, though, I was unsure. She's 80, and picked the perfect song from her genius catalogue to sing. — "Both Sides Now." Her voice retains traces of its magnificence, and she pulled it off, there in her throne. But it was hard not to feel sorrow, to see her, after so many health crises and the ravages of time,  in that chair, tapping her cane. "Steadily life takes away from you, bit by bit, step by step, the quality of fresh involvement," Tennessee Williams once wrote.
     Otherwise, there was plenty of Taylor Swift, standing up, clapping. She won twice. I was a bit taken aback when she first went up and accepted her award, noting this was her 13th Grammy and plugging her new album, announcing she was going to go and social media the cover. All business.
     Jay-Z came up with a young woman. "I hope that's his daughter," I said. It was.
     Toward the end, Billy Joel performed the first new song pried out of him after 17 years of recycling his old hits. It fell completely flat, for me, but then I never liked him much in his prime — "Piano Man," "Captain Jack," "Allentown" and quickly downhill from there. He always seemed like a downmarket version of Bruce Springsteen. "Did I wait too long?" he sang. Yes, Billy, you did. But in his defense, it's a bitch to get old. You lose your spark and have to coast on reputation.
     Thank goodness my mood was saved, by Taylor Swift of course, at the very end, accepting her record breaking fourth Album of the Year Grammy for "Midnights," passing Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder, who all had three. 

     "I would love to tell you that this is the best moment of my life, but I feel this happy when I finish a song," she said. In other words: This is nice, but what I really like is doing the work that leads to this. "For me the award is the work," she said. "All I wanna do is keep being able to do this. I love it so much, it makes me so happy."

     And the truth is, work is enough. Awards are nice — would be nice, I imagine. But even without the awards, the work is still enough, if you love it.