On the various music lists that I’m on/have been on in the past, people often include an “n.p.” at the bottom of their posts. It stands for “now playing,” and it’s followed by whatever they’re listening to at that moment. (There’s also “npimh,” which I like better: it means “now playing in my head,” and it’s used when a post’s content somehow calls to mind a song or song title.) I like looking at people’s n.p.’s; I’ve actually found out about new bands I’ve come to like just by asking about a record in someone’s n.p. line. N.p. lines are disappearing rapidly from one of the lists because a lot of the people there are using Last.fm/Audioscrobbler, so they just post lists of their top 10 scrobbles of the week, which is fine, except I liked it better when people posted actual content and then stuck an n.p. line at the bottom, rather than just posting a list of ten band names. But such is the march of technology, I suppose.

And I notice that various IM services have picked up on the n.p. idea now—I was a little alarmed the other day when I signed into MSN’s Messenger (which we use at work) to send a quick note to a co-worker who was talking to the client, and a little line appeared at the top of the message window showing the title of the song I was listening to. Oooh, creepy.

But I’ve decided that here on the blog, henceforth “n.p.” will stand for “now pimping.” I guess the more family-friendly version would be “now plugging,” but thanks to Postcard, I’ve gotten in the habit of calling the act of proselytizing for a band “pimping,” so I’ll stick with that.

Or maybe it should stand for “now proselytizing,” for that matter. I have a draft of a blog entry that I started months ago somewhere that’s actually called Proselytizing, and it’s about how like a lot of avid music listeners, I secretly think that my taste is the best and everyone should share it, but while there are certain bands that I actively proselytize for because I think that just about everyone I know—not to mention everyone on the planet—should know and love, there are some that I’m not as active in pimping because I know they’re not for everyone. In most cases, I fully understand why people don’t “get” those bands. They’re wrong, of course, but I forgive them. Dolorean were the example I was thinking of when I started the post, because although I think Al James can pretty much do no wrong, I understand that the band’s dreamy, slow, elegiac sound won’t appeal to everyone. So although I try to talk about them a lot, I don’t push too hard, because I know some people just plain old won’t like them. And I can live with that.

On the other hand, there are bands like the Delgados and the Libertines who deserve universal love. I won’t say this on an e-mail list, of course, where I am doing my best to remain polite and diplomatic because I got so sick of feuding with people (people who, for the purposes of my universe, were not actually people but merely faceless collections of zeroes and ones on the other side of a connection node, which makes it even sillier to get het up about disagreements with them), but in some small, impolite part of my brain, I believe fundamentally that if you are a fan of whatever you want to call the current post-indie-heyday rock genre and you don’t like the Delgados or the Libertines, you’re just wrong, and your head is implanted in some bodily orifice from which you really need to extract it. Okay, that’s only a small part of my otherwise well-behaved little brain that says that, but it does, in fact, say it.

And in that spirit, I want to start regular pimping of music, books, TV shows, and other forms of entertainment (I’d include movies, but considering how far behind the curve I am these days with movies—hell, I just saw “Vera Drake,” a highly acclaimed movie by my favorite filmmaker, last night—I think any movie recommendations I might make would be irrelevant, unless I’m pimping old classics, I guess) that I think everyone should be paying attention to. I’m going to try to pimp roughly five items per week; might end up with more than that, but given my, er, spotty history of keeping the blog updated, five seems like a good number to aim for at the start.

Except that today’s list is only going to include one item, I think, because (gee, how surprising) this one requires a little more than just a couple of lines of “why I think this band/record/book/blog/TV show is good.” Here goes:

1. Steve Dawson, “Sweet Is the Anchor.” Steve is the co-lead singer, along with his wife, Diane Christiansen, of the recently dormant but not dead Chicago band Dolly Varden, and this is a side project of his. It’s being billed as a solo album, though he recorded it and has been playing it live with a band, featuring vibes, pedal steel, and some cool percussion (not to mention Diane doing backing vocals). It’s quite different from the slightly alt-country-tinged indie rock (or whatever we’re calling it) of Dolly Varden; Steve’s a big soul fan, and there are hints of soul and gospel all through the record, but it’s not exactly a soul record. It’s hard to describe, so just listen to some MP3s here, and if “Love Is a Blessing” is a little too slow and long for you, don’t be put off; it’s a great song, but it is a little more lugubrious than others on the record. The instrumentation is part of what makes the record cool, but Steve’s songwriting and his gorgeous voice (and Diane’s too) are what really make it stand out. It was the only thing in my CD player for a good long while recently. Go see Steve and band live too, if you get a chance, because the record really comes to life when they play it live—though unless you live in Chicago, you probably won’t get a chance to see them.

