Friday, March 24, 2006

Ah, spring: when the man in mid-life turns from thoughts of...

...well, actually his thoughts don't turn at all; they just stay fixated on mid-lifey things. How nice for me that Donald Fagen has developed the habit of updating the mid-life man's soundtrack this time of year! Fagen approaches our mortal condition with his signature cheerful perversity. And the groove he's laid down for the title track is altogether infectious. Fans like us who watch the skies / We know it's Morph the Cat!



"This is my death album," Donald Fagen said in his office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. "It's about the death of culture, the death of politics, the beginning of the end of my life." Then he mock-sobbed, "Boo hoo hoo." More on Morph here and (thank you DV) here.

Also: john r. williamson did me the honour of reading (and commenting on) my musings on T Bone Burnett. Now, I've got a number of musician friends. I know these people all put their pants on one leg at a time. But I still believe the ones who have a passion for what they do slip into a plain where they serve the music. And this cat definitely serves the music. Be good to yourself, and check his music out here.

2 comments:

DarkoV said...

I've been enjoying his latest as well. There's got to be a better word than enjoy; something a bit more specific. One word for "smiling the sad smile when dealilng with death's imminent arrival". Well, at least that's what I'm doing when listening to "Brite Nitegown". That line, "You can't fight the fella in the Brite Nitegown."
(Read about WC Fields' connection with that here.

This track will definitely be on my "Darko's dead. Let's play his Funeral Vision cd".

Whisky Prajer said...

Wow - Round-Headed-Boy sure delivers a good post-Fagen riff. But while I, too, prefer Fagen's muse to Becker's, I still think the opening and closing tracks to Everything Must Go is pert near as good as either of those boys get.