Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? It gives tomorrow meaning! And heft! And Wednesdays deserve a certain kinetic energy, a notion of real accomplishment, right there in the middle of the week.
These are the things you can say when you just don’t feel like getting to those things on a Tuesday. But you still must go to the grocery store. So I did that. Picked up ginger ale and some lunch stuff and headed back to the house. Back to the grading, which is now, mercifully, almost done.
I’m slow walking it, and I don’t really know why. I have the time; maybe that’s why. But I’m giving myself an arbitrary deadline, just to be done with it. Why do Friday what you can wrap up on Wednesday?
Actually, today was spent compiling grades. There are a great many good grades, for which I am thankful. Either they knew it or they got it. If they got it from the class they might have learned it from me. If they learned it from me, that means the semester was a success.
That, of course, is just the quantitative part of it all. The real success of a term is: look how much we’ve learned, and how much we’ve grown!
I spent a little time this afternoon with the fig tree in the backyard. I bet I’ll be writing that sentence once a week all winter. Also, I found a reason to have a post-holiday inspection of the greenhouse. It came with the new place, but by the time we got here this summer there wasn’t much need for it. The late growing season got away from us too quickly. But something about that little 8 x 6 space in the corner of the yard just intrigues me.
I also walked around for a few photos.
I found a bit of moss growing in the stonework of the fence.
You wonder what all of that blue and purple sediments are in there. I wonder how I hadn’t yet noticed them.
Almost everyday, I still learn something new about the place. I have just come to think of it as little surprises from the previous owners. Some of them are quite neat, and they make sense. Others, you wonder, What was the thought process here? Expediency explains some things. Maybe, for other things, I just can’t see the problem the same way, but I wonder how they saw the solution. Perhaps it is best to stick with expediency.
On top of that same stone pillar.
I have this probably false memory of an elementary school teacher trying to teach the class about evolution and moss and lichen became part of the explanation. The moss beneath your tree could be the beginning of some future society! Real or not, elementary or not, the idea is sitting there in the hippocampus. Every so often I see a batch of moss and that comes to the fore.
This is on the backside of a stone column that is itself not in the most highly trafficked area. The next time I look upon it, there could be more. But I’ll probably see it again before it sprouts a proper civilization.
This I’ll see more often. It’s on a table. I’ll leave it ’til the spring.
That stuff can’t be the genesis of the next apex society. We’ll be using the space for our own social purposes when the weather turns.
And while it isn’t terribly cold just now, it could turn warmer again right now and that’d be fine. It’s mid-December, which is the time to realize: you didn’t dine outside enough this year.
The lesson is simple. Don’t put that off until next year, again.
Back to the Re-Listening project. In my car, I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the order in which I acquired them. I’m writing about it here, to share music, pad the space and, occasionally, take a trip down memory lane. Today that trip takes us back to the second half of 2004.
I was in a record store — remember those? — and flipping through the T section, or the Rock section, or the Alt section or the Stuff You Don’T Know About But Are Gonna Love section and I saw this photo of three dudes walking away from the camera. They’re all holding guitars. The text on the image said The Thorns. And, somehow, I divined that this was Matthew Sweet, Pete Droge and Shawn Mullins. This was something of a supergroup.
Sweet had a huge hit, in 1991’s “Girlfriend” under his belt. That song went to number four. In 1993 he had another song make it all the way to the third slot on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart and in 1995 he had a smash hit with “Sick of Myself,” which hit 58 on the Billboard Hot 100, 13 on the Mainstream Rock chart and number two on the Alternative Airplay chart. Droge, meanwhile, had become one of those musician’s musicians. He opened for the biggest names in the business, he toured relentlessly, his songs landed on major movie soundtracks, appeared in “Almost Famous” and has produced a lot of other great musicians studio projects as well. And in the oughts, everyone was familiar with Mullins, who was a 10-year-long overnight success by this point. He’d had four songs lodged firmly in the Alternative Airplay charts. “Lullaby,” of course, topped that chart in 1998. And then, here they were in 2003, all sat down together to put this little project together, The Thorns.
Brendan O’Brien produced the record, and played on it. By then, he’d produced huge albums for Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, Aerosmith, Paul Westerberg, Soundgarden, Neil Young, Dan Baird, Rage Against the Machine, Michael Penn, Korn, Train and Springsteen, to name quite a few.
This is what they came up with.
First track:
They released a music video for this song.
And what’s most interesting, but doesn’t seem to be online, is that I bought this as a two-disc set. The second disc is called The Sunset Session. They took a day off from touring in July of 2003 and recorded an acoustic version of the whole album. It might be even better than what I’m sharing with you here.
We don’t have a “Blue” policy on the site. Maybe we should. Let’s make a “Blue” policy. When you run across a Jayhawks cover, you have to share it. So here’s The Thorns’ cover of “Blue.”
Sweet has supported The Jayhawks, so I suppose that’s part of why that Americana classic is here.
The album is eponymously named, but there is a title track of sorts. It starts with these big drums, and it must have been a challenge during the production to settle on waiting until the fifth track to get this into your ears. And we’ll talk about that rhythm section right after this.
Jim Keltner, widely regarded as one of the best drummers in the business is playing on this record. He was about 62 here, but you wouldn’t know it from how he plays. And how he plays is magical. We could be here for a while working through a list of people he’s kept time for, but we’ll just say this, he’s played for three Beatles. Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Bee Gees, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Brian Wilson, the Traveling Wilburys and a host of others were in his Rolodex.
(It seems a few songs from the Sunset Sessions that have been uploaded. Here’s one now.)
Perhaps you’ve heard him in here, but Roy Bittan, from the E Street Band, is on this record. “The Professor” is another one of those omnipresent musicians. He’s played for everyone from Bowie to Dylan, to Gabriel, and from Dion to Reed and Meat Loaf and Steinman.
Go ahead and play this one loud while we talk about all the many strings you’ll hear throughout the record.
In addition to the guitars, this album will give you a vihuela, a marxophone, a dulcimer, a ukelin, a hurdy gurdy and some symphonic strings. They might have been showing off a bit.
You might think we’re listening to the whole album here, and I was tempted, but no. We’re only playing 70 percent of it.
Take just a moment here and think about how many classic pop-rock could also give you this song. This could be the Eagles, or Crosby, Stills, and Nash or anyone that’s ever sang harmony in Laurel Canyon.
I like to think most every album has a song on it that requires an open road, open windows and an odometer that urges you to disregard the posted speed limit. This would be that song.
I did not see The Thorns in concert. (I’ve seen Mullins a few times and Sweet once. That has to count for something.) They toured North America and Europe on this project and then each went back to their regular projects. The closest I got was a date they had in Atlanta, but that was before I even knew they existed as a group. But I did find this high quality recording of a show in Germany.
And with that, I am finally all caught up on the Re-Listening project. Caught up on writing about it, that is. Somehow, for much of the next 20 years I didn’t buy an awful lot of music. There are only two giant books to listen through. At this rate the Re-Listening project should run through next year. But I’ve lately been getting new records … this may continue until 2026.
