Carols by Candlelight, Adelaide, Christmas Eve 1944

67 years ago tonight (thanks to Persiflage for the correction to my always-shocking arithmetic), at Adelaide's first-ever Carols by Candlelight, a population depleted and exhausted by the war and its effects went streaming down to the most beautiful place in the city, which apparently the current government is about to wreck, to spend the evening by the river and sing some carols. Not tacky 'Christmas songs', just proper traditional carols.

Fifty thousand. That's one-twelfth of the 1941 population figure for the entire state.

From the Adelaide Advertiser, December 26th 1944:


FIFTY THOUSAND AT CAROL FESTIVAL
Amazing Christmas Eve Scene In Elder Park

Fifty thousand people celebreated Christmas Eve in Adelaide by attending the carol festival held in Elder Park in aid of the Adelaide Children's Hospital and the Somerton Sick and Crippled Children's Home.

Adelaide has never before see such a great gathering at night [although it was to see a bigger one less than a year later when the war ended -- Ed.]. Fifty thousand is the police estimate, but the number may have been even larger. Long before the festival began all the 30,000 admission programmes (£1,500) had been sold, and thousands of people unable to obtain one gave a donation at the gates, and sang carols from memory.

"Carols by Candlelight" was arranged by the Commercial Travellers' Association and [radio] station 5AD. It gave the city a Christmas scene of unique size and setting. Elder Park on the banks of the Torrens was solidly packed with people sitting from the City Baths almost down to the water's edge, and from King William Road more than halfway to Morphett Street bridge. The footpaths in King William Road were dense with latecomers unable to find room on the lawns, while down the road cars were parked in places two deep, in unbroken lines stretching beyond St Peter's Cathedral in one direction, and filling Memorial and Victoria Drives, and most of the adjoining streets. At one time the cars were three deep opposite the rotunda until the police compelled the line to move on.

Although the festival did not begin until 8 p.m. the crowd began to gather in the late afternoon. Many people brought tea [ie dinner; doesn't that take you back? -- Ed.] and picnicked on the lawns. By 6 o'clock they were beginning to arrive in thousands.

By nightfall the lawns had become black with people dotted red with the glowing ends of thousands of cigarettes. They sat outside the light cast by the band rotunda and a platform that had been built in front of it for the orchestra and 100-voice choir. The platform was lines with 7 ft. candles and floodlit from below.

The orderliness of the crowd was remarkable. There was no jostling or scrambling despite the great numbers. A single rope barrier round the platform was so respected that the police did not once find it necessary to patrol it. Everyone on finding a place sat down and remained seated till the end. St. John Ambulance officers had not a single case to attend to all night.

Normal service will be resumed shortly ...

... now that the standard November pile of work has been whittled down almost to a reasonable level. (And don't think I'm not grateful to have work. Au contraire, for how else would I ever hope to pay the dentist?)

I heard the most wonderful interview with Paul Kelly on the car radio yesterday and wrote a long post about music in my head but of course it's all gone now. Well, nearly all; hands up anyone else who remembers Peter, Paul and Mary singing 'I'm in Love With a Big Blue Frog'. Sigh.

Love, music, sex and death

Never having heard of this delightful young woman, though I sure as hell have now, I was mesmerised by this song on the car radio this afternoon, on Adelaide's local ABC.

I used to listen to, and perform, a lot of folk music when I was in my teens and twenties. But I didn't have the analytical skills I have since acquired, in 35 years of reading and thinking about literature and society, to think about these kinds of songs in a way that any educated young woman would automatically think about them now. If someone held a gun to my head and said 'Write a 3,000 word feminist analysis of this song and its narrative structure in the next three hours or you will be shot,' there is no doubt that I would get out of it alive.

But never mind that for the moment -- and you will get the gist at a visceral level anyway. Just have a listen to Sarah Calderwood's filigree musicianship and this haunting tale of commerce and nemesis, impossible to tell convincingly in any but a minor key.

The Don's legacy: more complex than you thought

The lovely Greta Bradman, granddaughter of Sir Donald.

