The Decemberists

I have fallen in love!

For a solid couple of weeks, virtually the only music I have listened to is that of The Decemberists, a group from the Portland, Oregon area.

I discovered them via last.fm, an online music community that has a downloadable radio that plays music based on a person's listening habits, which the site determines via the use of a plug-in for iTunes (or whatever player you might use). It creates a database based on what you've listened to in the past, then plays music it "thinks" you'd like.

Well... the more I listened to the last.fm radio, the more I heard The Decemberists, and the more I heard them, the more I liked them. I have since collected everything they've relased, as well as a two-CD re-release of the band's writer and lead singer Colin Meloy's college band — Tarkio.

NPR has a couple of concerts online — one of The Decemberists and a solo show by Meloy

Meloy is one of the most literate writers I've come across in a long time and his songs are often based on literature (he was an English major back in Missoula, Montana), and many of his songs have a very traditional feel to them. One of my favourites is "We Both Go Down Together"...

We Both Go Down Together

by Colin Meloy

Here on these cliffs of Dover
so high you can't see over
and while your head is spinning
hold tight it's just beginning

you come from parents' wanton
a childhood rough and rotten
I come from wealth and beauty
untouched by work or duty

and oh, my love, my love.
and oh, my love, my love.
We both go down together.

I found you, a tattooed tramp
A dirty daughter from the labor camps
I laid you down in the grass of the clearing
You wept, but your soul was willing

and oh, my love. my love.
and oh, my love. my love.
We both go down together.

And my parents will never consent to this love
But I hold your hand

Meet me on my vast veranda
My sweet untouched Miranda
and while the seagulls are crying
we fall but our souls are flying

and oh, my love. my love.
and oh, my love. my love.
and oh, my love. my love.
and oh, my love. my love.
We both go down together.

Oh, and there is no truth to the rumour that I only like them because my birthday is in December!

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Radio Silence

Yes, I've fallen into a period of radio silence... I like solitude a lot and I go through spells of wanting to keep to myself as much as possible. I turn off the phone. I don't answer email. I don't make calls.

Sometimes it's necessary. Sometimes I feel like I've allowed myself to get too stretched in directions and in ways I'd rather not be stretched.

I'm also going through a period of discovery; a time of wondering about most things. Perhaps it's got something to do with mid-life. Perhaps it's got something to do with having children that need me less and less. Whatever it is, I'm giving in to it. Or perhaps I'm throwing myself into it.

I'm learning French. It's an incredibly difficult language, and I'm wishing I were only a year or two old so that learning it would come a bit more naturally. After a lifetime (well, let's optimistically call it a "half-a-lifetime!) of building a pretty good vocabulary, I'm back at the beginning — learning nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, learning feminine vs. masculine nouns, le vs. la, vous vs. tu... Forever, I have wondered why vis a vis is pronounced veez-ah-vee and not veez-ah-veez. Now, I understand. So, if i learn nothing else, I've at least learned that.

I leave for Paris in another week. I'll only be staying a week this time, but I'm scheduled to go back again in November — in time to celebrate my 51st birthday. There is something very special about the city that I can't explain with words. Maybe that's why I took so many pictures while I was there last November.

I want very much to move there. Very much.

Oh, and I think I'm going to go to San Francisco before the end of July, too! The world keep spinning and I've got to try to keep up!

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Running On Empty

I don't spend as much time reading blogs these days, although I still try to at least visit a few of my friends' sites. I also still check in at the DailyKos to see if any new attempts to dislodge the miserable failure from our windpipes have begun to take shape. Alas...

This morning, however, I came across a post to which I had to respond as my memories of a night in 1978 remain fairly clear to me still.

First, I'll note that I first learned of Jackson Browne as I perused records in a K-Mart in Oregon, Ohio back in the early 1970s. I saw his first record (in LP form, of course) and liked the imaginative cover — the wine flask design with his graphically-rendered face — and I picked it up, looked at it and saw that Graham Nash and David Crosby (amongst a few other names I recognized) had contributed to the recording. I almost bought it without having heard a note or a word (I've been pretty lucky at buying music that way over the years) but didn't.

Shortly after that, on my way home from (high) school, "Doctor My Eyes" played on the radio (is there a chance that that song would be played on commercial radio in this day and age?) and the deal was cinched. From that day forth, Browne became one of my most favourite writers and singers, and surely has influenced my own songwriting. I've only seen him three or four times in concert, but all have been gratifying shows.

While in college in Bowling Green (Ohio), I saw him during the tour that promoted his Running On Emptyalbum, and after the show, a bunch of us (my then-girlfriend Robin Wilson, Scott Hilyard, Ed Nolan and a few others) decided to go look for him at the nearby Holiday Inn. We hustled into the lounge and waited a bit, hoping he'd simply saunter in and make our night, but he didn't. However, Karla Bonoff, the opening act, did happen in. I was a journalism major at the time and I had a story due for class, so I took the chance and walked over to her table.

I introduced myself and asked her and (I assumed) her manager if I could ask her a few questions for the article I needed to write. She was polite as I recall, but her manager was a bit on the snotty side and brushed me off and away rather brusquely.

We then went skulking around the motel looking for signs of Jackson, never finding him. We did run into his piano player Craig Doerge, however, whose door was wide open to the outside, so we chatted with him briefly.

I still have the t-shirt I bought that evening! Actually, my son has absconded with it, and he wears it often and I smile.

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Night Sounds

I live very near train tracks. It seems as though a train rumbles by just about every twenty minutes or so, and I take great comfort in hearing them.

I grew up along the banks of the Maumee River in Toledo (on the East Side) and trains regularly rolled along Miami Street as well as down closer to the river. In the summer nights, with the windows open and the curtains lifted into the air by the draw of the fan in my parents' room, I was often awakened by the trains as they followed the river's bend.

Tugboats would also belch their sounds into the deep, dark dead of night as they steered ocean and lake freighters to (or from) their moorings along the riverfront.

I can't help but recall those nights so very, very long ago with every train whistle that sounds, or with the rythmic thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump of train wheels passing over a joint in the rails.

There is something about trains, something about rivers that will forever keep days of my youth close to me.

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i love you but i've chosen darkness.
Originally uploaded by misscaro.