I'm with you, Amos. Get thee behind me, politics.

Stop me before I sink below the line again.

It's got to improve after November.






It's not as if there's not enough good music around. Jan and I got a "Nigel" in Sidmouth--which I gather is better than Very Very Silly--for Cicada Serenade--which we can't claim as ours--it was written about 1986 by The Pheremones.   But Jan did make up the cicada hats (backwards baseball caps with "big orange eyes",) and the gestures.

Gloom and Doom was pretty good too--the winner of that was somebody who sang excerpts from "The Leonard Cohen Book of Christmas Carols". Only thing I can remember is "Hit the bottle if you want comfort and joy".



And it was great singing sea songs in a PA pond while swimming last weekend. Great acoustics-- and great exercise too--leading the workshop from the middle of the pond. The trick seems to be to pick songs everybody else knows the chorus to, so you can breathe while they're singing it. I tried singing Sammy's Bar while floating on my back--and it did work--we stayed together since I could hear them singing through the water.


We also had a Beatles workshop-- please don't tell Bill D-- means sitting around with a few good guitarists and trying to remember how the harmonies went. (Admittedly a few of the guitarists had books).

Then we stayed up til about 4 (after the rooster sounded off at 3:30) singing a whole bunch of other things--mostly from the 60's. No books at that session--again just remembering stuff. Crosby Stills and Nash--it sounded to me like our harmonies must have been somewhat similar. I had fun rasping out Eve of Destruction--Barry McGuire sure sounded mad doing that.

Singing and playing together is always more than the sum of its parts, no matter what kind of music you do. It must be one of the ultimate highs.