"Baby Baby All The Time" Diana Krall-All For You: A Dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio

One of my very best friends from college, Jules, taught me much about the guitar. As luck and hard work would have it he wound up being one of the founders and the rhythm guitarist of the band Rev Theory. Along with Dave and Rich they started the band and played the old Townhouse Thursday nights in Lawrence, Mass. I never really dug their music but I appreciated it and it is quite cool to know that the boys I called friends a long time ago topped the charts with their single "Hell Yea". This past summer I caught up with them on tour and was captivated by the entire scene, backstage and just seeing some good old friends. Rev Theory is probably the farthest thing away from Diana Krall but I do have a reason for bringing it all up.

One night in my apartment on campus Jules and I were listening to music, I was constantly trying to show him the way and the light, to ween him off of the hard stuff. To his credit he always listened. It was late, we were quite drunk and I remember listening to Clapton's "Hand Jive" and pointing out a few of my favorite parts both on the guitar and vocally; particularly a line where Clapton drags his voice at the end of a line into the next verse. Afterwards with sober clarity he said: "Dude you really listen to music, all of it man, you really listen to it." He was terribly serious and if I do say so myself enlightened. I didn't have anything enlightening to say except for "Yes I do, everything".

And I really do, there are no throw away notes nor any unimportant syllables, the artist sweated over every second for a reason and it deserves to be cherished and enjoyed. In "Baby Baby All The Time" the first two seconds could be all that one would ever need, and I have hit the back side of the iPod after 0.02 countless times. It is the most seductive, classiest, svelte and sexy two seconds of piano I have ever heard, and it is also the only thing I can play on the ivories.

As captivating as those two seconds are prudence dictates that I engage the remainder of the song, all remaining 3:33 are just as intoxicating. Diana Krall's smoky voice is one that has been the background to countless rendezvous and in retrospect it is unclear whether or not I was focusing on the task at hand or Diana in the back of my mind. Sadly Mr. Costello now has those honors but I can still have my dreams and her to myself as I do now late in the night in an empty New York apartment with a cold bed.

Until the next rendezvous it will have to suffice, it is more than a mere sufficient way to spend an evening alone. I'll continue to wait for Diana to come to her senses, for that smoky voice to roll over and gasp "Baby" in the morning, only to get out of bed to hit other notes on the piano. She hits them all, just like the intro her piano playing is flawlessly simple and perfect, her phrasing holds true and steady until her last gasp of "Time" thereby bookending three and a half minutes of sultry foreplay.

My fantasies notwithstanding this song is what we picture those we want singing in our absence or after it is all finally over. In that way I can at least picture Diana in her apartment blocks away laying in bed with her husband, her mind singing this tune in her head looking out of her window over towards my place with desperate longing. I don't have to picture it because I know it, just like I know each and every note of this and every song I ever write about or own. Details not only contain beauty, they are the beauty and if you are missing them you are missing the point. Which is why in writing this blog on a weekly basis I tend to overuse the words terse, clear, stripped and clean. In the deep layering of modern music I feel much gets lost in the fray. Unlike a painting in which you can stare at the details for hours up end, in music you have to grasp it as it is progressing along its 4/4 tempo; when fluff is added the true notes have a tendency disappear.

Both as a part of my unrequited love fantasy and in its musical purity of the jazz genre this song is one of the best and Diana Krall is in her best form on this album. I can only imagine the offspring her and Elvis will one day produce.

"Fallin' and Flyin'" Jeff Bridges-Crazy Heart

Though I enjoy film I despise actually going to the cinema, the filthy floors, that person constantly opening up a bag of gummy bears in my left ear, coughing, sneezing, whispering...it is all too much for me to bear. The other night I ended my seven year sabbatical from the theater and dove into Crazy Heart, I came out pleasantly satisfied.

Knowing that Jeff Bridges was the star and T-Bone Burnett was in charge of the music I should not have been surprised. T-Bone Burnett is one of those shadowy figures people not in the know have no idea of but those in it revere with the gravitas he deserves. The founder of DMZ Records has left his print on movies such as The Big Lebowski, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, Cold Mountain, and The Ladykillers. He has produced and worked with Steve Earle, Robert Plant, K.D. Lang, Tony Bennett, Elvis Costello, Roy Orbison, Counting Crows and Warren Zevon. The iconoclastic zeitgeist of modern music adds to his resume with this song and the entire soundtrack of a movie based loosely on the lives of Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Merle Haggard.

The country and western music of Kris, Merle, Waylon, Willie and Johnny is a prosopopoeia of American blood running through the veins of the continent; culture capillaries invigorating a land founded on freedom and personal image creation. In the standard hypocrisy constantly displayed by the common NY/LA hipsters, where rap hip hop and pop is king and others genres are relics of a tired past such music is so often dismissed as the religion of a pious inbred congregation. With these beliefs they only illustrate the close-mindedness of self proclaimed prophets. If instead they actually drove through the fly-over states such offenders would grasp the essence of the openness and freedom that exists along the highways that connect the most beloved of the congregation, land and lives in which the inhabitants walk daily with a rope long enough to hang themselves with on a constant basis.