Music and memory

Fans of Jimmy Webb might remember his 1970 album Words and Music (so vividly recalled by the magnificent Ten Easy Pieces 26 years later) on which as well as his own songs, including the wonderful 'P.F. Sloan' which he later disowned after a spat with Sloan himself, he included a track on which he'd overlaid three different songs of the era in such a way -- because they had identical time signatures, similar tempi and similar chord progressions -- as to make it sound like one song with a great deal of interesting counterpoint in it. Let it Be Me, an adaptation of the French 'J'appartiens' from 1955 and best known in the Everly Brothers version, the Addrisi brothers' Never My Love, recorded by The Association in 1967, and Boyce & Hart's I Wanna Be Free, which they wrote for the Monkees (a group for which a very young Stephen Stills auditioned and was rejected for not being good-looking enough, PFFFT)

were all blended by Webb's arrangement into one fairly extraordinary track called 'Three Songs' which is not, I'm glad to say in this instance, sung by Webb himself, whose voice is an acquired taste. I'd post a video or sound file if I could find a postable or linkable one, but I can't; you'll just have to imagine it.

Jimmy Webb being the clever clogs that he is not just with music but also with words, even at the age of 24 when this album was released, the counterpoint extends if only metaphorically to the lyrics, which weave ironically around each other in their varying preoccupations with love ties and freedom.

So anyway, there I was a week or two ago, mucking around with iTunes as you do, and came up with this lovely Christmas song from the Indigo Girls. (Ignore the visuals.)



One of the reasons I liked this song so much was that it sounded very familiar. This familiarity nagged at me. And then last night as I was bringing in the washing before dark, wooden clothespeg in one hand and knickers in the other, it hit me with the proverbial blinding flash:



I think you could get an astonishing effect if you gave these two songs the Jimmy Webb treatment and glued them together. Not least because of the way the refrains both open up into an affirmation of possibility: of surviving some terrible loss.

Two things I read yesterday about Bob Dylan

When Bob Dylan was asked on American radio if he had been surprised by the success of Blood on the Tracks, he said, after a pause, that he didn't know how people got so much pleasure from so much pain.

-- Adam Phillips, On Balance

Bob Dylan ... mooches around backstage without too much fuss, friendly and quiet. I did four shows with him in 2001. We swapped gifts after the last show in Sydney. I gave him Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang and he gave me a big brass belt buckle -- western-style, embossed with the words THE STATE OF TEXAS 1836, which I like to wear once in a while.

-- Paul Kelly, How To Make Gravy

In which the older and wiser are not surprised

After a couple of more than usually frenetic weeks I was catching up with some favourite blogs last night and found this at Johnny's in the Basement, the music blog that celebrated Australian blogger Tim Dunlop writes for crikey.com.au.

I'd just like to say that, like my almost-exact contemporary Mark Holden, I thought that this child (as she then was) was the outstanding pick of the bunch even at sixteen, far too classy and original for Australian Idol. Go over to Tim's and watch it.

And speaking of generational tastes in music, there was a sad moment the other night when James Taylor and Carole King left the stage for their half-time orange quarters (and I'm not going to rave about them here for fear of being mocked by persons younger than myself; Leonard Cohen seems curiously immune from said mockery, but I fear Taylor and King may not be, despite their well-deserved legendary status) and my entire demographic got up and painfully stretched -- a great deal of Adelaide's cavernous Entertainment Centre is made of cement, including, it would seem, the seats -- thereby releasing an unmistakable eau de Boomer into the atmosphere. 'Ah,' said my friend D, 'the aroma of our generation. Half patchouli oil, half Denco-Rub.'

To Do list on this Blue Moon New Year's Eve

TO DO (in order of importance)

Pull oneself together

Accept the fact that it's going to be 41 degrees today and suck it up; everybody's hot

Finish and file weekly book reviews column

Make Eton Mess for fourteen (go out in the heat and buy more eggs because one is an idiot and forgot; make meringues; hull, slice and Kirsch-macerate strawberries; whip cream)

Work out appropriate bowls and plastic containers for transportation and serving of said Mess

Run a load of washing including half of tonight's outfit

Check the rest of tonight's outfit, bearing in mind that there's going to be a cool change in the middle of the event which may involve the hand-washing of a pashmina, and do necessary ironing etc

Cover up the lemon tree or all the lemons and leaves will get scorched

Call father for weekly yarn

Wonder, given the full-on car park rage hissy fit at 8.23 am (see 'forgot eggs', above), what sort of state one will be in by the end of tonight's six-hour* dinner
*well, it was last year


Meditate on art, age and womanhood. Here's Joni Mitchell at around 50, no backup (and almost no makeup), singing about a blue moon, which is what it is tonight: the second full moon in a single calendar month. 'Night Ride Home' is a happy love song, which for Joni is a blue moon event. Look at the length of her fingers, and the expression on the face of the little dude watching her right at the end.

