The Midnight Diaries of Catty Wampus

Last week I watched Josie and the Pussycats. That’s right, somehow I missed seeing it in the theatres when it came out in 2001.

Actually, I had no real interest in the movie at the time. It looked like another dip into the nostalgia barrel to make another movie from a television show like The Brady Bunch Movie or Bewitched. Actually, this was even a little bit lower than those because Josie and the Pussycats had been a cartoon and the movie was going to be live action; and we all remember how successful The Flintstones movie was.

But my interest was rekindled a few years later when I learned that the singing voice of Josie in the film was actually Kay Hanley, the lead singer of one of my favorite bands, Letters to Cleo. I love her voice, and I knew that if she was connected with the music it couldn’t be all bad, right?

Then I heard that some of the songs were co-written by Adam Duritz, lead singer of another of my favorite bands, Counting Crows. Adam’s lyrics always make me pay attention, and I knew that if he was connected with the music it couldn’t be all bad, right?

I went out in search of the soundtrack. What I had expected was typical, forgettable pop music specifically tailored towards a teenage moviegoing public. It turns out I was half-right: the production of the songs on the album are definitely geared towards the under-20s. But I was wrong about the “forgettable” part.

The Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack is a great example of well-crafted teenybopper music that goes deeper musically and lyrically than you’d normally hear in, say, a song by Avril Levine or The Jonas Brothers.

The movie itself is, sadly, a little forgettable. It’s not a bad movie, but I can think of dozens of titles I’d recommend before this one.

So instead of critiquing the movie, I thought I would share one of my favorite songs from the soundtrack album. And if that inspires you to go grab a copy from the iTunes store, I won’t tell anyone that we’re both in the Josie and the Pussycats fanclub. Deal? Deal.

And now, with lyrics by Adam Duritz and Kay Hanley on vocals, this is Spin Around. Enjoy!

I want to send out a huge thank you to everyone who submitted comments on my last post, http://www.sabudesign.com/cattywampus/?p=237Junk in the Trunk, whether it was here on the blog or in e-mail or in person. It’s so amazing to get everyone’s input to guide me, or confirm my suspicions about an idea, or to bring up thoughts that would never have occurred to me at all.

I ask that you indulge me as I run down the list of things I learned from this experience, and what I will do my best to apply to the next project.

As a refresher, here is the audio in the four abandoned sections from Junk in the Trunk:

Thing I Learned #1:
A Story is a Sequence of Events

Almost everyone said the same thing after listening to the audio: The first section was good and interesting, and the other sections felt flat and kind of dull. I absolutely agree.

The first section has a basic structure–an anecdote. One thing happens, and then the next thing happens. You’re constantly waiting to find out what the next piece of the story is. The other three sections have almost no momentum at all because they are simply Renee telling you what you’re listening to. In essence, there’s nothing to keep you interested and wanting to hear more.

In my original idea, I thought that talking over the music would be the most interesting part of the piece and so that’s what I geared everything towards. This is partly based on my enjoyment of the “Music Mondays” section of the Adam Carolla show every week, where each of the three crewmembers of the show play music based on a theme. They talk about the music, interject personal stories, and crack jokes, and it is always interesting and funny. I realize now that I must be missing what makes those segments work on the Adam Carolla Show, because my three “talk over the music” sections certainly have none of the appeal or interest that theirs does. I recognize that the personalities are different, but something tells me that the structure probably has as much to do with the people.

Thing I Learned #2:
What People Hear is What People Hear

This is a useful tip for any animators reading this as well. You see, many people made suggestions and had ideas about different ways I could have edited the piece to be more interesting. And I was struck with the instinct to argue back “Well, I tried that idea…” or “No, that doesn’t work because…” or “No, no, the reason I did it this way is because…”

When all is said and done, however–all is said and done. Your audio (or animation) is put out there for people to see, and you’re not going to be able to be there to explain it to everyone who gets to hear it. You have to be comfortable letting it lie where you leave it, and take everyone’s comments as they come. Your listeners don’t know anything about the work you put into the project, they just know what they hear when you present it to them. If you tell them how to listen to it after the fact, you run the risk of sounding like a douche.

