A lot of my music-loving friends had posted something about this song but I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t even give it a listen because I thought the title was terrible and reminded me of “Twilight” or something.
But I finally gave it a chance and boy, was I wrong. Probably one of the most powerful, heartbreaking songs I’ve ever heard.
Here’s Isbell playing the song in a sit-down interview…
One of the best games I’ve seen this year – felt like watching a game in the 80’s *and* the “Cardiac Kid” Calgary Flames once again staged a third period come back to win 4-2 after being down 2-0 for much of the game.
In my first librarian job, my boss and I had the opportunity to oversee the move of a crowded small town library into a soon-to-be-vacated nearby church.
This photo was during our first visit to the church to see if it would be a workable space once all the pews and other church holdings were removed.
I was never more glad to have taken a class that had an element of library design to it. The class was “Management of Special Libraries” but many smaller public libraries have some of the same characteristics of special libraries so those skills came into use during this project.
I bought my first guitar after coming back from a University exchange to England in 1995. It cost me $60 and I still have it. It’s an El Degas model which is Spanish for “cheap crap”. 🙂
While on that exchange, I lived in dorms where I ended up forming a “folk/punk” group with a group of American exchange students. Most bands have names but we changed our name every time we got together to jam so that was part of the joke.
One of the guys in our band would borrow a guitar from any British student who had one (and was brave enough to lend us one), I’d play “drums” on an upside down bucket, one person had a Dollar Store recorder and one person, uhm, I think she also played a bucket come to think of it.
We’d go to a nearby Spar (a British Dutch version of 7-11) and buy a few bottles of the cheapest wine we could find (I think it was called “Rochelle”) then consume that and anything else we could get our hands on while trying to write the funniest/stupidest songs we could. For example, the first half-dozen songs we wrote all had the word “Whitey” somewhere in the title. “Whitey” was British slang for passing out so that gives you some insight into our band’s philosophy.
Anyhow, there are a lot of stories I could tell about that band (uhm, come to think of it, probably not) but getting back to my own guitar history, when I got back to Canada, I realised that if we could write songs when our main guitar player knew basically two chords, it couldn’t be that hard.
I found the El Degas, likely on some primitive online bulletin board system and began teaching myself how to play using tutorials, chord charts and tabulature I found online (all text files since this is pre-YouTube) as well as books and videos from the Regina Public Library (yay!)
Soon, I learned enough chords to play along with most basic songs if I had the chord chart and since then, have always played for my own enjoyment and entertainment but never dedicated myself to the guitar in any sustained or systematic fashion. (When asked if I play, I always joke that “own a guitar” but I don’t really know how to play.)
I’ve had that first guitar since around 1996 (supplemented by a cheap used electric Fender Squire I picked up, also while in University and just a couple years ago, another acoustic I found at a garage sale for about $40 so I now have an “upstairs” and a “downstairs” guitar – lucky or lazy, you decide!)
Anyhow, I came across the video below tonight and it made me think how much different my guitar playing experience might have been if I was as dedicated (obsessed?) as this young man who, as many of the YouTube comments point out, seems as good after 30 hours of practice as people who’ve been playing for years.
His progress is amazing but then again, has he written songs called “Whitey, You Suck”, “Who’s That Whitey?” or “Whitey #9”? I don’t think so! 🙂
Millions of kids (including me) were influenced by Stan Lee over the years – in making us into readers, in making us think about good and evil, in making us into dreamers –
but in his later year, he was perhaps best known for his cameos in the massively successful Marvel movies.
