As 2021 slinks away

Among many other things, I'm thankful for the preset buttons on my car radio. I actually heard all of the following songs today:

• I Can See Clearly Now (Johnny Nash)
  
• Sister Golden Hair (America)
• With or Without You (U2)
• Day After Day (Badfinger)
• Walk Like a Man (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons)
• Slip Sliding Away (Paul Simon)
• These Dreams (Heart)
• Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Queen)
• I Heard it Through the Grapevine (Marvin Gaye)

In other entertainment news, "American Underdog" is a movie worth seeing.

My Thanksgiving cooking playlist

My sweetheart spent last night making a pumpkin pie while listening to Christmas music. Contrarian that I sometimes am, I still insist that Christmas music before Thanksgiving is premature, That said, her example inspired. 

We were doing meal prep in two different states, so I kept track of what was playing while I made deviled eggs from a proven recipe in The Deplorable Gourmet.

Directions in that crowd-sourced cookbook are, for the most part, spot on, but there's no way that prep time for deviled eggs is only 30 minutes -- at least not for me! My tripling the recipe didn't shorten prep time, but that's alright. Thanksgiving, y'all.

The playlist is eclectic because Dad had an influential hand in forming my musical ears. I miss him.

Pro tip: Slice the eggs on the longitude, not on the latitude. And I think they peel a little easier if you go pole to pole, north to south, after denting the egg to give your thumb some purchase.

Music to peel hard-boiled eggs

• Honky Tonk Woman -- Rolling Stones
• End of the World Again -- The Steel Wheels
• Good Hearted Man -- Fats Domino
• Call Me -- Blondie

Egg slicing

• Something so Feminine About a Mandolin -- Jimmy Buffet
• Mirabeau Bridge -- James Keelaghan

Scooping and grating

• You Ain't Going Nowhere -- Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
• When Silence Was Golden -- David Schnaufer
• Brighter Than the Sun -- Colbie Caillet
• The New Jerusalem -- Dan Wheetman

Mix and measure

• When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings -- Willie Watson and Tim Blake Nelson
• Worried About You -- Rolling Stones
• Fat-Bottomed Girls -- Queen

Using the "Poor Man's Pastry Bag"

• Some Nights -- Fun.
• Si Lo Hice y Que -- Carin Leon
• Into the Mystic -- Van Morrison
• Be Thou My Vision -- Martha Bassett
• More Than a Feeling -- Boston
• How Great Thou Art -- Home Free

Decorating with Paprika

• Find a New Home -- Will Banister
• Yellow Ledbetter -- Pearl Jam
• The Load-Out -- Jackson Browne

The recipe doesn't include a dash of Frank's Red Hot, but my deviled eggs do. That's how I roll.

More of the underrated

These actors and actresses have more range than many people seem to give them credit for having:

• Kathryn Erbe
• Katheryn Winnick
• Jack Black
• Ana de la Reguera
• Mary McDonnell
  (Truth to tell, however, when you successfully play characters in both Dances With Wolves and Battlestar Galactica, people know you've got game)

Among poets, on the evidence of When Earth's Last Picture is Painted, I think Rudyard Kipling is underrated.

Among brewers, don't sleep on the Benedictine monks of Birra Nursia.

Underrated musicians (lauded but not as well-known as they should be, given their talent):

• David Mason, the trumpeter on the Beatles' song, "Penny Lane"
• Laith Al-Saadi, dark horse Voice contestant and Michigan music legend
• Evelyn Glennie, deaf but extremely accomplished percussionist

While crossing Raleigh boundaries

Fall remains my favorite season of the year, but there's nothing quite as endearing around North Carolina as twilight in early summer. Cares seem to leach from the world for about half an hour, when the setting sun tinges the air a shade of lavender that slides almost imperceptibly into periwinkle blue. 

Skinny rabbits graze on suburban lawns, ignoring the blinking yellow-green lanterns of the fireflies that almost float by, buoyed by an alchemy of small wings and southern humidity. 

Twilight is the only time of day when, while commuting west to east, my thoughts segue from, for example, the Tuckman model of group development over to the bemused realization that "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "R-E-S-P-E-C-T" are actually songs about the same thing. 

