More evidence of the importance of the soundtrack:

Today's run was harder than usual, not due to the downpour, but because my music player's battery died only 10 minutes in. A lesser athlete would have just quit right there, but not me. Oh no. I gutted it out at least a whole 'nother 5 minutes.

I'm not sure why I didn't stop, at least long enough to get the medium-sized iPod from the house. Maybe because it was raining so hard and I didn't want to risk ruining it. Maybe it was laziness.

I'm not sure how I didn't stop. Running with music is just so much better. But, the song that was playing when the battery died did keep going through my head for quite a while...




I'm not sure what made me not stop. I guess my thoughts were enough to keep me distracted, but two days later, I can't remember what I thought about, other than the above Facebook status update.

And because it was a Facebook update, "at least 5 minutes" was all I was willing to publish about the length of the run. It was quite a bit longer than 5 more minutes. And it ended in a zero.

And I'm a little sad about that...I decided to quit messing around with numbers that end in 7 or 8 and just round up. It feels sort of more accurate and serious. I guess if I don't like it, I can just keep running until the end of whatever song is playing when the time turns to the zero. Unless it's one of those seven-minute songs and it just started...

Now that's my kind of protest song...

Sunday, 8 March
I bought "Sweet Cherry Wine" by Tommy James and the Shondells yesterday and can't stop listening to it. When I first heard it, probably sometime as a kid in the 70s I didn't like it. In fact, I didn't like much of the pop music that was made around the time I was born. But now I do like it, understand it and appreciate it - as much for the message as for the music.

But this winter I heard the song late at night, in the car. It was on the drive into Billings in -3 degree weather, but I felt insulated by the snow swirling around the highway and the windows and by the rich complex sounds coming out of the speakers when it cued up. It was one of those "transported by the music" moments.

It transported me again yesterday as I was baking birthday cake with the sun streaming into the kitchen window and again today, this time up the steepest part of my run. The sun was shining, it was warm and the song was perfect. And this time I didn't just hear the lyrics, they registered in a different way. The anti-war message is clear from the outset and I always knew it was there. But today what struck me was its gentleness.

Protest songs that evoke anger are necessary because they could spur us to take action against injustices. They are effective and logical and make sense in their graphic approach, explicit warnings and harsher tones, notes, rhythms. (hear "War (What Is It Good For?"). This one with its loving cup message more eases the listener into a feeling good groove with a more subtle approach. I wish I were satisfied with the live versions that are the only ones I could find on Youtube, I'd post the link for you to hear it. But then, if you'd like to hear it, you know what to do. Asa's "Jailer" (below) does the same thing...a gorgeous voice and its message against repression is lifted up to our ears by means of a groove. It may or may not be your kind of protest song...And so, it is good that there are so many different types of these songs that advocate an end to what we all know is wrong. The message, if it is echoed in enough types of medium might just be heard sometime.

I find subtlety so beautiful and I am so much more effectively convinced by it than by overt descriptions, explanations, images. And it works on me so well (when I'm able to grasp it, that is) that I over-apply it in what becomes my own soft and blurry discourse. And any subtle message can so easily and so often go unperceived. Indeed, if I have one now, it is probably obscured by the jangle of these words that lack the musicality that can make the medium a more beautiful message.

Asa - "Jailer"
Uploaded by naiverecords

I'm not lazy, I'm just recycling...

And from the "As Seen on Facebook" files:
Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at 10:24am

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Without losing her (illegal) grip on her cell phone, the diminutive driver of the (Alaskan-sized and named) SUV in front of me slammed on her brakes. I did the same to avoid slamming into her and let loose with an offensive combination of linguistic elements, slipping a code-switched infix into a schizophrenic string of alliterative regional differences in dialect.

"¡JO-fucking-DER! ¡Pinche puta pendeja! Si vas a bloquear la vista de todos que vamos detrás de tu camioneta tan culona, por lo menos haznos el favor de mirar más allá de tu rearview mirror, cabrona babosa!"

It's not the language that should surprise anyone, it is fairly representative of my Spanish, learned from a gran variedad of native speakers from all over the Spanish-speaking world, principally México y España. What did surprise me was the uncharacteristic verbal demonstration of road rage in general, not just that it came out mostly in Spanish. I'd been exposed to a lot of useful New York traffic vocabulary as a kid, and have tried to avoid overreacting to traffic in my own driving. But I guess I'm entitled to such expressions every once in a while. After all, that day on I-80, the traffic had gotten me coming and going.

