You've got something about you that I want around me

I'm a sucker for the soaring and otherworldly sounds of Gary Wright. This track is the logical advancement of what he established in "Dream Weaver" and "My Love Is Alive"-- you can hear that the equipment is more state-of-the-art than the tracks of 1975's The Dream Weaver.

Buddy of and collaborator with George Harrison, playing keys on Harrison's solo albums and pursuing a deep interest in India and spirituality with him. No surprise that relationship evolved into logging miles in Ringo's All-Starr Band.

Once in training to be a doctor, Gary assembles songs with the same kind of delicate precision that you find in a surgeon. He found his way around the early Korgs and Rolands, and even pioneered use of the keytar (see below).

And he could still get down.

Gary Wright is resoundingly under-praised, in my book.

As usual, I prefer the deep-cut, non-hit, that first reintroduction of which prompts the delightful realization, "I probably haven't heard this since it was on the radio in 198x!"

You'll be okay, follow your heart

So he had a soul that couldn't tolerate the braggadocio and the bleakness of the biz. That's what happened. 

"It's the deal with the devil: if you want your work to be seen, it's unfortunately not just about the work. And when it becomes less about the art, then the art suffers."

I savored this interview with musician/songwriter Gregg Alexander yesterday, reading it twice, listening to the songs*. And THE song:



I loved this song. I found it because I listened to the radio--the actual FM radio--15 years ago, daily. So many blocks between 1 W and 2200 W and 10 S and 1600 N spent tromping around to this, wondering what the hell I was doing in this city after only five months. I only feel like I heard it all the time, because I mustn'tve. Some time was spent hearing this or this and straining to reach the dial when this came on.

But this was constant, at least in my head, and when, a few years later, I could obtain (not legally) and play (legally) digital music files, I found this first, or something close to it (not like I remember my first CD purchase, which was, of course, this).

The song--and its creator--were widely admired and naturally dismissed until he slipped into obscurity. Some of the admirers who stepped up were surprising; Joni Mitchell, herself once an idealistic newcomer, gave the highest praise, including the track among others by Debussy, Duke Ellington and Dylan on an album of "music that matters to her."

Gregg resurfaced later, but no on really knew it. Of course, of course he also wrote this other guilty-pleasure treasure of mine, aerial and poppy and classic rock-y, all at once.

My own well-loved digital file of "You Get What You Give" faded, disappearing sometime in the last few years between device changes and computer upgrades and virus-laden downloaded file flushes from my music storage. That's okay; it's a relic of a time past, sonically, socially, personally. But there are some things about this song that are ageless. I mean, replace some of these names, and then trawl Twitter, the New York Times, or some episodes of The Daily Show (which, incidentally, premiered in its current incarnation at the exact time that "You Get What You Give" and Gregg were pushed out over radio waves in January 1999):

Health insurance rip off lying FDA big bankers buying
Fake computer crashes dining
Cloning while they're multiplying
Fashion mag shoots
with the aid of 8 dust brothers Beck, Hanson
Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson
You're all fakes
Run to your mansions
Come around
We'll kick your ass in! 

But, for me, the bloom is still on this rose because the song's sound matches the point. The sound and the thought soar together. This song was not at shy about aspirational, and that's how I needed to be in early 1999. It says, "Remember how you did that/this with them/those? And who you are? You still are."

You still are.

Your Guilty Pleasure: Full stock of thoughts and dreams that scatter

You CANnot deny this groove.

It's from this album, the predecessor to the monster Private Eyes. I dig this track and the album's other hit, because they're really in the same family as the early croony, funky blockbusters, and they precede the movement (descent?) into total synth and mechanized drumland, aka the mid-80s.

Today's Shuffle: Everybody wants to look the other way

Periodically, this blog is about how I (still) like Sting when I shouldn't.

My return to Shuffle coughed up my favorite track from The Soul Cages, the tour of which I actually saw almost exactly twenty-two years ago. I managed to miss most of Don Henley, who opened (hah, post-punk rules!) that night at Alpine Valley. My roommates bought me a ticket for my birthday earlier in the summer and then set me up to travel to East Troy with some of their friends.

I haven't forgotten that show, mostly because someone had a reserved ticket stub and each person in the group (who the hell they were, I have no idea now) used it to travel into the rarefied air of the Reserved Covered Area. I made to row 8 and was able to get an up-close with a forty year-old and still incredibly hot Sting and his big ol' Doc Martens.

