About Yesterday

Riddle me this:

Who was ejected
For restaurant rage,
When he learned I'd escaped
My Twitter cage?

#MondayMonday

A Goodbye That Resonates

I've been obsessed with this song since I first heard it on the soundtrack to Dear Lemon Lima -- an obsession recently reactivated the minute I got plausible copy of the lyrics.

I haven't heard a song so exquisitely, personally painful in a long, long time.

The Ghost was a Canadian band that released one album in 1970, when albums still suffered from a 1960s hangover. Lead vocalist, Shirley Kent, sings in a style reminiscent of Joan Baez and Judy Collins -- folk-y with a certain classical rigor. The combination of her throwback vocal style with her unexpectedly-steely lyrics creates the overwhelming impression that she's saying goodbye, not only to a thoughtless, inconstant lover; but to the 1960s themselves.

After all this time, it shouldn't hurt this much. But it does.

Goodbye the love that made rivers of flowers, Ships on my flowerbeds, sleeping away Roses now run to the sea, from the river Once that I've cried, once that I say Hearts and flowers die today
Hello, the face that brought me a new day Maps on my windowpanes, made out of rain Choose your way home for I'm only leaving Once that I've cried, once that I say Hearts and flowers die today
And as the flowers flow The ships, they had to grow Under horizons in your eyes Your window maps will find That I was left behind Now you don't recall my name
Goodbye the love that made rivers of flowers, Ships on my flowerbeds, sleeping away Roses now run to the sea, from the river Once that I've cried, once that I say Hearts and flowers die today Hearts and flowers die today

Here are The Ghost, with "Hearts and Flowers":

Emo Americana Summer Playlist

Lemony cologne. Picnic blankets. Potato salad. No-bake cookies. Open windows. Ice by the bucketful. Fireworks. Bug bites. Sea and Ski "Suntan Lotion". Those dreams where you feel like you're being tossed by ocean waves whenever you turn over in your sleep. And these songs.

Memories of summer.

Gotta Travel On; Bill Monroe: Some people never shake that itchy, spring-into-summer feeling. Bill Monroe gives himself away, redeeming a song from the Folk Scare in the process.

Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming To The Canyon); The Mamas and The Papas: I see two sides to this one -- the terrible fates that befell so many of the girls, and a repressed narrator experiencing a summer of the spirit, if you will.

The Poacher; Ronnie Lane and Slim Chance: Gorgeous orchestration; the notes skip like sunlight on the water. Is this the harsh reality of an otherwise gentle, English summer?

City Folks Call Us Poor; Larry Sparks, feat. Cheryl and Sharon White: Ex-Clinch Mountain Boy, Larry Sparks, describes, in loving detail, the kind of summer not everyone can appreciate. Everyone should get off their high horse.

Rocky Mountain High; John Denver: Like The Beach Boys, John Denver could make musical instruments sound like summer; how could you place those orchestral guitars anywhere else in time? Add to that the sheer poetry of nature, and you have the quintessential summer song.

Roseville Fair; Nanci Griffith: Raise your hand if you ever took in the fair with the love of your life. 🙋 Nanci Griffith and an all-star cast help give this track that old-time country feel.

For Your Love; Humble Pie: As hot as the season itself, and just as unconscious of the temporary nature of passion.

Because; The Beatles: Puts a period at the end of the sentence that was 1960s psychedelia. Unabashedly influenced by those shamans of summer, The Beach Boys.

The Warmth Of The Sun; The Beach Boys: Seriously, you didn't expect a summer playlist without these guys, did you? "I'm sad, but I'm at peace with it"? Saddest song on this list, but it hints at what a rock Brian Wilson really is.

Blue; The Jayhawks: Summer's end. If The Beach Boys had been country, they'd have sounded like this.

Ten Records That Made Me Pull Over

Let's be real: Every music nerd worth the name has had way more than 10 of these. This is just the list I remember today.

"Records" because I hate it when people refer to excerpts from classical works as "songs", which they're generally not unless you're talking Schubert. Or Copland.

Can you dig it? I knew that you could. Here we go.

Guinnevere; Crosby, Stills and Nash: Seems to proceed out of Vince Guaraldi's "Cast Your Fate To The Wind", which I knew and loved. There's a little bit of Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca, and her hapless replacement -- also known and loved -- here too. 

A song that has lost none of its power to haunt this listener, and inspire hope for the rescue of a woman trapped forever in the wooden memories of an inanimate object madder even than Guinnevere herself.

(What A) Wonderful World; Art Garfunkel, feat. Paul Simon and James Taylor: The arrangement was too elevator-friendly by half, but, oh, those voices! Nobody but Crosby, Stills and Nash was singing like this at that time, and that union was always touch and go.