And a very happy New Year to all.

'We must sit down and work'

If you have 25 minutes to watch it, this is just lovely: two of the most elegant and eloquent women I know, Helen Garner and Anna Goldsworthy, at the launch of Anna's memoir Piano Lessons at Janet Clarke Hall where Anna is Artist-in Residence. Watch the whole thing if you possibly can; after Anna speaks, she plays a Chopin nocturne and then there's a quick snippet of her teacher, the extraordinary Eleanora Sivan. The heckling baby you can hear is Anna's son Reuben, born last summer.

Never mind the guitar, look at the guitarist (1915-2009)

I don't know why that oblivious little dog in the background is so touching. Seen it all before, obvs.

Southern Gothic

The combined effect of a mention of Bobbie Gentry on the current Lazy Sunday thread at Larvatus Prodeo plus the amazing clip of the equally amazing Barry McGuire singing 'Eve of Destruction' at James Bradley's City of Tongues, with James' comment that 'the great ones never date', produced a kind of chemical reaction that sent me hightailing it to Google to find this:





This was one of the first songs I ever learned to play on my brand-new guitar (which I still have, stained with the blood of my fingers) and sing. I've got a particularly vivid memory of a houseboat holiday when I was sixteen, singing this song as part of the after-dinner family self-entertainment in an exaggerated Southern accent while my parents and sisters threw in a lot of Yee-ha and Lord have mercy in a kind of call-and-response approach, but my dad, half-cut and feeling no pain, and if I was sixteen he must still only have been, what, 42, got a bit more creative and started throwing in responses that acted as a kind of subtext to what is already an extremely veiled and secretive song, its drama residing in its silences. So our version, sung forty years ago in the middle of nowhere on a boat tied up to a willow on the bank a river that now belongs to history and myth, was full of things like this:

That nice young preacher Brother Taylor dropped by today
(Ah hates them preacher men)
Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh and by the way
(Here we go, this ain't good)
He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge
(Ah tole you never go up there)
And she and Billy Joe was throwin' somethin' off the Tallahatchee Bridge
(You in biiiig trouble)

Michael Jackson Youtube of the Day ...

... says it all.

This is not a review

Last night Roger Woodward played the first of two Adelaide concerts organised by Recitals Australia. Tomorrow night is Shostakovich; last night was Bach, more precisely The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, which he played from start to finish with a short interval in the middle.

Woodward looked gaunt and appeared to be unhappy -- possibly with the state of the piano, a glittery and gorgeous Bösendorfer that a harried-looking person came out to tinker with in piano-tuner mode during the interval, with (to my ears) some success; certainly Woodward looked happier at the end of the second half than he had at the end of the first.

But the music was an extrordinary thing to be in the same room as. Weirdly I have in my small CD collection some Bach music for flute, for lute and for violin, but no keyboard or choral, the things he's best known for. And I don't think I've heard any Bach live since about 2003 when I was skulking in the back row of the Second Sops in the Adelaide Philharmonia Chorus and we sang some. But I recognised every piece last night and often knew what was coming next, so I must have owned some recording of it in some obsolete technology long ago.

The thing is, you recognise Bach straight away, at least with keyboard music. His music has always been my first example of what I'm talking about when I teach writing classes on style, a shameless pinch from Aldous Huxley in (I think) Eyeless in Gaza where some character talks about style and our recognition of it using Bach as an example. It's something to do with the signature mathematical precision and symmetry with which his subjects and countersubjects, his quavers and his demisemiquavers, his arpeggios and his single notes are arranged around each other; the principles appear to the amateur listener to be essentially those of geometry and algebra.

