Uncertainty About the Near Future

Song 431: The week the playlist features How's It Going to Be by Third Eye Blind, written by Stephan Jenkins and Kevin Cadogan, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. I liked the second single (Graduate) from Third Eye Blind's eponymous first record, having heard it quite a bit on the radio, but then, about a year after its release, one night while sharing dinner with a friend at a Manhattan restaurant, I got to hear the entire album as background music. I liked everything on the CD, so following that enjoyable meal, I soon added the disc to my collection. This marks the 4th appearance of this list of a cut from TEB — Graduate is Song 105, Burning Man is Song 117, and Thanks a Lot is Song 320. The singer here has decided that if a relationship has deteriorated to the point of exchanging blows, it makes more sense to walk away rather than to engage in physical altercations. Understandably, if Where we used to laugh There’s now a shouting match Sharp as a thumbnail scratch, then I too would want to get out of this, and likewise, I would also wonder How's It Going to Be if I felt I wanted to get myself back in again just to feel the soft dive of oblivion.

What You Wear to Cover Your Head

Song 430: Seven weeks after my previous post about a personal friend, this week the playlist puts the spotlight on Hats by Jeff Wilkinson, who also wrote the song, with this being his first appearance on the playlist, and you can find a YouTube video of his track by clicking on the title. Back around the turn of the 1990s, he and I together created what we called The Camptown Coffeehouse in Brooklyn where we presented shows at a church on 7th Ave. of our favorite fellow singer-songwriters. While we have not been in touch for a couple of decades, I always respected his talent, and I think this cut from his 2005 CD Landscapes showcases all of them pretty well. During the era when we ran the coffeehouse, one night at the weekly Jack Hardy songwriter gathering in lower Manhattan, someone put forth a challenge for the following week to write a song about hats. I responded, but I didn't consider my hat tune anything special, and I soon rewrote the lyrics, turning it into a tale about AIDS called Fire in the Blood. I don't recall whether Jeff attended those two songwriter gatherings, but if he did, and this piece was the result, then I'd have to say that he rose to the challenge better than anyone else. Like him, I know how it feels to figuratively have too many hats, but at this point in my life, the phrase has come to have a literal meaning as well, and I wonder if that also might have happened to him. Maybe one of these days we'll reconnect, and I will get to ask him.

A Spirit Rising With the Sun

Song 429: The week the playlist comes around to Angel of the Morning by Merrilee Rush & The Turnabouts, written by Chip Taylor, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. This 45 topped my own personal chart not long after it appeared in the summer between my HS junior and senior years, and at some point during that season my best friend and I had a conversation that referenced the tune. Two years earlier, I had given up resisting my obsession with the Devil's music, and this particular discussion circled around the idea that we didn't let our religious morality interfere with our listening pleasure. My friend mentioned that the couple in this saga are obviously not married, and after spending a romantic night together, are apparently about to split up, which ran counter to our foundational ethics, but that never moved us to turn down the dial when the radio played the single. A few years later, during the spring of my sophomore year at NU, I had an intense but short-lived romance with a young woman who I had met in a religious context, and had come to know mainly through letters we exchanged over a couple of years. We were just friends until we were suddenly more than that, and just as suddenly we were just friends again. After the romance ended, we still kept in touch by mail for another couple of years, and at some point, I wrote something about how much I relished this recording. Her next reply expressed surprise at my enjoyment of Merrilee's hit, and made clear that she shared my delight. So for all three of us, If morning's echo says we've sinned by savoring this track, Well, it was what I wanted now, and it was what we all wanted 50 years ago. On a side note, that stormy romance from early 1971 inspired a stack of songs, with Stormy Winds being perhaps the best of the bunch, and you can find a YouTube lyric video of it by clicking on the title. On a second side note, this marks at least the third appearance on this list of a composition by Chip Taylor - Wild Thing is Song 187 and Try (just a little bit harder) is Song 333.

Ignoring the Clock Won’t Help

Song 428: The playlist song for this week is Running Out Of Time by Joan Osborne, written by Joan Osborne and Louie Pérez, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. I picked up a copy of Joan's then-current CD Righteous Love not long after catching her performance on a TV show back around the turn of the millennium, and from the first spin, I felt I had made a pretty good investment. A few years later, when a friend gave me an iPod for Christmas, RL numbered among the favorites that I soon added to that player. This cut, which opens the album, marks the 3rd appearance on this list of a track from that disc - If I Was Your Man is Song 274 and Righteous Love (the title track) is Song 342. I don't hear very much melody in modern music these days, and so I have always appreciated the melodic quality of Osborne's work, both in her lead vocals and in the accompanying riffs, with this recording providing a prime example of each. Any time this woman feels like bouncing anyone a message off the night sky, hopefully we'll all get it in a while.