Dear Janet Jackson (Superbowl Edition)

So... Today is the Superbowl, and yet again it is super, as it does feature my favorite team, the New England Patriots. People are not always understanding why that is my team, since I live in a state which has the ultimate of underdogs, the Detroit Lions, but it really is pretty simple. While I moved to the US in 1999, I didn't start watching football until 2001. My first two years, I was busy adjusting to a new life in a new country, getting my associate degree, working a little on top of that, and eventually fatherhood. Then we moved to Michigan in 2001, I had a Monday-Friday job, and some more time on the weekends, so I decided to start watching football. I didn't know much about any rules, but there was this one team, without any superstar whose quarterback got hurt and replaced by someone who barely got drafted a couple of years before. That was the New England Patriots and Tom Brady. So without any real geographic allegiances, I was drawn to this team because of their story that year - and their focus on the team rather than individuals, coming out on the field as one, rather than announcing superstars (mainly because there weren't any). And it stuck. I was hooked.

And no, my favorite Patriot was never Tom Brady - although I can't think of anyone I'd rather have as a quarterback. My favorite Patriot of all time was Tedy Bruschi. To me, he was the heart and soul of the Patriots until his retirement in 2009. He was scheduled to sit out the 2005 season following a stroke not too long after he won his third Superbowl, but he came back to play in a Monday Night Football game against the Buffalo Bills on October 30 that year - and the impact his return had on the team cannot be overstated. After starting the season 3-3, they did win that game, and ended up 10-6 for the season. They lost in the divisional round that year, but this year they are back in the Superbowl - against the Philadelphia Eagles.

Of course, not all Americans watch the Superbowl for the football - watching the ads has long been a sport of its own, and then there's the halftime show. This year's performer is Justin Timberlake. Now he is married and a family man, but back in 2004, he was dating Janet Jackson, and their performance together became quite the controversy - and the topic of a song by Richard Thompson. This is a song that in the Norwegian tradition would be considered a nidvise - which really is a satirical song in the ballad tradition, often mocking the main character. And mock he does. Please enjoy a good laugh as the warm-up to the Superbowl - and the halftime show - with Richard Thompson's Dear Janet Jackson.

2017 - August 26 - Oops I Did It Again

Today I just feel like straightforward pop music. And who knew that this Britney Spears "classic" actually hid a nice little song? Richard Thompson did. And his version of Oops I Did It Again makes me smile. And the day after our racist in chief pardoned a genuine piece of human excrement for detaining people based on ethnicity and nothing else I need to smile...

July 14 - Al Bowlly's In Heaven

Richard Thompson is one of my favorite singer/songwriters, and while he tells a lot of stories about heartaches and other similar woes, he has a very British approach to the working class and features the blue collar worker in several songs. My favorite of these has to be Al Bowlly's In Heaven from the 1986 album Daring Adventures. It tells the story of a man coming back from WWII, and the effects of a civilian life with unemployment and poverty that awaited him after the war. He is lamenting the stature he lost when he had to give up his uniform and feels like a walking dead ("I'm in limbo now"). Al Bowlly was a British jazz crooner of the 1930s who died in 1941, and he clearly was the soundtrack of his better days - but now that he is dead, the main character is envious. It's a beautiful song, and the version I have chosen is from the album Live From Austin TX and features spectacular fretwork from both Richard Thompson on guitar and Danny Thompson (no relation) on bass. This trio is rounded out by Michael Jerome on drums, and it has to be one of my favorite constellations of any of Richard Thompson's bands. This is a song to lay back and enjoy...

April 30 - Night Comes In

Today's son is the second time I let Richard and Linda Thompson's Pour Down Like Silver be represented, and within a short time as well. Today's song contains the album title in the lyrics, but it is still not quite the title track. There isn't much to say, other than it contains some of the most tasteful fretwork I have heard from Richard Thompson. Night Comes In - and it is dark and smooth as velvet.

April 20 - Dimming of the Day

Richard and Linda Thompson really perfected the art of the album closer. In three of the four albums that still are in print (they have two albums that appear to be close to locked away in Sunnyvista and First Light), their choice of closer are stunning: Wall of Death from Shoot Out the Lights and The Great Valerio from I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight - and then there's the song of the day: Dimming Of The Day that transitions into the instrumental Dargai from Pour Down Like Silver.

