So I’m fooling around with Spotify radio. I’ve got a problem with Pandora, the tune-outs and you can’t fast-forward and Tim Westergren is a Moonie. And whenever I’m given the ability to fast-forward on these services I end up just clicking to see what they play next and not even listening, it’s frustrating.<\/p>\n
But you can fast-forward to your heart’s content on Spotify radio so I decide to create some stations.<\/p>\n
The first one is Joni Mitchell but the initial two songs are not as meaningful so I create a Jackson Browne one which starts with "In The Shape Of A Heart", one of my least favorites of his hits, so I go with the Eagles because I figure that casts the widest net and at first I get Foreigner’s "I Want To Know What Love Is" which I can listen to every five years and then the Eagles’ "Hole In The World" and then I’m gonna create another station, see if I can make one based on a track, and the service starts playing Roger Daltrey’s "Say It Ain’t So Joe".<\/p>\n
The only Daltrey solo album you need to own is the very first, the one with the songs written by Leo Sayer and Dave Courtney. I know this, because based on it, I purchased most of the subsequent ones, which is how I discovered "Say It Ain’t So Joe". It’s on the third album, which has a completely superfluous version of Andy Pratt’s "Avenging Annie" but the final cut is "Say It Ain’t So Joe". Which was unknown to me at the time and fit Daltrey’s voice so perfectly.<\/p>\n
But a bit more than half a decade later, discussing the merit of this cut, my buddy Jay asked me, had I ever heard the original, by the writer, Murray Head?<\/p>\n
He made me a cassette.<\/p>\n
I always had a soft place in my heart for Mr. Head, because he sang on the original "Jesus Christ Superstar", the only one worth listening to in my opinion, the only Andrew Lloyd Webber production worth spending time with, and I absolutely loved "One Night In Bangkok", which was released as a single long before the "Chess" soundtrack came out.<\/p>\n
And I’m sitting here on a warm January night in this obtuse topsy-turvy weather-challenged year we’re living in and I’m thinking about days of yore and I wonder, do they have the Murray Head take on Spotify?<\/p>\n
OF COURSE!<\/p>\n
P.S. This has inspired so much song-surfing. I went to Sarah Brightman’s A&M album "Dive", so many songs with the same mood. And then I wondered… Did they have the title track of that Leo Sayer album that I played incessantly when I broke up with my law school girlfriend and fucked this woman I met at the ON Klub and had a one week relationship with before I crashed?<\/p>\n
YES! I was living in a fantasy. Momentarily.<\/p>\n
Forget the schmaltzy Sayer hits. Stay in for the change. I bought "Living In A Fantasy" in the cut-out bin and it became one of my absolute favorite albums that year, I’ve never forgotten it, it’s when you’ve got low expectations that things sneak up and grab you.<\/p>\n
I rarely dance. My claim is I only do so when inspired. But right now I’m movin’ and a groovin’ in my seat and I’m totally in the moment, purely elated.<\/p>\n
Hang in there, until Leo emotes YOU’RE TOO MUCH TOO SOON!<\/p>\n
Wanna know what I love? How I feel RIGHT NOW!<\/p>\n
You don’t have to be rich, you don’t have to be successful, you’ve just got to touch my heart.<\/p>\n
And all these songs did.<\/p>\n
And still do.<\/p>\n
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