Category: Rock
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Cycling Mantras ~ Establishing Desert Rhythms
Bicycling is among my passions, one of the ways I connect to the world, my body, my being. The rhythm of riding, the cyclical nature of cycling, of spinning the crank arms, to spin a cogset, to spin the chain, so that the wheels spin. Round and round and round in a circle game…the movement…
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I know why you’re crying ~ Orbison & lang know why too
Music is a powerful muse for me, and words often flow from the imagery and emotion which rises as the melody plays out. Less often, the words I’ve written bring a song to mind. This poem was in my thoughts this morning and as the words of it washed over me a melody rose out…
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Hearts traveling faster than the speed of love ~ the B-52s, Topaz
A vivid memory of dancing solo on an Australian beach, the full moon intermittently obscured by racing clouds even as its rays glitterred off the cascading breakers pounding the beach. This song, Topaz, blasting at top volume from the small portable stereo speakers attached to my iPod. A breathless churning of limbs and heart and…
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Grace on my mind, and in my heart ~ Dave Matthews
Dave Matthews, prodigiously talented and prolific, a true minstrel of our times writing soulful, often doleful songs of our everyday experiences. Transcendent, luminescent, playful. His live performances bring together extraordinary musicians with nary a glorious note misplayed or misplaced. And at the center mic, leaving no doubt as to the driving force of the band’s…
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Neil Young: He came dancing across the water
I can remember the first time I heard this album, Zuma. I was all of 20 years old, ski bumming in Whistler, BC, and gathered with a bunch of friends after the bars had closed. I can’t remember her name. She was skinny and not very attractive in any traditional sense, but there was something…
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Courage
I started a post about courage, featuring this song, a couple or three weeks ago. It’s still sitting in the drafts folder. The Tragically Hip are a favourite Canadian band from the late ’80s and early ’90s, a time when I, and many other Canadians, considered them the best rock band on the planet. Fully…
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Cloudbusting a rainy day in Vancouver: Kate Bush is in my subconscious
Maybe it’s due to the thick layer of clouds busting down with rain overnight and today. Maybe it’s about getting caught up in a rearward look last night. Maybe it’s about the upbeat glee of a gift and a moment shared with a friend across the miles. I’m not sure what put Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting…
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Nothing Else Matters when Bif Naked is your muse
Bif Naked came into my life in an odd way, the leading edge of a wave of the odd, the uncanny, the revelatory. This song has a lot of meaning for me, coming as it did amidst upheaval, chaos and — ultimately — awakening. And she came right into the middle of something else. I’ve…
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Peter Gabriel’s “So” — change is coming down like red rain
The text below (with some new edits) was posted as a link on my Facebook profile a week shy of three months ago. I’d just returned from a nearly 3 month-long road trip through the western US, preceded by 2 months in Australia. The story it tells begins to describe the unusual relationship I have…
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Peter Gabriel & Ken Follet: Fear, the mother of violence
A while ago I was reading Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth. Set amidst the brutality of the English middle ages, it’s interesting to see how all Follet’s characters experience fear, and more interesting how they respond to it and how, oftentimes, they are controlled by it, particularly the most violent of them, and…