On March 1st I wrote “The final trick of winter is upon us.” I know this, because I just looked it up. I was writing about the first blooms of the year then. It is, I maintain, a part of a cruel meteorological and botanical pattern.
And here we are, two months later, and the high was … 52 degrees. Honestly, that temperature felt like a sympathetic sop. It felt much colder. Gray throughout, and 40 mile per hour wind gusts.
May 1st. What a joke.
Enough grousing. Let’s get to the site’s most popular weekly feature, the Monday look at the cats. Phoebe, as I write this, is sleeping on a big, comfy blanket. But the other day, she was sitting in the morning sun. She seems to be willing me to take her toys out of that basket, but it looked artistic, to me.
Poseidon, as usual, is judging everything.
So the cats are doing great, but they, too, would like it to be a little warmer, even though they’re unburdened by their inability to read a calendar.
I saw this on a classroom white board. I don’t know what the purpose of the exercise was, or why the notes stayed on the board …
… but it is kind of fun to try to make sense of it all. Whatever it was, I was encouraged to see several variations of being supportive got listed.
Also, the colors tell some other story, I’m sure.
I had a ride Friday night, and then another on Saturday. Part of the Saturday ride was spent in virtual Scotland. This is a short, stiff stage called City and the Sgurr. Sgurr, I just learned, is Gaelic for “high sharp-pointed hill.” I believe it.
And then there was the fever dream that is part of the Neokyo course. What is that thing?
I could not bring myself to get in the saddle yesterday. The sofa was too comfortable, basically. But I did get in 27 miles this afternoon.
And since we just wrapped up another month, let’s check on the mileage chart. The purple line is what I’ve done.
That horizontal part marks the two weeks A.) we were out of town, and B.) I was fighting off a cold. So a light March — despite five consecutive days of pedaling — but I’m still ahead of all of my humble little projections.
This isn’t a lot of mileage, not really, but it’s a lot to me.
We return to the Re-Listening project, and we return to the summer of 1998. The Spice Girls became a foursome, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston started dating, Mulan was released, and so was Win 98. But I was listening to Shawn Mullins. “Soul’s Core,” a bit overwrought as a title, is the fourth studio album. (The title stems from a lyric which we’ll get to in a moment.) This is the one that had “Lullaby,” which you probably liked, until you didn’t. It made it to the top of the Adult Top 40 chart and peaked at ninth on the Modern Rock chart. Shimmer also cracked the top 30 on the Adult Top 40. The albums went platinum.
Here’s the lead-off track, with an entirely different instrumentation.
I used a live version of “Anchored in You” because I really wanted to use the live version of “Gulf of Mexico.” I wanted to see if he’s still singing it as Gu’f.
He does, in places.
There are two conditions where Shawn Mullins absolutely excels. One is in a big harmony, which will come up in a future installment of the Re-Listening project, and the other is when he’s just playing his guitar. The guy figured out the singer-songwriter thing and he’s sticking with it.
But that song is a good illustration of something said to me in passing once. I wish I could remember who it was, but it was obviously someone that I respected a bit. He found Shawn Mullins pretentious, and I found that deflating. And then I think about that lyric there, “I hear a voice from my soul’s core saying freedom’s just a metaphor you got nowhere to go … ” and I get it. There is a something there that’s a bit much. But we sometimes glaze over the awkward for the good. This one is really, really good, even if you don’t know the predictably tragic tale of Richard Brautigan.
He’s writing a lot of character studies, but he’s doing so without a larger thread. It’s both a shame and a relief.
Here’s a fun game to play with your friends. Ask them what musical characters they want to have sequels or updates on. They’re probably not going to understand, so make up something about Jack and Diane. Whatever happened to those two crazy kids? Shouldn’t we have another look in on them? Your friends will understand, and then Jack and Diane are disqualified from the game.
I want to know what became of this character. And, also, how in the world he was able to cram so much color in a three-minute song.
For a while, this CD was a vocal warm up. I would drive into the studio in the very, very dark pre-dawn hours and hum and sing along to a few of these songs. It was a good way to get the instrument working at 3:00 a.m., and, I always hoped, it would lower my voice just a tiny bit. You want your voice to sound authoritative in your first live hit at 4:30. That was the idea, any way.
If you’re now wondering what became of him, Shawn Mullins is another one of those guys who got his fame accidentally, who isn’t in it for stardom.
But, in 2018, to mark the 20th anniversary of his major label debut, he re-released the record with new musical arrangements. That was his most recent studio album. Mullins is doing some limited shows this summer. I’ve seen him a few times over the years. I once took a date to see his show in Atlanta. It was a good show, and everyone had a nice time, even if he wasn’t really her taste.