Thing I Learned #3:
Planning Planning Planning

You can’t just sit down with a microphone and talk to someone, even for an hour and a half, and expect that you’ll get something decent out of it. You have to have at least a little bit of an idea about what you want your final piece to be, and then prepare questions to direct you towards appropriate answers while still allowing the interview to feel open and natural.

Now, to be fair to myself, I had actually done a good amount of planning. The mistake, as I mentioned earlier, was that I thought it would be interesting to talk about the music itself and so that’s what I planned for. If I had kept in mind that what I really needed was a story, my planning would have been different: I might have tried to talk to Christine, or been more inquisitive about how Renee searched for the songs, what other people have thought of her Mix tape, etc. Hopefully I’ll know better for next time.

Thing I Learned #4:
You Learn by Doing

This might be another one that’s familiar to budding animators. As it applies to audio documentaries, it goes something like this: I have read a tone of websites and articles, heard many instructive podcasts, and watched many YouTube interviews with Ira Glass, all of which had great information about what it takes to put together a decent and interesting piece. But even if I had read everything there was to read on the subject, I’m not sure that my first piece would have come out much better than this. That’s because we tend to learn the most from our experiences.

There’s that old chestnut about an artist needing to get 5,000 bad paintings out of themselves before they reach the good paintings. The adage says nothing about reading 5,000 books about paintings. You just have to do ‘em. And by doing it more and more, the more you’ll remember for the next time you dip your brush into your palette.

Thing I Learned #5:
Try Try Again

I’m already thinking about what my next piece will be. And I know that these lessons will be carried into it–some of them might become sharper, and other new lessons will almost certainly occur to me. The people who have been doing this well have been doing it for years, so I’m not discouraged by a first-time attempt that isn’t a blockbuster. Stay tuned for the next one, whenever it arrives. I’ll need your feed back then as much as ever.

Thanks again to everyone for listening, and for enduring the silent days and nights here at the Midnight Diaries. Now that this piece is out of my system, I can get back to more puppets and stop signs. Come back this Friday if you don’t believe me.

Cheers!

(note: if you simply want to hear the audio in this post, scroll down to the end–but I hope that what I’ve written will give it some context, and be interesting enough to read through)

Learning a new skill can be exhilarating. It can be fun, and frightening, and inspiring. It can also be incredibly frustrating.

After listening to so many episodes of This American Life and Radio Lab and any number of the wonderful documentaries at Transom.org, I decided that I would try my hand at producing an audio piece of my own. As luck would have it, my friend Renee had a story that seemed like it would provide a great opportunity for a first attempt: she had made a mix tape for a friend, and the inspiration for the mix was funny and quirky and I knew it would be a lot of fun to talk about!

Renee and I sat down earlier this year to record the initial interview that would give me a foundation to build the documentary on top of. Renee is always great to talk to, and I truly enjoyed interviewing her for an hour and a half about the mix tape, the songs she included, and even some personal stories she associated with particular songs. I felt like I was off to a great start.

It turns out that the interview was the easiest part of the process. When I tried to edit the audio together into a cohesive story, I discovered it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.

This is generally the case when you’re trying anything new. Many of the people who read this blog are animators. They can testify that their first attempts at animation were difficult, and may have even ended in abandonment. But they learned from those first attempts, and brought that knowledge to their second attempt. The second attempt may have been a bit better, but chances are that it was another opportunity to learn how to approach their third attempt.

And this is where I am with my first attempt at putting together an audio piece. I have reached a point where there are several sections I am proud of, and some I am less than happy with. Overall, I have learned a great deal from this experience. The piece is unfinished, but I will take my experience and knowledge and carry it over into my second project, whatever that might be.

