When we packed up the studio in Kansas City last May, after all the gear was in the truck—and there was nothing left in the studio itself besides its own odd-angled walls, its multi-colored-German-kindergarten-like tile carpet squares, and its corner-wraparound-iso-booth-window—Greg, my engineer, and I sat on the carpet and talked for a bit.

         The talking wasn’t just something that happened. We did it on purpose. Greg and I had discussed the fact that production work, like artist work, is marked by intense projects that conclude with an embarrassing dearth of fanfare. No funeral, no graduation, no sting, no ecstasy, no sweet, no sour, just the calm passing of the ship out of the harbor. Often the day after the record comes back from mastering, we look at each other and ask, “Now what?” The humdrum answer usually goes, “Well, I guess… burn backup DVDs.” So, we had decided that, before we locked the door to the Kansas City studio for the last time, we ought at least to sit down on the empty floor and talk about our time there.

The main topic that afternoon was our favorite memories in that room. As I recounted mine, I realized a common theme. All my favorite recording moments were moments where we felt the presence of one another in the music. Not surprisingly, many of those feeling moments occurred when we were tracking live, together, not overdubbing things one instrument at a time. In other words, I don’t have magical, electric memories of recording shakers on V2, or Big Guitars on the CHO. I do, however, remember when five of us, no headphones, felt our way through a moving rendition of a Courtney Reid song, or a Barclay Martin tune. Those were magical times. That was electric.

Remember, on John McKenna’s album, when Billy taped the clave’ to his prosthetic leg, and Greg had to hand him the shaker after the first chorus, so we could capture it all live? And remember how Billy had just dropped by, more or less out of kindness, cause the budget was so low, and we were using that crappy green kick drum Tim gave me from his plumbing warehouse (some punk band left it behind), and Billy hit a metal pail with brushes, and we threw all that stuff together in a few minutes, and it was like lightning in a bottle. That was something.

I’m still in love with that. I still love the chance to have inspired moments of ridiculous creativity, to have real human beings interact, and to corporately lay our hands on the clay and watch it transform before us. Now it is a woman reaching for an apple. Now, a boy with waxen wings plummeting into the sea. Now, a father. Now, a farmer. Now, a schoolgirl. Now, an unrequited lover.

Yes, we hammer out chord charts, and we talk about arrangements, and instrumentation, and tone, and we place our mics, and we dial in our sounds. Of course we do those things. But once the craft and the hard work is done, we submit to the mystery, and for those five minutes, we care together about the song, and about being a part of it, and we can feel it in the room. And that, dear friends, is why we all got into this in the first place.

“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,

the only Son of God,

eternally begotten of the Father,

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made,

of one Being with the Father.

Through him all things were made.”

-The Nicene Creed

When the heat pump crapped out at our new house, I started researching heating systems. Turns out that one of the big things you have to pay attention to is what they call an efficiency rating. The efficiency rating measures how much energy you’re putting into the heater against how much energy you’re getting out of it. Heads up, it’s never 100%. You always lose some energy.

Compliments of inertia, friction, and black holes, everything loses energy. [Author’s confessional note: Truth be told, while I’m confident that inertia and friction play a big role in inefficiency, I’m not so sure about black holes. However, I wanted to throw a little something Einsteinian in there. I’ve got a feeling about that guy. He seems like he ought to be part of this conversation somewhere. Plus, he’s got cool hair.] And because everything loses energy, we all cast about, trying to figure out how to compensate for what’s missing. It’s the way of the earth. [Additional author’s note: we ended up getting the heater repaired under our home warranty. This has temporarily solved the problem, but I’ll have to re-visit it sooner than I’d like, I’m sure.]

Believe it or not, I thought about all this in church this morning as we were reading the Nicene Creed together. We recited, “…God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made…” and I started thinking about how the Father’s “creation” of the Son is perfectly efficient, that there is no God-ness lost in the “transfer” of power. This is because there is no real “transfer” of power. The Son does not borrow anything from the Father. He is the Father, and the Father is Him. They are one being, perfectly efficient—if it’s not too crass to say so—with all energy conserved.

By contrast, this got me thinking about normal human communication, and how often the speaker’s intent is lost on the listener. The meaning is not equal to the message intended. I’m talking, for instance, about drive through transactions:

“I’ll have a number three with a medium Pepsi,” you say.