Now, of course, I look at the footage of it from my desk (and imagine not being able to comprehend that 22 years ago--I mean, did I know an Internet existed in 1991?) and see that Sting, as usual, positioned some incredible musicians from across genres to deploy his cross-genre music, his music that, in the immortal words of Branford Marsalis, "is a motherf*cker."


Love, Erykah Badu New Amerykah Part Two
Lithium, Nirvana Nevermind
Pass the Plugs, De La Soul De La Soul Is Dead
Pursuit of Happiness, Weekend Players Pursuit of Happiness
Ships Passing Through, Jimi Hendrix Valleys of Neptune
Everybody Wants The Same Thing, Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah
My Time, Kaskade It's You, It's Me
Summertime, Sarah Vaughn The Very Best of Sarah Vaughn
Uncountable (Feat. Tomomi Ukomori), Hideo Kobayashi A Drama
Fin, Supergrass Road To Rouen
Don't Lose Your Temper, XTC Black Sea
You Can Get It If You Really Want, Jimmy Cliff The Harder They Come
As, Stevie Wonder Songs In The Key Of Life
Baby Britain, Elliott Smith XO
Seen Your Video, The Replacements Let It Be
Bombers, Gary Numan The Pleasure Principle (30th Anniversary Edition)
Can I Get A Witness, Marvin Gaye Greatest Hits
Fire Island, Fire Island Hed Kandi: Back To Love - True Club Classics 2
West of Hollywood, Steely Dan Two Against Nature
Hoover Dam, Sugar Copper Blue
Jeremiah Blues, Sting The Soul Cages



Addendum:

I just found this, and, despite afternoon dyspepsia, I've become happy as a pig lolling in jazz-rock poo:



By the way, is Branford wearing the first iteration of a WHO DAT t-shirt, or what?

Your Guilty Pleasure: You told me to take this chance and learn the ways of love

High tenor gets me every damn time. El wrote this for Marvin Gaye, who left the Gordy label stable and, I guess, became unavailable to sing it. El clearly implies his love for Gaye in this track; he deploys that falsetto elsewhere, later.  I'd like to know if there is a deeper story behind El's hopeful early 80s composition, which doesn't have the artificial sheen of Smooth Jazz's 90s catapult.

Of course, my story with this song involves a pool out in the country in the languid sunset heat of August in Kentucky. I think I floated on a raft at some big barbeque party or other, as if in a womb of summer-at-home. 

As the sun has its place up in the sky...

Your Guilty Pleasure: Hang a sign upon the door

Oh, it's back.

And this is a YGP in, like, triplicate, since the men behind the music in The System created the synth arrangement and programming for some big hits circa 1983-85. I submit (with absolutely no authority) that, without these guys, we wouldn't have had Tony! Toni! Tone! 

I've always loved this song (a familiar refrain); I remember hearing it while in a swimming pool at a family and friends-of-family bbq party in somewhere out in the country on the way to Richmond from Lexington. The lush synths, the detail (which is why they were called in by the big guns), the...groove.

I love how the video (or its initial scene) was clearly inspired by the metaphor of hanging a Do Not Disturb sign. Yeah, let's have the guys playing the song in a hotel room, just set them up with a microphone and whatever that keyboard/stick thing is.

Oh, 1986, you were so simple. You were, too 1990

And the feeling's so real.

(Also: this video and song makes me want to totally 1986 my hair one day for the hell of it, now that I have bangs again for the first time since then. I think with enough product I can get them to make that cascade I was always trying to get them to do.)

He's the rolling stone

This isn't a Your Guilty Pleasure*. It's a great song.

This interview/focus on the song from BBC radio (which starts around 1:04), is a lovely remembrance of an unforgettable song and an empathetic, agile artist who, sadly, leave much of a legacy.

Man, this song has it all: screaming guitar solo, hip-shaky bongo noises, soaring,otherworldly riffs, and that take-it-to-the-bank saxophone solo, which, as explained in the BBC piece, was created by Gerry Rafferty, not saxophonist Raphael Ravenscroft.



It is so legendary that I submit that the Sexy Sax Man pick up his shiniest axe and purvey this smooth riff across some Kohlses and hell, why not a Thanksgiving Day parade, this fall.

And guess what? I can dig into this song myself as the nights begin to chill and shadows lengthen earlier and earlier.

*a song that you didn't know you liked, liked but didn't want anyone else to know, or that you find is making your mind or butt involuntarily move.

Your Guilty Pleasure: I Want Some, Too

I don't have to explain why I like this.

--I'm not implying that you should know; I'm saying, I don't have to explain why I like it.

