Musical miracles

An old friend posted on Facebook, “Looking for some new, laid-back blues/folk music? The second album from TajMo (Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’), Room On The Porch, is out today!”

I flipped over to my Apple Music app, did a quick search for the album, and it was playing on my laptop in about 30 seconds.

Once upon a time, I would have scrawled the album title on a piece of paper, and the next time I rolled into town with some disposable income, maybe I would buy the album unless there were higher-priority albums on my buying list. The process might take weeks, months or years, if I ever did hear the album.

Nowadays, for 12 bucks a month I have access to almost all of the music ever recorded. In addition to the brand new stuff, I’ve been catching up with many of the albums I missed when they were new in the sixties and seventies. After seeing the A Complete Unknown movie, I went through Bob Dylan’s early catalog and felt pretty foolish not to have paid more attention to him at the time.

Don’t get me wrong, my favorite format for listening to music will always be vinyl. Sitting back with a 12-inch-square piece of artwork in my lap, preferably with a lyric sheet, and listening to the stylus navigate the grooves, is the way I learned to listen to music. My records have outlasted several other formats and still sound terrific a half-century or more later.

The downside of the subscription business model is the artists get a fraction of a penny when I play each song on their album as opposed to the somewhat more substantial royalty they receive when I buy their album. The upside is there potentially are millions of me, and those plays can add up.

The TajMo album is pretty darn tasty, maybe even tasty enough to buy a vinyl copy for when the cloud goes down or disappears. Twenty minutes earlier I didn’t even know the album existed. What a wonderful world.

One irony is that I’m preparing this blog entry while Sara Groves’ wonderful album Add to the Beauty plays on the turntable. It’s a Kickstarter reward celebrating the album’s 20th anniversary and, to my knowledge, only the second that Groves has released on vinyl since she started recording in 1998.

I own the album on CD and LP and I can also call it up on Apple Music. If I am blessed to live 20 more years, which version do you think I’ll be listening to?

+ + + + +

See the World! Podcast, Episode 5 — sponsored by See the World!, now available for pre-order.

Listen and do

It’s going to be all right.

You are taking control of your life — of course you are; your life belongs to you, and it’s your responsibility.

Hold on.

Come to think of it, your life belongs to God.

The control still belongs to you. The choices are yours. Listen to your own devices and maybe it’ll be OK and maybe not. Listen to what He says and you’re gold.

Listen, and do, with love.

It’s going to be all right.

+ + + + +

See the World! Podcast, Episode 4 — sponsored by See the World!, now available for pre-order.

Laurels and a hearty handshake

**The Oconto County Courthouse in Oconto, Wisconsin**

The Oconto County Board gave me a certificate of recognition Thursday for “50 years of dedicated service to journalism, including eight years of valued contributions to our local community at the Times Herald.” I was more moved than I expected, and I sincerely thank them.

County Administrator Richard Heath described me as old school with solid, accurate and non-hyped reporting. I did always try to be a just-the-facts reporter with my personal opinions in check, at least when sharing the news. I reserved any editorial comments for the editorial page where they belonged.

I always respected the local boards anyway — it was the state and national-level politicians who managed to outrage me at nearly every turn. Government is a weird institution — People don’t need to be governed, a word that means “to restrict or hold back,” we just need to respect one another. At the local level that’s generally the case, but as any institution gets larger it tends to lose respect for individuals. States are no different than any other institution that has grown too large, and don’t get me started on the feds.

County, village, town and small city governments for the most part do public service, and Oconto County has this servant mentality as well as any other local government I’ve encountered. It was a nice place to close out a career.

I’m not done, of course. I still have a voice and a pen and other implements of wordsmithing, and now I have more time to use them.

+ + + + +

See the World! Podcast, Episode 3 — sponsored by See the World!, now available for pre-order.