“A number three with a medium Dr. Pepper?” the attendant says.

“No. A medium Pepsi,” you say.

“Okay. A medium Pepsi. Will that be all?”

“No. A NUMBER THREE with a medium Pepsi?” You say,    and, even though it’s happened plenty times before, you can’t believe it’s happening again.

Or arguments between two people:

“Why do you always say that about me when it’s clear that I’m    making an effort?” he said

“Well, first of all, I don’t ALWAYS say anything, and second of all, I don’t know what you call an effort, but that doesn’t look much like one,” she said.

“Oh. Okay, so it doesn’t count that I stayed up late the other night working on that thing for you?” he said, the sarcasm fairly obvious, at least to him.

You get the idea.

It also happens in art. As a musician, songwriter, and producer, I work hard at creating delicate little songs that suffer an encoding process that gets them shuffled around from one device to another. They tumble out of speakers and headphones at the most  inopportune times: between breaking up with your girlfriend, and making your big pitch to the new client, and showing up unprepared to the final exam, and picking up your kids at soccer practice. The agony and the ecstasy of the song is treading water in the ocean of your life, but it’s sputtering, taking in gulps of water with the air. The song often doesn’t get the time it wants from you, and when it does, you misunderstand lyrics, musical intent, and even, sometimes, the overall point of the artist. Again, hardly a 100% transfer.

The artist might be me. Or it might be Steve Perry from Journey. A friend of a friend supposedly sat down with Perry, and asked him why he’d dropped out of music. Steve said he’s been disappointed by how ironically his band’s been re-interpreted in today’s culture. He never meant anything as a joke, as overstatement, as bombast. He was dead serious, and if no one wants to take him and the music seriously, well then it’s too painful to try anymore. When you listen to “Don’t Stop Believin’,” you see what he’s saying: “Some’ll win/ Some will lose/ Some’re born to sing the blues… Don’t stop believin’/ Hold onto that feelin’.” If nothing else, that’s a work of utter honesty and sincerity. And his voice, for crying out loud, is full of pathos. I know. Journey. Dude, it’s just Journey. But, as my wife said, upon me telling her about how Steve Perry supposedly feels about his problem, she said, “Poor Steve Perry—bless his heart—everybody misunderstands him.” She was not, you see, being ironic. She was as serious as Steve was when he was telling us about the shadows, searching, up and down the boulevard.

Yep. Everybody misunderstands everybody all the time. We all superimpose our own stories on one another. We hear what we want to hear. We placate Hitler. We crucify Jesus. We ignore the poor. We give no time to our own dreams and visions. We are half-conscious at best.

And then we stumble into church, and hear “…God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made…” and it’s kind of unbelievable. The Father begets the Son, and there is no intent lost between them? Well, yes, because there is no intent between them; they’re one. No intent. No misunderstanding. Just one-ness.

I like that quite a bit. It makes me want to go order a #3 with a Pepsi all over again, and, on the way, to listen to Steve Perry sing, and not to stop believin’, but to hold onto that feelin’.

I am reading The Life You Save May Be Your Own (An American Pilgrimage) by Paul Elie. a blended biography of four American Catholic Writers (Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy). Sprinkled in is the spiritual history of America. In one section, Dorothy Day, is cavorting with her leftist-leaning literary friends of New York in the days before she solidifies her vocation in the Catholic Workers Movement, and they are all discussing philosophy, and pondering the downward spiral of capitalism as well as asking each other “What might the antidote be?” There is one sentence that caught me up short: “…to the schools of thought then current in The Village- Communism, anarchism, distributism- there was added the… emerging philosophy of the yeoman farmer, whose simple, self-sufficient life, grounded in a sense of place and of responsibility to others, stood outside the Northern-Industrial-capitalist system.” (p.45)

Now what caught me short might be a bit surprising, because it has nothing to do with the specific veins of thought these early twentieth century thinkers were exploring. It has to do with the context in which they explored. I don’t feel, at least among the thinkers I know, that there are any such clear lines of delineation around the conversation. In those days, it seems there were these fairly clear philosophies one could cite, and compare (e.g. communism, anarchism, distributism, etc.). These days, what is there? A collection of moods.