I'll just say it's like a really good party in my head right now.

Your Guilty Pleasure: Say What You Want to Say

This was inevitable; I've had a crush on this sassy thing since the moment I first heard it. And I wonder if something else is inevitable, too. Since bright, jazzy pop songs from Britain that I liked two decades ago seem destined for Smooth Jazz radio, does that mean I am destined to be driving a new-used hybrid in, say, a decade (maybe entirely electric; god, let's hope so for our blighted Earth's sake), and listening to satellite radio--or the satellite radio chip implanted in my head, okay, maybe not that yet, maybe I am merely wirelessly connected to my "cloud" and my "cloud" contains a preponderance of what became in the last decade of the last century known as "Smooth Jazz?" Will I be ferrying who/whatever around X city listening to a personal mix of Seal and Sade and Swing Out Sister and Lisa Stansfield (and don't worry, that's gonna be an eventual YGP as well)?

I hope at least I am centered and making more money while I'm beating the steering wheel in time with "Time and Tide."

This anxiety about becoming no longer cool is pointless because I think that not being cool AND not giving a shit about not being cool is actually quite...cool.

This anxiety is actually about aging and not coolness. Or, rather, it's about coolness to the point that you become less cool as you age, but because you are aging you don't give a shit that you are less cool than you used to be, you give a shit about other things more endemic to aging. Like what kind of car you drive. Or aching.

So aging, for that reason, can't be all that bad.

Neither is this song. The Roots certainly thought so, and that's cooler than cool since Questo is my current favorite tastemaker. Until, that is, I am old enough to completely stop giving a shit about others' taste.

Your Guilty Pleasure: Maybe Just By Holding Still It'll Be There

What happened to Joan Osborne? I know you are already pissed at me because now you have that song in your head at the mere mention of her name, but let me tell you that one of the real shames of 199-whatever was that that song catapulted her into everyone's consciousness, where she was widely hated for it. It was an earworm that ultimately only open-minded high school church youth groups and office workers who lived for Lite FM ease-you-through-your-workday radio could love.

That song unmercifully branded her as a one-hit wonder when I'd posit that Joan is actually an unusually talented musician. She's got Sheryl Crow's prowess and mid-America charm, but none of the Nashville/LA gloss and high-profile romantic partners (but don't get me wrong, I still to this day love this, and I will sing it in the car every time I am ever on Santa Monica Boulevard, and it is one of my go-to karaoke songs). But I'd go head-to-head with anyone who claims that Jewel's cheesy, free-spirit persona and whine or Alanis' carefully groomed nutjob ex, free-spirit persona and whine supercedes this woman's extravagantly lush blues growl.

On the other hand, while it imprisoned her, that song has also given Joan Osborne freedom that most artists dream of from their mattresses on the floor and day jobs and rusting Honda Civics.

Plus, she is from Kentucky. 

That song--Joan Osborne didn't even write it, and it was allegedly filler on her first album, which I can't say that I've heard. Well, maybe I have, but god only knows where or when, or if it was under duress or during a lift home. Look, the point is that this song, which is on that album, and which I probably first heard someplace like XRT, which was my FM ease-me-through-my-workday radio when I first landed here, this song is what that song isn't. Caffeinated blues-funk-old-upright-pianer fun--and that voice. Oh, that voice. I for one, forget every warble and strum of that other song when I hear this.



You know what, I used to wear my Beastie Boys "Aloha Mr Han"/Chevy Van ringer tee (purchased en concert, so fuck off) just like Joan wears whatever ringer tee-shirt she's wearing, over a skirt just a tad too nice for it, for, you know, some declasse contrast, and I'd feel all right, in it, because a. I looked cute in it, and b. the B Boys were my thing for a solid several years, and---oh god I am still so fucking angry that I let ***** borrow that shirt, that shirt which by that time I had moved through three apartments and into a new city--seven years!--and then we broke up through sudden and (then) chronic lack of communication (except the one time he finally returned my front gate key to me so that I wouldn't have to enter through the alley only, and that transaction only happened because I called him several times, ultimately leaving a message that said, "bring me my key because THERE IS A RAPIST IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD," which there was), and I every time I think about how I didn't think to ask for the return of both the key and that shirt my eyes practically bleed because musical group commemorative clothing only really means something to me when I've purchased it near or on the premises of the experience being commemorated.

Oh, it's available in the great big vintage store in the intertubes, but like hell I'm going to buy it when it's been carefully "curated" aside a sixty-fucking-five-dollar "Hip to Be Square" t-shirt and sterling fucking silver Kokopelli earrings .