In their simplicity and terse construction all country deals with the most human of emotions; the elation of being on the ragged wild, loss, death and the self realization of fucking up and having no one to blame but yourself. Mistakes are not written off to parents and situations, both literal and figurative hangovers are embraced with Epictetus stoicism. From that crucible of self reliance the shrinks couch is supplanted by metal strings and thin wood bodies, the psyche is cleansed with four line verses, pedal steel guitars and a great refrain hook.

Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake embodies all these ideals in both their beauty and outright misery. The cliche of a country singer is somehow born anew in this film while still retaining the cliches that made it as such. This song is exactly the same, on the surface it could be written by a seven year old, but the more you hear it and let it run through the synapses of your own personal interstate you realize only through the experience of an old washed up man could such lines be born. If like me you despise the movies, suck it up and check this one out; then buy the soundtrack. Better yet buy the soundtrack and skip the movie, head out on the road with no destination and put the circulation of this land back in motion once again, it is long overdue for an Angioplasty.

"Old Love" Eric Clapton-Live in Hyde Park

I don't know where to begin with Eric Clapton. I have a friend here in New York who is one of EC's closest friends. Like Clapton himself he was an addict and it was Slowhand who convinced him to get clean. I have another friend who has a beautiful dobro that Clapton used back in the day which was won at auction for the "Crossroads" foundation in Antigua. A few years ago I remember renting his old house down there and playing guitar on his couch, one of the most sublime experiences of my life, in a sense trying to channel him with no avail. For the past twenty years he has dedicated his life to helping people who have fallen into the same trappings of life he has, drugs and alcohol; it is a noble cause to say the least that he has a peninsula of Antigua where people can come (free of charge) and try to get their lives back together.

Before that there is the man who stole his best friend's wife away from him. Layla was George Harrison's wife and Clapton had a tumultuous affair with her for many years, obviously the inspiration for the legendary song. There is the man who while so hooked on the junk had his friend give a concert with all the proceeds intending to send him to rehab, he would take the money and spend it on heroin. He sat in his house for many years doing nothing but airplane models and shooting up. I think one of the most hysterical and yet chilling things I have ever hear was Clapton in an interview saying that when he finally became clean in the later years of his life he was nervous about having sex because he had no idea what it was like, the prior thirty years he was too fucked up to remember and he was basically a virgin.

Having said all that, for better or worse he is one of the premier guitarist and song writers of our lives. Like every artist the pain and suffering of a life misspent, the depression, the jones-ing, the months forgotten, has led to a brilliance in craft the likes of which few people encapsulate in this world. I will never forget, as a young guitar player, that friend who owns his dobro saying that if you want to see what a blues guitar player should look like in technique, then look no further than Clapton. His mastery of the pentatonic scale is what guitarist's wet dreams are made of, his phrasing and ability to pull out the stings of one's heart are legendary and without equal.

I don't know the background of "Old Love" though it is safe to assume it was written for one of the many dysfunctional relationships he endured throughout his life. There are so many fantastic versions of this song, the Unplugged acoustic version, 24 Nights, his live recorded show at MSG with Bob Dylan and David Sanborn...all different versions of an amazing piece of music. However his version in front of eighty thousand people in Hyde Park is probably my favorite, if not for any reason other than he appears to blow out every amp on stage with the toe flick of a pedal in the middle of a solo.

The song itself is restrained and is played mostly in a minor key giving it a slow gravitas one would associate with the topic of a love gone by the wayside. It is painful, but the type of pain you had when pulling out a baby tooth, yea it hurts but it feels so goddamn good at the same time. Like the junk itself this song is a trapping, you know it is bad for you to indulge in old loves and thoughts of what could have been but it can be terrible seductive to contemplate such affairs. The lyrics are somewhat banal, and while this isn't a blues tune necessarily it still retains the form of the genre and in keeping with such...well most blues lyrics are quite simple. But like a pure blues tune it is the guitar playing that entices and intoxicates you, and it does true as the love of which you are lamenting.

And to get a little high with you and bring me back to my old more reckless days of my youth whenever I went off the reservation and started feeling sorry for the women who have passed by in my life I would always hit up this song. Years ago I mastered the acoustic version of this song and would sit back on the couch a bottle of Cutty Sark deep with a full ounce cut on the table, a Martin on my hip and just have at it. Today, like Clapton (though by saying this I am in now way putting myself on his same holy level) I look back on those times and remember the beautiful music that once came from my strings and also the next morning of nosebleeds, shakes and a heart that felt as though it was ripping out of my chest.

This is not Cream though and this song is not a drug ditty by any means, it is the beatituderific repine of something that hurts much more than waking up in a shoddy room with stains of the mattress, it is the regret of someone who will never pass by again. Like the blues itself, even in this somewhat pop-esque form, "Old Love" comprises the hurt and sorrow of laying in bed and thinking of her not being in yours, being between the sheets spooning with someone else while you are alone. It is seeing your high school girl on the street battered up and weathered when you wanted to remember her as an annual of the spring, ripe and full of promise. If there ever was a way to capture such emotions Clapton brings them to life when he blows out a couple thousand amps with one switch of a pedal in the cold London rain.