Song Assassins, 2008

The following are my "song assassins" of 2008. I don't claim that these are great songs.

Most of them are not even new.

What these do represent are tunes that just "killed" me. They made me stop what I was doing, and just listen. They made me go find the CD in my collection and play it, repeatedly, for a few days straight. They inspired me, spurred me on to (ideally) better art.

They made me believe.

As the 2008 went on, I jotted these down as they revealed themselves. Here they are:

February - Always in Love (Wilco)
February - For All the Right Reasons (Jayhawks, Rainy Day Music)
March - Stolen Car (Bruce Springsteen, The River)
April - Midnight Man (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Dig, Lazarus Dig!!!)
April - In the Morning (Norah Jones)
May - Dixie Chicken (Little Feat, Dixie Chicken)
June - La Cienega Just Smiled (Ryan Adams, Gold)
July - Mercy (Duffy, Rockferry)
August - The Sun Also Sets (Ryan Adams, Easy Tiger)
August - The Step and The Walk (The Duke Spirit)
October - Two Silver Trees (Calexico, Carried to Dust)

A great paragraph...

From this book

"Later... I start to dream about all the people in the world who live bad lives -- all the drug dealers and arms manufacturers and corrupt politicians, and all the cynical bastards everywhere -- getting touched by GoodNews and changing... The dream scares me. Because I need these people -- they serve as my compass. Due south there are saints and nurses and teachers in inner-city schools; due north there are managing directors of tobacco companies and angry local newspaper columnists. Please don't take my due north away, because then I will be adrift, lost in a land where the things I have done and the things I haven't done really mean something."

What's Happened to Wonder?

I can tell you...

Wonder has been mistaken for glam, for ever-increasing budgets and light shows.

The wonder of the smallness of life has been subsumed with the 50 inch plasmas, hyper-reality, and multi-tasking screen culture.

The wonder of peace and silence; the pregnant God-reality of a moment has been washed away by overly triumphant, ticketed celebrations and a parade of charades.

... I think that's what happened to wonder.

We killed it.

Going Back to Babylon

100 miles from Babylon, i felt the tremble of the earth
my shoulders began to shudder, and my cough started to get worse

the earth had lost its center, i heard the voices in my head
but everything sounded different, and nothing made any sense

la la la la la la hey

we raised our bricks and mortar, built a superhighway to the sky
said, “to hell with the infidels”, turned our backs and waved goodbye

turned up the music on our stereos, feasted in the middle of the storm
thought we’d stay so happy and contented, i’m not so sure anymore

Take me back … goin back to babylon

hang all of the martyrs, hang all of the dead
hang the one’s who misunderstood and chose to sleep in instead

hang the poor and stinking, the sick and the blind
break me off a turkey leg, and pass me that bottle of wine …