MY FAVORITE BACKGROUND MUSIC TO WRITE BY THESE DAYS : COZY LIBRARY COFFEE SHOP : LOFI MUSIC

KODI LOFI YOUTUBE STATION : COZY LIBRARY COFFEE SHOP 

Damn but this one makes me want to own a coffee shop, maybe near some beach.

HOW SOON IS NOW : JOHNNY MARR

 This just sends me...

DON'T TELL ANYBODY THE SECRETS I TOLD YOU by LUCINDA WILLIAMS : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

Am I Lucinda Williams fan? Not really. I first heard her in her Sweet Side era. (World Without Tears album.) But I have been reading musician memoirs. This one is forthright and personal and moves at a good pace. And, unlike some I've reviewed, this one has introspection and change. Lucinda Williams was told not to write about her childhood but she did and it's important to her development as an artist. Lucinda tells about her mentally ill mother and dysfunctional childhood, her poet-lecturer father, her roots in Christian fundamentalism, being an anti-racism Southerner, dropping out of high school and not looking back, and a variety of relationships with men and which songs were inspired by which men, which is something I think most readers are interested in. This book contains the poetry of others and song lyrics of hers, planted in the right places. There is also sexism;  she was not allowed to do erotic videos though so many men in music have and do. She also tells that she has had dozens of inconsequential jobs to pay the rent into her early 40's when, after years of believing it would happen and putting in the work, it finally did.  Money enough.  No more "day jobs."

What this memoir did for me was make me want to listen to more of her music. 

C 2023  Christine Trzyna

Excerpt page 94: I've been called an 'erotic' song writer. I don't disagree, but even though I had plenty of sex when I was younger, I was never promiscuous. I always had partners. Some of them didn't last that long, but I wasn't sleeping around willy nilly. The brain is the real erogenous zone, at least for me, so I have to connect with someone intellectually and almost spiritually in order to be attracted to them physically, and that rarely happens immediately.  I realized early in my adult life that talking - real, honest, substantive conversation - could be superhot, and it didn't have to result in anybody taking their clothes off for it to be erotic in a lasting way, in a way that can really last longer in your mind and memory and in your feelings than physical sex. Very often a good conversation is more memorable than fucking. That's what I was getting at with my song "Something About What Happens When We Talk" on the Sweet  Old World album.

***

Lucinda Williams was interviewed on the Seth Rogan show.  She said she wrote her entire memoir by hand as she has never learned to type.

RED GIOIA ON THE BIZ

ROCK AND ROLL - LOU REED

A CROATION SINGS ME AN OPERA AT THE BUS STOP : TALKING TO STRANGERS

Although there are distinct cultural difference between Poles, Croatians, Slovaks, Slovenians, and other Slavs - eastern Slavs and western Slavs, here in the United States we all seem to be put into the same niche, and Slavic people seem eager to identify with each other more so than other Europeans - just an OPINION (You know, EVERYONE HAS ONE!)

I was more disarmed than charmed when this old man began to gleefully sing me a song in Croation - LOUD - and was proud of his operatic voice.

I thanked him.

And then, though we had started out talking about what time the bus to take us up a hill was due, and that it was overdue, he got up and walked home.

FAVORITE BACKGROUND MUSIC

Jazz from the early 1960's and back.  Louis Armstrong.  Mickey Hart's Planet Drum.  Played low - just a hint - no lyrics.

KC and THE SUNSHINE BAND : GET DOWN TONIGHT

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF QUINCY JONES (By Quincy and a Lot of Other People!)

The Autobiography of Quincy Jones C 2001 Quincy Jones (What about all those other people?) Doubleday 

What ABOUT those other people who wrote this "autobiography?" Well, they include Quincy's brother, his ex wife Peggy Lipton (who has more recently written her own memoir), and his best friend, each who have a chapter that moves the story along. But doesn't the term "autobiography" (as opposed to biography) mean written by the subject himself? The use of other narrators on this book is effective and the chapters Quincy wrote himself are quite creatively and humorously written too (or did he have a ghost writer?) so I tend to think that the idea here was to take the same story and introduce a variety of viewpoints, most of which are harmonious with Quincy's POV about his life; no one has anything too bad to say about the man though (moral judgement call!) he is a self confessed DOG, yes he is... To focus on my favorite part, the chapter Quincy we suppose wrote called "My Life As A Dog," I particularly enjoyed his telling of the story of how he became enamored with an mysterious woman who he almost never met, but who had his (phone) number as well as the numbers of a good number of other famous musician type dogs, and managed to seduce his imagination... Page 160 - 161- 162 - 163 "My most vulnerable point as a dog- and one of the most bizarre in retrospect -involved an incident that would take place in the wake of a numbing marital breakup. (Note the downsizing of the event with that word "incident" CT). On September 6, 1986 I got a call at the Bel Air Hotel from a woman who called herself Ariana... Later it came out in Vanity Fair magazine in an article called "The Obsession with Miranda" that Ariana had gotten through the phone defenses of no fewer than thirty-seven guys....I'll always be grateful for her making me risk love again after my nervous breakdown, even if it was only "phone jones" in the beginning. At the time I met her (he barely did! CT) I was totally shut down emotionally....She played all of us like a Stradivarius - a pound of world-weary dogs who'd heard and seen it all.... After eluding my bodyguards and ignoring the advice of my best friend, I took a limo downtown with champagne and a hamper of smoked salmon sandwiches in a box, all excited. It had been seven months now, and I was finally starting to be able to feel love again....