James Blake is the boy from the haunted house next door – Bela Lugosi’s visiting nephew. Haunting ain’t the word. He possesses you. Beacon don’t fly too high.

Women are a superior breed to men, but everyone from God to James Thurber knows they sure like to talk. Girl Talk.
I personally wouldn’t have it any other way.

50 years ago I was at the Woodstock festival, in the mud and the mire and the morass. Joni wasn’t, but she got it right in the song. True Woodstock is in the mind.

50 years ago the Woodstock festival took place in upstate New York. I was there. I got wet and muddy and cranky and went back home after one night to listen to some of the same artists on my headphones.

The albatross of fame and fortune. Young Joni crafting her disillusion into a gem, 1970.

In which Jeff indulges in gooey nostalgia, imbibes a few underage beers, ponders his life, and swills the unadulterated, luscious gush of emotion that is Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ ‘Ooh Baby, Baby’.

Who would have thought that ‘feelings’, the notoriously amorphous and slippery quick of our inner lives, could be so precisely dissected, reconstructed, and formulated in a mere song? Paul Simon’s ‘Jonah’ will swallow you whole.

The most brilliant self-destructive Scottish acoustic folk-jazz guitarist-singer you’ve never heard of.
Watch John burn.