As soon as I'd hit the brakes and stayed inmóvil for a few seconds, the stereo cued up a "blast-from-the-past" gift of a song and I had no choice but to let its opening strains prick up my ears, let the subsequent drum beats force my head back against the seat and the ebullient keyboard and exuberant sax notes bubble through my veins. The road rage lifted al instante.

Perhaps you'd like to give it a listen, putting any contrary politics or personal situations to the side and instead of focusing on lyrics signaling the possible demise of a relationship, just letting the Jersey bounce sounds of Bruce Springsteen's "Going Down" run through you, too. Y no, no deja de ser significante que la canción es del album Born In the U.S.A. Lugar de un delicioso multi-¿?

In case you need it now, a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZarmRLa2p9Q



It's lovely, but it's not nearly enough...

Her look cancels out any initial off-puttingness of her name.

And Autumn Sky's sound and charming way of engaging with her audience made me forgive the excessive use of whistling and "ba-da-dum". I'll buy/download anything she makes available.

Why is "Favorite Music" still a category on social network sites when we're all so very eclectic nowdays.

My recent purchases included Gene Pitney's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962) immediately followed by "Marta, Sebas, Guille y los demás" (2005) de Amaral after having heard it for the first time on Cable TV channel 5015.

So, not only am I eclectic, I manage to be simultaneously retro-kitschy-cool and pathetically behind the times.

"I said, put your hands on the radio and feel the healing power of the Lord!"

Does anyone else actually ever reach and and put their hands on the radio to feel the music or its message?



Social Distortion's "Ball and Chain" is nothing if not prayer.

The tunes - RoadTrip #1

• The first day I called from the road. "Have you seen those CDs Eric sent? I couldn't find them anywhere." I'd been saving those CDs so I'd have new songs to listen to in those areas with poor radio reception... "Yeah, they're right here where you left them. I'll bring them to Bismarck."


• I'd been quite content for several miles until I realized that I should actually be embarrassed to be singing, note for note, along to "Dream Weaver".


• "Did you bring the CDs?" "They're in my suitcase, let's just listen to the radio." "OK, what do you want to hear? Country-Western, Christian, or Classic Rock?"


• The real reason I'm afraid to wear the bluetooth earpiece while driving is that I'm afraid my lipstick, stored next to my phone in the caddy below the gearshift, will somehow bump into the keypad and dial some poor soul who will be subjected to an infinite voice mail message of me singing something like Garth Brooks' "Rodeo".


• The haunting echo of the intertwining steel (?) guitars Neko Case's "Hold On, Hold On" paired perfectly with the vast expanse of sky and the wheat colored earth of Eastern Montana.

Blog de Anywhere #¿?

Arrived home last night to see the very last seconds of a muted sunset over the city. As I crested the hill, KFOG's DJ cued up a brand new song. It was a perfect, appropriate song for this physical and emotional homecoming to a place and space that is at once old and new. Dar Williams' "It's Alright" , even on my first hearing, fits me as comfortably as those faded jeans.

The voice you were expecting.../The voice you were waiting for...

"La copa rota"

I loved the melodramatic lyrics (below) of "La copa rota" ("The Broken Wineglass", I guess it could but "tomar una copa" just means having a drink, and in parts of México, the vino doesn't just translate to "wine", but to any alcoholic drink), so I bought it. It's about a man who purposely bites his liquor glass and cuts his mouth so that the "poison of a treacherous kiss" will bleed out. But now I wonder if it wasn't a bad omen...I've gotten several cuts in the past few days. Today as I was packing up my office, I knocked the carafe from the coffee maker off my desk, watched it bounce once, land intact, bounce again and shatter. Cleaning up, one of the shards pierced my left middle finger (how will I manage to drive?). Strangely, it's not this freshest one that stings the most, but I'm sure I'll feel it tomorrow.

Aturdido y abrumado
por la duda de los celos
y deciste en la cantina
un bohemio ya sin fe
con los nervios destrozados
y llorando sin remedio
como un loco atormentado
por la ingrata que se fue.

Se ve siempre acompañado
del mejor de los amigos
que le acompaña y le dice
"ya está bueno de licor"
Nada remedias con llanto
nada remedias con vino
al contrario la recuerda
mucho mas tu corazón.

