Birds and Snakes and Aeroplanes, Part 28

“I’m better off with my friends.”

Life in the time of Coronavirus is hard. I’ve been quarantined since June 23, after somehow having 4 exposures in 4 days. I got a test, but they say it will take 3-5 business days. I’ve watched all the above average TV shows. I’m profoundly bored. I don’t have much to say anymore. Let the words be yours, I’m done with mine, and so forth.

I’ve been looking for a song that sums up how I feel. About life. Isolation. Fighting with people on Facebook over masks. Missing my kids. Wondering if they miss me. Wondering if I’m doing right by the good people who work beside me in my office.

I think this might be it.

I Want to Sing About How One Day…

I’ll forget you. This, folks, is mighty fine country music.

About
Raised under the rays of the sun in Huntington Beach, CA, Victoria Bailey was surrounded by music in her household from an early age. From her drumming father’s rock ’n’ roll band practices to her mom playing the narrative-driven songbooks of folk icons like Cat Stevens and James Taylor, Bailey was naturally drawn to music and the art of storytelling. After falling in love with the guitar at the age of 12, she quickly developed an affinity for songwriting in her late teens and garnered the kind of support system every musical child would dream of: her father was so impressed by her talent that he called on his three musically-inclined best friends to join him in becoming his daughter’s backing band, eventually performing shows around town.

More great music at Rancho Radio (on Apple Music).

The Four Best Songs, Ever

So my best songs ever list changes like the weather. But these four have been up there for a while. So there.

This is the best song ever written. I’m certain of this. What an amazing thing it must be to feel this way about another person. Or to have someone feel like this about you.

This is probably the second best song ever written. I’ve felt this way for a while.

And number three. Three.

And the way I should have felt every time I left some place I used to be.

Birds and Snakes and Aeroplanes, Part 26

“It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump’s leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent.”

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

End Over End

We was out in the sticks down Highway Six
And the crowd was just about right.
The speed was too, so out I flew
Like a stick of rollin’ dynamite.

“Course we kept it a secret from everybody ’cause, if our folks had found out, we’d all been off to military school, but then my buddy went and printed up flyers and distributed them at school sayin’ to come and see the ‘master of sparks‘ that night on jack-rabbit road which was Highway Six, our launch pad.”

More great music at Rancho Radio (on Apple Music).

Birds and Snakes and Aeroplanes, Part 25

“As a rough average, during pre-pandemic life, 5 to 7 percent of people met the criteria for a diagnosis of depression. Now, depending how you define the condition, orders of magnitude more people do. Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, extrapolates from a recent Lancet study in China to estimate that about 50 percent of the U.S. population is experiencing depressive symptoms. ‘We are witnessing the mental-health implications of massive disease and death,’ he says. This has the effect of altering the social norm by which depression and other conditions are defined. Essentially, this throws off the whole definitional rubric.”

Remember the words of all the prophets,
wise men, fools, the weary and blind
Remember the innocence of days gone by,
the cruelest joke, now plagued by time
It’s getting dark, it’s getting cold,
it’s getting late and the pages keep on turning
So hit bombs and light it up, enjoy the ride,
for the fires, they will be burning