...I'm not angry at or about him any more, or the unsolicited Kokopelli jewelry I've received in the 90s.

Or, really, the shirt.

Because, alright, these small oh-that's-RIGHTs are going to crop up, even years later, but what is key now, what persists now, more strongly than Joan's on-trend for 94 outfit, is how this song is an ode to, well, hooking up, but also to not to looking for, but knowing that there'll be the now-faceless person who'll follow you up your stairs one late night (or, rather, from whom you will borrow a toothbrush after squishing your underwear into your handbag). Whom you'll like so much you'll loan him your favorite, seven year-old t-shirt. When Like is in the air but not yet because they (and you) are just not quite there yet, even if you are standing next to a reasonable facsimile who reminds you that, even if he can't fix it, you can find someone who can.

It's the same jumbled-inside feeling that something's coming. 



I pretty much always think of Tony singing under the clotheslines when this Joan Osborne song crops up. I think about how laughter about something that hasn't happened yet bubbles in your throat, how you walk differently in the street when there are some definite maybes on your mind or social calendar, and how knowing, knowing like this can be either sly or pure, and how it feels to stop looking back at stained mind  pictures but ahead, toward dim images, from which something will emerge. 

Who knows?

Your Guilty Pleasure: I'm Only Off To Wander Across a Moonlit Mile

Even though it takes extra effort to not hear this as peppy aural wallpaper for the trailer of a Kate Hudson urban romantic comedy, I've always liked this little overplayed gem.

Your Guilty Pleasure: Drop Your Glasses, Shake Your Asses

"I just do me."

Best four words in a song I needed to hear at the right place/right time. I'll explain in a minute.

Eve seems to always have just done herself. Philly-born, she came up as an MC out in Los Angeles through the Ruff Ryders posse, whom she joined after auditioning via a rap battle. Right now, I'm giving tracks off of her Ruff Ryders-produced/released first album Let There Be Eve…Ruff Ryders' First Lady a cursory listen; you can tell why the singles were singles. On the whole, not my cup of tea -- but that's not the point of this mini-essay or highly personal, unauthoratative-authoritative review, or navel-gazing nostalgia--or whatever it is.

Her first album shows Eve is a tough woman -- tough-on-the-inside, sure-of-herself tough. Toughness that was buffed to a fine sheen by the time she emerged from the ubiquitous chrysalis of the early 00s known as Dr. Dre, as--and I love this handle--Eve of Destruction. Yes. She lives up to that brash moniker --and this is why Dre nurtured her in the first place: she's an f-ing hot MC. Allegedly, she turned her first networked meeting with Dre into an audition. And nailed it. Not surprisingly, after her second album, Scorpion, plowed up the charts and out the radio in 2001, kicking up catchy, huge hits, "Who's That Girl" (nanana na-nanana-na-nanana) and today's Guilty Pleasure, "Let Me Blow Ya Mind," Eve quite tidily became a triple-threat (music-acting-fashion).

I totally forgot she had a sitcom, an eponymous one that ran for three years. Not that I ever saw it, except while skipping across channels. And every time I did see her onscreen, I thought about how the really good (and good-looking, but very sweet) trainer/instructor at 3-W gym (Women's Workout World), the one who'd actually push us instead of just watching us execute moves, who had us doing those planks with feet on a ball and then scrunch your legs in kind of ab work, had moved to Los Angeles to be Eve's trainer because he'd hooked the same gig in Chicago while she was in town filming Barbershop. My abs' loss was Eve's biceps' gain.

What's happened to Eve? Any recent recordings have gotten stuck in the ass-in-head revolving door at the top level of her record label, apparently. And she's been kind of supplanted by Ciara and, God, I hate to say it, the likes of Ke$ha--who is a reminder that we need more Eves in popular music. Stat.

But she's doing alright. She's guested twice on Glee apparently. And, since that's not like guesting on, uh, trying to think of a sinker TV show in a multi-billion channel world...um, whatever is on Fridays at 9:00 pm on CBS, she'll be fine.

Oh wait. She guested on that, too.




This was the sound of the summer of 2001, at least for me. I listened to the radio a lot; it was one of those times when you have to exile yourself from a lot of familiar music, due to memories, or the thoughts that can spring from the shape of a verse or the name of the track or just that it's part of the 20 frikin percent of your personal collection that you have to just put aside (okay, avoid) until you can reclaim it as your own once enough healing time has passed.

