Monthly Archives November 2024

“It’s hard to see the surface…from the bottom” sings Oklahoma-born, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Parker Millsap in his fiery “Dammit” anthem that fuses near-despair with a defiant, emphatic hope. As so often happens, I stumbled across the impressive, infectious body of work Millsap has been producing for the better part of a dozen years now while I was looking for something else to complement a few thoughts I was hoping to draw forth to help get myself—and maybe you?—through these next days, weeks, oh hell, let’s say it: years.

Four of them.

So many feelings sloshing around about that prospect, words pouring forth from them, competing for expression since the tide started turning in an ominous direction as the late dark hours turned darker on Election Night.

Appalled, confounded, dispirited, disillusioned, fearful for what awaits, for what the man has threatened and promised he will do.

The rhyme ...

Alright, enough, for the moment, of electoral tempests and distempers. The election and the world will be what they will be, chagrined, stupefied or elated as we ourselves may become in observing and then contending with them, as we must. But we need not do so in every waking moment. (Being at the mercy of our night dreams, of course, is another matter.)

Whatever happens come Tuesday and its aftermath, we must also make time for music and dancing and loving, for joshing and jiving, for romping through woods and along shores, for piling into cars and buses, subways, trains and planes en route to both our appointed and freefloating rounds.

For beholding “the lilies of the field, how they grow.”

The curse and blessing of the formative music from one’s youth (starting at about age 14, according to cognitive scientists) is that it demands squatter rights on the residence it took up in your heart and soul back t...