January 28ths (Purple Paisley)

1/28/2005

Listening to 70s music on the radio. Most of the songs evoke the album on which they appeared—for example Home At Last which was on Steely Dan’s Aja album. It’s a synecdoche--the part stands for the whole. Generations all developed certain expectations for media. Songs are part of albums an hour-long, TV commercials are 30 seconds, and so on. A 20 year-old might like the Steely Dan song Babylon Sisters but won’t care that it was on the Gaucho album. The concept of the album has temporarily devolved from the music pantheon . Prediction that it will come back. Note to year 2020: Did it ever come back?

[1/28/2025: It has come back for me in the form of video albums, which simulate the experience of looking at (mostly static) visuals while you’re listening to the album--not just individual songs, which might just be singles not attached to any larger concept. It seems inconceivable in 2025 that people will sit down and listen to an album as they did in 1975, but they do binge-watch shows and even long films.]

1/28/2007

Watched Rikki Lee Jones concert on PBS. She’s a musician that has totally embraced her own quirkiness and gets up in front of an audience with no shame at all about who she is. She did a little banter/lecture about being concerned about what other people think can stop us from fulfilling our dreams.

1/28/2022

The purple paisley dream: At a cafe and sitting by the window. A woman sitting at the table in front of me asked me what sign I was and I said I was a Libra and she said “Libras are dreamy and wear paisley”, and then a guy walked by wearing a purple paisley shirt.