Frequently, my radio dial would land on 103.5 FM. This was a brief, strange period when that station's format was Top 40, and Top 40 during the summer of 2001 was weirdly tolerable--at least during, or because I was engaged in, a music embargo. Missy Elliott, Janet Jackson, Eve, Pink, Destiny's Child -- a rare surfeit of really rather good female singers/rappers making solid pop music, and, because Autotune was a production tool and not a requisite style, really singing it themselves. You couldn't get away with a lot back then. Only Britney did, really.

So this song was welcome in my earbuds. It felt like feeling the hard edges of  myself where I'd previously felt bled out, soft, weak. It made me feel, not think.

With each hesitation-BEAT, hesitation-BEAT, I felt stronger, somehow. My chin would rise and head nod during the sassy playground rhyme chorus.  

And if I had to give you more
It's only been a year
Now I got my foot through the door
And I aint goin nowhere
It took a while to get me in
And I'm gonna take my time
Don't fight that bull shit in your ear
Now let me blow ya mind

Taking in my surroundings. "Beware, cuz I crush anything I land on," she winds up at the end. I can pin this experience with this song very specifically to walking to the old Kozy's location in the South Loop to pick up my bike -- the same bike I have now. I rode away a lot of stuff on that bike that summer. I became tough. Like Eve.

Your Guilty Pleasure: Ain't No Doubt, We Are Here to Party

This is happening because this song, while I've enjoyed it as basic four-on-the-four schlock that I recall from the back of the Toyota Corolla as a kid, hides more under its sunny, multitracked surface. Too late to be trailblazing and too transparent to be influential, Heatwave emerged from London, that hotbed of disco excess, and landed squarely in Donna Summer's lap during the spring of 1977 with their first album, Too Hot To Handle (the heat theme continues with all of their albums--Central Heating, Hot Property--until they kinda gave up and just called their 1980 effort Candles). Johnnie Wilder was an American serviceman landed in the UK after discharge and hooked up with Englishman Rod Temperton via the usual "band looking for..." ad in Melody Maker. And if the name Rod Temperton sounds familiar to you just sit with it. ...Sit with it...sit with it... think back to the record you opened up time after time, gazing at the flawless skin and Saturday Night Fever suit and the baby tiger dangling (foreshadowing!) over his knee...sometimes you glanced at the credits, maybe watched them spin on the turntable, and the name turned there, "Thriller" (R. Temperton) (5:57)...yeah. He wrote "Thriller." And "Boogie Nights."




If you can endure the lion's mane polyester jumpsuits and male headscarves, you can pick out Rod, he's the white dude on keys with the visage, to borrow a phrase from The Simpsons that I always borrow, straight out of the Big Book of British Smiles. Rod wrote one of my all-time favorite songs of all time, "Rock With You," having been recruited by Quincy Jones, who was impressed with all of Rod's heat-related recordings, to collaborate on Off the Wall.

"Boogie Nights" has a real funk foundation. You can hear the infamous "the One" in it; I'll just let the man who learned it the hard way explain what that is. And I'd like to say extremely unauthoritatively that Rod and crew brought real funk cred to the erotic whispers and flimsy Giorgio Moroder beats that skittered across the dancefloor in '76 and '77.

And this song provided the title of one of my all-time favorite movies of all time -- the one with the amazing, one-shot opening sequence that uses the disco song that is another of my all-time favorite songs of all time. The one that does not include "Boogie Nights" (R. Templeton) (3:56).

If there is an unnecessary (and unrequested, I know) lesson here, it's that there's more to everything than your eye sees and transmits to your brain parts. Sometimes, you have to let your ass parts move to the four-on-the-floor and the One, give your brain parts a rest, and just enjoy.

Your Guilty Pleasure: I Was Such A Clown (By Request)

Oh, my friend Jenna picked a good one (and rightly so, she is moving on to new, away-from-Chicago adventure very soon!). From the spaceship-taking-flight synth intro to the big, rubbery bassline anchoring the pleading heart of darkness, this is beer-stinkin' angst in red leather pants and (most importantly) a headband.

Lyrically, um... the story is less dramatic. Good thing "down" rhymes with "clown." Sometimes it's all about the atmosphere the song creates, kids, whether it hits you in the solar plexus or the groin or the head. So, yeah. This song is about it kicking you (and getting kicked in) the nuts.

