by Kevin Burton In J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Sound-Sweep,” the main character is a non-verbal boy who has the job of vacuuming up all the stray sounds in a world without music. He befriends an opera singer living in an abandoned recording studio. The opera singer is destitute, having been displaced from …
Category Archives: music
Wife To The Rescue of Alexa And Me
by Kevin Burton My songwriting is punctuated by bursts of creativity, drive and joy but it swims in a vast ocean of self-doubt. If confidence were gun powder, I couldn’t blow up an apple. My confidence is like that sorry little piece of fat they call pork, in a huge can of beans, …
Can You Imagine Elton John As A Banker?
by Kevin Burton Elton John turns 76 today. So when I was nine years old listening to Crocodile Rock, he was all of 26. He wasn’t called Sir Elton back then, not hardly. He was a sight to behold. His wild costumes and antics on stage. His huge international hit songs, these …
Spoonful’s John Sebastian Turns 79
by Kevin Burton Happy 79th birthday to the personable multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter John Sebastian. Both his music and his personality seem accessible, based on how he comes off in interviews on You Tube. I mean, here’s a rock and roller who plays the auto harp of all things. He said he learned the instrument …
Hey Baseball, Get Off My Lawn!
by Kevin Burton The seasons are changing, calendar and sports calendar; the time is changing (spring forward Saturday night, kids), too much is changing. Any number of poets have rhapsodized about the beginning of spring and all it symbolizes. OK, I’m good with that. But as a sports guy in the man cave, …
Raised On Radio: Petty’s “Last DJ” Banned
by Kevin Burton National DJ Day on Jan. 20 sent me rocking down memory lane, recalling a time when deft tuning of a transistor radio could take you to another world. The heyday of radio, as we talk about it now in the past tense, was a whole other American era, an entirely …
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The Case For George Harrison, Best Beatle
by Kevin Burton I asked a co-worker, a big Beatles fan who has played guitar since high school, for his opinion on The Big Question: Who was the most essential Beatle? I suppose I was spoiling for a McCartney/Lennon fight. That discussion goes to Paul McCartney and John Lennon and stops there, right? …
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Quibbles And Bits: Chiefs An Evil Empire?
by Kevin Burton Today, some updates, passing asides and leftovers from previous posts. When I cook these up together, I call them quibbles and bits. Come and get it!: From my two posts about favorite duets: I can not overstate how much I love much of the work of Paul McCartney. …
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Looking For A Spark In A Springsteen Song
by Kevin Burton My favorite Bruce Springsteen song was born of irritation and is marinated in frustration. I seem to have slipped into it comfortably, as one might slip into a t-shirt and jeans. Here is how the song came to be, according to SongFacts: “Springsteen wrote it after his manager, …
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Don’t Miss The Moments Life Brings You
by Kevin Burton Somewhere between the art of science and the science of art, I dropped the ball and missed a moment. The girls were up from Oklahoma between Christmas and New Years Eve. The girls are our now-ten-year-old granddaughter on my wife’s side and her five-year-old step sister by living arrangement, not …
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