Bob Dylan

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I can’t say when it occurred to me to write my own songs. I couldn’t have come up with anything comparable or halfway close to the folk song lyrics I was singing to define the way I felt about the world. I guess it happens to you by degrees. You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs, especially if you’re a singer who has plenty of them and you’re learning more every day. Opportunities may come along for you to convert something — something that exists into something that didn’t yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain. It’s not like you see songs approaching and invite them in.—Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

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Today in History: Oct. 13

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Paul Simon is 75 today.

His most recent album, Stranger to Stranger, his thirteenth solo album, was released in June to excellent reviews and he has spent 2016 touring on its behalf (he is in Europe at present). It is excellent and has moments of rhythmic experimentation: he uses instruments built by the music theorist and general eccentric Harry Partch on several tracks.

He remains a figure of some controversy in the music business, usually the controversies are over matters concerning the business part of the phrase music business. As a music fan though he is on my personal Mount Rushmore of songwriters.
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Fulfilling Promise

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Did William James ever say, write, or think anything about human beings using only 10% of our brains? No, nope, and no. An investigation:

* * * *
Blame Lowell Thomas. He’s as good a person to blame as anyone.

lowell thomas

Lowell Thomas

Because if you are going to make a claim—about anything at all—in the forward of a book that goes on to sell tens of millions of copies and remain continuously in print for nearly 80 years, you are going to be responsible for authoring a claim that will stick in the communal mind, that will become a part of how we as a culture think we understand ourselves. And as Lowell Thomas might have put it himself in his folksy manner of speaking, it was a doozy.
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