All of that was audible last night. There was the unrelenting logic of the sort of music that forces you to realise that all music is essentially about maths and physics: the displacements of air that determine the length of soundwaves; the regular fractions of time into which notes are divided and played off against each other, as in one extraordinary piece where what appeared to be happening was that the main melody was being played on the offbeat, like a shadow or an echo of its absent self.

But within that cage of logic, logic's enemies, passion and anarchy, resist its containment. Bach's music -- especially, again, the keyboard music, where the logic of each note is so naked and so clear -- is like a heart beating inside a ribcage, or like the idea of a perfectly regular and abstract triangle that has become a red canvas sail on a blue horizon, swelling into three dimensions with a beautiful pregnant roundedness, filled with moving air, the breath of life. Shapes with souls.

I wondered whether he'd be able to stay away ...

From today's edition of Crikey:

Next week Crikey launches a new music blog from on-line legend Tim Dunlop.

Music reviews, gig reviews and the neverending search for the perfect song.
Music for grown-ups who remember when they weren't ... You know the deal, s-x and drugs and rock n' roll, and jazz, and lieder, and disco, and Gospel, and s-x, and drugs, and country, and western, and whatever else takes our fancy ...

A new addition to what is quite possibly the country's niftiest blog network.

Lookin' forward to it.

The drilling in the wall kept up, but no-one seemed to pay it any mind

Since 7 am yesterday, yes, Good Friday, the renovators have been at it next door, and by 'next door' I mean 'through the party wall of this maisonette/terrace'.

Today the drilling in the party wall itself has taken the place of something I presume was a jackhammer through, as distinct from in, said wall. I'm not sure whether it's better or worse, and anyway the point is moot.

And I can't even complain, because the neighbours (who warned me and apologised in advance, bless them) put up with quite as much from me, in the way of overflowing bougainvillea, tree-roots in the vexatious shared and ancient plumbing, and, I fear, some choice language from time to time across the back fence.

In the meantime, however, the noise has recalled that post title and with it a whole lovely memory that fell into my hand like a ripe peach from the tree of the past: early 1975 and we've just bought Blood on the Tracks and I'm in the living room with the folding doors and panelling in Third Avenue listening to it for the first time and halfway through 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts' I sit down on the cheap ethnic rug and burst into tears of happiness.

I do this, as I recall, because the storytelling, character-drawing Dylan I remember from his very earliest years seems, after several years of going what has looked to me a little disappointingly doolally, to be back in force and even better. Which brings in its train a whole slideshow of memories of listening to that album at various times and places and reinforces my sense, as strong now as it was oh my god almost *cough*35*cough* years ago, that Blood on the Tracks is actually the best album in the entire history of the world ever and that's including Blue and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle.

All of which reconciles me no end to the bloody noise in the wall, without which none of these lovely memories would have come to the surface in the first place. And anyway, this too shall pass.

Everywhere you turn, there's another dishy man singing

One of the joys of a regular income is that one can afford to toddle along to various beautiful Adelaide venues whenever the mood takes one in order to see and hear quite remarkably lovely men doing what they do best. Last month it was the legendary Leonard and now it's these two. I've seen them both perform on stage before, David Hobson as a hilarious bumbly Nanki-Poo in The Mikado

(Hobson on right)

and Teddy Tahu Rhodes as a chilling Joseph de Rocher in Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking.



But this is a simple, straight-up evening of duets from two beautiful dudes with gorgeous voices.

From the blurb:

Two of Australia’s singing superstars, tenor David Hobson and baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes will be touring Australia in March 2009 for Andrew McKinnon Presentations. These will be the most romantic nights of the year with much loved arias and songs from Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Cole Porter, even Australian folk songs!

Fresh from recording their first album together for ABC Classics (You’ll Never Walk Alone), these two dazzling singers are set to wow audiences with their beautiful arias and songs including operatic arias, folksongs, show tunes and, of course, the duet from The Pearl Fishers, voted the greatest opera moment of all time by ABC Classic FM listeners, as well as a few surprises thrown in. This exciting once in a lifetime concert features two of the hottest names around will be a highlight on any music lover’s concert schedule. Separately, these two stars have carved themselves indelibly into the echelons of Australian musical history. Together, and with Australia's leading accompanist Sharolyn Kimmorley, they will create a night of pure musical delight.

