Hello July. This year, my 74th trip around the sun, has already been a thing. I'm ignoring the absurdist play that politics has made ours, and instead focusing on crawling out of the mourning pit which this past Thursday night's debate dropped me unceremoniously into, and sharing something that made my day, just yesterday.
Yesterday began as a home-based workday, with loads of laundry piled in two rooms, remnants of our little aside journey into heaven the previous week. I may post on that soon, but maybe not. Suffice it to say that our 9 days at Jumby Island Resort, Long Island, Antiqua, Antigua and Barbuda.
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| Jumby Bay Island teaser |
My main reason for posting today, however, is due to my afternoon yesterday, which began with yard and housework then joyfully deteriorated into grabbing a mid-day Mexican snack at Don Julio's in Joelton with my friend Rocky, and then retreating to Rocky's own little heaven, his farm office, to sit in the air conditioned tiny home watching all manner of birds feed from the flower garden and the feeders out his big Northwestern picture window. He had picked up a couple of nice cigars and we each had one while sipping whiskey and working our way slowly through those together, chatting and sharing music.
He introduced me to Erika Lewis and some wonderful other singer/songwriters who he had discovered on Spotify, and we talked about how much we both like the app's suggestions features. For the one or two people who may not know, I can, for example, play an album (Rocky and I are both unicorns who prefer listening to a record beginning to end) and then let it continue to play other songs Spotify's algorithms determine we will like based upon that. It's a feature that can be turned off but we both agree it is one of the app's best features, despite the well-known usury of artist's and its nation-mimicking economic unfairness to the less-famous creatives. Both of which we are.
Rocky snuck a song of mine I did not expect to hear. I hadn't listened to it, I swear to you, in years. It was kind of good. He proceeded to tell me that it had played after he had listened to another artist, and he had checked in to see who it was. "I said, 'Is this the Scott Merrick I know?'" And then he told me the album was in his morning rotation of music to start the day with his morning coffee, looking out upon the same garden view we were sharing. "I listen to it once every week or two." He also said the he thought "This is your masterpiece," and "I would love to get this in a studio with some really good players after running it by a producer who knows what he's doing. Orchestration, strings, an upright bass on "Strumsticking..." (on which I allude to bass with a tuned down acoustic six-string, ha).
So I listened. It's the first time I have ever listened to it with another human person. I like it. Some of the songs are instrumental versions of songs I sent out in 2004 with my Last Frontier Band live compilation, some are just instrumentals, titles suggested by musical themes within them. Rocky's favorite is one of the latter, "Flying Dutchman," a ghost ship song created in Alaska after reading about it somewhere, I don't recall. It's 12-string so it must have been recorded before my honey and I left Nashville to work and live in Florida in the mid-80's. But maybe read the Flying Dutchman's Wikipedia entry whilst listening to the song.
I share it all here. Hear...