I admit that perhaps the clarity in Elie’s description is an illusion, that history permits a degree of retroactive categorizing; that things were more muddled and overwhelming in those days than they seem to us now; that, had I been in those rooms, sipping that coffee, participating in that conversation, hearing those jazz records in the background, things would have felt equally undefined.

However, I suspect there was still some greater respect for authority in those days. Furthermore, even though plenty of the thinkers of the early postmodern era took great pride in flouting authority, there were still credible authorities to flout. In other words, there was Lenin to quote, or Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy, or Dickens, or whoever it might have been, and there would have been the assumption, socially, that, even if you disagreed, you ought to have read said author, and ought to have acquainted yourself with their views. Nowadays, there seems to be no such matrix of influence.

I live mostly in the midst of music, rather than literature or philosophy; therefore many of the people with whom I discuss such things are simply not reading much in the way of literature and philosophy to begin with- myself included (this is the first book in a long while). But is this non-literary distinction among musicians not different from those days too? Did not the musicians, even as recently as the sixties, occupy themselves with reading more? Surely, they did. They didn’t have the internet, DVDs, and nauseating quantities of broadcast television to distract them. However, even among those who are now reading, there is no consensus on where the discussion should begin. No two people seem to have read the same books. We’re all reduced to describing, in our impotent, and overly brief ways, the content of the books we have read.

Of course, it doesn’t end there. The same is true of movies, and of music.  I got a compilation CD recently released by Verve records, a subsidiary of Columbia Records, and a legendary jazz music record label. The compilation comprises single songs by older jazz artists who have been recently remixed in an electronic music context by DJs. It’s called Verve Unmixed, meaning,  “we didn’t actually do anything to this music; your hearing it just like it was released.” And to us this is A Novel Idea. At any rate, I heard Billie Holiday sing “Strange Fruit,” (eerily distant, yet brutally immediate) Sarah Vaughan sing “Summertime” (vocal hard right, orchestra hard left, a stunning performance in which each leaks onto the others’ side of the stereo in a dance of harmonic overtones that can’t be accomplished in our isolated-overdubbed-era), and I heard Astrud Gilberto’s rhythm section with its oddly dampened cymbals and clave’s, sounding remarkably like the bossa nova setting on all those drum-machine-equipped-organs I love (and I think to myself, “Aha. This is the origin of these rhythms and sounds”). And here is the point: how is it that I never heard these songs before, or if I did hear them, didn’t notice them? How can we be moving so quickly along that there’s no reference backwards anymore? We’re all so inundated with information and- God help us for this dreaded word- CONTENT that we have no common talking points. It’s all a bit depressing.

I have friends who will no doubt disagree, saying that it’s a sign of our postmodern, information-soaked, diversified, blankety-blank era, but I’d just like to say that I feel the loss, and that there are times that I wonder whether all our activity is amounting to mere (and sometimes unhealthy) fracture.

Perhaps I’m just feeling crusty today. Tomorrow, I will delight in the river of ongoing ideas, and watch that iPod commercial, and have the conversation with friends again, “Really? From Israel? That’s so great… Yeah, I know. Her voice is so… yeah, striking. Exactly. I think it’s so great that whoever it is over there picking music is so… yeah, subversive… yeah, and film & TV too. Right. It’s like a mini-revolution.” And I will be happy with myself again, and with my generation because we make good commercials. In the meantime, pardon me while I lament the loss of well-defined points of view, which have been replaced by a surfeit of buzzwords that seem to mean everything and nothing all at once.

As regards the idea of human greatness, and its elusive nature, there is one more story that comes to mind. We’ve already examined Paul McCartney and Billy Joel. The next logical step is John the Baptist. Bible stories, of course, have mostly been told and re-told a thousand times, but let me try it again anyway. This is all in Matthew, chapter 11, more or less like I’m telling it, and it goes like this:

John- whom some called “The Baptist,” for his routine of baptizing people into what he called “the repentance of sins”- was in jail. Herod- the corrupt Roman ruler of the region- had thrown him in the clink for his public declamation of Herod and his wife as immoral. Herod’s semi-incestuous power-grab-marriage to his brother’s wife was contemptuous to the Hebrews that Herod ruled over, and John made no bones about pointing that out. So, now John was in jail.

