Ramble On

I've had the opportunity of late for a lot of conversations with my cognitively challenged mother. She's 70 and she was diagnosed with M.S. over 30 years ago.  It has affected her more cognitively than physically, although her balance is bad, and she can't walk very well.  Talking to her is like talking to a precocious grade schooler.  Anything she thinks, she says. She has favorite stories that she likes to hear over and over, and tell over and over. She gets very excited about her favorite food and likes to have her things around her all the time. Environments and changes are bad for her. Anyway, we were at a gas station and while filling up the car, she mentioned to me that as a child she used to love the smell of gas.  And she observed aloud that that probably meant she was a very strange child.  I told her I wasn't so sure that's true.  She sat back for a second and then she said, yeah, maybe I was just extremely normal. That made me laugh a lot at...

Here we go again.  I've been curating my playlist for this post since January 1, and now we're already in 2017! We've come a long way, 2016. The songs of this year fell pretty easily into clear categories.  I don't know if my year could be categorized so easily, or even into the same categories, but it was helpful to see how these themes just naturally came forth when I started taking a hard look at this year's selections.  And some of them are pretty accurate reflections of my thoughts about what the year has led me through. I've culled this list WAY down from 79 songs, so count yourselves lucky.  I could have written about all 79 of them, and many of the ones I cut appear on my " Albums of 2016 " list, which, I fully admit, is sort of cheating.  I tried, really tried, to get it down to 25 songs.  But I just couldn't do it. In many ways, this list serves as an archive of my memories for the year, so if a song has a specific memory tied to it, ...

 And so here are the albums that played a big part in my year in 2016. They aren't in any order or organization.  I just loved these bodies of work and the artists who made them.  Let's dive in, shall we? Bon Iver - 22, A Million Sonically, I think this was probably the most interesting and beautiful album released this year. Justin Vernon has a head for laying down tracks and paints these rich canvases of sound that I can listen to over and over.  It took me a while to get into this record but once I finally put it on in my house on a cold winter night and spent some time with it, I really heard it and started to love it.  It was 8 (circle) that initially grabbed me.  The horn arrangements on this record alone.  Haunting. This is an expected choice.  This was on everyone's list this year and I believe it deserves a place among the best musical contributions of 2016 for sure. Lori McKenna - The Bird and the Rifle Definitely my favorite al...

I've been to over 100 shows at the 9:30 club in DC.  It's my most-attended venue and one of my favorites in the city.  It's a venue that artists love to play as well.  Many of the bands I've had a chance to talk to always list 9:30 club as a "we've made it" gig, and often comment on the special feeling they get playing there. Tonight was one of the best shows I've ever seen at the intersection of 9th and V St NW. The Lone Bellow brought spirit, the Holy Spirit, to that already spiritual room. I felt like I was in a revival tent. I've seen the Lone Bellow in three other venues in DC: DC 9, the Hamilton, and the Landmark Festival.  Each time they thoughtfully constructed their set list and played to their strengths given their environment.  But this gig everyone was firing on all cylinders.  The 9:30 club was doing what it was created to do, and Lone Bellow was doing what they were created to do, and the audience was treated to a show of power and ...

We left the city and that took quite a while, but once we got out, we were on a highway, passed a GIGANTIC monument to Genghis Khan, and then turned down a gravel road and into the highlands of Mongolia. We drove for two more hours through some of the most sweeping and gorgeous, remote landscapes I have ever seen and arrived at our ger camp just before dinner. We pulled up a hill to a grassy overlook area and parked the car. We were greeted by staff, and then, I kid you not, a yak was fetched to bring our luggage to our tent/room. I should take a moment to say here that I found the Mongolian people all to be very beautiful. They have high cheekbones and a ruddiness to their complexion that is gorgeous. Their faces are round but structured and they have uniformly kind eyes, slanted up and out. Everyone I saw seemed like they had been born in the region except for two people at our camp, and it was truly lovely to interact with such beautiful people, inside and out. Our beautifully a...

Cara and I left the calm oasis of her apartment in Liangmaqiao at about 9:45am Saturday morning and headed into the thick of Saturday traffic in Beijing, which Cara explained to me is extraordinarily bad. It took us about an hour to get there, and when we did the crush of people outside the station was overwhelming. It took us a while to figure out that we had to go through a ticket check outside the station to actually get in and get to our train. We were stressed because we were getting close to our train’s departure time and we still needed to get food. We had heard the train food was pretty terrible and though we had an epic snack collection with us, it wouldn’t be enough. No one was answering our questions, or taking our orders at Subway. It’s strange, we were asking for the things one always asks for, and Cara was asking for them in Chinese, and her Chinese is excellent. But people just sort of could only hear and see “foreigner” and they either willfully chose to ignore or m...