And it's a far better tune than the ubiquitous "Working for the Weekend," now the intro music for FM-radio Retro Weekends and Weekend Rewinds from coast to coast. Do they still do those? Regardless, Jenna can request this gem from KABG Big 98.5 Classic Hits in Los Alamos. I'm sure Big 98.5 weekday DJ and hometown boy Chaz Malibu will want to spin a lil' Loverboy for you.

Your Guilty Pleasure: So Put Me on A Highway (By Request)

This wistful ballad from One of These Nights is the epitome of The Eagles' Southern Californiafied country rock. I did not know that the band essentially formed out of Linda Ronstadt's backing band; Glenn Frye, Don Henley, and Randy Meisner were session musicians for one of her early 70s albums. Meisner takes the lead on "Take It To The Limit," one of the few times either Henley or Frye don't sing on an Eagles hit single. And this one was pretty huge at the end of 1975, and I'm sure continues to be a before-set-break slow burner for umpteen bearded cover bands from Southern Cali to South Carolina.

Here's some god, not another spreadsheet, 2:00 pm reading for you. Meisner quit the Eagles after the Hotel California tour (he checked out and he could leave. Sorry.), and became a session player from here to Dan Fogelberg, returning to relative obscurity. Except that for the better part of the 90s, he contended with a personal outlaw, a rogue impersonator who traveled between Nevada and California, trading on the name of the Eagle that everybody sorta-kinda knew, and bilking dozens of women out of money, dignity, and their pants. Here was a charismatic shyster who probably told some tales about "Take It To The Limit," spun yarns about upcoming record deals and tours, but who was well-known in Vegas casino pits and rode the Greyhound. According to this gambling world update from 2006, the impersonator, Peter Lewis Morgan, was caught, convicted and served barely a year before returning to Vegas and his Meisnerdom, as if nothing had happened.

It's a bizarre tale, but what it's got me thinking of primarily is how one can toil at one's art in obscurity, then not (dude toured for Hotel California. Come on.), then toil again while likely enjoying the largesse of that moment in the sun. And that there's a D-level throughout the entire entertainment socio-industrial complex, and how astonishingly easy it is trade on the amount of power associated with D-level fame, and how it feels for anonymous, everyday souls to interact with D-level fame, even in the grasping bronze age of reality TV.

Ugh. Let's put that lurid dialectic aside and get some solace in ol' Waylon's drawl and Willie's reedy simplicity. What I didn't know (for shame) is that everyone's favorite Outlaws covered "Take It To The Limit" and even named the album after that track.

Get in the truck get on the road. It'll be cooler with the wind in your hair.

Your Guilty Pleasure: The Hero Would Be Me

Here's one that pierces with the sad arrow every time. The song has such a...delicate and contained rawness that I stop what I am doing when this plays, and "the hero would be me," perhaps its most hopeful thought, just slays. This is no "Time In a Bottle." There's something about the way it lands sonically, but also the fact that he's talking about sweeping in and saving her from the sadness of a broken relationship when in fact he is also in the sad, broken relationship and he just can't do it.

Heroes often fail.

Slays.




(And the gliding kayak-everywhere idea actually works.)

Your Guilty Pleasure: You Can't Control an Independent Heart

This is the first installment of your guilty pleasure, in which I give you a song that you didn't know you liked, liked but didn't want anyone else to know, or that you find is making your mind or butt involuntarily move. It's okay. Enjoy. I won't tell anyone.

Let's start this nice and easy. If you went to high school and/or college circa 1984 - 1993, it's likely this is lying around in your cassette collection. Or if you are not like me, long ago donated to Salvation Army. The Dream of the Blue Turtles was Sting's hotly anticipated, ultimately ubiquitous first solo effort. Recorded in the cushy confines of Quebec and Montserrat (documented in the film Bring On the Night) and slickly produced, the album still managed to feel spontaneous -- likely due to the colossal talent of his backing band, composed of jazz journeymen Omar Hakim, Kenny Kirkland, Darryl Jones, and the only thing that made me ever watch the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, saxophonist Branford Marsalis. (With whom I also shared a crazy dinner--with Kenny Kirkland as well, I believe--near Rue Pigalle in Paris years and years and years [and years] ago. Not to sound like a name-dropping asshole, but that is a story for another time). Anyway, this is a solid, pop-jazz record with just enough mid-Eighties social consciousness ("I hope the Russians love their children, too," he broods) to seem relevant rather than a relic, so just plug your ears the next time you hear "If I Ever Lose My Faith in You" blaring out in TJ Maxx. This is the Sting album that matters. And the Zenful call-to-end-co-dependency first single, well, it makes my heart feel pretty free.