Song of the day, 3 April 2026

That Piper cat's something I can't explain

New tunes

Jay Farrar continues channeling Woody Guthrie in a new song called "These Days Have No Shame". Also, Son Volt will be on tour later this year.

Tomeka Reid has a new album out on the 13th called dance! skip! hop!. The 2nd single from it, "oo long", is previewed on Youtube and can be found in full on her Bandcamp page. Both it and the title track are available there and they both are fantastic. Hopefully she and her band will return to Madison this year.

Divorce has brought about many unexpected things

2025 began on a foreboding note: my wife didn't make Hoppin' John.

Divorce has brought about many unexpected things. 

By the numbers:

5: days it took me to mourn the end of my marriage.

10: days it took me to stop checking that my wedding band was still on my finger.

My divorce is nothing at all like the break-ups I've had with girlfriends. While I still have a long row to hoe, I have been able to put certain things behind me with amazing rapidity. 

I've noticed that it is getting progressively more difficult to recall the smell of my wife's skin. In fact, I am not sure that my memory of it today bears any relation to reality. I used to love to smell her neck and breathe in the alluring musky sweetness that was her. These days a miasma of what smells like coconut-scented lotions and potions follows her everywhere.

By contrast, I can recall the smell of a particular girlfriend's skin instantly and it's been 30 years. 

Divorce has brought about many unexpected things. 

I wrote not long ago that sometimes little things mean a lot. Such has been the case over the past few days.

Over the weekend I was at the supermarket where I had gone to procure some pumpkin for a pie now that I have been instructed on how to make pie crust. This was the fancy organic stuff and, after snatching a can and doing a 180, I was looking at the organic junk food. I began perusing the shelves for any novel salt & vinegar snacks. Had I, for example, missed the S&V chick pea chips, perhaps? As I was scanning for the Precious, someone pushed their cart past me. Upon looking up at the interloper, I found that it was a lovely woman roughly my age. She smiled at me and I was pleased to find that my natural reflex to smile back kicked in immediately instead of my brain intervening and having its usual conversation with itself about what to do and coming to the conclusion that I should smile back only after the woman was halfway down the aisle.

I felt like I was 12 again and a cute girl in my class had smiled at me. What a lovely feeling! It's one I haven't felt in ages.

And then one morning earlier this week on the bus as my stop approached, I made my way to the door and a woman, again roughly my age, flashed a highly winsome smile at me before quickly looking away. A fantastic way to begin the last leg of my journey into the office.

A couple more friends that deserve mention.

One is a fellow film devotee and I am grateful for the trips we take to the theater. Not only do I get to enjoy some fine cinema but I also get out of the house and away from the scene of some of the worst memories of my life. Plus the company is good. Younger generations receive a thorough excoriation in our conversations, I can tell you.

And his texts often come at just the right time - when I am feeling alone or ruminating. It is almost a preternatural ability.

The other is someone I've known since kindergarten. Cast your minds back, oh, 5 or 6 weeks. I am at work with a mere 5 minutes left on the clock when my personal phone rings and it is him. What an unexpected joy!

We were best friends for 13 years before I moved away from Chicago, where he still resides, to Wisconsin. After that we carried on our relationship in spurts. We'd trade calls and later emails for a stretch and then lose touch. And then we'd regain it. Repeat.

I asked him what prompted his call and he replied that he'd been meaning to call me for months to thank me for the cards.

During lockdown I began sending out cards to family and friends since face-to-face contact was verboten. As my list of recipients grew from a small coterie to 30ish people and the lockdowns ended, I scaled back my mailings to just the equinoxes and solstices.

I was taken by surprise and quite humbled^. It didn't take long for us to fall back into our easy rapport. We chatted as I finished up a couple tasks, made my way to the elevator, walked to the BRT platform, and rode a bus to my first destination. As my second bus approached, I pledged to call him later in the week when I wasn't in media res of a commute.

That conversation lasted for nearly 2 hours. We caught up on one another's lives and reminisced quite a bit. It was exhilarating! Our next conversation lasted just as long.

While we don't see one another, though I am planning a visit, and we don't chat with great frequency, bringing this friendship back to life has been a very meaningful contrast to the end of my marriage.

********

That's all I want to say about the divorce. For now, anyway.

Divorce has brought about many unexpected things.

 

 

 ^Three or four people have recently told me how much they enjoy receiving my seasonal cards. All of them said that they keep each and every card. I am happy to be able to bring a little epistolary joy to the people who bring joy to me.

Storied Ghosts to Share

While Jay Farrar will forever be primarily known for Son Volt, his brief solo career has been interesting in its own right.

Son Volt's third album, Wide Swing Tremelo, tacked a course away from the alt-country of their first two efforts. Farrar then put the band on hiatus and released Sebasotol, his first solo effort, in 2001. While "Barstow" from that album mines the same alt-country vein as early Son Volt, the album is notable for the prevalence of keyboards and a sound that hearkens back to late-60s rock. To my ears, anyway.

2003 brought his second solo album, Terroir Blues. Acoustic guitar plays a larger role here as the songs are often sparser while Farrar hits a sombre tone through most of the album. Every couple of songs he throws us for a loop with a piece of "Space Junk", which are short, psychedelic bits featuring instruments played backwards that reek of the Woodstock era. Whether or not these little interludes do anything for you, there is plenty of classic Farrar on this album. My favorite is probably "Out On the Road".

I find it to be a plaintive song, with its delicate guitar strumming that seems to struggle to keep the melody afloat. Lew Winer III adds some gorgeous flute on top which challenges Farrar's singing to keep up. I've always thought the song was simply about life and moving forward in the face of adversity. ("You're gonna find pain when you're out on the road") Perhaps this is because Terroir Blues was released shortly after my father's death. It has that same fragile sadness makes "Tear Stained Eye" so poignant. Just achingly beautiful.

There's also an alternate version featuring cello that I prefer. I adore how the cello fills in the sound without being obtrusive. It adds some low end and a nice droning quality to counterpoint the rickety guitar and fluttering flute. A little something extra but it never makes things too busy or distracts you from wistful feel. Check it out if you can find it.

Encomium for Jay Farrar

The older I get, the harder it is to surprise me. The windswept waves of CNN deliver man's inhumanity towards man everyday in nice, discreet 30-second bundles. Hearing news of the exploits of genocidal maniacs has become old hat. Still, there are things that surprise me and Jay Farrar's music is one of them.

During my last stint of dogsitting, I threw in his Terroir Blues and became entranced with "Out on the Road". Sparse acoustic guitar and flute create a fragile hand that cradles his ragged voice intoning loneliness and weary despair. He sings "You're gonna to find pain" and the flute flutters past your ears like a butterfly as it offers just a hint of a palliative.

It's something he does so incredibly well. Several of his songs are studies in melancholy but they all have hints of hope. "Tear-Stained Eye" is one of my favorite songs of all time. There's just something about how he sings "Sainte Genevieve can hold back the water/But saints don't bother with a tear stained eye" that sends a shiver down my spine. I get a certain sense of knowing exactly what he means, of knowing exactly how he feels without really knowing him at all. A town may be able to keep itself from being flooded by the Mississippi, but lonely people's hearts are always flooded by the River of Constant Change. Still, he offers hope:

If learning is living, and the truth is a state of mind
You'll find it's better at the end of the line

And that's what I keep wondering. When is the end of this line gonna come? When will it get better?