Love Is Like Oxygen; Sweet: Could just as easily have been "Addicted To Love", which provoked the same reaction when I first heard it. And then, I saw that video .... So, Sweet takes it. There's just something about riff rock (Green River, Long Cool Woman, Dwight Twilley's I'm On Fire) that puts your whole day right.

Bonus: Slightly-delusional lyrics. Also, two great riffs in one -- that synthesized, French Horn opener, and the crunchy guitar. 

No apologies.

Stories We Could Tell; Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: I had seen this tour, and was still marveling that some New Wave cat (that'd be Bobby Valentino of The Fabulous Poodles) had sounded every bit as country on the fiddle as Roy Acuff. Then, they released a live version with Valentino as the B side of ... something, and I was done.

Stop Draggin' My Heart Around; Stevie Nicks, feat. Tom Petty: This was smart, it was lean, it was tough, and it boasted a frontwoman.  It's impossible to state how different it was from anything that had come before.

The Köln Concert; Keith Jarrett: A lot of water under the bridge, and a lot of soulless, brunchy imitators can't rob this record of its beauty or its power. A magnificent achievement that captivates from the first few notes. Like being lost in the storm-tossed ocean without ever drowning.

Bury My Lovely; The October Project: Kate Bush without all the silly, rich-girl trappings. Completely, utterly, and appropriately serious, yet just as utterly without pretense.

The Water Music Suite No. 1 in F major, HWV 348: VII. Bourree, Georg Friderich Händel; Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Gerard Schwartz, cond.: Improv, baroque style, courtesy of virtuoso oboist, Alan Vogel. 

I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry; The Holly Cole Trio: A musical banquet of country, jazz, gospel, and old-style hymn singing. The lonesome streak that runs a mile wide through all those genres makes it work in a way some cheap, exploitative "crossover" hit never could.

Tennessee Blues: J.D. Crowe and The New South: From the first, halting notes of the banjo, this George Jones cover announces an unshakable soul sickness of the kind you can only catch when you're forced to act all homey in a place  that makes you feel homeless.

Reading Music, 2018

Some perennial favorites to commemorate World Book Day.

Through the Looking Glass

Sandy Denny died 40 years ago this month, on April 21, 1978. This is not something I have wanted to examine.

I first read of Denny's death in Rolling Stone. I hadn't yet heard any of Fairport Convention's music, much less Denny's solo work. 

After that obit, I didn't want to. 

There was something wrong, something hush-hush, the obit implied -- not just about Denny's death, but about Denny herself. Wherever I was in my life, I didn't want to go down that particular rabbit hole -- not even after I fell head over heels for her music 10 years later. Sure, she was brilliant, but wasn't there something dark and rotten at the core?

Fast forward to the present, and a career spent examining the lies people tell. Such is the life of an ad copywriter with even the barest shred of ethics. 

A dear friend floated the gentlest of suggestions: What about taking another look?

So, here I am.

Listen Listen to him do
He is the one who is for you
Listen, they say
He'll come and take us all away

-- Listen, Listen


But man has come to plough the tide,
The oak lies on the ground.
I hear their tires in the fields,
They drive the stallion down.
The roses bleed both light and dark,
The winds do seldom call.
The running sands recall the time
When love was lord of all.

-- The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood


You take away homes from the homeless,
And leave them to die in the cold.
The gypsy who begged for your presents,
He will laugh in your face when you're old.

-- Genesis Hall


While we fumble in the darkness where once there was light
Roaming the land of the ancients.
Oasis of love, sweet water of life,
God bless the poor ones whose patience never died.

-- One Way Donkey Ride


Sad, deserted shore, your fickle friends are leaving
Ah, but then you know it's time for them to go
But I will still be here, I have no thought of leaving
I do not count the time
For who knows where the time goes?

--Who Knows Where the Time Goes


Denny's lyrics, whether she wrote or merely sang them, were hardly superficial declarations of principle. Yet everyone, from gossipy obit writers to her dearest friends, felt the need to posthumously trash her for behavior that has earned famous men celebration -- even acclaim.

No one is without hypocrisy and contradiction, but neither do alcoholism and addiction spring from shallow roots, despite the cheap diagnoses of those in the know. Did she jump, or was she pushed indeed.

It's nothing more than 20/20 hindsight to say that everyone around her missed the signals Sandy Denny kept sending. The science of addiction treatment has made great strides since she passed -- so, too, common knowledge of it. No one can go back and change their responses, and we shouldn't guilt them into trying.

All we can do is clean up our own act. 

We can stop imagining it's cool and edgy when men go this way, but perverted and unnatural when women do. We can stop using other people's pain to gratify our cruelest impulses. We can do the hard work of discovering where our ideas come from, and reversing course when we discover how wrong we have been.

We can stand up for those whose weaknesses are different from our own, and we can shed grace by the boatload. If Sandy Denny spent her life saying anything, it was this.

This is Sandy Denny, out front of Fairport Convention, singing "Genesis Hall".