The lack of posts at this blog has been due to my decision that I would not write another word for this blog until I was ready to post either the finished audio, or at least something that would give me closure on it. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to ask for 6 and a half minutes of your time to listen to four sections of the unfinished audio documentary, Junk In The Trunk

Enjoy!

I would appreciate any feedback you have; whether you enjoyed it or not (and why), whether the story was easy to follow (and if not, where and why), the production quality, the editing choices, anything at all. I look forward to hearing your thoughts, and I will take them with me to guide me on my next project as well.

Finally, and most importantly, I want to express special gratitude to my very good friend Renee Marcotte, who has always been a source of smiles and laughter for me. Renee is the curator of the Gassy Knoll Gallery here in Portland, along with her boyfriend Robert Lewis, who has been one of my best friends for years and I hope will continue to be for years to come. Thanks so much to both of you!

This is a monthly segment I’m calling Midnight Diaries Radio. It started last month as The Interlude, but I think the idea is much more like a little spot of my own personal radio. I’ll choose a small sample of music to share with you, and all you have to do is tune in and enjoy

I have to start off this month’s radio broadcast with an apology to my friend Renee. Renee, I told you I’d try to have your thing up this month–give me one more month, okay? I want to make sure it’s really good.

But I’ll give a nod to Renee anyway. See, a few months ago Renee helped me paint a room in my apartment and we spent a lot of the morning listening to The Adam Carolla show. I see eye-to-eye with Adam on a few subjects (less than eye-to-eye on a few others), and one of the issues I think that Adam and I are in perfect sync about is horn bands. They rock. There’s nothing that will get you going quite like a good horn section, and there’s no horn section quite like Blood, Sweat, & Tears.

Folks: Blood, Sweat, & Tears are a band from the 1970’s. They were a little bit before my time, but I heard them through the countless hours my father had them playing on cassette tape, CDs, and some funny old black discs called records. You may know BST from their bigger hits like “Spinning Wheel” (or as some refer to it “What goes up must come down”), or “And When I Die.” If you like those at all, dig deeper into their music catalog. You will not be disappointed.

This is one of my favorites, “John The Baptist (Holy John).” The song is from their fourth album, and it was never released as a single. That makes it all the more precious, I think, because it hasn’t been played out on the radio over the past three decades.

Even the intro to the song lets you know you’re in for something–listen to the horns swell with each chord hammered out on the piano. Then the drums kick in… the bass, then the guitar… Then finally David Clayton-Thomas with his unmistakable voice. MMMMmmmmMMMM! Give it a listen, friends:

Yeah! Can you feel that deep down in your soul? Check out those horns again in the second verse, just after “I saw him down there in a long, white gown.” Hear those trumpets blaring the news of John’s baptism scene? How can you not feel good listening to that!

But I’d like to take it a step down now… mellow out a bit, you know? I bring you a classic song from 1972. This is The Looking Glass performing “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl).” This has a similar brass build-up as “John the Baptist,” but the real star of this song is the story. I’m a sucker for an unrequited love story. I think this started with all of the old folk songs I mentioned in Folkie. In fact, “Brandy” fits in very well with that sensibility of old-times: there’s no mention of modernity, it’s just ships and sailors, barmaids, and the sea.

If you don’t know the song already, I’ll let you listen to it so I don’t ruin the story.

Aww… isn’t that sad? It was true love for Brandy and her man, but they could never be together forever. He always returned to the sea.

I’m thankful that the “Brandy” story seems to have taken place so long ago. Setting it as a kind of fairy tale, I can swallow the romance of it all much more easily than I could if it were set in a time of airplanes and telephones. I wonder what it is about the past that allows it to be romanticized in that way.

