The Lemonheads - “The Turnpike Down”
I think Natalie Goldberg would agree with Bono. You do miss too much these days if you stop to think!
This is the second post I’ve started today. The first was going to extol the virtues of Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on The Edge of Town” and declare it my theme song for today. I failed at that post because I was unable to write it when it hit me. When I got back to that thought, the spark had been doused, another brilliant casualty of my unfocused mind.
I was about to let that happen a second time but I heard the alarm in my head and stopped. I reached for my notebook and blue pen, squeezing words from my head to the page like juice from an orange to a glass.
So, back to that brilliant thought before I lose track of it. It’s not so much a brilliant thought as it is an observation. I was thinking about how albums I review can sometimes become a casualty of my review process. Listening to a record I’m going to review can almost become a chore because I’m likely to listen to nothing but that record. It’s very concentrated listening and I get worn out by it. Add that to the stress of trying to translate my thoughts and feelings into words and get them onto page. When I’m done, sometimes I’m just done; the record becomes a casualty of its review.
Sometimes I remember to come back and today is one of those days. I recently reviewed The Lemonheads’ It’s a Shame About Ray. It’s a stormy Friday afternoon and I’m in the ravages of nicotine withdrawal. Evan Dando is the perfect shade of gloom for humidity-soaked cravings (”between a want and a need to”) and a sense of bemused ambivalence.
I don’t know what Dando pictured when he wrote “The Turnpike Down,” but bemused or disappointment-tigned ambivalence is what it sounds like to me. Maybe it’s a Boston thing, because it’s reminding me a lot of Joe Pernice. “Theme To An Endless Bummer” may be next.
Filed under: Tags: Music of the Moment