However, he was awaiting his rescue. He had, after all, not only met but also baptized Jesus of Nazareth- The Messiah Who Was To Come And Save Us All, and he was quite sure that, at any moment, that same guy would be making his way to John’s cell and kicking down the door to spring him from the joint. But no rescue came. Instead, John was visited by whispering doubts: “Maybe I was wrong,” or “Maybe this Jesus isn’t the one after all.” Finally, tormented by these questions, he sent his disciples to ask. And they did- point blank:

“Are you the one, or should we look for another?”

And here’s what Jesus said:

“Go and report what you hear and see: the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up and the poor have the good news preached to them.”

That’s what I’m talking about, Jesus. And when do we get to the part where you kick down the door to John’s cell? And then Jesus adds one last thing,

“Blessed is the one who does not take offense at me.”

Oh.

Then it says that the disciples were leaving when Jesus started to tell the crowd about John. He said several profoundly complimentary things, but we wonder if the disciples heard any of them. I have a pastor friend who thinks they didn’t. He thinks the disciples were out of earshot when Jesus started into praising John. And, for the sake of this blog entry at least, I’d like to go with that assumption; because if that’s the way it went down, then it seems to say something fairly profound about my present preoccupation- the question of human greatness.

Jesus, in his praise of John, reaches a climax with the statement, “Truly I say to you among those born of women, there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist!” Had the disciples of John heard that, it seems, they could have gone back to their leader, and re-invigorated him, “He said that there is no one born to a woman who has been greater than you.” Imagine hearing that. But instead, maybe all that John got was the same thing most of us get for an explanation: “Look. It’s all happening. Jesus is doing all the stuff we heard he would do- lame walking, blind seeing, dead coming back to life. He really is the one, but, John, it’s just that you may not experience these things first hand. You may not even make it out of here to see it all come to pass, and Jesus doesn’t want you to get offended by that.”

And of course John didn’t make it out alive. He was beheaded in chapter 14 by indirect request of Herod’s wife, Herodias. She was furious with John for the way in which he represented her to the public (i.e. as a tramp who ditched her husband to marry his brother simply because the brother appeared to be a bit more powerful). So she got her oversexed little daughter, Salome, to dance erotically for Herod. Herod was so aroused by the event (yes, the story is that foul and bizarre) that in his drunken stupor, he offered her whatever she wanted in honor of her extreme sexiness. The girl turned to the mom, “What should I ask for?” And the Mom said, “Ask for the Baptist’s head on a platter.” So she did. And that was the end of the great John the Baptist.

And great is right. John The Baptist is one of the foremost saints and martyrs of the Christian church, and the man whom God chose to be the first to pin the title of messiah on the Incarnated God-man, Jesus. His position is secured not only in the church, but in all of eternity, and he is truly a great man. So you’ll have to forgive me if I now commence comparing his story to that of Billy Joel and Paul McCartney, because, even though it borders on sacrilege, I think the comparison needs to be made.

For all three men… and really, I suspect, for anyone who wants greatness (and I must sheepishly raise my hand as a member of that subset of human beings), there is a fact that must be confronted: greatness is not always easily seen. It is elusive. When you get it, you may not know it, and once you have it, you will most certainly not be able to hold it in your two little hands. It rarely expresses itself in the things you might imagine, and often springs up in the oddest of places: Billy Joel went in to do the piano bar gig one more time when suddenly the whole scene at the bar unfolded itself before him as The Great Human Drama, which he documented in “The Piano Man.” Likewise Paul sat in the home of his youth, his mother in the next room, and stared through the provincial lace curtains to the endlessly familiar Street He Lived On. And suddenly he captured, as if in a bottle, the yearning young people have had for ages, to strike out on one’s own and follow the incandescent light before them regardless of how it signifies a break with home and family, regardless of the rain through which one has to trudge. Voila. “I’ll Follow The Sun.” In these humble and mundane places, the greatness of humanity flared up.

Now, I may be silly for comparing it to the greatness of John the Baptist. I probably am. Certainly giving your life for your convictions, and speaking truth to power are among the highest on the list of human achievements, but sometimes, oddly, it’s the more achievable greatness that inspires me to go beyond. It’s the moments when I think, “I can do that. I can just try to be in tune with the transcendent moment when it comes along.” After all, who knows when that will be? You may be in just the right place to shake the cage. After all, immediately after he praised John as the greatest among those born of women, Jesus said,

“Yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

And now what? What's Billy doing now? He's inviting some whiny pop-kid named Cody on stage to sing Billy's Hey-did-you-know-there's-a-war-going-on anthem "Christmas In Fallujah". It's not that I begrudge Billy the idea of commenting on the war being under-covered by the media (which it is) and absent from the American communal mind (which it is), or even his everyman patriotism about it (which reminds me of my Dad a bit, and I kind of like it), it's that the song doesn't bear any of the real insights that we love about most of his really good songs. He seems to have lost touch with whatever it was that made him great.