Speaking of romance, I want to leave you with one final selection in our horn music segment this month. This is a story about a young man who has fallen in love with a prostitute. He begs and pleads with her to give up her unseemly ways, to give in to his love for her. But she knows that this boy is merely experiencing a crush, and he cannot provide for her in real life. So she continues selling her body, as this young man’s heart is torn in two. It’s so sad, and the brass in this song really stirs my soul–I urge you to listen to the song with headphones with your eyes closed just to take it all in.

Oh, also: it’s an instrumental. I’ll explain where I got the story from after the music. Get ready for it:

Tearfully beautiful, isn’t it?

You may have even recognized a few familiar strains in there, though some of them are almost entirely removed from their original source. I won’t blame you if you couldn’t quite place it. Maybe the story gave you another clue as to the original piece. What if I told you that that prostitute’s name is…. Roxanne.

This song is from an album called “Straight to My Heart: The Music of Sting” performed by the Bob Belden Ensemble. If you are a fan of Sting or The Police, I highly recommend this album. Bob Belden has arranged some incredible jazz versions of Sting’s music–sometimes including vocals, and other times leaving the music to speak for itself. It is one of my favorite albums to listen to from beginning to end.

And with that, I bid you a good evening and I look forward to seeing you on the first Wednesday of next month for the latest installment of Midnight Diaries Radio.

See you then!

It’s time for a new tradition here at Catty Wampus.

Welcome to the first Midnight Diaries Radio. This is an opportunity for me to share me to share some music with you; maybe it’s some music I’ve been listening to lately, or music along a topic that’s occurred to me, or just a song or two I feel like expressing my opinions about. I’ll even take requests if there are any suggestions.

I’m really looking forward to Midnight Diaries Radio becoming a regular addition to the ol’ blog, and maybe it will even introduce you (and me!) to music that would otherwise pass us by.

So! I thought I’d start with some opera.

Now, before you groan and roll your eyes, rest assured that most of the opera I know comes from Bugs Bunny. I’m guessing that it’s the same for most of you, too. You know picture Elmer chasing his wabbit, singing cwazy words to grand and ostentatious tunes written over a century ago. But behind all of that there’s some pretty cool stuff, too.

This first piece is from a Rosinni opera called “The Barber of Seville.” The aria Largo Al Factotum might now strike you by name, but I guarantee you’ll recognize it as soon as our main character, Figaro, hits his first stride of “la la la la la la la las.” And those familiar with the old “Our Gang” shorts will certainly remember Alfalfa’s off-key belting of the “Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!” part.

Largo Al Factotum is our introduction to Figaro. Figaro is a barber, well-liked among the citizens of the town, and an all-around happy-go-lucky guy. In addition to his regular barber’s duties, however, he also plays his hand at matchmaker, hooking up any number of young men and women around Seville. He’s quite proud of himself, and I really enjoy John Rawnsley’s performance here. He’s so boistrous and joyful!

(thankfully there are subtitles included in this clip, for those of us who don’t speak Italian)

Isn’t that wonderful? I love it.

Now that we’ve heard a jolly and happy song, lets get a little bit darker, shall we? Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” is an aria that I only knew from repeated viewings of Amadeus. In the film, the setpiece for this aria is a hypnotizing spiral of night sky, clouds, and stars. I simply assumed that it was a piece about beauty and poetry. Oh how wrong I was!

Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen translates to “Hell’s vengeance boils within my heart.” !!! Yikes! It seems that The Queen of the Night is ordering her own daughter to kill the Queen’s enemy, Sarastro, with a knife. If the daughter doesn’t, the Queen will disown, curse, and kill her.

Since this video doesn’t include subtitles, I’ll give you the English translation from Wikipedia:

The vengeance of Hell boils in my heart,
Death and despair flame around me!
If Sarastro does not through you feel the pain of death,
Then you will be my daughter nevermore.
Disowned may you be forever,
Abandoned may you be forever,
Destroyed be forever
All the bonds of nature,
If not through you Sarastro becomes pale! (as death)
Hear, Gods of Revenge, hear a mother’s oath!

