Voices

An eventful morning. Just after showering at 8.35, a massive, sharp jolt of pain in my left leg as I lifted it in the process of drying off. Could just about keep walking after it, but the discomfort running through the whole leg was considerable. But here's the coincidence: I'm booked to see my back doc at 10.30, so the timing is, ironically, just right. I lie on the floor for a while after the jolt and the pain mildly subsides, so walking is okay. But not driving, so Noi does the duty when we set off to the hospital.

Anyway, I'm given a jab of the magic potion and a new set of pills for the day, and by the early afternoon I'm pain-free but mildly spaced out (as I am typing this, to tell the truth.) So lying on the floor I get to thinking about voices - singing ones - I guess because I'm still thinking about Dylan from yesterday and the whole thing about his voice is a mystery to me. Glancing at some on-line commentary, I'm reading the usual stuff about how bad his voice is and how he can't sing at all, and part of me can see why these posters think that way. I remember borrowing an album off someone at school, as a kid, thinking I should really get into Dylan, and almost laughing at what sounded to me so thin and, frankly, comical. (Can't remember what album it was, though. John Wesley Harding?) And now, of course, as one of the Bobistas (lovely insulting term for us fanboys that one commentator came up with) I think his voice (or, more accurately voices) is/are just so obviously glorious that I really don't get why others don't hear the same way.

Which, for some reason, gets me thinking about other voices that I rate as just glorious in themselves. Eliza Carthy comes to mind, and I bung on the one solo album of hers I possess. (I have no idea why it's just the one, but there you are.) Now I've always liked Dreams of Breathing Underwater, but I just got completely lost in it today. Every aspect of it sounded perfect in every way. For a while I wondered whether Eliza had become my GOAT female voice replacing Ella Fitzgerald - and that may be so, until I play me some Ella again.

I was thinking of providing a link to the album here, then exploring YouTube realised that the video of Hug Me Like A Mountain I'd seen before wasn't the album version from Breathing, but a more recent production with the Wayward Band and the utterly wonderful Teddy Thompson - another great, great voice, and how could it not be considering his parentage? Which also got me to thinking of how Richard Thompson's voice which sounds thin and reedy on early Fairport stuff - I'm thinking Full House, for example - sounds way stronger now he's 70+, and wondering how he's done that.

Anyway, enough, here's the link to Hug You Like A Mountain and if you click on this and don't recognise its brilliance, then there's no hope for you, Gentle Reader.