When it comes to people who were great in their youth, but have gone stale in older age (certainly you can invite Stevie Wonder and Elton John to this party) I've always assumed it was that loss of common-folk surroundings, the loss of connection to regular people that dimmed the genius of these heroes, but now I'm wondering if I've got the right theory. Maybe it's about getting to the top of the mountain only to find that the top feels like a more comfortable version of the bottom. No great revelation. No great accomplishment. All you have are the things that people tell you you've done. Music, after all, is ephemeral. There is no arriving within it; there is only the ongoing moment-ness of it. So after the show is done, and the record, finished, you're left with other peoples' analyses, and they are not the music. They are not the greatness you longed for, and achieved.

So, people may call you great, and you really want to believe them, but secretly you doubt that it's true. Secretly, you hide in your closet and wonder where it all comes from. In the end, I think greatness must be left for others to attribute, and maybe the great people themselves are incapable of facing it. Maybe it's elusive, and maybe it only brushes against us, but refuses to reveal itself, and if we had pinned our hopes on meeting it face to face we will be nothing but crushed by our fling with it, because it is loose, and wild, and unpredictable, and was never really ours to begin with. We mistook our own hunger for its presence, but really it's in the meeting of the two (the intersection of desire and inspiration) that the sparks fly. It's not an affair that's ever intended to consummate. It's an eternal flirt. And this is as it should be.

In some ways, everything is the same. The streets are still here. The buildings are still looming over the same corners, casting the same shadows, and I still feel like I know them well. Residential blocks are still stuffed with houses, which are still home to many of the same people I've known for years. And the November sun is ascending on the town this morning, doing what it usually does this time of year: lighting everything up, but barely offsetting the chill.  You can see your breath.

I ran into a friend who works at a coffee shop this morning. We talked about the move. When I said it had been almost six months, he said, "Wow. Has it been that long?" He had just carried a box into the shop. He was living his life. He has not been weighing each moment of my absence, nor I his. Lots of little events fill our days; and lots of little details inform our relationships to family, friends, and community. Both the events and the details just keep coming, and you wake up one day, and it's been six months.

However, I had a different kind of moment last night, one where everything did not seem the same. Once we arrived at the hotel, and everyone settled into his or her bed, the room was quiet except for the sound of sleep. In that moment, I had the same feeling I often have in this one recurring dream of mine.

In the dream, I'm in the upstairs of my childhood home, or I'm in a dorm room from college or some other place I've lived in the past, and I discover a secret room. No one else seems to know about it, and, when I discover it, I wonder how I could not have seen it before. Inside of it, depending on which version of the dream it is, are: hidden treasures (you know, like electric guitars and recording studio equipment), or papers from my youth that hold answers to long-pondered questions, or forgotten items from the past, most of which I was sure had been thrown out or destroyed. Interestingly, the dream is never as much about the treasures themselves as it is about the feeling of finding them. "I can't believe these have been here all this time," I think, "and I was so close, but I never knew it. This is like a miracle. And it's a miracle of common surroundings."

So last night, in that sleep-filled room at the hotel, I got up and went to the window. I looked down at the city below, where Brookside Boulevard was wreathed in the foggy glow of streetlights. I felt sad, and the sadness was the hidden treasure. I suddenly missed my friends and family. I missed my parents, who passed away years ago. I even missed myself. Just being back here in Kansas City, I re-awoke to realities within me that I had forgotten about. I stared through the window for a while as Lori and the children slept, and I cried a little. It's hard to say exactly what the crying was about.

I think, though, that big changes take a while to digest, and that they incur casualties. There's no way around it. If I make a big change, I'm going to lose things. That's just how that goes.

And even when the grief about those losses seems small, it probably isn't. Sometimes, I assume-in light of how busy I've been since the move-that I've managed the transition without much loss. But it's not true. I know I'll eventually feel every one of the losses; that somewhere there are secret rooms filled with things I didn't know I needed to feel. Some day, I'll find each of them, and each will have been right under my nose the whole time. One of them, as it turns out, was here in a hotel overlooking the plaza.

