In his poem “To the One of Fictive Music,” Wallace Stevens venerates the muse that inspires, at least in part, his art of choice, while he simultaneously articulates—via his typical rhythmic and verbose wordplay—that poetry works best when it couples imagination with the familiar. Reframing the known, in essence, should be the goal.
For so retentive of themselves are men
That music is intensest which proclaims
The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom,
And of all vigils musing the obscure,
That apprehends the most which sees and names,
As in your name, an image that is sure,
Among the arrant spices of the sun,
O bough and bush and scented vine, in whom
We give ourselves our likest issuance.
Similar is my lofty goal, week in, week out, with this blog. My posts are not poetry, of course, though at their best they include wordplay, rhythms and rhymes, and my subject is not poetry but a sibling art. I am also not a poet or songsmith, nor do I play either on TV, though I did—decades ago—study the written word. Rather, I celebrate the ephemeral muse that makes life’s good times better and bad moments a little less worse, aka songs and albums, and hope to explain why the ones I recommend deserve to be heard.
If that sounds like highfalutin nonsense, so be it.
Most weekend morns I strap on headphones, click play on the latest focus of my affection, and tap-tap-tap on my decade-old MacBook Pro, hoping against hope that words will spill from the collective unconscious and fill the empty page. They rarely do. No, writing for me is a laborious endeavor of false starts, missteps and willful distractions, of putting off to the last minute that which could have been done hours or, in select cases, days earlier. There’s no rhyme or reason to such delays, just the out-of-sequence seasons of the process. Spring does not always come first and winter does not represent the end. (Cyclical matters not when the wheel is flat!)
All that said, a well-written missive matters less to success (aka many hits) than interest in the artist, album or song, which is generally fueled by TV appearances, playlist placement, social media and radio play. That’s the most frustrating aspect of blogging, I think. My favorite posts only occasionally intersect with The Old Grey Cat’s most popular and typically veer away from the standard-issue review template.
Without further adieu, here are—in reverse-chronological order—five favorite posts for 2023 along with their first paragraphs; click on the titles to read more.
1) I Dream in Lifetimes (Ruminations, 11/12/23). “I spent the bulk of Friday transferring a 7-inch reel of old Super 8 home movies into the digital realm. A decade or so ago, I spent a small fortune to have it and others turned into HD files and came away less than impressed by the washed-out result, which I chalked up to the films being stored in less than ideal conditions for 50+ years. But the excellent restoration of The Adventures of Terrific Man implanted the notion that, perhaps, I should re-do the films myself using the DIY equipment Terrific auteur Todd did. So I invested in a ‘used but good’ projector-scanner from Amazon and digitized a few ‘long lost’ 3-inch reels from the late ‘70s that I came across while packing for our 2018 move. The result looked promising.”
2) First Impressions: Trouble Finding Words by Malin Pettersen. “I’ve experienced a spate of vivid dreams of late—or, more likely, I’m simply remembering them when I wake. Here’s one: I’m navigating the packed waiting area at the TGI Fridays restaurant of my (relative) youth, but as the me of now. Mumbles from the crowd all but drown out the background music, with just its incessant rhythm breaking through the din. Thwack, thwack, thwack. Boom, boom, boom. The mass of people parts and there, standing before me, is a woman I simultaneously recognize and don’t.”
3) First Impressions: “Unknown Legend” by Bella White. “Adulthood brings with it responsibilities and even sacrifice, of foreswearing one’s dreams and facing reality head-on. Neil Young’s ‘Unknown Legend,’ covered to empathetic perfection by twang-tinged folkie Bella White, paints a multi-hued portrait of a woman who’s doing just that. The first verse shows the woman as a diner waitress accustomed to moving on, a lesson she learned from her itinerant father. (‘Daddy always kept moving so she did, too.’) The chorus expands upon the scene, digging into escape literal and figural: ‘Somewhere on a desert highway/She rides a Harley-Davidson/Her long blonde hair flyin’ in the wind….’
4) First Impressions: Lost and Found by Buzz Zeemer. “Strong thunderstorms are pushing through the Triangle as I write, with waves of heavy rain hitting my specific slice of paradise. Slow-rolling booms crackle overhead like a stylus treading along the grooves of a dirty LP, while water bullets from heaven drench the bunnies, deer and people who dare to tread across the communal green.”
5) The Essentials: One for the Road by the Kinks. “What makes a go-to album a go-to album? It’s hard to say, as what’s go-to for me may not be go-to for you. In the case of the Kinks’ live One for the Road, a double-LP set released in June 1980, there are a myriad of reasons why it’s my most-played Kinks album. In a fashion, it’s little more than a live greatest-hits package released to cash in on their late-‘70s renaissance, when they transitioned to arena rockers after signing with Arista Records in 1977, featuring a mix of the band’s classic hits from the 1960s, a few gems from the earlier ‘70s, and a half dozen tracks from Low Budget, the 1979 studio set that cemented their comeback. Yet it’s also one of the greatest live sets to ever grace my turntable, coming across as if it was processed in spatial audio long before that gimmick became a thing.”
The Old Grey Cat 
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