Fishmans - Long Season (live)

I have to admit I felt a little bit bad this time around, but not as bad as the previous two times. 

But still bad.

But then I listened to the 45 minute live version of "Long Season" by Fishmans

Jungle - Back on 74

Rosalía - Berghain (w/ Bjork & Yves Tumor)

 

October 2026

He woke up, the room was bare

He didn't see her anywhere

He told himself, he didn't care

Pushed the window open wide

Felt that emptiness inside

To which he just could not relate

Brought on by a simple twist of fate 

 

People tell me, it's a sin

To know and feel too much within

I still believe she was my twin

But I lost the ring

She was born in spring

But I was born too late

Blame it on a simple twist of fate 

Raphaël - Le train du soir (w/ Pomme)

Pomme - Sans toi

Fitting, I suppose.

Aurora - Invisible Wounds

 

Mogwai - Friend of the Night

I'm shocked to discover that I have hardly written about Mogwai in the 46 years I've been writing this blog. And yet, I can't think one one musical act that has soundtracked my life more than Mogwai in the past 10-15 years. In New York City subways, on Metro North, in desultory moments at home on the couch, on interminable airplane trips to Texas and California, at airport lounges in La Guardia and Houston and LAX, in bed late at night---it was always Mogwai.

I don't want to get into a long historical disquisition about Mogwai here. You can find the history of the band on the tubes of the internets, but what I will say is that their music has a deep deep deep deep reverberation in my psyche. Not all of it. Some of it is distant, remote, muddled. But most of it is so deeply lined, spliced, layered on my psychic being that words fail me. That sweet spot between melancholia and absolute loud fucking insane volume--that's where Mogwai resides. In order to truly experience the futility of life you have to experience its volume as the jet engine roar of the loudest guitar in the world feedbacks its rotary spinning clownsound into the ear drums of your soul.

I present "Friend of the Night" from 2006

 

 

The Waterboys - When Ye Go Away

 

This time that is upon me, this week, this month, this year, I feel strongly will be a time of departures. Of exits. Of retreats. I feel it in my bones. It may happen this fall. This song, introduced to me sometime in 1988 soundtrack a kind of exit too.

 I don't know anything about the background to the song but all the poets and all the bards of yore could not have distilled better the poetry of departure than simply: "I will cry, when you go away." 

Pete Townshend - There's A Fortune In Those Hills

Every so often I'll discover some new demo from Pete Townshend that he wrote in the early '70s, one he never released at the time, one consigned to Disc 7 of some massive box set from the 2010s that no one bought. Some brilliant piece of tossed off pop, something that lesser songwriters would have killed to have written, but for Townshend, it was nothing, just something forgotten and never released. 

Here's 'There's a Fortune in Those Hills,' a parable about an old man's delusions of something better just beyond the horizon. The chord sequences are so beautiful, you forget to breathe as it moves to the next one -- just gorgeous. The arrangements hark back to a lot of the countryfied sensibilities that he seemed to have embraced in that period. Guitar twang and all that. As with all his demos, he plays all the instruments.

I feel such a deep melancholia when the bridge comes on.