I'm Wrong About Everything

As I did some more unpacking tonight, I dropped John Wesley Harding's The Confessions of Saint Ace into the CD player. I hadn't listened to this in a while and I'm not sure what made me choose this now, but I do know that "the best Elvis Costello album that Elvis Costello never made" made me feel good about a bunch of stuff that's been making me feel kind of bad. Not really bad, but...unsteady. Anyway, people either love this album or hate it; I am firmly with the former. I think that JWH is even more fantastic live than recorded, and listening to Saint Ace made me homesick for the Tin Angel, where I'd seen him a couple of times, variously with Ellen and Joyce and Charles (old friends). Our Lady of the Highways (recorded with Steve Earle, whose voice couldn't be any more different than JWH's) will always remind me of driving long stretches of I-95 between my Philly home and my family home in bad holiday weather. I don't particularly miss doing this, but, after three short months in the desert, I've lost all sense of season...aural cues have had to replace other bodily cues that the holidays are about to make me exhausted again. Add to this, my confidence in my ability to read situations and people, while perhaps not lost, has certainly been shaken. Melissa (old friend) has endured and helped me laugh through phone calls about schizophrenic situations being left behind (I'm Wrong About Everything, a fabulous song used in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, segues into Same Piece of Air segues into Old Girlfriends) and the reticence surrounding those being created (what a brilliant job JWH does of capturing reticence in the seemingly silly Goth Girl and in Too Much Into Nothing, probably my favorite track). Only Melissa and Brit Pop out of Brooklyn could make such heavy stuff feel so much lighter.