Every rose has its thorn…
Just like every cowboy sings his sad, sad song
Every rose has its thorn
Yeah it does.

Just as my last entry was a paean of praise to Paul’s populist party, so is this entry a reflection of regret on the receding brilliance of his recent releases.

At the same time that I was high on rock and roll, dancing with my children, and becoming late for church, I was, in the back of my mind, pondering Sir Paul’s fall from grace. The fact is, as much as I say I’m not a “Paul guy,” I have quite a few of his solo albums and some of his stuff with the Wings, and I like them. Heck, even if Paul had never been in the Beatles, there was still something pretty great about him. Take the whimsy of the first solo album, or the grandiose blend of domesticity and furious joy on Ram, his second solo album, or, for that matter, all those great hey-it’s-the-seventies-let’s-live-it-up Wings albums. Good stuff. So, while I’m dancing away with the kids, I’m wondering why he seems incapable of doing some of the great things that he did in his earlier artistic life. After all, as good as his newer stuff may be in some regards, it suffers the rather sad distinction of being neither innocent nor wise. It isn’t the easy exploration of good times that he had as a young man; and neither has he become the wise fool of old age. His work falls between two stools, and when you’re not dancing with your toddlers, sometimes it’s kind of a drag.

Paul himself offers a clue to this reality, I think, when he says in one of the interview bits on the US Tour 2005 DVD that he remembers exactly where and when he wrote “I’ll Follow The Sun” (one of my all time favorite Beatles tunes on the early album, Beatles For Sale). He was at his home in Liverpool, looking through the lace curtains. He was feeling the possibilities. That song is the sound of a young man promising to do something great: “One day, you’ll look to see I’ve gone/ For tomorrow may rain, so I’ll follow the sun” At the time, he was on the cusp of greatness and staggering fame. However, now, years later, he says that fame turned out to be something slightly embarrassing- that he feels like a regular guy, but everyone sees him as something much more.

And so once you achieve the greatness you longed for, what do you do? You can’t complain about it, and no one believes you if you’re still longing. How do you keep up the dance? Do you force upon yourself the kind of discontentedness that can only come about by pain and suffering? And since you have no material pain and suffering to speak of, do you do so by living a lifestyle of addiction or violence? Or do you just sort of numb out, giving yourself as much latitude as your obscene wealth and comfort afford you? These are the great and tragic questions of pop culture heroes. If, after we raise them on our shoulders and parade them about town, they won’t admit that they’ve found peace and joy, we get mad. Then we curse them for the very sense of discontent and longing that we fell in love with them for articulating in the first place. 

Meanwhile, they start writing worse songs.

Nonetheless, my two-year-old chose it, and there we all were, before church, watching Paul’s 2005 US tour (which not only takes place in the U.S., but it’s about “US,” right? That’s a double meaning right there. Sheesh, Paul.). As my two kids (Ruby, two; Miles, four) are smiling and dancing and generally having a great time, I’m starting to feel a bit emotional myself. Despite all my protective measures, Paul starts to get to me. Slowly, I begin to feel embarrassed about having internally shunned Paul’s late-life musical shtick. He is, after all, a real populist when it comes to emotions. “Everyone gets to feel these things,” he says, with such open-heartedness that you feel a bit guilty and petty for calling it sentimentalism. Why would you withhold these good feelings from anyone? Your resistance is weakening. Bit by beautiful, groovy bit, you are won over, until, about 5 minutes before it’s time to leave for church you want to yell “More good feelings, Paul! More good feelings for everyone!” And you’re elation is only tarnished by the conviction you feel. His sincere willingness to share the thoughts and feelings in his music are almost an indictment against my intellectual and cynical reasons for explaining them away. Oh, how deep I am with my “incisive analysis of pop culture” or what significant battles I fight, armed with my Dylan-fan argument that the great art doesn’t give itself away. As Winton Marsalis says, “the great art doesn’t come to you. You come to it.“ Well, when Paul’s crack band kick starts “Back In the USSR,” I want to say “Well then, let’s forget about art, Winston, cause this feels awesome! I’m back in the U-S-S- Aaarrrrrrr, baby!

We were late for church.