So did any of that CD get you interested? You know it's just simple

melodic pop-rock and that's about all. I'm sort of tired of looking

for great purpose in pop music. I still like that, but I wasn't

allowing myself to accept just approachable, hooky songs that I liked,

especially for their melodies. That's what I first listened to from my

first Beatles 45, and I am listening for it again.

I was getting to be like a serious jazz snob, only acknowledging the

proven canon and the righteous and forgetting how much fun simple songs

are. In the absence of a watershed moment, like punk or psychedelia, I

made my own. The biggest musical movement of the past twenty years has

been hiphop/rap and I never got into that at all. My references became

very old and most of the artists I've been listening to are on their

twenty-fifth album or so and do not have anything new to say, lyrically

or musically. Somehow it has been established that there's a limit to

how innovative a pop musician can be, there's a time when they just

wear out and can't do anything special anymore. It's like we know them

too well. I hate to think it's like a marriage when our old spouses are

not exciting anymore, that scenario deserves some work. But with

popular music, loyalty will just bore a guy to death. The saving grace

is that you can be unfaithful to your old loves and nobody cares. I

won't trash my old loves, because I am still fond of them, but I can't

get it up for them anymore.

My new loves are sometimes actually new artists, and sometimes old

people I never paid attention to before. I recently found a bunch of

David Bowie stuff I liked, I always dismissed him in the past. I still

like Frank Black and the Pixies. I like Tom Waits. Miles Davis and John

Coltrane. But play me no more Van Morrison, my friend. Peter Garrett

has retired. Steve Earle, Billy Bragg and Michael Franti are beating

horses long dead. Brian Wilson did a brilliant thing with Smile, but

he's still a crazy old man. Even XTC are guys our age with creative

blocks. Give me tuneful young blokes who pay no respect to the blues or

reggae or spend any time worshipping anything from artists who came

before 1995. I know everything from before then, but I don't think it

is all that matters.

I love melodies, at the heart of it. Polyphony, early music, Beethoven,

Stephen Foster, Civil War songs, folk tunes, ragtime, swing, the

Beatles, Thelonious Monk, Radiohead, the Shins. The stuff I put on the

CD is all melodious. Smile is won-won-wonderful for me because of the

brave melodies rising and falling and swooping everywhere. The Shins

songs are unexpectedly sweet. The Long Winters, Fountains of Wayne,

Built to Spill. Melodies give songs legitimacy for me, not just the

beats, the instrumentation, the soloists or the singer. I liked that

Joe Hill oratorio we heard because I did not know where it was going.

That was novel!

Al these forms that I know so well - blues, bluegrass, jazz - are

useful but too many recordings are just re-hashed tunes, harmonies,

lead lines, patterns that I've heard a hundred thousand times. When

Bill Monroe played a mandolin solo it was refreshing. Sixty years later

a Ricky Skaggs copy of it is just a waste of time. Same with Eric

Clapton, my poster boy of boredom. His whole career, with the possible

exception of a few years in the sixties and seventies, has been

highly-polished imitations of people who originated the blues form. Now

he's done TWO Robert Johnson albums! Life is too short for me to care

about him any more.

At present I have to take a break from so much of what I have liked.

Blues gives me the blues. Reggae is a cul-de-sac. Classic rock is over

and done. Robert Plant is fat and Paul McCartney dies his hair. I loved

them but now I retire them. here's my manifesto: It's time to take

chances again, experiment, go places where I never went before and not

to spend any time sitting in a parked car just because I found a good

space.

Whaddya think?