Check this out:

That’s Diana Damrau performing the role The Queen of the Night. And let me tell you something: I’ve spent the past few days watching just about every performance of this aria that youTube has to offer and Damrau’s is, by a wide margin, the most frightening and feels the truest to the lyric. Particularly on those high and beautiful “oh oh oh” notes that appear throughout the piece. Where other actresses perform those notes very well , Damrau endows each of them with a menacing power–as if she’s using every single breath to bully her daughter into becoming a murderer. How evil!

And by the way, let’s just take a moment to think about both John Rawnsley and Diana Damrau, or really any masters of operatic voice, and respect the training and athleticism it takes to hit such amazing notes so clearly and accurately. A friend of mine commented that some of Damrau’s notes hardly sounded human–which I believe is not only the point of such an ethereal character and the music written for her, but also a real testament to her razor-sharp talent. The human body is an amazing thing, and with enough effort, you can condition it to perform the most stupendous tasks.

That’s it for this month’s music entry. Tune in on the first Wednesday of next month for more music; I promise it won’t be more opera.

I’ve never found a polite or delicate way to say this, so I’ll just say it plainly and proudly:

I like balls.

I’ve liked balls ever since I was a kid. And I was lucky enough to be a toddler in the late 1970’s, which meant that my father’s office had a clock that looked like this:

Sure, you needed to perform weird mental acrobatics to actually tell what time it was, but look at the balls rolling around! Whee!!

Only a few years later, on a trip to New York City, my dad showed me a much more exciting and larger clock in the Port Authority–a dazzling display of color and sound created by sculptor George Rhoads, whose balls have been entertaining children and adults for decades.

It was only a few years later that I would visit my uncle in Boston, and in the Children’s Museum gift shop he would buy me Spacewarp, a wonderful rollercoaster I could put together myself and then watch my balls gleefully as they twisted and turned all day long!

I haven’t had many balls in my life since then, but my ball-lust was recently rekindled when Aja pointed me towards the addictive computer game, Peggle. Whether you’re on a Mac or a PC, you can download a 60 minute free trial. Trust me, you’ll be mesmerized as you watch your balls bouncing in so many fun directions!

You may expect that I’d sign off this post with a classic tune from Australian rockers AC/DC, and I’ll admit that it’s tempting… so tempting…. But I think I’ll go a bit more modern and give you another Dan Bern song (to add to his Christmas song). I think it will be clear why I chose this song, “Tiger Woods,” for you today. Enjoy!

Like most people, I listen to all kinds of music. But if I’m asked what I like to listen to, my go-to answer is generally “Folk.”

It’s actually been a while since folk music was the majority shareholder in What’s Filling Eric’s Ears, Inc., but I still return to it now and then when I’m in the mood, and it takes me to places that I can hardly get to with any other music.

“Folk” is really a wide range of different musical styles. Even as a broad description, there’s still the question of traditional folk music, or contemporary folk music? They both have their charms, and I can’t choose one over the other. If anything, I’d say that my tastes can be swayed by production value–contemporary folk like Shawn Colvin and Dar Williams tend to have better production than a lot of the traditional folk music that’s been recorded in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Shawn and Dar are definitely high up on my playlist, and there are a few other contemporary folkies I could toss out there, too.

But my focus (folkus?) here will be on the traditional–and in particular, the Irish/British/Scottish path of folk music.

When I was in summer camp as a young teenage, it seemed like every third person had a guitar and was either playing the Indigo Girls’s “Closer to Fine,” or else they were teaching their cabin mates how to play and sing the back-up harmonies to the Indigo Girls’s “Closer to Fine.” Which was fine (heh). I liked the song a lot as well, but it did get a little played out. So I was glad to be sitting with camp counselor Eric one evening while he played some of his own songs, and some Bob Dylan, and then a song that I’d never heard before–a song that broke my heart: Annachie Gordon.