Christian radio on the east side of the 40/440 split (where the same FM band flips from WSMW's "We Play Everything" format over to "HIS Radio" and its "Positive, Encouraging" tagline) runs seasonal promotions this time of year. My current favorite touts a pilgrimage to Israel with the slogan, "You haven't lived until you've toured the Holy Land with about 30 Tennessee rednecks."

Personally, I'd rather hear Gov't Mule sing "Soulshine" than listen to Tauren Wells croon his way through "Known," but that's a generational and probably also geographical thing. 

(Existential sidebar: Am I too quick to dismiss honest sentiment as cloying, or does anyone who grew up watching Marlin Perkins narrate Jim Fowler's close encounters with dangerous animals on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom between 1970 and 1983 really appreciate 'Contemporary Christian Music' as a radio format?)

It's in early summer, on this particular weekend, that one of my parish priests can preach insightfully about the "Markan sandwich" of  Jesus coming to the aid of Jairus, the synagogue official, despite being interrupted by a faithful woman with a history of hemorrhages (a story within a story =  a"sandwich," according to people who know). 

Fr. Ramirez de Paz pointed out that Jesus does not regard the woman who is healed by touching his cloak as an interruption. She is a child of God. Moreover, the wise young priest wryly observed, "To Jesus, death is not an emergency. To us, it is." 

And I did not know until it was mentioned in this sermon that the raising of Jairus's 12-year-old daughter from the dead is one of only three times in the New Testament when the original Greek text also includes the words of Jesus in Aramaic (in this case, it''s Jesus' tender invitation, "Talitha koum").

Both stories in that Markan sandwich have special resonance now that my sweetheart is blessedly and and cerfiably free from breast cancer, according to the oncologist whom she'd been treated by for more than a year.

Friend Chris, a dab hand at borrowing from the Church Fathers, observes after the fact that it's no coincidence that the woman in the story featured in the Catholic liturgy this week had suffered from hemorrages for 12 years, or that the girl whom Jesus brought back to life was 12 years old, "given that there are 12 tribes of Israel."

Hobbits of the music world

 I have a few thoughts about artists who are underrated.

The most underrated singers:

• Patty Smyth: If you haven't heard her song Wish I Were You, you're missing out. And her duet with Don Henley on Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough still grabs me after almost 30 years. Goodbye to You and The Warrior (1984) were Patty's biggest hits. She's hardly unknown, but she ought to be in the same musical conversations that Ann Wilson and Pat Benatar are. And I miss the early Eighties music videos that bands made just by hiring a videographer to capture them dancing around a studio. 
• John Popper: Sure, he wailed like nobody's business while fronting Blues Traveler with a diatonic harmonica, of all things, but anybody who sings Hook (1994) as well as John Popper does also has serious vocal chops. And Hook wasn't a one-off, as you'll know if you also listen to Run-Around or The Mountains Win Again.

The most underrated guitar solos:

• When The Knack made a splash with their monster single My Sharona in 1979, the pretty braless woman on the album cover and the take-no-prisoners drum beat got more attention than Berton Averre's guitar, but what Averre brought to the party still stands in perfect propulsive counterpoint to all the other energy in the song. Everything you'd want in a lead guitar solo is in there somewhere.
• (YouTube legend Rick Beato agrees with me on this one): What Tom Scholz does with his lead guitar on the Boston anthem A Man I'll Never Be  (1978) is too often overlooked by people who recognize Scholz for his producing and arranging, or the home studio he used to put together Boston's legendary debut album way back when.
• The original recording of Paul Simon's Late in the Evening (1980) doesn't feature a traditional guitar solo from Eric Gale, but only because it already has a propulsive duet between bass and drums plus horn parts you can dance to. With drummer Steve Gadd using two sticks in each hand, Gale has to content himself by playing fills throughout the song -- but they're very tasty fills.

Equity and equality reconsidered

Neo -- she of the blog that is always worth reading -- looks at blind auditions for symphony orchestras, and uses that as a metaphor to think well about what might change for the worse if current notions of "equity" (as opposed to "equality") remove the blindfold from Lady Justice.

"Equality" isn't the only word that's been put through the wringer lately, however. "Moderate" used to be roughly synonymous with "impartial" or "fair-minded," but it's not anymore.

