It’s Friday night and I’m at home in my basement looking out at the Christmas lights across the valley from my office.
Jethro Tull is lilting out the speakers in that weird flutey maze of sound they have. To me many of Tull’s songs sound a bit like Christmas music, oddly enough. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve also got a lot of James Galway Christmas music, courtesy of my flutist sister-in-law.
I’m glad that I’m alive now. I’m glad that I live in the same time as Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf and Ian Anderson and Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music and (for awhile at least) Freddie Mercury. Because no matter what bumps there are in my life, those bumps are easily sanded down with this sort of dramatically lyrical songstuff.
I hate to write about music and food. I’m never adequate to the task, never quite able to capture that bit of soft comfort and delight. It makes me feel like the worst of the world’s writers. But then I realise that it also means that I have an ineffable store of private treasure untainted by the air of exposure and that’s not so bad either.
Songs from the Woods is one of my favorite non-Christmas Christmas albums.