Heavy

Just time for a quick book-blip this morning before I popped out for a network meeting at Arnold Library to try and explain why procrastination always seems to win out over actually doing any work towards this ACLIP qualification I'm doing. Gary Lachman's book about the occult 60's ("a revisionist history of the 1960s counter culture") is a very good read, by the way (and heavy only in so far as it covers an awful lot of ground...), despite being out of print and not cheap secondhand (I had to do an Inter-Library Loan...) Lachman is his academic name, interestingly enough - as Gary Valentine he was a founder member of Blondie and wrote 'I'm Always Touched By Your Presence Dear..' (Pretty cool.)

It's funny how some albums seem to exist in glorious isolation, at least to me. I've had 'Skyscraper National Park' by Hayden for ages (I sought it out on the back of his rather brilliant title tune on the soundtrack to Steve Buscemi's film, 'Trees Lounge') and despite the fact that I find myself coming back repeatedly over time to his kind of grungy, slurred-yet-mellow take on Americana, for some reason I've never bothered to find myself another album by idiosyncratic Canadian singer-songwriter Paul Hayden Desser (for it is he...) He seems to get compared quite often to Iron and Wine, who I'm not really a fan of though I can see the similarity - Hayden's stuff is more human, groovy and organic. Anyway, this is by way of getting round to the fact that I came across his 'Elk-Lake Serenade' album in a charity shop the other day (a mere six or seven years after it's release...) and it turns out to be almost as good as 'Skyscraper...', with tracks (like this one...) generally shorter and more fragmentary (but in a good way, if you see what I mean...?) Apparently there are a couple of earlier albums too, and at least one later one, but I'm sort of tempted just to wait and see if fate drops just drops those into my lap sometime too...