Deconstructing a Bach cello prelude

 Just because this is awesome.

The version by Inbal Segev is great, too.

Christmas with Luciano Pavarotti

Adeste Fidelis

Melissa Maricich with a Marian hymn

Worth re-posting today (The holy name referenced in the hymn title is the name of God, but the hymn by John Michael Talbot is a paraphrase of Mary's "Magnificat" as recorded in Luke 1:46-56). This was beautifully recorded a few years ago:

Scattershot and ideological, methinks

 Years ago, I thought his book Bobos in Paradise was amusing even if blinkered in the way it used white-collar workers in the Acela Corridor as templates for pronouncements about changes in American culture. Since then, however, Bobos author David Brooks has been on a long glide into self-parody. 

Brooks is the guy who in 2005 was much taken with Barack Obama's "perfectly creased pants leg" after an interview. In a recent puff piece for The Atlantic titled "Bruce Springsteen and the Art of Aging Well," Brooks takes a gratuitous swipe at President Trump before strewing rhetorical flowers at Spingsteen's feet:

"President Donald Trump is a prime example of an unsuccessful older person," Brooks writes, "-- one who still lusts for external validation, who doesn't know who he is, who knows no peace." 

Sheesh. That's amateur psychoanalysis at its most disposable, not to say hilarious. Donald Trump seems to know exactly who he is. More than that, he seems comfortable with  himself (as does his very different but complementary Vice President, by the way). Heck, Trump seems to appreciate people who are comfortable with themselves (not least among them Melania Trump), and you can't do that if you're insecure. How Brooks missed that when it's been on public display as long as it has, I'm not sure. Why he missed it is easier to explain -- the man has axes to grind, and they have nothing to do with Bruce Springsteen's latest album. Perhaps the "problem" is that Trump does not care to be validated by the same people that Brooks does. Cocktail party invitations don't mean as much to bar owners as to partygoers who are still looking for signs that their phone calls get returned.

"The Boss" may indeed have life lessons to teach us, but it's hard to stomach Brooks' sycophancy knowing that Bruce has said he'd be on "the next plane to Australia" if American election results don't meet with his approval. Whatsa matter, boss man? You've already got your mansion on a hill. Do ya still feel like you're a rider on a downbound train?

Groovy tunes

 "Just Right Radio" (WPTK) lived up to its name recently, at least as far as I'm concerned:

• She Loves You (The Beatles)
• Sister Golden Hair (America)
• Sloop John B (The Beach Boys)
• To Love Somebody (The Bee Gees)
• Here We Go Again (Ray Charles)
• Stand by Your Man (Tammy Wynette)

I especially like the Hammond B3 organ that Billy Preston plays for Ray Charles in Here We Go Again; it sounds like what you'd hear at a funky evangelical Christian church service.

On a related note (ha!), Badfinger's "Day After Day" entered Jamel's reaction library as another data point in his quest to "keep great music alive". Not for nothing did that jovial man say, "I'm getting a Beatles feel from these brothas." I'm pretty sure that people who commented in his channel have since explained the ties between those two bands to Jamel.

Lessons from songwriters

Pope Francis could learn from the songcraft of Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, and Jackson Browne, I've decided.

A soundtrack life

Driving through a lightning storm the other night was entertaining. It came with a smattering of rain, but not so much that I had to keep the windshield wipers agitated for 35 miles, so that was good. The car radio kept me company, although I bopped back and forth between two different stations, as is my habit:

• Ray Charles, You Win Again
• Aerosmith, Sweet Emotion
• Green Day, Basket Case
• AC/DC, Highway to Hell
• Commodores, Night Shift
• Huey Lewis and the News, Power of Love

Bonus track: Jefferson Starship, Miracles

On the way to chemotherapy early the next morning, Lisa and I had a chance to sing along with Simon & Garfunkel while they were singing "Mrs. Robionson." 

And Lisa passed her chemo test, which meant she could actually receive treatment. Intimidating as that toxic cocktail of chemicals is, that it was successfully administered means we're one big step closer to finishing her 20-week treatment regimen (not counting surgery).

Sweetheart is winning her fight against cancer smack in the middle of covid-19, and for that we are profoundly grateful.