In the interests of full disclosure, and because I’ve mentioned Dolly Varden at least once on the blog but haven’t really talked about them at length, I’ll take a little detour here to pimp them, even though they won’t have a new record out until next year at the soonest. I had never even heard of them until I was asked to interview them, back when I was living in Chicago and still writing for the MoMzine. Corrie from Miles of Music sent me their then-new record “The Dumbest Magnets,” and my friend Roy was also pimping it at the time, so I expected to like it, and I did, pretty okay. And then I listened to it some more, and then a few times more, and with each listen I found myself falling in love with it a little more. It’s that kind of record: you don’t just want to listen to it, you want to date it—gaze deeply into its eyes and take it with you everywhere you go.

I interviewed Steve in person and Diane by phone, and really took to them as people, too; they’re extremely gifted (Diane is an artist as well as a musician, and one of these days, I’m going to buy a painting of hers), but also totally down to earth and normal— that is, normal in my definition, which is “having a lot of common ground with me.” The article was one of the best I did for the MoMzine (though I can’t prove that, unfortunately, since the old archives aren’t online anymore). I’d always chat with Steve when I ran into him at shows during my remaining months in Chicago, and we stayed in loose touch after I left. They put out another record, “Forgiven Now,” which objectively speaking is pretty much every bit as good as “The Dumbest Magnets,” except that I’m not capable of objectivity about the latter.

Steve and Diane also put out a pretty stellar duets record (no longer available, alas, but you can go buy the entire Dolly Varden catalog at their site), and then I pimped Steve and Diane for a duet show at Twangfest 7, where they were rapturously received by at least five of us. (Twangfest Wednesday night shows are usually as much about everyone seeing each other again for the first time in a while and catching up and chatting as they are about the music, which is fine, but that night I wanted to physically assault anyone who talked during Steve and Diane’s set.) Bill and I were planning our wedding at that time, and we agreed that Steve and Diane would make a wonderful wedding band for us, so I took a deep breath after the show and asked Steve, who said they’d be honored and to send him the details.

So Steve and Diane sang at our wedding, with their then-preteen daughter in tow. She hung out with Bill’s niece, who’s just a year younger, and they hit it off, and our families, including my dad, absolutely loved the performance—my oldest brother ended up buying one of their CDs. It couldn’t have been better. The did both appropriate covers (“Together Again,” “If I Needed You,” that kind of thing) as well as their own material, including the title song from “The Dumbest Magnets.” It’s a song that Steve wrote about his wedding to Diane, and objectively, it was probably a little weird for me to request that they sing it at my wedding—it’s their wedding song, not ours, after all. But it kills me, it’s such a perfect (and I mean that word in the most literal sense) song, lyrically and musically, and I couldn’t not have them sing it. Bill and I were married on a glorious October day in one of the pavilions in Tower Grove Park in St. Louis, and the reception was at the Eliot Room at the Schlafly Brewery in St. Louis. Schlafly is where Bill’s favorite beer is made, and where Twangfest’s Wednesday night shows are held, so it was sort of a natural (if amusingly so) place to have our reception. But it’s also a beautifully restored old building with lots and lots of big, wide windows, and there’s a line in “The Dumbest Magnets” that goes “Room all lit from the outside/Indian summer,” and just at the moment that Steve and Diane sang that line, the late afternoon sun was still streaming in, and…well, okay, enough mushiness, but it was a moment of pure, soaring joy, and maybe that captures a little of how special that song, that record, and that band are to me. So I’d probably pimp Steve’s new record even if I didn’t think it was superb…but fortunately, it is. And that’s what I’m pimping today.

Next: a simple five-item pimp list, just to prove that I can too write a post that’s less than novel length.

I’m getting a big kick out of the comments on my Speedies/Student Teachers post from a few days ago, and I expect my blogging will be kind of focused on that for a while, plus I have to admit that I’m having trouble concentrating on much of anything this evening with the news from the Gulf states turning terrifying again (I have friends and acquaintances down that way, and I’m worried as hell about them). But nonetheless—and tying in to the universe’s apparent ongoing effort to keep me somewhere between 1978 and 1981—I need to write just briefly about the Sandy Denny boxed set that arrived in the mail yesterday.

