"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.