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Dear Friends,
Step into my study! Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent!
I know there are a lot of books on these shelves, and a fountain pen and inks and notebooks and artisan paper, but this study is not limited to “bookish” things. Let’s do a little music appreciation! Sadly, this will not involve vinyl records or my turntable because I do not have the music I wish to share with you on vinyl.
You all know that I’ve been a musician and songwriter for over three decades, but the odd thing is that I don’t often listen to new music. I have my favorite artists and influences, and when life got busy from the ages between 20 and 40 I sort of “settled” into my own familiar musical world. The result is that I am not really exaggerating when I say that I don’t know probably 90 percent of the “top artists” of today. My daughters will mention the names of various divas-of-the-month and I just shrug. Olivia who? Same with bands. I just don’t know a lot of them, and that has been exacerbated by the advent of playlist streaming. Because we don’t listen to particular artists or albums, a song becomes “oh, that one song that’s on the acoustic playlist all the time,” rather than, “Oh, that’s The Arcadian Wild’s ‘Dopamine.’” Streaming has been a disservice to artists, and not only in the financial sense.
My girls and I have been on a recent kick, reintroducing ourselves to one particular artist who has remained very busy over the past two decades. And after a pretty extended time of listening and digesting, I have arrived at the opinion that she is arguably the greatest musical artist of the last twenty years. Again, take that with a complete grain of salt because I just admitted I’ve been checked out for the last twenty years. And these sorts of opinions are just opinions, of no real importance.
She’s a Russian-American Jewish immigrant by the name of Regina Spektor. Her family managed to immigrate from the Soviet Union in 1989 when she was around ten years old, and they settled in the Bronx. She’s a classically trained pianist—which shows—and possesses an otherworldly and unique singing voice. She is, to put it in a single word, mesmerizing. How mesmerizing? The other night after the baseball game I pulled up YouTube and it suggested a video for me. It was a live concert video taken by some random fan on his cellphone. Shaky, a long distance from the stage, angled so that you could only see her back while she was playing and singing. Surely, I wasn’t going to watch that for an hour-and-a-half. Right? The next thing I knew, it was the wee hours of the morning and I had watched the entire concert. Filmed on a shaky cell phone. Because I couldn’t turn it off.
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