A few weeks ago my friend Gorm was visiting and spotted a couple of Nick Drake documentary DVDs on my shelf. I had been saving them for special occasions because I knew they would be emotionally challenging to watch and I would want to write about them (as this review bears witness to), and at the same time I hadn't really wanted to watch them for fear of disappointment - the usual syndrome that c
OK, so I've heard from a few parties about my perhaps overly intellectualized analysis of Van Morrison's song, That's Entrainment, from his new album Keep It Simple. But that was just one way of writing about the record, and as I indicated in my post there is more to be said... This time, though, I'll try to heed Van's own advice and keep it simple.Van Morrison's output over 4 decades is so massiv
For years I listened to at least one Van Morrison track every day, often playing one of his songs to energize myself before going in to teach a class or give a lecture. We're talking major obsession, here... so bear with me and this long post.These days my Van-time comes in waves, on and off. Lately it's been on to an unusual extent, due not only to the release of his latest album Keep It Simple,
I recently finished reading Joe Boyd's memoirs of 'making music in the 1960s', White Bicycles. Boyd is famous in an underground sort of way for producing a large number of British and American folk, rock, pop and jazz acts in the 60s and 70s, and for occasionally taking on more contemporary projects during the folky/jangly guitar revival years of the early and mid-80s (he did the 3rd R.E.M. album
Since road trips seem to be on my mind today, I'll start with a little US-memoir. A couple of years back I had occasion to go on a grand tour of the southern 'Villes, to wit: start in Gainesville, Florida, drive up to Louisville, Kentucky and finally, crossing the Smokies, end up in another Gainesville - this one in Georgia. This peculiar itinerary was occasioned by a couple of invites (the two Ga
Unlike my main obsessions - Van Morrison and Nick Drake and various American folkies and songwriters, such as Townes Van Zandt - which are mostly under control to the extent that I don't write four blog posts on them every day, occasionally a minor obsession bubbles up and gets out of control...Recently I have found myself listening fairly obssesively to a specific instrumental track whenever I dr
As this is the debut post on my new informal blog/notepad, A rare, rare find..., I should probably come clean about the title I have chosen for the blog. It is, as many will know, a quote from a song by late great songwriter, guitarist and singer, Nick Drake. More particularly it is a line from the song titled "Time has told me" which originally appeared on Drak
For those of you who can read Danish, I have a long review of Todd Haynes' 'Dylan'-film I'm Not There at Kulturkapellet. http://www.kulturkapellet.dk/filmanmeldelse.php?id=130Check it out, if you like Dylan, or postmodern meta-film, or both...For those of you who don't read Danish, here is a clip from the film, depicting the hilarious first meeting between Cate Blanchett's Dylan character (Jude Qu
Locating MOG account...