Unexpected music

True stories that brightened my day:

• Most of the signs in my local Korean grocery store are, naturally enough, in Korean. But on my most recent visit there, Loggins & Messina's "Your Mama Don't Dance and Your Daddy Don't Rock and Roll" was playing over store speakers while I shopped. Good times!
• The higher-end fuel stations around here that serve both prepared and pre-packaged food still have their dining areas closed for the sake of pandemic precaution while North Carolina grapples with the Wuhan coronavirus. But there's something absurdly entertaining about eating tacos in a parking lot to the soundtrack of Blue Oyster Cult's "Burning for You."

Music for Memorial Day

A twofer, just because.

First the Marine Band honors our country by playing the national march, which (as the conductor's introduction notes) was written by its most famous director, "the March King."



Second, the British a capella octet Voces8 covers Enya's hauntingly beautiful "May It Be," which was also a main theme in Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies



The New Neo also has a wonderful musical Memorial Day tribute song posted.

And the PowerLine blog dusted off a beautiful essay about why we observe what we do.

My Pandemic Pals

A nice gesture from the USN and the USAF over NYC

These are the people whose YouTube videos helped make social distancing and other lockdown measures --including chemotherapy precautions -- easier (albeit not easy) to take.

Knowing they're out there helps keep me going until the end of sweetie's chemotherapy and the not-a-minute-too-soon return of live music, library hours, professional haircuts, pub food served on dark wooden tables, elective surgeries, community theater, road trips, baristas who work counters rather than drive-up windows, and hot / olive / salad bars in better supermarkets:

• Matt and Savanna Shaw: The father-daughter singing team was new to me, and immediately showed itself worthy of a subscription. Two great voices in one household! Three cheers for family bands!
• Rick Beato: His 'crazy musical uncle' shtick still works, even when I disagree with some of his choices (e.g., there's no way that John Lennon's pretentious "Imagine" or Sting's criminal-minded "Every Breath You Take" should be on ANY list of 'Top 20 Rock Ballads,' much less in higher positions than "Let it Be" and "She Talks to Angels")
• Mary Chapin Carpenter: Songs she sings from her kitchen introduced the rest of us to Angus, the mellow golden retriever, and White Kitty, the striking feline whom Angus keeps company with. And she still sounds as resonant as she did when making hits in the Nineties. Artistry without artifice -- gotta love it.
• Local talent Jonathan Byrd is an old hand at livestream video concerts, but where he really comes into his own is in the "Byrd Word," his thoughtful weekly email to fans.
• Billy Strings: I found this guitar wizard via Tommy Emmanuel, himself a grandmaster on that instrument, and wow! But Strings can sing, too. As one fan noted, "He's like a cross between Roy Rogers and Stevie Ray Vaughan." 
• The winsome  "MonaLisa Twins" have covered both Pink Floyd and David Bowie to very good effect.

I would be remiss if I didn't also note a few filmmakers, because I enjoyed the following movies on a little screen:

• The Searchers
• Bohemian Rhapsody
• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
• Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
• Dan in Real Life
• The Mission
• Open Range
• The Blues Brothers
• The Mask of Zorro
• Soul Surfer
• Hell or High Water
• The Help

John Prine -- That's the Way the World goes Round

Rest in Peace, John Prine. You did good. And are missed, but also celebrated. Now you can sing with Bill Withers, who went (one hopes) to glory just a bit earlier this spring.



(Thanks to Jim Chambers for posting this song to YouTube)

See also Last Call with John Prine for an affectionate note about the singer/songwriter's fondness for  a cocktail he called "Handsome Johnny."

Their duet will make your day

Mat and Savanna Shaw bring the beauty and the inspiration:

Well done, you two. And thank you!

Hope for Netflix yet

"Anne with an E" is good TV, with top-drawer acting, writing, and cinematography.

Among other things, the show reminds me of "Little House on the Prairie," except that it has more verisimilitude than that show did.

I like the Canadian setting, because (as in the original Anne of Green Gables books), following late nineteenth-century lives on Prince Edward Island evokes for me the song "St. Anne's Reel," which I first heard played by a now-retired concert violinist named Charlann Gastineau, very likely at the Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Contest in an early-Nineties gig with Phil Salazar when he helmed The Acousticats.

