I am slowly making my way through the magazine, hoping to find at least little tid-bits about why these songs (which reminds me, the guy who wrote the Fitzgerald piece is Walton Muyamba) and I was about to have to set fire to the magazine after reading Donn Cooper’s piece, which should live in infamy as exactly the kind of writing that drives me cracy about the OA Southern Music issues–you have here a song that you hear on the CD, “Divorce Decree,” which is a song about a woman who had a fine marriage which descended into shittiness and that shittiness is never going to accurately be reflected in this here piece of paper, but hallelujah, this here piece of paper is her freedom.
And you don’t hear many songs that can be summed up as “Hallelujah, I’m divorced.”
So, I was hoping that the article would at least touch on that, but no, instead it’s all about Cooper’s search for the singer–okay fine–and all on about how she made these terribly sad songs. And I’m all like “Fine, except the song on the CD, which you have not talked about at all.”
Possibly, I want different things from music writing than music writers want to give me, but I’m hearing all this new stuff. Help me through it. Tell me why you love this artist, this song.
Anyway, this is just a long tangent to say that what I found at the end of Cooper’s article delighted me so much I about can’t stand it–a couple of poems by Patricia Spears Jones. From “My Angel #1”–“He’s a ‘he’ which I find ironic/ but then, to be spiritual in an age of religious/ fanaticism is to be ironical.” I’ll be thinking about that all day.
Maybe I just need poetry more than usual, with those big pauses like the quiet after a too-large meal in which you let your body work.
But to me those two poems about angels said more about what we need writing and music for than anything I’ve read all week.
Tiny Cat Pants 
Dang, did I miss the Oxford American music issue this year? Gotta look for it.
I suspect the problem is different editors assembling the CD and the magazine. It may be there are no writers available who are actually interested in the particular song chosen for the CD. I’ve often wondered how they coordinate the two as well as they do.
Practically any complaint about music writing brings to (my) mind this wonderful quote from Frank Zappa: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
I dance about architecture all the time, though. You should totally see my Frank Lloyd Wright rumba.
Steve, if you can catch him, Mark Smirnoff may still be down in the other comments grouching at me, so you can ask him.
Elvis Costello said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture — it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.”
Frank Zappa said, “Jazz isn’t dead, it just smells funny.”
Didn’t Nietzsche say that first?
Hear hear on the Patricia Spears Jones love. Those jumped out at me and made my heart do a little rumba. (Not a Frank Lloyd Wright one, though. Maybe a little more toward the structural engineer side.)
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