Who has what it takes to play these tunes? Step forward -- your disc is waiting.

In earlier days, when our pub business was young, I learned several valuable lessons about how one goes about shaping an atmosphere.

To be sure, one way is to try pleasing everyone, which generally implies mediocrity or worse, and usually at the expense of excellence. I don’t recommend the “all things to all people” approach. Pick something you do well, concentrate on it, and inform the specific consumer who seeks it out. That consumer will then come to you.

When it comes to alcoholic beverages, an “anything goes” mentality suggests that something violent or stupid certainly will occur, and while there’ll always be the possibility of behavioral problems in this milieu, it’s positively startling how many fewer fights break out (a) in the absence of cheap hard liquor, and (b) when prices for good beer are three times higher than what people are accustomed to paying for mass-market swill.

Of course, there comes a time (known as “last call”) when the drinks stop pouring. What does a bartender do to gently encourage evacuation of the barroom when the hour has come, but people don’t want to go to their homes quite yet?

Neither shouting nor tantrums provides a properly dignified formula. Rather, the answer can be found on the CD shelf, filed under “Balkan, folk (female).”

That’d be any CD of songs performed by the Bulgarian Women’s Choir, music that I personally enjoy, but that will clear any Southern Indiana barroom faster than fire, flood and Cliff Clavin -- combined. Strong words quite simply take a back seat to an uncomfortable habitat, and the human décor is infinitely malleable if properly directed.

I have reasons for considering these matters, having devoted much time over a period of weeks trying to determine my personal criteria for casting a vote in the forthcoming mayoral primary.

Considering the Democratic slate (Randy “Lockjaw” Hubbard, a Republican, is unchallenged, mute, and thus far irrelevant), there are surprising pluses and formidable minuses for each candidate, including the incumbent James Garner, and challengers Doug England (a former two-term mayor) and downtown businessman Larry Scharlow.

With a mind toward my unshakeable conviction that New Albany’s most recent half-century marketing “plan” has been a proven catastrophe, and accompanied by the perception that an increasingly broad consensus exists that neighborhoods are the fundamental building block of a revitalizing urban area, my act of surveying this field of candidates leads to certain conclusions pertaining to our collective choice of New Albanian dance music.

As a city, we’ve chosen too often to look the other way, permitted anything to go, and ignored our own rules. As a result, we have an unsavory, negative image that is difficult to reconcile with the many merits of living here when it comes to attracting investment – in terms of both money and people.

Obviously New Albany needs to exploit a Louisville area demographic niche by providing an up-market experience at slightly below-market prices. We need to do it as quickly as possible, lest our “barroom” be rendered entirely uninhabitable in the future tense owing to the accumulated weight of calculated disinvestment, neglected neighborhoods and decaying infrastructure, and of the prevalence of those entities most likely to thrive in such a shambolic social setting: Social disintegration, drugs, crime, gangs, boom cars, street spam and the unkindest profiteer of all, our ever-eager slumlord caste, i.e., cockroachis gregoryanis.

All of this is known and for the most part oddly tolerated, but now we’ve come to a point where we must decide, either to stay the course – in other words, to fail as a community – or to begin the process of thinking and acting according to different fundamental premises.

Which brings me back to the symbolic power of music, and a simple question:

Of the three Democratic mayoral candidates, which one is committed to spinning the Bulgarian Women’s Choir disc as a symbol of calculated displacement, making New Albany’s neighborhood habitat unprofitable for the looters and vandals among us, and espousing a pro-active philosophy of civic governance that rewards the city’s existing stakeholders and makes this city marketable to the sort of people we most need to attract in order to survive?

I have the CD. The hopeful who promises to play it may borrow it. It comes with my vote.

Just let me – let us – know.

Photo credit: Bulgarian singers