Just when you thought the sinusitis was done with you, the head thickens once again. Otherwise? Feel great! Except for right around the middle of the head. It’s just a head pressure thing, a let me go and move on abut my day thing, an enough already thing. It’ll be fine soon.
So, it’s back to the OTC pills.
I treated myself to a nice long swim today. The water was warm, 92 degrees the thermometer said, and it is true what swimmers say, you swim faster in colder water.
That’s why I went slow, you see. Has nothing to do with taking forever to get my arms warmed up. Nothing to do with poor form. Nothing to do the continued head cold recovery. It was all about the warm water.
But I did have a nice 3,000 yards of it.
It gave me a lot of time to think of something legendary swim coach David Marsh told me. He has won 12 national team championships and 89 individual NCAA champions, and he’s coached 49 Olympians, so you come around to thinking he knows a thing or two about what happens in a pool.
On a show I hosted, he told me, “You have to respect someone willing to spend hours and hours, swimming hundreds of laps, to shave a thousandth of a second off of their best time.”
I didn’t swim a lot then, but I thought I understood his point. But now, swimming lots of laps of my own, I appreciate the point a bit more.
See? I’m slow in the pool.
I’m never shaving anything off my time.
But I bet if Marsh stopped by, he could give me two pointers that would improve everything.
Too bad he’s busy just now, Olympic year and all.
We return to the Re-Listening project. I’ve been playing all of my old CDs in my car, in the order of their acquisition. The real point is to just enjoy the music, but I’ve doubled my value by using it as a way to pad out the site with a few memories and some good music. These aren’t reviews, far from it; there are enough of those, and then some, out there. Besides, we’re going back to 2005, or 2006, to discuss a 2000 record.
I picked up “Smile” without knowing anything about it, because I’d been fully bitten by The Jayhawks bug. It was their sixth studio album, and it was a move in a somewhat new direction for the band from Minnesota. The alt-country, jangle-pop sound gave way to a more straightforward pop, sonically.
“Smile” reached number 129 on the Billboard 200 and number 14 on Billboard’s Top Internet Albums chart, which no one knew existed.
If you picked up this album, the first sounds you heard were also the title track.
It isn’t entirely devoid of the jangle-pop sound we all loved so much. But you can chart the progression all throughout the record.
But you couldn’t overlook the new direction. Probably it didn’t sit well with the purists, but Gary Olson was gone (for the first time) and this was their second album without him. It was like they were looking for something. And it took a little getting used to.
They were clearly exploring new distortion pedals. If you sit with it, though, the lyrics are still strong in spirit. Most importantly, the harmonies were still shimmering.
This was always a car CD for me. A lot of back-and-forth to work, 20 or 25 minutes at a time, for quite a while. I was probably late a lot. Hurried parking lots and the like. I remember I bombarded The Yankee with it, because we were carpooling at the time, but she preferred other Jayhawks records, I think. I also think it’s hard to go wrong. What you get, across their catalog, is material for a lot of different moods.
The Jayhawks are going back on the road next month. And, in October, they’ll be playing a show about two-and-a-half hours from us. This was the first band my lovely bride and I saw together. They were about that same distance away that night. And the next day we decided we, in our late 20s, were too old for driving that far and back in one night for a show, with work the day after. (We were both working morning drive at the time and being in the newsroom at 6 a.m. the next day was not easy or pleasant.)
But this show is on a Saturday. Something to think about.
And with that we are, for the time being, caught up in the Re-Listening project. But there are still about 150 CDs to hear again, and share with you.
Come back tomorrow, we’ll talk about a neat little light.