It’s my second Sandy box (this one is “Boxful of Treasures,” which repeats a fair amount of what’s on the box I already owned, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” but also includes a lot of demos and home recordings and alternate takes, and I’m a sucker for that kind of thing), which is maybe a little self-indulgent, but I got it for a “good” price (brand new, still shrink-wrapped, not a promo, for $70 instead of the $100+ that most retailers wanted for it), and I was feeling sorry for myself last week, so I ordered it. It arrived yesterday, and I posted about it on one of the music e-mail lists that I’m on, but that wasn’t really the appropriate venue for it—not too many fans over there, or probably even people who know who she was. So I’m going to do something I don’t normally do: crib part of the post from that list and repost it here, with some edits and rewrites.

I guess if I’d made a concerted effort to compare the track listing side by side with that of the other Sandy
box, I’d have realized that there was a lot of overlap between the two, and maybe I wouldn’t have bought it. But then again, as soon as I started reading the liner notes, I thought, “Fuck that.” Richard
Thompson’s introduction alone was worth the money.

I’ve posted about Sandy here on the blog in the past, but this year, I finally came to the conclusion, after years of wavering about whether I could make such a strong statement, that she was simply the greatest singer I’ve ever heard. (That’s opinion–I’m not attempting to state it as fact, so I hope no one will
attack me for it.) Her songwriting was always interesting and occasionally brilliant, and of course, she was an essential part of the revival/modernization of British Isles traditional music. Her death, at the age of just 31, was close to inevitable, and was the result of damage she’d knowingly done to herself, but it was
nonetheless tragic, especially when you consider how much more she might have contributed. Several quotes in the liner notes from those who knew her express surprise and even bitterness that she hasn’t
received the same sort of cult adulation that Nick Drake received, and though I think it’s a little strange to be bitter about something like that, I also see the point (though I’m also a member of the cult of Nick, certainly; that’s a post for another day too). She was extraordinary (as a singer, but also apparently as a human being, according to those who knew her), and irreplaceable.

And mostly, for me at least, it was that voice: breathy (I’ve always said that she sang kind of the way Bette Davis talked), but in no way wispy or ethereal; on the contrary, she was a magnificently powerful singer with extraordinary command and control of her voice, a wonderful sense of dynamics and phrasing, and just the most beautiful, awe-inspiring tone and timbre I’ve ever heard. I can sing some (not so well as I used to, since I’m an old broad and haven’t sung as regularly as I’ve gotten older as I used to), and from the very first time I heard Sandy sing, I tried to model my voice after hers. Doing so improved my phrasing and some other aspects of my singing…but I could never actually sound like Sandy; no one ever did or could. (Wanna see me get really, really mad? Find one of the several reviews from the late 1980s of one of Syd Straw’s records that compared her voice to Sandy’s. Yeah.) There are a lot of female singers in the trad-folk/Brit/Celtic tradition that I admire and adore, from Niamh Parsons’s wonderful dusky contralto to Karan Casey’s miraculous, airy, tripping soprano to Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh’s (hey, first time I’ve ever spelled that right without having to look it up first!) canonically gorgeous and sweet high soprano to Kate Rusby’s modernized version of a great traditional British voice, and more. But when you get right down to it, none of them can touch Sandy: she was the greatest, period.

I started crying as soon as I opened the box and looked at the photo on the booklet cover: an older Sandy (as old as she got, anyway), looking dissipated and world-weary and a little bit lost. Not the photo I’d
have chosen, probably, but an honest one, at least. I’ve always half-wondered (and I’m not the only one) how different her career and life might have been if she had been beautiful and sexy instead of
sweet-faced and dumpy…though that’s speculation for another day.

The first thing I listened to from the box was “The Pond and the Stream,” one of my favorite songs that Sandy wrote. She wrote it about the far more obscure singer Anne Briggs, who was a huge influence on Sandy and other Brit-trad female singers of the time, like Maddy Prior and Linda Thompson. (I didn’t
know about Briggs until this year, I’m embarrassed to say, and I’ve been meaning to have a word with my Lancastrian/Mancunian friend Ged about how he could allow this ignorance of mine to exist. But I’ve made up for it since then.)

