Illustration taken from New Milford Counseling Center’s website, dated 9/27/22.
I’ve restarted Paul Lisicky’s memoir Song So Wild And Blue with intention. I’m not sure I can identify the passages I found that affected me on first reading. Immediacy and newness will be missing. I do know this was one of the things I read that resonated:
There was no way you could make anything without confronting what didn’t work about it. Making art of any sort was about learning to sit next to failure; if not exactly holding its hand, then riding in the back seat with it…
My other intention is to listen to Joni Mitchell’s songs as they’re referenced. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard most of them, and some I’ve never heard at all.
Though the book is a tribute to Mitchell’s music, its substance lies in Lisicky’s observations of how that music and her creative choices (which are also often life choices) helped shape him as a writer while he sought and found his own voice (as songwriter, lyricist, fiction writer, and memoirist).
Hearing the songs provides a way for me to be “in the moment” of the book, and also in the moment of my reality in this place, this time, as a reader. Listening in real time will slow down my reading experience, but among many great things about reading, one is: It’s not a race. Unless you’re trying to finish a book at your little sister’s house before you fly home. Or you have a paper due for a class, or a test on a book the next day. Or you’re a kid under the covers with a flashlight trying to defy “bedtime” while you read Little Women before you get one last parental check for the night. (Do these seem oddly specific? 
)
About today’s playlist: Songs I remember hearing when I was young hit different decades later. They all seem part of a longer biography. They all seem part of my newer fiction. They all seem part of then and now. They all seem both too old and too new.
They all seem like prophecy.
Songs identified by title in the first 73 pages:
“The Circle Game” 1966
“The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey” 1975
“Down To You” 1974
“Let The Wind Carry Me” 1972
“The Same Situation” 1974
“Jericho” 1974
“Edith and the Kingpin” 1975
“Rainy Night House” 1970
“Blue” 1971
“Woodstock” 1970
“River” 1971
“Night Ride Home” 1991
“Otis and Marlena” 1977
“The Three Great Stimulants” 1985
“No Apologies” 1998
“Lesson in Survival” 1972
“Amelia” 1976
“I Had A King” 1966
“See You Sometime” 1972
“Banquet” 1972
“Talk To Me” 1977
“Song For Sharon” 1976
“Dreamland” 1977
“Blonde in the Bleachers” 1972
“The Priest” 1966
During Covid lockdowns, I bought a used compilation 2 disc set of Dr Demento 20th anniversary collection, which was childhood rebourn from a then grade school best friend and brother that checked the set out of the public library.
Replaying a few of those on the original CDs, which as a teenager I taped through the air of of their CD player and later through college the tape gave in, there were memories of High School earworms of those I taped. The rest I didn’t tape were new again, though we played them, I just never taped them and our giggles, the longer/lost biography, the then and now, old and new. But it would be rather amazing if I could link the two CDs to a prophecy, other than how to survive lock down in solitary confinement with a bunch of records, CDs and DVDs, that covid made me search for such an obscure and long forgotten name of a collection of tracks, but eventually found with “fish heads” [the high school earworm] and “star trekkin'”.
And to have and to hold once more the two CDs, just like finding rare bargin bin new vinyl of UK Now that’s… and others feeding the soul with past albums in near new condition too…
Thanks for sharing that. Music holds such powerful memory, influence, and magic for us. I also acquired a lot of it during Covid, also frequently drawing from my past but getting to hear new versions and rare outtakes of my life’s soundtrack. I simply can’t imagine, and don’t want to, a world where the arts are denied us through banning and censorship, whether music, books, visual arts, and other performing arts. Art isn’t meant to be controlled by the state or by tyrants or small people with little minds and vendettas. Art is of and for all of us.