Painting Penguins with Kate Bush

I was listening to Kate Bush’s bizarre 1982 track “Leave It Open” the other day.  There’s an ending vocal passage (starting at 2:34) that’s hard to decipher.  When I first heard the song years ago, I thought she was singing “Leave it open / Let us in,” but I later found out it’s “We let…

The Mystery of M.O.I.

It’s not a spine-tingling who-dunnit, not a long-unsolved case which has baffled the experts, has nothing to do with hip-hop singer M.I.A., or with me or moi (as they say in France). Rather, it’s a mystery who a mid-1980’s Toronto area band called M.O.I. were. I recently bought a used record put out in 1985…

The Vinyl Detective: The Run-Out Groove

Last year’s The Vinyl Detective: Written in Dead Wax, by Andrew Cartmel, was the first installment in a new mystery series (a series but they can be read independently) and one of my favorite books of 2016 [see my review]. The latest, The Vinyl Detective: The Run-Out Groove, continues the adventures of our narrator and…

Lonnie Liston Smith and his Cosmically Echoing Hats

As I write this (though I confess that I’m typing it a couple of days later), I’m sitting at a quiet café patio table in the shade by myself, sipping on an iced coffee. It’s a warm, late spring, blue sky kinda day and I was planning on listening to Lonnie Liston Smith’s 1973 album…

Gregg Allman’s “Multi-Colored Lady”

Though “Melissa” has always been my favorite Gregg Allman song, (and it’s my wife’s name, which bumps it up a few notches), “Multi-Colored Lady”, from his first solo album, 1973’s Laid Back , shares some of the feel and mood of that earlier song. I sometimes picture the roaming traveler of “Melissa” further along on…