When Sandy died in horrible, stupidly unnecessary circumstances in 1978, I was, coincidentally, experiencing my first (and still worst) major depression, and her death hit me especially hard, almost like the death of a friend. I still have the journal entry I wrote about it at the time, though I won’t post it here—there are some limits to how confessional even I’m willing to get. But now that I’m watching “Butterflies” again (and the first season of “The Muppet Show”! Another blast from my past), and since, as noted, the universe seems to want me to revisit my late teen years, I find myself mourning her again. Then again, in some sense, I never really stopped. Every time I hear her sing—that voice, my God, that voice—I mourn her all over again.

…or at least to the Speedies, who were in the New York Times this past Sunday, so maybe now it’s superfluous for me to write about them. Or maybe it means that I have to finish what I started writing about them before the laptop (have I mentioned I hate laptop keyboards? Let me mention it again) ate the entry. (Note to self: hit “save and continue” constantly. After I lost half a day’s work today—good work, the first bit of work at my new job that I was actually proud of, and was even planning to blog about—because Visio decided to crash right after I saved the file and then wouldn’t recover it, my mantra is going to be “Hit save every five seconds” for the rest of my life. But I digress.)

The Times article, like my lost post, focuses on the sudden revival of the song “Let Me Take Your Photograph” via a remixed version that’s being featured in an HP commercial. The article uses Gregory Crewdson, former Speedie and now famous photographer and Yale professor, as its focal point, which seems appropriate to me because in a way, he was my focal point for the band too. Back in my freshman year of college, I moved in with the two frontpeople of a semi-local band, Tina Peel (some of whom later went on to become the much better known Fuzztones); the female half of the couple, Deb O’Nair (real name Carol Krautheim), was a friend of a friend, and the apartment was on a great block in the East Village—this was 1979, and the East Village was barely starting to gentrify, but even then, this was a great block—and my share of the rent was $117/month. So it didn’t seem to matter that after four years of a really longass commute from my family’s apartment on the Upper West Side to my high school in the East Village, I was subjecting myself to almost the exact same commute in reverse, only a few stops longer, from the apartment in the East Village to college up in Morningside Heights, in upper Manhattan. (And adding a ten-minute-on-a-good-day walk to the subway to the mix, since we lived between Avenues A and B and the most logical subway stop to go to was way over on Eighth Street/Astor Place and Broadway. But I digress.) And for a while, till my roommates became totally insufferable, it was a great setup, because I was Miss Punk Rock then anyway, and it didn’t matter that I missed most of my 9 a.m. biology classes that first semester (a small problem since I was a bio major at the time) because I was staying out every night at Club 57 or my beloved Tier 3 or Hurrah or wherever, and even on nights when I stayed in, my roommates had to walk through my bedroom when they came in at 4 a.m. and open the squeaky door to their bedroom because it was a railroad flat. It didn’t matter; I was living exactly the life I’d wanted to lead for years.

Tina Peel’s manager was also one of the partners (owners? managers? I can’t remember anymore) of the great Upper West Side club Hurrah, so we were there all the time even when Tina Peel weren’t playing (that is, when I wasn’t hanging out with my high school friends at Tier 3, a club so brilliant that I can’t even describe it adequately), and partly because of my own connections (I wrote for New York Rocker, and I knew some people who knew some people, that was how it went then) and partly because of my roommates, I got to meet all sorts of bands, both touring ones (hanging out with Madness at Irving Plaza remains one of my fondest memories, though not quite as fond as my memory of hanging out with the Gang of Four on their very first US dates…but that’s really a story for another day) and local ones, including the Speedies.

Back then, the NYC teen punk scene had some really silly rivalries, none of which anyone took very seriously, but there they were. I was spending a lot of time with some little girls (I’m not being condescending there; in addition to being four years younger than me, they really were little–the tallest was 5’0″, I think) who didn’t actually go to my high school, or at least didn’t go there for long, but were vaguely affiliated with it—it was kind of a small scene, and everyone knew someone who went to my high school. I knew them through a guy named Allan Hart, who was one of maybe six or seven punks in my high school when I was still there. Anyway, these little girls and their crowd, the fringe of which I sometimes lurked on, were Stimulators fans. The Stimulators were a hardcore punk band, known mostly for their extraordinarily young (and rather talented) drummer, Harley Flanagan, who I think was about 12 at this time. He was what gave them their notoriety, but they were a good band regardless, and always fun to see live. (And in a weird confluence of eras of my musical life, they gave Soul Asylum their original name: the Stims’ slogan was “Loud Fast Rules,” and the Soul Asylum boys had no idea who the Stimulators were, but they saw the slogan on a photo of the back of someone’s jacket and liked it, in kind of a semi-ironic way, enough to call their band that before changing the name to Soul Asylum. But yet again, I digress.)