When Pour Down Like Silver was recorded and released in 1975, Richard and Linda Thompson had converted to Sufism, which is a mystical branch of Islam, often concerned with purification of one's inner self. The album clearly has a religious theme, and Dimming of the Day is a great example of this - although it can be read as a love song as well, a finer reading of the lyrics does reveal a religious aspect.

March 8 - Read About Love

Today's song is a real gem in terms of funny lyrics. Richard Thompson has been a favorite of mine since Thomas Ekrene introduced me to him, and in 1991 he released the album Rumor and Sigh, produced by Mitchell Froom, who really was busy that year helping create several very good albums. Richard Thompson is a great guitar player, and while 1952 Vincent Black Lightning is the best known song on Rumor and Sigh - and possibly the best song as well, I have chosen Read About Love as the song of the day. I really like the humor in the frustrated boy/man trying to read his way to the secret of women's sexuality. What better way to recognize the international women's day? I will leave this without any further comment - just make sure you listen to the lyrics.

February 20 - Now Be Thankful

Today is a day of gratitude. After having had two major surgeries in two days (Wednesday and Thursday), yesterday was a much needed day of recovery for Christine. Although it was just the first of a long series of days in the healing and recovery, the fact that there was peace and calm with everyone, from medical staff to family as well as Chris herself, was a great relief, and I ended up going home last night to spend the night in my own bed.

Waking up rested today really made me feel incredibly grateful, and today's song will reflect that. I would like to thank Dawn, Chris' sister, for simply being amazing. She stayed with Chris last night, which allowed me to go home and rest up a little without feeling too guilty (I still don't like being away from her for long while she is in the ICU, but knowing she has someone there really made it possible). Chris' mom has also been there throughout everything, which really has been a great support as well.

I'm also very grateful for having Chris' kids, Andrew, Samantha, and Sarah, and their families in my life. They have stood by their mother's side through all of this, and while I am positive they have been scared out of their minds because of the brush Chris had with death ten years ago, when she first had breast cancer, they have been incredibly supportive. The rest of Chris' family have also been incredibly supportive, from her niece Laila and nephew Nabeel, who had the opportunity of being there in person, to everyone who have been staying in touch with us throughout the hairy days - and I truly believe those days are behind us. I would also like to thank the two youngest people stopping by for bringing big smiles to Chris' face: granddaughter Emma and great niece Lilliana.

Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends, whether you know Chris or not, for the incredible support you have shown both of us. For anyone ever doubting that Facebook can be a powerful tool used for good, I can tell you that it indeed can. I have seen and felt the support from both near and far, and I love you all back!

So before this gets all too sappy and sounding like a bad Oscar acceptance speech, I should talk about the music of today as well... I cannot claim to be a fan of Fairport Convention, although I do like them a lot. However, I am a huge fan of Richard Thompson, and since his music career started with FC, I have developed an interest in their early work. The first Richard Thompson album I owned was the retrospective Watching The Dark, a 3 CD set that included 3 Fairport songs: Genesis Hall, A Sailor's Life, and Now Be Thankful, which is today's song. Now Be Thankful is sung by Dave Swarbrick, who also cowrote it with Richard Thompson. To me, it is about gratitude in the face of extreme adversity, although there are many ways to interpret the lyrics... From 1970's edition of Fairport Convention, here is Now Be Thankful.

January 10 - Fergus Laing

So it should start to be pretty clear that my musical tastes are pretty eclectic, to put it mildly. Some of it mirrors bands I have followed, while others mirror tastes of friends - and my interest in folk music from all around the world has been largely influenced by Thomas Ekrene with assistance from Johan Ludvig Brattås. The backstory for this interest is found under Radio Days: Resurrection - but the part I believe is missing is the fact that when I first moved to Bergen in January of 1995, the very first day in my student apartment I could hear the unmistakable guitar intro to La Grange by ZZ Top. I had no idea who lived next door, but I took La Grange as a good sign.

As I started working in Studentradioen - and more specifically as I started working with Thomas in Plog - I would frequently take one of the last busses home, and it turned out that Thomas was on the same bus. We walked separately - he had a gruff personality, and I had not yet established much of a rapport with him - and sat apart from one another on the bus, each listening to our own music. However, my jaw dropped when I saw that his key fit perfectly in the lock of the student apartment next to mine - the one that had played La Grange when I first moved in.