Years later I realized that the tune had also been covered by John Denver.

FWIW, nearby Cape Breton Island also has a strong fiddle tradition.

How holy was it really?

Blues guitar ace Joe Bonamassa, apart from his considerable musical chops, is also a master of self-promotion, so emails from the people in his retinue authorized to speak for him do not come as a surprise. JB has minions who communicate with fans every week, and his online store also sells "merch" associated with other musicians. Everything from bobble-head dolls to t-shirts, pins, and guitar picks is offered there, all of it evocative of what the marketing elves assure us is a "blues lifestyle."

More often than not, I smile at the "Buy Now!" and "Watch Now!" earnestness of the Bona-machine, knowing that it would be churlish to begrudge musicians a money-making opportunity. But JB can try my patience, even though I've never met the man. One reason I prefer lesser-known acts like Martha Bassett and the Blue-Eyed Bettys is that their email communication with fans tends not to overwhelm, whereas Bonamassa's multi-channel approach inevitably touts both what he's done and what he plans to do next, with side trips into what he likes and what he thinks you should like.

This morning, Joe Bonamassa's crew blasted out an email with the off-putting subject line, "The most rockin' 'O Holy Night' ever -- Watch Now!"

I do not think that was an appeal to people in my (traditionalist) demographic, because my initial reaction to that directive was to think "What fresh hell is this?"

Let me explain what I see as JB's interpretive failure, while opening a can of "Get off my lawn" familiar to other devotees of the weaponized quotation mark:  "O Holy Night" is my favorite Christmas carol, and it's supposed to be transcendent, not 'rockin.' "

Joe's "guitar face" smirk and shades don't suggest awestruck wonderment or tranquility, which is probably why he felt the need to keep his toggle switch duct-taped into the "blues" position. In this case, however, he's committing what I think is a musical misdemeanor of the kind that YouTube icon Rick Beato alluded to when he said that the problem with competitive singing shows on TV is that they put a premium on vocal fireworks and "note chasing" that can be a disservice to songs. Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, or Townes Van Zandt wouldn't come within a million miles of winning a competition like "The Voice," yet each of them is (or was) indisputably a top-shelf artist. There's a reason why the definitive duet on "Seven Spanish Angels" is by Ray Charles and Willie Nelson rather than, for example, singers of arguably greater vocal prowess like Randy Meisner and David Bowie.

If you're going to cultivate or celebrate a sense of the sacred, you have to start humbly rather than from the "here, hold my beer" point of view on which so much rock (turn it up!) or blues (you think you've got it bad?) depends. "O Holy Night" is not a rock anthem, and shouldn't be treated as such. When I want a feeling of reverence evoked by the whammy bar on a Fender Stratocaster, my go-to guitarist is Mark Knopfler, anyhow.

Bonamassa bends notes expertly, and he's got the same fondness for creative distortion that Jimi Hendrix had, but there are compositions that ought not be messed with even in the interest of refreshing them, and O Holy Night is one of those. Adolphe Adam's stellar contribution to the corpus of Christmas music doesn't need a blues-rock overlay.

I don't mean to suggest that "stay in your lane" is an ironclad musical commandment. The folk-punk cover of "Sweet Child o' Mine" by a German polka ensemble has much to recommend it. But The Heimatdamisch lent knowing humor to their Guns n' Roses homage.

Competent artists can take a sturdy chestnut like O Holy Night and add welcome filigree (even if that means singing it while you wear a cowboy hat in church). They can also go beyond filigree to turn the carol into a power ballad, as Jennifer Nettles has done, although her impressive effort remains less affecting than Martina McBride playing it straight with the same material.

But Bonamassa's take on O Holy Night subverts and cheapens the 19th-century French poem on which that carol is based. JB and his accomplices don't play the hymn as an exercise in Christian piety. For them, it's just another platform from which to showcase their virtuosity. Apparently they wouldn't know liturgical resonance if they tripped over it.

JB needs an introduction to Gregorian chant, a refresher on the joys of acoustic music, or a few pointers from what Alison Krauss did so sublimely in the river for the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. In this instance, at least, Bonamassa has forgotten the axiom about the singer serving the song rather than the other way around.