Una noche como un loco
mordió la copa de vino
y con su cortante filo
que su boca destrozó
y la sangre que brotaba
confundióse con el vino
y en la cantina este grito
a todos estremeció.

No te apures compañero
si me destrozo la boca
no te apures es que quiero
con el filo de esta copa
borrar la huella de un beso
traicionero que me dio.

Mozo sírvame en la copa rota
sírvame que me destroza esta
fiebre de obsesion
mozo sírvame en la copa rota
quiero sangrar gota a gota
el veneno de su amor.

Mozo sírvame en la copa rota
sírvame que me destroza esta
fiebre de obsesion
mozo sírvame en la copa rota
quiero sangrar gota a gota
el veneno de su amor.

Pandora opens yet another...

The Detroit Cobras quite rock. Just very very good. Lead singer with a sexy, smoke-fed voice, incredible lead and bass players. They are a cover band...but... if you've actually heard the originals of more than 4 of their songs, you rock even more than they do. Saw them last night at Slim's, which also quite rocks. It seemed like a perfect place to sport those henna tattoos acquired at the Pirate Festival. Decided to splurge this time and reserved dinner seating, not really knowing what to expect. Not knowing indeed, if the ticket price was just to assure a seat to actually sit in or if it really meant dinner. It meant dinner. And not just bar food, but reallyreally dinner. A salad, a choice of a proper meal with veggies and cake for dessert! (him: lemon pepper chicken, me: spinach ravioli, but we could have had rib-eye had we not, in the throes of hungry-cranky, shelled out a ludicrous amout of $1.00 bills for "saucy tips" sangies at the Pirate Festival)

It seemed a bit strange to be chowing down on something that required a knife and fork while listening to the opening band, The Hi-Nobles. Do click the name for their MySpace...excellent musicians with influences that seem to span 5 decades. The highest-energy band of le soir featured a lead singer in a shiny red suit and porkpie hat. Forgave him the ubiquitous hat whilst watching him scale the amps and drum set like Stella used to run along the back of the couch and other alternative surfaces. The keyboard player interacted in an aggressively hermeneutic manner with his candy-apple red organ, tilting it so that at times he was playing it at a 45 degree angle - and never once hit a wrong key.

Still trying to decide if Les Sans Culottes are a fake French band...either way, loved them! The band members have silly names, like Jacques Strappe, Edith Pissoff...

Clicking here for the write-up Slim's gives the Detroit Cobras, I see that they were also in town last year on a significant date. Last year was my turn to plan and all I came up with was a Pulp Fiction theme: breakfast and a "Bad Mother Fucker" wallet presented in a Hefty bag... Had I only known of the band then, Slim's might have become "Jackrabbit Slim's" for a night...

Musical medicinal

The woman-power message of Trisha Yearwood's "American Girl" seemed about 15 years too late when the song came out. But perhaps things are different in places where Country music has a wider following, and it is a bigger deal there when a girl decides to replace the "ribbons and bows", "heels and pearls" with things that will allow her to "make it in her daddy's world". I like the song in spite of most of the lyrics not really fitting for me and most women I know. One lyric does apply. Yearwood lets us know that the subject of her song makes it through the hard times with a little help. "She's got her God/ and she's got good wine/Aretha Franklin and Patsy Cline." I understand and go there myself. But to that already excellent list I'd have to add a couple of substances and songstresses. Franklin and Cline are classic, but I may have played them out quite a few years ago. Thankfully, there's also...Courtney Love, Joan Baez, Holly Golightly, Joan Jett, Shakira (¡don't judge me!), Dolly Parton, Billie Holiday, Lola Beltrán, Emmylou Harris, Paquita la del Barrio, The Donnas, Nina Simone, Yearwood herself, Peaches, Julieta Venegas, 7-Year Bitch, Emily Jan White, Dusty Springfield, and many many others I'm forgetting...

Who are your go-to gals? Or guys?

