Whole Album Burger

I recently decided to do something I had not done since I was a child. No I didn’t kiss my mother or put on pajamas with feet, I listened to an entire album in one sitting. And not just any album, this album was John Prine’s German Afternoons. 

Now when I was basking in the light of Prine’s album,I was also fingers deep in making a burger that was going to be very juicy. This juicy treat was topped with cooked onions, cheese and my own mayonnaise/barbecue sauce mixture(I have spent years perfecting the mayo to BBQ ratio). I misread the instructions and made a burger that was one inch thick in height, which I do necessarily not recommend. While I prepared this monstrous delight,I sipped whiskey from my favorite bottle and worried about the effects of touching my hands on everything in the kitchen after handling raw meat. Prine was kind enough to relieve my worries by serenading me.

I could go through every song on the album and describe its affect on me but I have been rendered unable because alcohol is an amnesiac. The important result of this listening process was that I learned something and it had nothing to do with the music. Although that music was damn good, I tell you!

You see there were some parts of Prine’s album that had the feeling of a Tuesday. Then there were other parts that felt more like a Saturday such as the pure ecstasy of hearing a song that rocks your world, such as “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian” being one that intoxicated me. Lastly, there were songs I just kind of liked, like “Bad Boy.” I kind of liked bad boy because I myself have been a bad boy at times.   

These songs and thoughts had an effect on me because I was not surprised by how my post burger night unfolded. My evening with Kip,Daddy Long Legs and the boys had some good parts sure, but there were some ecstatic parts too and then there were Tuesday like moments. 

That is when it dawned on me, through my previous musical choices I had been training myself to be unhappy. Unhappy because I had been going from great song to great song to great song and that is not what everyday life is like. Life is not like going from EmmyLou Harris’s “Red Dirt Girl” to Taj Mahal’s “Queen Bee.” No, it is more like going from Guy Clark’s “Dublin Blues” to Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You” to “Mind of a Junkie” by Anders Osborn. 

I realized that listening to whatever you want all of the time is not what things are really like and therefore is bad for you(like drinking too much soda when daddy is away on business, resulting in a guilty tummy ache).Sometimes life feels like a blues album and sometimes it is more like a black sabbath song but one thing is for sure, life is not a greatest hits playlist.

Now let’s say there is a Billy or a Bongo who says “Relax its just music. Let people enjoy it the way they want to enjoy it.” The thing is people don’t actually enjoy it! They don’t! If you go from banger to banger to banger there is no downtime, there is no suffering, so those songs do not have the effect they should.  When you listen to the whole album, especially one you have never heard before, when you hear that new song, that song that changes your life for a little bit, it is so unexpected that it could bring a man to tears. 

pass the tissues, John