Hearts traveling faster than the speed of love ~ the B-52s, Topaz
A vivid memory of dancing solo on an Australian beach, the full moon intermittently obscured by racing clouds even as its rays glitterred off the cascading breakers pounding the beach. This song, Topaz, blasting at top volume from the small portable stereo speakers attached to my iPod. A breathless churning of limbs and heart and [...]
Teach Your Children Well ~ A Manifesto
A friend of mine teaches music from her home and had this to say about how she goes about the task. I teach with all I have. It’s a promise I made to the little girl I used to be… that the children who come to my door would be protected, guided, loved, inspired, and [...]
Take It Easy ~ Zen and the Art of Simplicity
I like to make things complex. Do you? I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I see so much complexity. Look at this blog, for example. There are six ways to Sunday to identify a single article. This post will appear in the Music, Pop and Rock categories. There’s a country music inflection to “Take [...]
Grace on my mind, and in my heart ~ Dave Matthews
Dave Matthews, prodigiously talented and prolific, a true minstrel of our times writing soulful, often doleful songs of our everyday experiences. Transcendant, luminescent, playful. His live performances bring together extraordinary musicians with nary a glorious note misplayed or misplaced. And at the center mic, leaving no doubt as to the driving force of the band’s [...]
Neil Young: He came dancing across the water
I can remember the first time I heard this album, Zuma. I was all of 20 years old, ski bumming in Whistler, BC, and gathered with a bunch of friends after the bars had closed. I can’t remember her name. She was skinny and not very attractive in any traditional sense, but there was something [...]
Courage
I started a post about courage, featuring this song, a couple or three weeks ago. It’s still sitting in the drafts folder. The Tragically Hip are a favourite Canadian band from the late ’80s and early ’90s, a time when I, and many other Canadians, considered them the best rock band on the planet. Fully [...]
Nothing Else Matters when Bif Naked is your muse
Bif Naked came into my life in an odd way, the leading edge of a wave of the odd, the uncanny, the revelatory. This song has a lot of meaning for me, coming as it did the fist time amidst upheaval, chaos and — ultimately — awakening. And she came right into the middle of [...]
Ingrid Karklins: A Passion to Race the Sky
A trip across Australia with Midnight Oil and Yothu Yindi in a Holden Gemini leads to passionate encounters with love and the extraordinary passion and beauty of Ingrid Karklins’ music.
The Philosopher Kings all dressed up for San Francisco, bringing their charms
It was the summer of 1995. I was back from extended travels through Australia and SE Asia, living in a Deep Cove cabin with the gentle high-tide waves lapping on the rocks just 20 feet below me while I busily built a website (a blog long before the name became popularised) from the travelogue and [...]
Peter Gabriel & Ken Follet: Fear, the mother of violence
A while ago I was reading Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth. Set amidst the brutality of the English middle ages, it’s interesting to see how all Follet’s characters experience fear, and more interesting how they respond to it and how, oftentimes, they are controlled by it, particularly the most violent of them, and [...]
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