THE CROWD AND THE TEA-LEAVES We may get some more tangents to delight in on this scenic road, but meanwhile I’m just going to link to a web page where a crowd was asked what In Between Days was all about. I usually avoid such places like the plague, especially if I’m going to write about music that’s new to me – I want to just start with what I can see from cold, and work out from first principles myself, before consulting others for their interpretations – and said web pages are not usually renowned for high-quality comments – which is why I prefer to talk to my husband, friends and other music nutters about it.
Exploring the Back Catalogue: HOTD & PMI Lens
ANOTHER LOOK AT THE HEAD ON THE DOOR I’m on a slightly early teabreak, owing to The Head On The Door being barely over 35 minutes long. I’ve listened again after putting it away for six weeks, and today’s impression was a bit more favourable than my earlier impressions of this album.
Frame of mind and whether you’re giving something your complete attention are just two of the things that can change the way we respond to something – and this morning, I was in “go with the flow” mode, and I was not giving the album my total attention – I was doing some weeding, a necessary chore during spring flush even if you’re doing weed-avoidant permaculture stuff. Of course, weeding isn’t all-bad; it yielded a couple of tubs of livestock fodder, and quite a few tubs of organic material for the compost heap – bringing carbon back to the ground and getting nutrients recycled, while making oodles of compost worms happy.
Exploring the Back Catalogue: KMKMKM & HODT Compare/Contrast
This episode of the curated open journal is an excerpt of an open journal entry comparing and contrasting Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and The Head On The Door, and selected responses from discussion that ensued. To see the complete discussion, you can go to the original thread here.
… it’s funny what offends Americans, and what doesn’t when it so totally should… You can spew hate speech about women and minorities and gibber idiocies all day long and be elected president there, but you can never ever say “fuck” because man, that’s morally bad. (I am disinclined to its use myself, and when people use it for punctuation or to purposely offend I want to vomit, but I’m not opposed to the use of that word when it’s truly appropriate.) You can’t sing, “I wish you were dead!” but you can blow up Japanese civilians with a nuclear bomb, or take out hundreds of non-American civilians to avenge one American death – yeah hey, that makes total sense.
South Coast Wilderness Walks 2021 Volume 2
This continues our series of photoessays on days spent hiking in largely unspoilt National Park and Nature Reserve areas on the South Coast of Western Australia – the places which escaped the bulldozers of the white settlers and are still clothed in the original Australian ecosystems that go all the way back to Gondwana. The …
Continue reading “South Coast Wilderness Walks 2021 Volume 2”
The Kingfisher, the Horse, and being on Country
FOR DAVID GULPILIL, SUNSMART AND THE EARTH, WITH LOVE AND THANKS Written December 6 – 16, 2021 This is still being revised because it’s so difficult to find the words and tie everything together, but I thought I’d put this out in the open now. A week ago a longtime friend died on the same …
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Exploring the Back Catalogue: Step Into The Light & General Reflections
Going largely backwards through a decades-long back catalogue after falling in love with a latter-day album is the reverse of how it generally works with music, but run-of-the-mill with literature. It’s like starting Dickens with Great Expectations, or Shakespeare with Hamlet, and then backtracking to their earlier work. In literature, nobody expects you to fetishise the first couple of efforts by an author and then bemoan the rest of their work, but that’s standard procedure for some music aficionados, in the context of contemporary music. Why is that?
Exploring The Back Catalogue: HOTD First Impressions, KMKMKM, Oddments
I’m at a crossroads here with presenting the journal material so far, because originally we also had a preliminary listen to The Head On The Door straight after KMKMKM, and neither of us were thrilled with that record. This led to some online debates, not all of which were particularly friendly, and a deeper exploration of reasons we didn’t take to that album like we’ve taken to albums such as Bloodflowers, The Top and KMKMKM. After that, I had a first listen to Wish, which I much preferred to the 1985 release, and got straight into looking at the lyrics on that. In the thick of all of this, I completely forgot to have a closer look at KMKMKM and its lyrics, an omission I will rectify on this blog soon – so much to explore with that album, and really looking forward to that.
Meanwhile though, here’s a very preliminary entry on The Head On The Door, lumped in with two entries on other songs. Also a couple of sermons related to YouTube & co commentaries. 😇 Plus, I’ve thrown in something extra over and above the “reprint” on the last entry here – i.e. that scorching Hendrix cover, and Pink Floyd…
South Coast Wilderness Walks 2021 Volume 1
This is a series of photoessays on days spent hiking in largely unspoilt National Park and Nature Reserve areas on the South Coast of Western Australia – the places which escaped the bulldozers of the white settlers and are still clothed in the original Australian ecosystems that go all the way back to Gondwana. The …
Continue reading “South Coast Wilderness Walks 2021 Volume 1”
Requiem for a Friend
A wonderful friend I’d known for decades died this year. This is for her, and her life partner. August 31, 2021 FOR ALICE AND ROB, WITH LOVE AND THANKS What’s on my mind this morning is that a dear long-time friend’s time is running out. She is in a coma and not expected to live …
Exploring the Back Catalogue: KMKMKM First Impressions
The next album from the Cure’s back catalogue that dropped into our rural mailbox in the middle of nowhere was Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. We were systematically closing gaps, having been captured years ago with Bloodflowers, various live albums and the concert film Trilogy, and having at that point gradually added Disintegration, The Top, Wild Mood Swings, Join the Dots (4 discs of B-sides, excellent value) and 4:13 Dream to our CD collection.
I started open journalling about the music with Exploring “Join the Dots”, then decided to continue the process with 4:13 Dream and subsequent new acquisitions in a new open journal, Exploring the Back Catalogue. I initially did both on a forum, but will now curate them on my blog and then continue gradually adding to them here.