I should stop for a moment and say that one of my favorite subjects in a song is unrequited love. It appears that folk music from the British Isles excels at this subject, and Annachie Gordon is the crusher of all crushers in my book. It paints beautiful pictures while telling the story of Jeannie and Annachie, a young couple desperately in love. Jeannie’s parents, however, feel that Annachie is too poor for their daughter, so they arrange her marriage to a local Lord. You can probably see where this story is heading, but if you really want to embrace its full sadness, grab a box of tissues and listen to Mary Black performing the song:

I heard this very version when I was 16, and I was hooked. I wondered if anyone else had ever recorded the song. But in those days, kiddie-pies, finding out this kind of information was difficult. My local record store had a giant yellow-paged book that listed artists, songs, and albums, and if you asked the desk clerk nicely enough, they might look something up for you. But there was no guarantee that your request would be in there–it wasn’t a comprehensive music catalogue, it was merely large enough to encompass most of the popular music of the day. Finding a folk song, a traditional folk song, was a slim possibility at best.

When I got to college, which is to say when I got access to the internet, I was able to conduct a slightly larger search for more versions of my favorite song. It still wasn’t very easy, though–partly because there are several variations for spelling “Annachie”, and partly because the internet wasn’t nearly as big as it is now. But I was able to find the song listed on a relatively new album by John Wesley Harding called “Trad Arr Jones”

“Trad Arr Jones” is a phrase that refers to the way folk music is generally credited in liner notes and sheet music. Since most folk music can’t be traced back to a particular songwriter, the songs are listed as “traditional” (abbreviated, trad.), and further credit is given to the song’s arranger (abbreviated, arr.). “Trad Arr Jones” refers to Nic Jones, a popular British folk singer in the 1960s and 1970s. This album was John Wesley Harding’s way of acknowledging his enthusiasm for Jones, as well as an attempt to bring Nic Jones to a contemporary audience. Annachie Gordon was on this album, but it had a slightly different flavor than I was used to. I still liked the song, but not as much as Mary Black’s Annachie. Luckily, however, there were many other songs on this album that were now brought to my attention, most notably Annan Water.

This is a beautiful song about two young lovers whose homes are separated by a vast and rushing river. One night, when the young man tries to visit his true love, he and his horse are met with a particularly violent cu rrent in the water–so violent that even the boatman won’t go sailing in it. So the young man tries to cross the stream on his horse, and you can probably imagine the rest. (you can probably also recognize a theme in this English folk songs involving two young lovers)

In the liner notes to the album, Harding mentions that there was a version of Annan Water done on an album by Kate Rusby. Now that I was fully equipped with the internet, I went in search of Kate Rusby. And oh my goodness, am I ever so glad I did.

Kate Rusby has the singularly most gorgeous and charming voice I think I’ve ever heard. Her music is beautiful, her arrangements are exactly what I think folk music should be: traditional songs performed with a contemporary sensibility, but without distancing themselves from their history. Kate Rusby is, in my book, nothing less than sublime. Here, have a listen to one of her songs. I’ll make this a more upbeat selection, just to show that not all folk music is people dying for love–sometimes it’s just about someone getting drunk:

(Shakespeare fans may notice that this song tells a story very similar to the one which kicks off “The Taming of the Shrew”)

And speaking of getting drunk, I wouldn’t want to neglect one of the most playful contemporary folk bands I know of, Great Big Sea from Newfoundland, Canada–an island with a wonderful tradition of Celtic music, along with many other cultures. In fact, one of my favorite Great Big Sea songs is from the French Celts who settled in Newfoundland centuries ago. The song, Trois Navires de Ble, concerns some wheat merchants so sail into port one day and are teased and seduced by three lovely young women only to be left high and dry when the pretty girls dance away, never having intended to make good on their flirtations.

This is the only song that Great Big Sea performs in French, but it’s so good that I simply had to include it. Still, I know that about a paragraph back I promised you one more drinking song. So I will let Great Big Sea take us out with a song about the death of Pat Murphy, a man whose friends chose to celebrate his passing by getting drunker and drunker and drunker….

