Back in 1987, I turned my ex-wife, and said: “You know, this October I am turning 58, and I haven’t had a mid-life crisis yet. Do you have any suggestions for me?” It turned to that she did, and it was a doozy. Before that very same birthday rolled around I was a single man.
As I have done since I was in my mid-teens, I turned to music when the clatter in my head grew too loud and a bit of respite was needed. I found that I could replace that mental static with a song. For the next couple of years, there was a short list of perhaps a dozen tunes that were in very frequent rotation. Looking back, I can’t see much of a pattern in them, and they would go in and out of the daily playlist depending on my sense of the world at that given moment. But they were always there, arrows in my quiver for use when life would place dragons on the stoop.
I’ll post a few of them here today.
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In 1956, driving home from work at the grocery store, I head a song on the radio that stuck in my head. You know how it is, you go through your day with noise of all sorts passing by you and your brain, luckily, ignores most of it. Then, for whatever reason, one of those sounds sticks, like a dart on a board. The tune was Frankie and Johnny, and the artist a man named Lonnie Donnegan. I bought the album and every song was a winner for me, even at that age. Playing that LP on the cheap equipment that I owned at the time I eventually wore it out, so I bought another copy. Later on that album was lost, and when digital music came ’round, it hadn’t made the cut. Still hasn’t. But I found later on that all of the tunes that had been on that original album were now available on other Donnegan collections. He and I have become great pals that never met.
Album title: An Englishman Sings American Folk Songs
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I ran across Richard Thompson in 1982, when I read a review of the album Shoot Out The Lights in Rolling Stone. Since then his music has been with me as a constant presence. Going through his catalog quite a while back I came across Beat the Retreat, which I absolutely loved. Such mournful guitar work … my, oh my. Later on in life when times were melancholy it was a song to turn to. Not for solace, perhaps, but to help put words to feelings that were as yet inchoate.*
*I’ve never used “inchoate” before. Nifty word.
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Phoenix is the sort of tune that might have been sung Karaoke-style way after midnight by a middle-aged man in his cups who was swimming in self-pity and loss.
If any of you know of such a Person of Pathos, recommend it to them. It contains something more than slender hope, it holds out the possibility of triumph.
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Friends, Elon Musk and I (we are bffs) would like to recommend the messaging app Signal to you.
Signal is free to use and available on both Android and iOS operating systems. Alongside the extra security protocols, it includes all of the basic messaging tools you’re going to need, including read receipts, emoji support, group chats, and voice and video calls.
Company website
Not only is it better at keeping your secrets than its predecessors, there is always the chance that you will get to sit in on a national security session where they talk about war, bombs, and other cool stuff!
And it doesn’t cost you a cent. With emojis, yet.
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Little Home In The Valley 