Anyway, if you liked the Stimulators, you weren’t supposed to like the much poppier and sweeter-sounding and “nicer” Speedies. There are those who were there then who will now deny that those rivalries existed, but trust me, they did; when I started becoming friends with the Speedies as people, I always had to make sure none of my Stims-fan friends saw me. To complicate matters further, the Speedies had a different sort of rivalry with a semi-local (half from NYC, half from the Westchester suburbs of Larchmont and Mamaroneck) band called the Student Teachers. I loved the Stims and got into them because I wanted to be in with that in crowd, but I purely adored the Student Teachers, who were smartypants but melodic, depressive but catchy, and totally irresistible. (Their guitar player, Philip Shelley, went on to go to Columbia at the same time that I did, and we were friends; he and a later-legendary guy named Ned Hayden, who didn’t go to Columbia (he went to Clark) but spent so much time there that he might as well have, wrote some truly amazing songs together.) Gosh I loved the Teachers. And if you were a Teachers fan, you were really supposed to hate the Speedies.

It wasn’t actually that hard to hate the Speedies, because despite having a good ear for melody (mostly courtesy of their bass player, John Carlucci) and some great guitar playing (thanks to Eric Hoffer and Greg—he was Greg then—Crewdson), they were incredibly annoying due to the insufferable mannerisms of their singer, John Marino. I can’t really imagine what it was like to be gay in high school in that era, and I know a lot of John’s campiness was defensive, but that still didn’t make him a good or even tolerable singer. The fact that he sang in a fake British accent half the time didn’t help; Joey Ramone could get away with that, but only Joey. (When I first heard the remix of “Let Me Take Your Photograph” in the HP ad, I thought it was not a remix but a cover, because John Marino redid the vocal, I guess, and he toned the Brit accent and the mannerisms way down.)

So I didn’t have any trouble maintaining allegiance to the Stims and the Teachers…except that John Carlucci was really good friends with my roommates from Tina Peel, Deb and Rudi. He still lived with his parents in Queens back then, so he stayed at our apartment a lot when he didn’t want to make the trek back to Queens, and even when the two bands weren’t sharing a bill, he’d often come over just to hang out. I had a sort of vague, half-hearted crush on him; he was incredibly cute, so I knew he was way out of my league (even back then, when I had a great body and lots of style), but he was so adorable that it seemed almost silly not to have at least a little crush on him. He was also a sweetie, not the brightest guy on the planet, but good-hearted and lots of fun to be around. And through him, and through Tina Peel and the Speedies playing an increasing number of shows together, I got to know the rest of the band (except for John Marino—he never seemed to register my existence, which was fine with me). I honestly don’t remember Alan, the drummer, very well at all, except that he was a nice guy. I remember that Eric was a sweetie, and even then, his academic brilliance was obvious; when I read that he had gone on to work at Apple (and Sun Microsystems, I think) and was one of the developers of QuickTime, I wasn’t even faintly surprised. Eric was quiet and a little shy and tended to huddle quietly in the corner with his girlfriend, whom he’d been with forever, but I still considered him kind of a friend.

But it was Greg who was really my pal. Greg had a girlfriend too in those days, and I don’t think we were ever interested in each other romantically even on a theoretical basis; at any rate, there was a sort of tacit agreement between us that we were friends and nothing more. But we were sure good friends; he was one of those people you sometimes meet and instantly feel like you’ve known forever. All those memories are kind of hazy now, but I remember that as soon as I walked into the backstage area of whatever club they were all playing, he and I would gravitate toward each other and just talk and talk and talk. “Soulmate” would be way, way too strong a word, because we didn’t spend that much time together and it wasn’t that intense, but he was someone who I just clicked with, in that magical way that doesn’t happen all that often.

None of it lasted all that long. Roommate Rudi (real name: Glenn Dalpis) was truly hideous to live with—he was 26 then, the same age as my oldest brother, and he had the maturity level of a particularly immature 12-year-old—and ultimately, I fell out with them and moved back home for a while. After that, I didn’t go to Speedies gigs much, and eventually I stopped going at all. I’d still see John Carlucci (who was always friendly to me) from time to time at shows, but somehow I rarely ran into the other guys. I moved farther uptown, closer to school, made friends there and started paying more attention to Britpunk than to the local scene, and so Eric and Greg, my favorite Speedies, just sort of slipped out of my world and eventually out of my memory; it wasn’t until a number of years later, when I started to see Greg (who was by then Gregory) written up in the Village Voice or even The New Yorker, that my fond memories came back to me. I was overjoyed for him that he’d become a success, and I went to see some of his exhibits and was very impressed, but not surprised; he wasn’t quite the conspicuous genius that Eric was, but he was smart as hell himself, and gifted, and I was always glad to see him do so well. I’d be truly surprised if he remembered me at all anymore, but I remember him, with great fondness and good feeling.

