Cool American - "Tom Courtenay" (Yo La Tengo cover).

Harold spent the first hour thinking about the way it felt as if he had been to this party before. Not literally this party, but parties indistinguishable from this one. There were all the same people and all the same songs. There were the same rooms with the same conversations and the same shades of drinks. Everybody was holding a glass bottle or a plastic cup, except Harold, who keps his hands balled up in his green hooded sweatshirt. He had taken the tea before coming. In his own kitchen, with water from the electric kettle, while his parents slept upstairs. He didn't know why he wasn't buzzed yet but he wasn't worried either. This wasn't the first time. He kept wandering through the people and songs. He started noticing the spaces between the guests, gaps in the air that themselves held a shape, in a way. He started hearing the way different conversations rhymed - the same cadences or even the same sentences, repeated. He started to count the colours he saw, just out of curiosity: black, that's one; grey, two; yellow, three. He made it to fifteen, burgundy, before he ran out of colours. "I've seen all the colours," he said to himself. He realized he had said it out loud. The song changed. The carpet was like a wine-coloured lawn. A man stood with his head in the mirror talking to a girl like two candles. Each doorway was a three-sided rectangle. A four-sided triangle, Harold thought, and he understood that the tea was working. He went outside, where the moon was like a hole punched through a piece of water. There were cicadas singing. There were moths. Harold sat on the cold back step beside a girl who was kissing the boy next to him. He watched divers plunge into the swimming pool, their wings upraised. The water was sapphire blue. She smelled like oranges. He knew it would be autumn soon because the summer was almost over. Harold quietly didn't begin to cry.

[this outstanding cover is from a charity record for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. There are also versions of songs by Prince, the Magnetic Fields, Nelly Furtado, and many many more. Gramophone-friend Tyler Bussey's "This Must Be The Place" cover deserves its own accolades. Please buy the comp, fling a donation their way, because this Yo La Tengo cover alone deserves a night's worth of jukebox tokens. / More from Cool American.]

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A contest: In early 2014, I won a strange contest. The prize was a dinner with the extraordinary Anil Dash, including travel from Montreal to New York. Two years later, my life has changed a lot. The same eccentric sponsor has now launched a contest where the prize is a mentoring dinner with me. Maybe we can talk about writing, or music, or novels, or trying to be a good person, or making mixtapes. Maybe we can talk about everything you know and I don't. The winner will also receive accommodation and airfare to Montreal from anywhere in the world. Enter here (it's free), please share, and look out for other so-called Sage Suppers, promising meals with interesting people.