Sometimes it’s worth looking a bit more closely at the stuff that social media randomly serves up via its algorithms, because you DO find the occasional gem that way…like, for me recently, a band called The Empty Pockets. From their bio:
Light flickers in even the darkest of spaces and smallest cracks. Similarly, The Empty Pockets ignite a bright flame of their own by harnessing a joyful friction between Americana, folk, and rock ‘n’ roll spiked with roots soul. The Chicago quartet—Josh Solomon [guitar, vocals], Erika Brett [keyboards, vocals], Nate Bellon [bass, vocals], and Adam Balasco [drums]—lean on an unspoken, yet airtight musical dialogue honed by countless miles on the road, performances alongside the likes of Kenny Loggins, a procession of fan favorite releases (including a #1 debut), and a wealth of memories together.
I’ve only listened to a few of their songs thus far, and to me they are redolent of smoky bars where the scent of grilled meat and fried onions is on the air and where the main light is the neon from the beer signs. The wood of your table is shiny and well-worn, and in the corner is the band.
And now for something completely different! (Read that in the voice of John Cleese, please.)
YouTube served me up one of these the other day, and I watched it, thereby signaling YouTube to serve me up more of these, and honestly, I’m not going to complain because they’re kind of fun to watch and also on some of these you really have to admire the work that obviously goes in to the creation. The concept is simple: Make a model railroad layout in your backyard, stick a GoPro on your locomotive, and record the journey.
I file this under the category of “Things I wouldn’t mind having, but the amount of work involved is a major turnoff and I’d settle for just knowing someone who has one.” Landscaping is not my passion in any way; I don’t even like pulling weeds. I love bearing witness to nature–hence the photography–but shaping it? That’s for someone else.
Anyway, here’s someone’s really nice backyard train. Yes, it helps to be wearing overalls while watching.
I had two t-shirts way back in high school and college. I wore them to death. The label was “Caribbean Soul”, and they featured nautical art and some words that were evocative, even if I honestly didn’t know where they were from. It took me a few years but I wore those poor shirts to the point of unwearability.
Then, in 1998, while shopping in Disney World while celebrating our first anniversary, I found new versions of those same shirts. The art was slightly different, but somehow better. I bought them both, and I have kept those shirts in very good condition ever since. I only wear them a handful of times a year and am careful about washing them. That’s how it works, you see.
Here’s the back of one of the shirts.
I don’t know when I realized that those words are actually lyrics from a Jimmy Buffett song, but that did come as rather a shock.
I wasn’t a big Jimmy Buffett fan for a long time. I didn’t have anything against him, really–it was just that he didn’t really speak to me directly. Or so I thought. It’s easy to think that of an artist when they have a huge body of work that somehow only ever gets reduced down to one or two songs. In a way, Jimmy Buffett was rather like Van Morrison for me, in reverse: I knew that Van Morrison is a genius song-writer and singer with a huge and rich body of work, that somehow gets reduced down to “Brown Eyed Girl”. Ditto Mr. Buffett and “Margaritaville”, which is a good song–but that’s not all he did. Not by a long shot.
The lyrics on that shirt are from “A Pirate Looks At Forty”, which is actually now my favorite Buffett song. Of course, I still haven’t heard enough of Buffett’s work to say that “A Pirate Looks At Forty” will remain my favorite, if I listen to more of him, but for now…this is it.
Of course, Jimmy Buffett died just the other day. The outpouring of grief in my community, online and off, was as large as it was touching; Buffett is a man whose music has moved a lot of hearts and offered balm to a lot of souls, whether weary or not. Apparently Buffett had been ill for some time, but he also passed in the company of his family and his dogs. I assume the ocean was near. He lived in Sag Harbor, New York. I would have thought that he lived somewhere nearer warmer waters…but the ocean is the ocean, isn’t it? You can hear Mother Ocean’s call in any port.
Some people pointed out Buffett’s earlier work, written before he landed on the “Beachcomber” lifestyle as his brand, as speaking to them most directly. I gave one such song a listen, for the first time, and I was quite surprised by what I heard in “Come Monday”. This is almost a pure country song, from a wonderful little subgenre that seems to have reached its height in country music of the 1970s: a man wanting nothing more than to go home and be with his lover, and more often than not, knowing that he can’t. “Come Monday” lives in the same heartspace as Eddie Rabbit’s “Every Which Way But Loose”, Charlie Rich’s “I’ll Wake You Up When I Get Home”, and Ray Price’s “For the Good Times”.
For all of Jimmy Buffett’s air of “Grab a rum drink, pull up a chair, and let’s sing a while on the sand”, he really does seem to have been able to capture the most wistful sides of life along the way. The sea often feels like home, but you can’t always go back, can you?
Anyway, thanks for the music, Jimmy Buffett. I think the cannons have a little thunder left, personally….
I’m guessing this would fall under the category of “cultural appropriation” in some way, right? This is movie music by English composer John Barry, which he wrote for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. The film takes place in Japan, so Barry tried to incorporate an “Oriental sound” into his score, which was the practice in 1967 but which now seems oddly disrespectful.
And yet, it’s John Barry, so the result is unquestionably beautiful. This cue underscores a false “wedding” in which Bond, disguised as a Japanese fisherman, takes a local “wife”, who is really an undercover agent working with him. The cue is lovely and delicate in a way not usually associated with Bond.
I’ve avoided mention of that ghastly song by country singer Jason Aldean for many reasons, but I bring it up now because while I am not a big country music fan, by any means, sometimes I do love a country song a whole lot, and I hate to see a genre that is strong with possibility so consistently associated with a piece of hate-filled dreck by a right-wing clown who is nothing more than a pretender, as far as his “small-town” credentials go. (The man grew up in Macon, GA–population 150,000 or so–and Homestead, FL–population 80,000, but it’s part of the Miami metro area.)
Meanwhile, other country artists are honoring the genre’s folk and blue-collar roots with songs of real emotional import and weight, and I hate seeing all of the oxygen in the discourse sucked up by yet another crappy anthem for the MAGA crowd.
So, today I have a song by Tyler Childers. I saw this article mentioned on social media the other week and saved the song and its accompanying video, which tells a rather heartbreaking story of gay love in a 1950s Appalachian mining town:
Like any country music singer worth his salt, Tyler Childers knows a little something about heartbreak. Unlike most of the current crop of shiny Nashville honky-tonk pretenders, though, he also knows a whole lot about growing up in coal country.
Childers was born and raised in Lawrence County, Kentucky, a stone’s throw away from the storied home places of country legends Loretta Lynn and Chris Stapleton (with whom he performed a stirring duet at the Kentucky Rising festival last year). His father was a coal miner; his grandpa, a tenant farmer, scraped a living out of the clay-rich soil. His music — a blend of country, folk and bluegrass (though don’t call it Americana), is steeped in that rural Appalachian upbringing and the lessons he learned at home in the hollows. Childers has come by his fan base honest, and has used his rising fame for good by speaking out about issues like racial injustice and religious intolerance.
As for the song itself? It’s quite a beautiful song, really…gentle and sad in the best country-folk tradition. It reminds me of the Shannon Dooks song I platformed twice this summer already, in its depiction of a love that is devoted to overcoming the challenges. There’s an emotional honesty in this song that the Jason Aldeans of this world can’t come close to capturing.
