Inaugural edition. Vinyl only is the only rule. No theme, other than, “Luna & I needed to listen to this this week.”
LMK what we should listen to next. My record collection’s wider than it is deep. If I don’t have the artist, I’ll match the style…
:^D
Woke up slightly crunchy this morning after a friend’s “4-hour-dinner at Barbuto” birthday party. Wonderful counter programming.
AOTS is one of those records where there’s nowhere to stop. Even the sounds you make in flipping it are part of the show. Impenetrable fog. Then the first clear light as the fog breaks
Musgraves’ tracks here harken back to early Willie Nelson, Porter Waggoner, & Patsy Cline days, full of aching sketches of people on the margins looking beyond their horizons. No one loses hope in this world, but it goes bleak, belying every gorgeous melody and major-key harmony dripping off the grooves. Willie materializes in a hidden track at the end, cementing that Kacey’s is a world without judgments. You come out of it realizing that being young in America today just sucks, but because kids are smarter now than ever, not dumber
You can feel Evans’ troubles under the surface of this set from 1962. The rare (for Evans) focus on accessible tempos & melody only serves to amplify the tragic undertones. In retrospect, as he fights through the whole record simply to be understood, this is the sound of an artist believing he might eventually control his demons, that the worst is behind. Evans’ albums are a continuum, though, so they don’t fix in time. His career had no “phases,” only movements in an unfinished symphony
Music should… teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It's easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That's the real mission of art.
- Bill Evans
Joy Division’s Ian Curtis lived with epilepsy, as does Luna. He was tortured with understandable self-awareness, however, where Luna seems not to judge herself. In any event, I am forever grateful that someone in 1980, a few months before Curtis’ suicide, plugged a tape deck into the University of London Student Union hall soundboard and captured this glorious band.
Every once in a while, I need a reminder that history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. Kennedy painted outside a lot of lines with his rhetoric. Last week, on a prompt from a friend on Twitter, I read his 11 June 1963 “White House address on equity for Black Americans.” Still a pipe dream, 60 years on…
Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.
{sigh}
Reading that speech compelled me to pull this lp off the shelf. The record is a WMCA-AM New York City radio broadcast from 22 November 1963, the day JFK died. A few of his iconic speeches in their entirety are interspersed with background and context from the station’s main political reporter, Ed Brown. Kennedy was young, but his gravity wasn’t an act. The record set a record at the time for album sales, moving 4 million copies in its first 6 days of release.
One of my fav album covers, and the tracks just float away any rainy day
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