“What excites me most about this concert is the variety of repertoire. In the first half Teddy and I will be singing some of opera’s greatest moments and in the second half we bring things closer to home with some show tunes, folksongs and more contemporary works,” says David Hobson.

Leonard Cohen in the Southern Vales

Following the lead of Laura from Sills Bend, I am not going to say too much about the content of the concert, in order not to spoil it for people who have yet to see it. But here are some things I learned.

-- Ten musicians who can all hold the stage individually can also merge seamlessly into one breathtaking performance.

-- It is possible to perform for almost three hours, with a lot of physical activity including kneeling and effortlessly getting up again, and for some of which you have been looking straight into the setting sun, even if you are seventy-four years old.

-- It is possible to be seventy-four years old and neither decrepit nor in any other way out of date. Au contraire in spades: Cohen's knees, fingers and memory all seem to be in perfect working order, and his voice is utterly engaging and compelling -- musical and beautiful still, as well as charismatic. The ears are an erogenous zone, what can I say.

-- Rehearsal is a beautiful thing, especially when all ten of you are artists enough to inject passion and spontaneity into music that you have prepared and rehearsed to a hair's breadth.

There's one song I really do want to single out, though. 'The Partisan' was one of my favourites back in 1970. Apart from loving the song for its own virtues, I loved it that a Jewish Canadian from bilingual Montreal who had his fifth birthday a few weeks after World War 2 broke out should write such a song, with so deep a knowledge in it of war, and of western Europe, and of the French language, in which some of this song is sung, and most of all of being hunted and haunted and steadily resisting:

There were three of us this morning
I'm the only one this evening
But I must go on

On the original recording, if memory serves, there's just him and his guitar, possibly plus the little chorus of angel voices he has favoured all through his long career. Last night, though, it was ten brilliant musicians whipping up a perfect storm: its dark imagery and driving beat brought to mind the word duende, about which Alison Croggon did so brilliant a post, with reference to Paul Capsis, at Sarsaparilla some time ago [will link to that as soon as Sars is contactable ... No, wait, here it is at Alison's own blog Theatre Notes]. And here's Christopher Maurer, courtesy of Wikipedia:

... at least four elements can be isolated in Lorca's vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical. The duende is a demonic earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence ... who brings the artist face-to-face with death, and who helps him create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art. The duende is seen, in Lorca's lecture, as an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm (what Spaniards call 'angel'), and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. Not that the artist simply surrenders to the duende; he or she has to battle it skillfully, 'on the rim of the well,' in 'hand-to-hand combat.' To a higher degree than the muse or the angel, the duende seizes not only the performer but also the audience, creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort. It is, in Lorca's words, 'a sort of corkscrew that can get art into the sensibility of an audience...

Landscape and weather, taken as the queue inched forward, glacierlike, at Leconfield Wines as they searched everyone's bags before they let us in. If only it had been glacierlike in other ways. You can see how hot it was from the depth of blue in that sky.



The heroic Glenn Richards from Augie March, on whom some kind punter took pity and bestowed the hat. For reasons best known to themselves, the promoters had set up the stage facing due west, and the sun went down in a white and blinding blaze of heat. 'My hair is melting,' said Richards plaintively, not long before the hat donation. They were great.



Paul Kelly had been warned to wear his cap and sunnies so came prepared. His nephew Dan Kelly did likewise, in a shirt that matched his uncle's hat and Leonard's giant muse backdrop. They were great, too.



First sighting of Leonard.



This guitarist is from Bareclona. He was sitting in a capacious and luxurious fuchsia-coloured chair. I like the way he appears here to be bumping the muse's giant but shapely and diaphanously draped breast with his head. Leonard played to, with and off him all night, often kneeling as he sang to be on eye level.

Leonard's years in a Buddhist monastery showed very clearly, in the spareness of his disciplined frame and the relaxed stillness of his body when standing back and listening to the other musicians. Obviously some of this is pure showmanship but I have never seen the Buddhist notion of 'mindfulness' acted out in such a protracted, exposed and practised way.



After performing for about an hour, Leonard and the band took a break. By now the sun was well down and there was a dishevelled, festive, heat-drunk air about the crowd that made us look like a downmarket Antipodean 21st century version of Renoir's The Luncheon of the Boating Party.



Leonard and his 'angels'.