With Christmas just a few days away, I wanted to share a song by Dan Bern. You probably don’t know Dan Bern–he hasn’t had many (any?) radio hits–but he’s an incredible songwriter, and highly respected in the indie folk scene. Dan’s music is super smart, and it can also be super satirical, or just plain super funny. He has a great sense of humor, as well as a great sense of humanity. In fact, I almost hesitated sharing this song here lest anyone peg Dan as a novelty songwriter. He’s anything but, believe me.

To find out more about Dan Bern, visit his website here: www.DanBern.com

In the meantime, enjoy his Christmas song I found somewhere on the internet.

Merry Christmas!

“What kind of music do you like?”

It’s a simple question–the kind of thing you’ll ask when you meet someone new, and just want to enjoy a little small talk as you get to know them. People have widely varying tastes, but I generally get this answer:

“Oh, I like just about everything. Except country.”

I’ve often wondered about this very direct and specific caveat. People want you to know how open they are in their listening tastes–but they don’t want you to think, for even a second, that they like country music.

I think people have the wrong idea about country music. Country music has a reputation for songs that concentrate on spurned lovers, drinking, fighting, and misogyny all sung by a voice with a piercing twang. Almost like the reputation of many regions in middle America, where people are assumed to be dimwitted, uncultured, racist, and violent. And it’s notable that many people believe “those are the people who listen to country music.”

As much as I don’t want to admit it, maybe I used to think that way myself a little.

But I got turned on to country by my friend, Alix. She told me that she was a fan of country, and we tend to enjoy the same things, so I decided to give country a shot.

One day as I was driving around doing some errands for work, I was flipping through the radio stations and came across a song with a nice and slow steady rhythm held on an acoustic guitar with a sprinkling of piano here and there.

I listened and heard the lyrics tell the story of a man whose girlfriend had left him a year ago, but he still hoped she’d come back someday. After all that time, she decides to get back in touch, just to see how he’s doing. He’s not home when she calls, though, so she gets his answering machine message–and much to her surprise, the message ends with the man declaring that he’s still in love with this woman and still hopes she’ll call him sometime. Naturally, the woman is taken aback. She’s too distraught to leave any kind of message and takes a few days to think about what she heard. It’s been a year, after all–had he really been waiting for her all that time? She’s swept away by the thought of this man whose love for her is so strong, so undying. She calls back and leaves her phone number—then patiently waits by her phone, and when he calls her, she confesses that she still years for him, too.

The song was Blake Shelton’s “Austin.”

It was one of the most sappy and romantic things I’d ever heard… I was practically in tears by the end of it.

This was how I discovered that country music might hold more for me than just redneck bar fights… there was powerful sap here, and I wanted more.

Now, in all fairness, there is a fair about of redneckery out there, too. Anyone familiar with Toby Keith can attest to that. And if you like Toby Keith, and that’s your thing, well, more power to ya. But I find him a little too unabashedly male, and patriotic, and pro-drunkenness, and dirty, and wrong… not to put too fine a point on it.

But give another listen to “Austin.” And then listen to some Tim McGraw, whose songs tend towards the life-affirming and joy of family. Listen to Lonestar’s “My Front Porch Looking In,” about a man who is more in love with his wife and two kids than anything else in the world.

Get into some classic country. Willie Nelson, singing that “The life I love is making music with my friends,” or Eddie Rabbit’s beauty-of-nature oriented “I Love a Rainy Night.”

More than in pop music, country offers story songs–and stories that are catchy and memorable, too. Tell me, is there anyone who doesn’t know what comes next if I say to you “You got to know when to hold ‘em”?

Interested in hearing more? Head on over to my Pandora station, Good Country for some good ol’ toe-tappin’, sweet and sappy tear-jerkers of country music.

I’ve tried to weed out all the Toby Keith that I could. Nyyyeh.