Eventually we started talking more, and we became friends, first and foremost united by a love for music, and he really started pushing his main drug: Richard Thompson. At first I was lukewarm, but I started warming up, and after I moved back to Trondheim for a while, he sent me a tape (or was it two) with some of his favorite Richard Thompson songs in good old-fashioned mixtape mode. And it worked... In addition to being one of the best guitar players I ever have heard (electric or acoustic), he is also a great songwriter. He has a very typical British dry humor, and his songs often appear depressive - but they are filled with very dark humor that you have to see through the grim depressive material. Add to that that he has written good old fashioned nidviser - very critical and satirical songs about living and real people - Madonna's Wedding about her renting a Scottish Castle to marry Guy Ritchie and Dear Janet Jackson about the infamous exposed nipple.\As one of the bonus tracks of his last album, Still, which came out last year, he wrote another song about an existing person, but since this person is a litigious current frontrunner for the Republican Party, the name was changed to Fergus Laing - but there is little doubt about who it is written...

Radio Days: Resurrection

My last stint in radio was another spectacularly great one - at least for me. In 1995, I finally packed my bags and record collection and left Hustad Leir (see earlier blogposts here and here for more about that time) for Bergen, where I joined Studentradioen i Bergen. I started as an engineer mainly for the shows Skumma Kultur hosted by Svein Tore Bergestuen, Høydepunktum, and Plog. Three very different shows with very different demands: Skumma Kultur was a cultural program in a magazine format, but with Svein Tore, they covered quite a bit of breaking news, and he had high technical standards, which in turn made me a better engineer. Høydepunktum was probably my favorite show to work on - a highlight show of the week that was. As an engineer, I was challenged in reediting a lot of the pieces so they were shorter and fit a new flow. This was also in the days of reel-to-reel tape editing, so I had to physically manipulate the tapes. I loved every minute of it. And I had the fortune of working with great young women (they would probably say girls at that time): Line Hegna, Tonje Aursland, Kathrine Synnes, and, I believe, Vibecke Spjeld. Some of them have gone on to careers in NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Company. The last show, Plog, was the music magazine dedicated to "roots" music, artists like The Louvin Brothers, Tom Waits, and Richard Thompson were among Thomas Ekrene's favorites, and he was the host of the show. Johan Ludvig Brattås was also involved, and he brought his eclectic taste for international traditional music to the show as well. I was introduced to Mongolian throat singing and Finnish traditional music - and I actually started liking it.

While Mongolian throat singing surely is interesting, I have to confess that Hedningarna is higher on my list of favorites. I got a chance to see them live in 1999, not too long before I moved to the US. They are a Finnish/Swedish band, and their last studio album, Karelia Visa, explores traditional music from Karelia, a historical Finnish region that largely now is part of Russia following the Winter War of 1940. The liner notes are extremely interesting - describing their experiences researching this music in a region that appears not to have changed much at all. The following song, Mitä Minä, is from Karelia Visa (Karelian Songs).

However, I started getting restless being in the control room at all times, so I asked if there was any chance that I could start a show of my own. I had a name and a concept for it that I really liked. The name was Undertoner (undertones), and it was about all the unsung heroes of music - the producers and session musicians. The people in charge liked the concept and I got my half-hour time slot. I remember shows about Rick Rubin, Daniel Lanois, Tessa Niles, and Tony Levin. However, I also remember being chastised for having one half-hour show featuring one song only, with my voice in the intro and in the middle, hovering over the effects. The song was Echoes by Pink Floyd. It was and remains my favorite Pink Floyd composition, and it showcases so many of the elements I like in music. It is droning, it is dissonant at times, yet it has dreamy, ethereal beauty in the vocal harmonies, it is slow building, and it uses dynamics effectively. "And I am you and what I see is me." However, playing one song for close to 30 minutes is not the most radio friendly thing to do...

