The evil music junkie speaks

This is a photo of part of my mom's CD collection. It's all classical, except a couple of soundtracks I bought her: Chicago, The Phantom of the Opera. I don't have a photo of my CD collection.

You could say music-acquisitiveness is in the blood, only very few of my CDs are classical and those that are are the dustiest.

I want to recommend each of the three CDs that have entered my collection within the past 24 hours. I think I'm listening to a guy named James Blunt, a CD called Back to Bedlam which is very close to one of Anne Sexton's book titles. He has kind of a studied, polished, semi-effeminate voice which is compared to David Gray and Damien Rice, a couple of guys you'll hear on local WFPK--the "ecclectic" music station.

The other two CDs leapt into my hands when I entered Underground Sounds questing after the Moody Blues because I had "Nights in White Satin" playing in my head all day. Well, they didn't have any Moody Blues, but they did have the latest Morrissey CD and the debut of a group called The Magic Numbers. You see, I was good, I stayed in the M's.

Morrissey is someone you either like or don't. I was a Smiths fan in the 80's, and hung on for the solo career, even though I could objectively tell myself that the insistence on a kind of dark melancholy outlook could potentially get old, though Mr. Morrissey himself doesn't seem to tire of it. In case you don't know, he's a proselytizing vegetarian, first famous for the song "Meat is Murder." My first favorite Smiths song was "How Soon is Now" which was played often in the Providence clubs in the mid '80s. We would emerge from a night of dancing singing the lyrics:

I am human and I need to belong, just like everyone else does.

Funny, but those lyrics still seem relevant today. I don't have as much to say about the Magic Numbers, have only heard the CD once, and I can make the profound statement that it sounded good. I read a review which compared the group to My Morning Jacket, my favorite Louisville group.

I am human and I need to belong, just like everyone else does.

Oh, did I repeat myself or something???

---Harriet.