Music emergency

A couple of decades ago (unfortunately, that's not as much of an exaggeration as I'd like you to believe) I was getting dressed when I heard from the bathroom, "Help! Help!" Not exactly the kind of thing you want to hear an overnight guest yell from the shower. His tone didn't quite match his words in urgency, but I opened the door fast and barged in anyway, asking, "What's wrong?" "Will you change the station?! Now!" "Sure...but why?" The radio sitting on the closed toilet seat was blaring Tom Jones' "What's new, Pussycat?" He replied, "I can't stand this song. Please change it!" I had an equivalent experience this morning, but was I alone and had just squeezed shampoo into the palm of my hand when I heard a song that I now know is called "100 years" (normally I'd like that because of its association with Cien años de soledad/Hundred Years of Solitude, which I will always love, for the record, no matter how fashionable it is to trash or dismiss GGM). I had no choice but to suffer through it and continue with the shower routine, wondering whatever made Pandora.com think that I would want songs by the Dave Matthews Band in "My Stations" (and, yes, now I do know that it wasn't even the Dave Matthews Band). The song lasts forever...I guess I should just be glad that the annoying falsetto makes it almost impossible to discern the lyrics.

And, borrowing, the annoying catch phrase used by Sex and the City's protagonist, Carrie every time she narrates one of the columns she writes, "I couldn't help but wonder what song(s) would elicit from you, trapped in the shower, far from your towel, a plea for rescue from auditory assault?" Really. I want to know. Leave a comment. Porfa.

No need to speak French, Brazilian Portuguese or Khmer to groove to these groups

From Dengue Fever's MySpace page

Local band French Disco, which are neither (though they do create lyrics in French) opened for Dengue Fever at the San Francisco Independent last night. More accurately, since they were the first of three groups, they opened for punk/jazz/funk/forró brasileiro band Bat Makumba, also from San Francisco.

The ticket price averaged to about $6.00 per group. Add a bit more for gas (OK, a lot more, it's up to $4-ish around here), bridge toll, dinner and the parking we finally found (after one of us had an extended conversation with one of SF's finest about parking in a yuppie supermarket parking lot and another banged on the door of what turned out to be a medical marijuana clinic with a heartbreakingly empty parking lot right across the street from the venue) and it was a wonderful, sort of inexpensive evening in the city.

The SF Independent is a great place to see a band, though if you need a seat, you'd have to get there really early. It's very hollow, lots of standing room on the black concrete floors and when it gets too crowded to see the musicians on stage, there are mirrors on the walls and you can see their reflections.

French Disco was very calming...sort of smooth and soothing. Bat Makumba, uber energetic. The tall drink of water lead singer rapid-fires Portuguese and English into the mike while in constant motion. The rest of the band plays a myriad of instruments, including all kinds of tropical Brazilian shaky gourd instruments and a flute and they draw on sources running the gamut of o tropicalismo (Brazilian arts movement of the 1960s whose best-known musical pioneers were probably Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso) to the David Bryne project to Frank Zappa to rap.

I conserve my previous assessment of Dengue Fever. They're reallyreally LaLaLa. So much talent and energy. If they're coming to your town, go see them.

iTunes Confession #3

I should probably stop listening to 99.7 on my commute home. If the angle of the sun is just right and I'm in a susceptible mood (like anyone else), I'll fall under a song's spell and end up buying it against my better judgement. The lyrics alone don't do it. Sometimes it's just the melody or the voice or both; or one or both of those combined with meaningful or evocative lyrics.

Yesterday's song purchase is hard to explain. No, it wasn't Mariah Carey's awful (and disturbing) "Touch My Body" song with its creepy line "I will hunt you down..." if she sees herself on YouTube after the hookup. I'm not that naca. Close, though.

I almost didn't buy One Republic's "Apologize" because I'm a snob and it's syrupy pop and it's overly dramatic (and I usually only tolerate that in Spanish). Its lyrics also gave me pause. The oft-repeated message in this boy-band sounding tune is that "It's too late to apologize." I'm more the judeo-christian "forgive 7 times 70" type (yes I am aware that I've revealed exactly how sentimental a fool am I). However, the melody won me over. It is quite compelling, but even more than that, it is, to my ear, diametrically opposed to the lyrics. The music feels and tastes like the most sensuous possible atonement, forgiveness and reconciliation.

ReallyReally LaLaLa

Despite the thousands of pages I'll have to read between now and then, I'm seriously contemplating going to see this band April 18.



This is Dengue Fever and video is for their song "Seeing Hands", which I've been hearing on Pandora. I did about 2 minutes of Internet research and found that the band is from Los Angeles. They have an excellent mix of styles I could pick out some jazz, pop, lite punk, surf, psychadelic. The lead singer is Cambodian and sings in Khmer and English. Their works (2003-2008) are a mix of covers of old Cambodian pop songs and their own compositions. Dengue Fever is something completely different and not just because of the language of most of the song lyrics. Click on their name, above in yellow, to see their MySpace page - especially interesting is the documentary film Sleepwalking Through the Mekong. It chronicles the band's tour of Cambodia, focusing on the homecoming it represents for the lead singer.