I worked in Studentradioen until I left Bergen in 1996, then again from fall of 1997 until I left Bergen in the fall of 1998; however, I had one final ambitious project: I wanted to create a series about the history of rock music. Coda was the name of the series, and I had close to 30 parts, each at about 30 minutes (I have to check the number of episodes, but it was scheduled for the full year). When I left Bergen, I was around week 10 or so of the series, so the final 20 episodes or so were made at a high pace, trying to get it all wrapped up so they could keep broadcasting the show. It was a great project for me, and while I wish that I could have spent more time on the last episodes, I am incredibly proud that I did create it. I tried making copies of the show for myself when I recorded all of them onto DATs (they had been recorded on a computer workstation at this point - we finally had one), but I messed up a few of them - but I believe I have them on MiniDisc still.

When I left Bergen for the second time, I also left my radio days behind. However, I met a lot of great people that way, both in Radio Ung and in Studentradioen. I learned a lot about sound and music, and my musical tastes were significantly expanded. The final song this time is one that I believe I played during the Undertoner show about Tony Levin, a spectacular bass player, here with King Crimson. This six-piece version of King Crimson was spectacular - and the use of Midi with Adrian Belew's guitar is interesting. But listen to Tony Levin's deep bass singing (he is the bald bass player with a mustache) and pay attention to his bass. Robert Fripp's tritonus is creating a spectacular dissonance throughout the song, and having two drummers in Bill Bruford and Pat Mastelotto and then Trey Gunn on the Chapman stick (which also really is Tony Levin's instrument)... The double trio created very interesting music!

Now Be Thankful (Fairport Convention)

My road to Fairport Convention goes through Richard Thompson, and I can guarantee you that both will be revisited in this blog, as I have gained an enourmous respect for both. However, in order to get there, I have to go back to the band that started my Thanksgiving series of songs - ZZ Top. I have already talked a little bit about the start of my civil service in Norway. What I didn't say was that I didn't last 16 months at Hustad Leir. As soon as 1995 rolled around - I had been at Hustad Leir for six months - I was able to leave for Bergen and an assignment at Centre for International Health (CIH), a research institute under the University of Bergen. I moved into a room at Fantoft Studentby, which essentially was an apartment style dorm room way outside the university campus and Haukeland Hospital, which was where CIH was located. I was nervous - I was on my own for the very first time, and although I had very good friends in Bergen, I was far away from home. Some of those nerves were mitigated when I heard familiar music through the wall - it was La Grange from ZZ Top's spectacular Tres Hombres album.

I had been living in Bergen for a very short time when my friend Vegard Nørstebø told me that the local student radio station, Studentradioen i Bergen, were interviewing - and that they were looking for engineers. Studentradioen was an all volunteer radio station - the only paid members were the editors - and I had background from Radio Ung in Trondheim, both as an engineer and a DJ, so I thought it sounded like a good idea. Vegard had already been working there for some time (we had both background from Radio Ung) and was enjoying it, so I saw it as a great way for me to get to meet people as well. I was able to join them, and among the shows I was the engineer for was Plog (the norwegian word for Plow - the noun, not the verb). Plog was an eclectic music program, drawing heavily from traditional music from all over the world - I envision the name as an indication that the music was whatever turned up after one had plowed all corners of the earth. It was hosted by cantankerous Thomas Ekrene - at least he appeared cantankerous to me initially - and I have to admit that I was a little afraid of him. After the show was over, both of us would walk separately down to the bus terminal, get on the same bus (still separately), and take it to Fantoft Studentby, where we both would walk separately to our rooms. Except his room turned out to be right next to me - and he was the guy who had been playing ZZ Top when I first moved in.

After a few weeks of walking separately to the same bus and then the neighboring dorm rooms, we finally started talking to one another. How it happened I don't remember, but the endresult was that we became fast friends - we played together in ad hoc bands assembled for Christmas parties and we eventually became roommates. And in the midst of all this, Thomas introduced me to Richard Thompson, the spectacular British guitarplayer who is a "musician's musician," one who rarely gets the acknowledgment he deserves by the general public, but who is revered by musicians in a variety of genres. The first song I heard was Shoot Out The Lights, and the first album I heard was You? Me? Us?, an ambitious double album produced by Mitchell Froom featuring an electric disk (voltage enhanced) and one acoustic disk (nude). The first Richard Thompson album I bought was Watching The Dark, a 3-cd set stretching from 1988 back to his beginning in a British folk-rock band called Fairport Convention. Among the songs from that time was a song written by Richard Thompson and Dave Swarbrick, Now Be Thankful, a beautiful ballad that seems to be a fitting song for Thanksgiving.