But now they’re back, those Speedies, on my TV screen on a regular basis (they played the hell out of the HP ad during the US Open). Not that long ago, I finally managed to find an MP3 of a really wretched quality live recording of my favorite Student Teachers song, “Christmas Weather” (I had the single, bought it when it came out, but it’s long since disappeared, on a site that Teachers’ lead singer and frontguy David Scharff set up, and that was a thrill too. A better musical thrill, I might add—the Teachers are still a better band. Old rivalries die hard, I guess. And those old memories, vaguer and vaguer all the time now, are all good ones, so even though every single one of the Speedies seems to have done just fine (better than fine, really) in their post-punk-teen life, I hope they’re making some big money off that ad. In my heart, if not necessarily in my ears, they deserve every penny.

…about getting the blog started again? Well, see, there’s this thing called Twangfest…and I should never try to do anything in the weeks leading up to it, or for that matter in the week after it. I’ve barely looked at a computer other than at work this whole week.

I’ll do a write-up of Twangfest later, I think. This is just a stealth post in the meantime that has the dual purpose of keeping the blog sort of active and reminding me that a potential record of the year is coming out next week: The Dreadful Yawns’ new one, after a long hiatus. I write that as though I know something about the band, but in fact I just heard of them this morning, via the Miles of Music weekly e-mail. The description intrigued me, so I found some clips, and it was pretty much love at first hearing. I am leery of judging anything based on just a couple of 45-second clips, but I can’t imagine hating the rest of the record. (Famous last words.) So I’m posting this in part to remind myself to buy it when it comes out on Tuesday.

Also recently heard and liked: Columbus, Ohio’s the Squares. They have an EP out. I have philosophical objections to EPs, especially ones with only four or five tracks, but I might buy this one just to show support. And then there are the St. Louis bands I’ve been liking lately, like the Love Experts and the Gentleman Callers and the (now defunct, sadly) Phonocaptors. Plus Glossary have a new album coming out that they’re already sold out of; I’ll be buying it when the second pressing is available. And then there’s…well, suffice to say that my months of buying very few CDs have come to an end. Stupid good bands, they keep costing me money.

All this meme-tagging stuff is new to me, but Jamie tagged me with this one at least a week ago, probably more, and I figured it would be a good way to get the blog restarted.

The last CD I bought was:
Orange Juice, The Very Best of. There’s a new Orange Juice comp that just came out called The Glasgow School, which focuses solely on their Postcard Records days. Reading about it made me all nostalgic and wistful, so I went hunting around for You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever, which I have on vinyl somewhere but have never owned on CD. Couldn’t find it, but I did find this best-of, which includes both “Rip It Up” and (most important) “Felicity.” And suddenly it’s 1981 again.

Song playing right now:
Erm, nothing when I started typing this, but the mere mention of “Felicity” drove me to put it on. Instant happiness. I can’t explain what it is with me and that song—it’s partly a time-and-place thing, but it’s also just the type of song that fills my heart with joy and also makes me grin. Rare qualities in a song, especially the latter.

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
Five? Sheesh. How about five hundred?
Oh, okay, five:
“Petal”—Lori Carson
“The Hatfield Side”—Cheri Knight
“Dancing on the Ashes”—Robbie Fulks (a song about a veteran of the Somme, which I find one of the most compelling stories in history, really. Someday I’d like to ask Robbie what inspired him to write about that particular topic—was it something he was reading, or just his imagination, or what?)
“I Will Dare”—The Replacements
“Goodnight Loser”—The V-Roys/Scott Miller (either version will do)

Five people to whom Iâ??m passing the baton:
Um, yeah. I’m going to have to give that one some thought…like thinking up five people I know who blog.

Okay, a relatively low-key and perhaps inauspicious restart to the blog, but a restart nonetheless. Later, I’ll talk about my new job, and how I finished grad school (tortuously, in a nutshell, but ultimately successfully), and I swear I’ll get to that next installment of the Mats saga. And maybe I’ll write about just why 1981 was such an important year for me.