A few years ago I was staying in a hotel while visiting a friend in Canada. I was up early, so I turned on the television to see if anything interesting was on. I flipped through the stations, catching glimpses of Andy Griffith reruns, bow-flex infomercials, juicer infomercials, etc., etc., etc. I didn’t stop on anything until I noticed a kind of A&E Biography-type show that was featuring Elvis Presley.

I’m not a big and all out Elvis fan, but I enjoy a lot of his music when I hear it. I grew up practically wearing out my parents’ VHS tape of Jailhouse Rock (I don’t know why they had it–I don’t think either of them were very into Elvis), and I have a particular soft spot for the fictional Elvis movie Heartbreak Hotel.

There is just something about Elvis that is so captivating. I know I’m not alone in thinking this–how can I be? I once heard that there are three things from American Culture have been so popular, any person from anywhere around the globe will recognize their names; one is Coca-Cola, one is Mickey Mouse, and the third is Elvis Presley. And whether that’s true or not, it isn’t difficult to believe that it’s true.

Even if you don’t like Elvis at all, you can’t help but watch him when he’s on your television screen. So much raw charisma!

These days, a lot of people think of Elvis mostly from his later years, when he was a bit chubbier, wearing rhinestoned jumpsuits, performing concerts that were over-produced with lights and a full orchestra. Not very rock-and-roll at all, not very dangerous. Fat and sloppy.

But to be honest, I never quite saw the whole Fat and Sloppy thing, even in the later-years Elvis. Every television show or photograph I saw of him from the mid-to-late 1970’s, he merely looked pudgy. I never understood the whole “fat” label that people placed on Elvis.

Then I saw this program in my hotel room in Canada. Most of what they showed of the heavier Elvis was familiar to me–the big Vegas show, the photograph with Nixon, and stuff like that.

But then they showed a recording of one of the last performances he ever gave. This was a few weeks before he died–when the drugs and food and lifestyle had left the man in a horrible state. I watched as a super-bloated Elvis walked across the stage in his white suit and sat down at the piano. The camera zoomed in or a close-up on his face, and he was barely recognizable. If that face had been in any other context, not sitting behind a piano with huge, rhinestone-decorated lapels, I would have simply thought “there’s a random old man that time has not been kind to.” I was horrified at the way the King looked–and the knowledge that he would be dead less than two months later gave the old recording an almost ghoulish feel.

He began to play (or “bang out,” as my father would have called it) the Righteous Brothers’ hit, “Unchained Melody.” You can check out that performance here:

He has a playing style all his own, and while I wouldn’t call it refined, it gets the job done and certainly speaks again to Elvis’s talent. I didn’t know that he played the piano, and I even suspected that he didn’t even play the guitar–it had always seemed much more of a prop than an instrument when it was in Elvis’s hands. So it was a pleasant surprise to find out that he could actually manage accompanying himself.More surprising than that, though, was a moment about a minute and seventeen seconds into the song when I saw something extraordinary. From behind the mask of the heavyset man’s sweat-drenched bulbous face, Elvis appeared. It was just a flash of a second, when he looked out at the audience–there’s that classic kind/friendly/confident/cocky/charismatic Elvis smile and I don’t think it would be going too far to say that his eyes sparkled with the young Elvis that was still somewhere in there.

It’s gone almost before you knew it was there at all. But to see it is to see this incredible glimpse of both Elvises: the Elvis that was mocked and ridiculed for being gaudy and sold-out, and the Elvis that had set the pop music world on its ear in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

I turned off the television after the program had ended and tried to fall back asleep. But that one moment was so haunting that it kept me awake.

Even now I can’t quite say what I find so powerful about those few frames of film–as I said before, I’m not an Elvis devotee. It’s something more than that. Maybe it’s about aging, or changes we go through–who we are, who we were, and what parts of us still shine through from the past…I’m not going to think about it too much. Maybe it’s better, this time, to just let it be there and be fascinating.