Agatha yesterday mentioned wallowing in Lucinda Williams and Haagen Daaz, and the Chair, elsewhere, has spoken of Billie Holiday and scotch. For me, it's about the music.
We all have them. Those discs, artfully camoflaged in our music collections, that we keep because we know we'll need music to hurt by at some point. When we feel like we're off our heads, it's a given that we don't select the tunes we'd choose when we're fully compos mentis. It's not the cool stuff, the good stuff, the great stuff by which we want our friends to judge our otherwise-excellent musical taste. Entirely the opposite, sometimes.
It could be the cheesiest, most egregious, most awful bubblegum slush, but it doesn't matter if it helps you make it through the night. Sometimes you find yourselves singing heartfelt choruses to the most banal lyrics imaginable, feeling as if they're near-poetry. Sometimes the music has no words at all. It may be about matching one's mood, or perhaps lifting it slightly, or just saying, "Fuck it" and greasing yourself straight down the tubes and doing a splashy cannonball into the slough of despond. Sometimes it's about finding a safe place to float temporarily between the emotional storms, not unaware that you're sad, but able to shelter yourself for a bit. And of course, some of it is actually good, and good for the soul.
I don't doubt that we all have top five and top ten lists of hurtin' music. I have twelve. Hey, it's arbitrary. We coyotes tend to avoid the country and western standards -- too many bad connotations to do with guys who want to shoot us from the backs of half tons. I realise this list dates me some, but everybody's music is tied to certain times in their lives, and considering I'm a millenia-old trickster, and could've chosen a proto-Sundance drum chant just as easily, I figure I ain't doing badly:
* Astral Weeks -- Van Morrison
* Late for The Sky -- Jackson Browne
* A Night to Remember -- Cyndi Lauper
* I'm Alive -- Jackson Browne
* River's Gonna Run -- Patrick O'Hearne
* Ashes Are Burning -- Renaissance
* Flight to Jordan -- Duke Jordan
* White Ladder -- David Gray
* Outskirts -- Blue Rodeo
* Touch -- Sarah McLachlan
* Partitas for Violin Solo -- J.S. Bach, played by Viktoria Mullova
* Way to Blue -- Nick Drake
Two Jackson Brownes, I know. I just like him 'cuz he howls a lot...
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