Playlist: "Traffic Jam Taizé"

Some songs that probably should be considered de rigeur for commuters whose trajectory involves I-80.

Their simple and/or repetitive words and/or melodies (or some element that I don't entirely understand or know how to explain) might induce a pleasant state of meditation while still leaving you alert enough to drive yet sufficiently mellow not to fly into a road rage.

Los siete magníficos

Charlie Russell painting (title forthcoming)

I have a high school reunion of sorts coming up this summer. I'm not sure I want to start writing about it yet. My high school experience was not as awful as it could have been. Or even very awful period. But I can't help wondering what it would have been like to attend CMR High in Great Falls, MT. C.M.R. stands for Charles Marion Russell, author of the above work of art and my favorite Western artist. His paintings and sculptures show how it is and how it was around the landscapes surrounding one of my favorite Montana towns. But back to CMR. Their fight song is the the theme from The Magnificent Seven. How cool is that? And how cool would you feel if you were on a sports team and did your little warm-up laps to this?




I bought the song on iTunes this weekend (along with the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly).Before leaving work I copied it onto a CD with some other recently acquired gems. It came on as I drove through one of the few patches of open spaces and immediately evoked round-up images like the one above and its modern version (which occurs somewhere near Roundup, if I'm not mistaken ;) ). When hearing something like this, no matter who or where you are, you just can't help but ride drive sitting up a little taller and straighter in the saddle driver's seat.

It's sooooo LaLaLa!!!

Yael Naim's "New Soul"

Joy to the World

Three Dog Night
My time wasting du jour (the online part of it, anyway) revealed that Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World", according to some readers of Spinner.com, has the 3rd best opening lyrics. This prompted me to do a bit of research on the first pop song I remember hearing. I was three and we'd gone to the lake. As we walked in to a waterfront café, the song was playing on a jukebox. I liked it. That day was cold and I also remember having an absolute hissy fit, wailing at the top of my lungs, because the beach was covered with dead fish - and no, the connection to the lyric "Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea" was not lost on me, even then. But, back to the findings. My first source revealed that Hoyt Axton wrote the song and a few seconds later I found this image on a very lovingly prepared website dedicated to Axton's music.


Seeing Axton's name occasioned another stop on memory lane. After Mom died, I was looking through her day planners (I found them back to 1994 or 1995 - tax reasons) and in one of the Address/Phone number sections I came across the almost surreal entry "Hoyt Axton" followed by a Bitterroot phone number (the 777). Yes, he did live in Victor at the time she lived in Missoula, but I'll probably never know why Mom had Hoyt Axton's phone number...

Desire (1975)

Last Tuesday, driving home from Angélica's way the hell out in Sac. off Madison, flipping radio stations (a leitmotif of this blog), I found KYDS 91.5. I can't remember the first song I heard on this indie station, now affiliated with Sac State's KSSU, but it was a rock song from the 80s. Perfect for clearing my head and it ended as I rolled to a stop at one of the many 4-ways. The next song started, and the familiar opening notes of push-pull gently rollicking piano and slightly plodding drum made me brake completely and turn the volume up. I couldn't name it immediately, but I knew it was a song I'd known almost all my life. As soon as the vocals began, I felt my own voice pulled up and out by some sort of tow rope from the past and right on cue, "I married Isis on the 5th day of May, but I could not hold on to her very long..." The rest of the words to Bob Dylan's "Isis" (Desire album, 1975) followed, or perhaps I followed them, like a winding path I hadn't taken for years, but used to walk every day and knew almost instinctively. I probably hadn't heard the song for more than 20 years, but I guess it's been intact inside my head for the last 31 ... I hardly missed a word and even anticipated the syllabic manipulations, enjoying being on oral/choral auto-pilot, smiling and laughing aloud at the loopy, often forced rhymes that we only tolerate from Bob Dylan.

A clip until I can figure out how to make this blog multi-sensory.

Bought the CD Sunday, played it while making cupcakes and was transported to stifling hot summer nights on the plains. "Classic rock, gripping story songs and a gypsy violin," proclaims the sticker on the case of this remastered version. They do lose something, of course, all these years later, without the snaps, crackles and pops of that worn-down album...