Paul Simon - writing "Still Crazy After All These Years"

I've been on a huge Paul Simon kick lately, both listening and learning - meaning that I'll never truly get the hang of playing - his songs, and I found a great clip of him playing an unfinished "Still Crazy..." with Dick Cavett.

The bridge has always been the most striking part of the tune, and to watch a master songwriter like Simon weigh his options about where to go next is really fascinating.
"Have you ever reached for your C-sharp and gotten your C-natural instead?" is pretty priceless as well.

If nothing else, think about this:  how badass a songwriter do you have to be for Ray Charles to cover you?

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Ian Messinger
My Other Centaur...is a LADY Centaur
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Les Paul - who knew?

(download)

The first Les Paul song I ever heard was "How High the Moon" on the soundtrack to My Favorite Year.  For years, I assumed Mary Ford's stack of 12 vocal tracks was the Andrews Sisters, and that Les was an entire small combo.  I always loved the song, and I was thrilled (and a little embarrassed) to finally discover after his passing that it was only him and Mary playing around with the multi-track recording methods that he invented.  Who knew?

There's a lot of excellent footage of the then-married couple playing together on variety shows - see one of my favorites below, where Mary really shines:

An amazing, amazing guy - I could listen to that intersection of jazz, rockabilly and country all day, and the modern era of recording might very well not exist without his innovations.

Wild Things and a Tribute to Nilsson's "The Point!"

Beloved children's books!  Beloved children's cartoons!  Oh boy!  October is going to be a quite a month.  First, Where the Wild Things Are finally comes out on October 16th:

There's even an excerpt of Dave Eggers' Where the Wild Things Are screenplay / novelization available courtesy of The New Yorker.

On Oct. 27th, we get a tribute to Harry Nilsson's The Point!, one of my all-time favorite records and movies.  Featuring covers from Devotchka, Martha Wainwright, Andrew Bird and more, you can stream the songs here: 
http://amanorecordings.bandcamp.com/album/songs-from-the-point

The record benefits Eggers' 826NYC, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting literacy and writing skills to kids in NYC and beyond.

Speaking of totalitarian cultural regimes (and yes, that's essentially what The Point! is about), I'm flying through Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn - a novel about the gradual outlawing of the alphabet on the fictional island of Nollop - and it scares the hell out of me for some reason.  I highly recommend it for the subversive and literate (or even literally subversive), especially at a whopping $5 from The Strand.