'Famous Blue Raincoat.'

Off to see Leonard

*Sings*

'To-night's the night ...'

*Does little dance*

I'm spending the morning packing the picnic supper and the other things we hippygrandmas need to survive outside for six or seven hours on a 35 degree day/evening: 30+ blockout, litres of mineral water, Nurofen Plus, personal Aerogard, a good big hat, and, since my mates are driving down from the other direction, a novel and an Itty Bitty Book Light for the wait to get out of the car park (thanks to Laura for the tip). Because at around 2.30 I'm hitting the road for the drive down the coast to the paradisal landscapes of the Southern Vales for the Leonard Cohen concert.

In 1970, when I was seventeen and he was thirty-six, I bought my first Leonard Cohen Songbook and learned a lot of fairly easy chords (you want hard chords, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell are the go-to persons; I still have the bloodstained guitar from that era) to accompany the wild imagery of his early lyrics. I had very little idea what I was singing about, but the songs had a sort of reach into the subconscious that I now think of as Jungian; they appealed on some level well beyond, or perhaps above or possibly below, personal experience.

The music I listened to that year was Cohen and Mitchell, the Beatles, a young Jimmy Webb, a very young Elton John, and Fairport Convention with the quite incredibly young Richard Thompson already writing even-more-visionary lyrics than Leonard's. I learned more about how to use language from their lyrics (well, in Elton's case, Bernie Taupin's lyrics) than I had thus far taken in at school. When I think of being seventeen I'm always in my bedroom with the door shut, sitting on the floor with the record player on, and Joni is singing 'I could drink a case of you / and I would still be on my feet', or Leonard is singing 'No moon to keep her armour bright / no man to get her through this very smoky night', or -- the clearest moment, one of those defining memories -- the 23-year-old Elton John is singing

And I came down to meet you
in the half-light the moon left
while a cluster of night-jars sang their song out of tune
and the bright light shone down from the room

It was from these people that I also learned some things about how to be an adult, and what to expect all the way through my 20s and 30s, and oh dear these people did not lie. Or perhaps their prophecies were simply self-fulfilling.

For some mad reason I was not expecting to spend this morning being haunted by 1970 and all its works, but there you go. I haven't followed Cohen's career in the way I've followed Mitchell's, but every now and then he has popped up and I've thought Oh my yes, he's still got it -- 'First We Take Manhattan', 'Dance Me to the End of Love', 'Alexandra Leaving', 'Hallelujah'.

Photos tomorrow.

Memory

Caught by surprise tonight, when without warning the opening chords of 'Shelter From the Storm' came on the teeve as part of the drama of the drama.

I don't know what it is about the violence with which music retrieves memory, but I suppose we did play Blood on the Tracks all through the summer of 1975-76, till it wore out (we're talking vinyl here) and I could probably still sing every song for you all the way through. But just those first few bars were enough to bring down a flood of remembrance: white silk dress too much whisky lying on the seagrass matting reading Crime and Punishment in Adelaide heat crazy lover too much whisky singing in the folk club concerts sitting round the kitchen table too much whisky.

Those were the days.

He's my man, and I don't care how much it costs

This is Leonard Cohen in 1970, the year I was in what's now called Year 12: he was thirty-six and I was seventeen.

It was the year I first discovered him: I read Beautiful Losers, bought Songs From a Room and Leonard Cohen with saved-up pocket money, bought the sheet music and learned to play and sing fifteen or twenty of the songs:



(Question: when did she study for her exams? And does this explain the D for Matric Modern History, which still rankles all these decades later and which her entire undergraduate career was one long attempt to redeem?)

(Also, my mother made that round cushion, which was a kind of steely grey-blue velvet.)

Three years earlier my heart had been broken by my first-ever boyfriend, a beautiful Greek boy, who engendered a helpless lifelong passion for swarthiness in all its lovely forms.

Over the decades, Leonard and I drifted apart. And then one day a few years ago, my friend R played me this and I fell in love all over again.

R texted me today to say he's playing here on Australia Day and do I want to come with her. Hah. It's an outdoor concert at a winery down in the paradisal Southern Vales and he's being supported by Paul Kelly. On the other hand it's going to cost hundreds of dollars and it'll probably be 42 degrees. But I do not care.