duncansheik<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Why you also can’t hear the cut on Duncan’s homepage flummoxes me.\u00c2\u00a0 Not that it sounds so good streaming on MySpace.\u00c2\u00a0 Just imagine yourself in the Santa Monica haze with the sunroof open and the tunes FLOWING out of the speakers.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe then you’ll get it.\u00c2\u00a0 I know his voice is somewhat affected, that it’s a bit of an acquired taste, but as the song progresses the instruments resonate.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s created a whole symphony.\u00c2\u00a0 In a pop world more akin to Phil Spector than Alan Parsons it rings true.\u00c2\u00a0 Music isn’t only to dance to, to be a member of a group with.\u00c2\u00a0 When done right, you need nobody else.\u00c2\u00a0 The music takes you into its bubble and you float away, with all your problems suddenly dissipated.<\/p>\nThen, after my stop I caught Peter Gabriel’s "Secret World".\u00c2\u00a0 To truly understand the studio version on "Us" one must listen to the double live album, where the track is extended and comes alive.\u00c2\u00a0 But the blueprint is in the original cut.\u00c2\u00a0 Remember when Peter Gabriel left the cushiness of Genesis and took us to a place we didn’t even know existed?\u00c2\u00a0 Never mind shocking the monkey, he shocked us too.\u00c2\u00a0 And it wasn’t the sledgehammer numbers that got to us, but the more left-field stuff like "Games Without Frontiers" and the sublime "Biko".<\/p>\n
And pushing the buttons after "Secret World" ended I found Neil Young’s "Needle and the Damage Done".\u00c2\u00a0 Hey hey, my my, I like a good amount of Neil’s latter day stuff, but nothing competes with those first four albums.<\/p>\n
I’ll admit I push the button when "Heart Of Gold" comes on.\u00c2\u00a0 But maybe the fact that "Needle and the Damage Done" was cut live keeps me listening.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like a phone call from an old friend.\u00c2\u00a0 One who took the road less traveled.\u00c2\u00a0 You were so close back then, and even though you hardly speak anymore, when you do, you lock right in.<\/p>\n
As I approached my house I contemplated what I’d lost.\u00c2\u00a0 The innocence of youth, the hope.\u00c2\u00a0 I wanted that back.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, to be nineteen again would suck.\u00c2\u00a0 But in 1972, my life was still completely ahead of me.\u00c2\u00a0 And music was still not the mainstream, but the secret world of the enlightened.\u00c2\u00a0 Then again, maybe the mainstream success of "Harvest" was the end of the era, maybe this is why Neil went on the road and played new electric tunes, to push the casual fans away.\u00c2\u00a0 He wasn’t playing for these people, but the believers.<\/p>\n
I’m not sure I still believe.\u00c2\u00a0 In an era where music is something you enjoy in the car, where you possess a stereo far eclipsing the one in your home.\u00c2\u00a0 Then again, a car is a bubble.\u00c2\u00a0 And in a world that bombards you with more messages than you can comprehend the bubble is so appealing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes everything sounds right, great, and it’s these moments I treasure. Earlier this week I didn’t even want to turn on the stereo in my car.\u00c2\u00a0 But, on my way to the post office, after a therapy appointment today, everything sounded as if the deejay had picked the tracks just for me. It started off […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-6X","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}