This other thing.

By the way, just a quick observation but I've always thought of Under Pressure as a Queen tune that just happens to feature David Bowie. Hearing it show up on a Bowie CD, it occurred to me that you might also think of it as a David Bowie song with backing by Queen.

It'll hurt your brain if you think about it too long.

Lift Off.

I think we all listen for the same thing: that song and that perfect moment of lift off that happens in just one tune in a thousand. The song that builds and builds until the wheels take off and you're flying. You forget where you are and what you're doing. It's that song that lives a couple of inches off the ground.

I can think of a few of them. Sinead O'Connor's Troy gets me there every time. Prince's The Beautiful Ones drives off the road at the halfway point and goes to another place entirely. Where The Streets Have No Name always seems to me to be the one U2 song that couldn't possibly have come from just 4 guys and a recording studio. Sister Morphine. Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want (which does it in an astonishingly short song.) Tom Waits' On The Nickel. Joni Mitchell's River. All of them.

I want to add another song to that list then. Heroes. No surprise, I guess but here's a song that gets there and makes it look easy. I'm stealing from someone else's observation at this point (and I wish I could credit or link you to the person who wrote this, but I can't remember) but they had this to say: Heroes is a song that, for probably less than a minute and close to the conclusion, becomes one of the biggest songs ever created. You know the part that I mean. There's a turning point in the song where it up-shifts from being a great David Bowie tune to being an epic life-or-death arena-rattling number. Everything is moving and everything is clicking. Listening to it, I always know that it's coming and I listen carefully. Still, I can never put my finger on just where it happens.

Those are the songs that I listen for.

[On a sidenote, Under Pressure just about gets there also. Pretty freakin' close.]

Opera In One Ear.

With the warm weather coming on, the days of the brakelight/CD-pause phenomenon are pretty much at a close. So it is that my CD changer, spiteful rocking bastard that he is, has developed a new way to pee on the Blitzeroo. And I know you're familiar with this experience from at least one of your old cars...

We've got an intermittent right speaker, crackling in and out, sometimes playing full volume and sometimes none at all. This has happened before (during a run of that Furious Chick Belinda Carlisle in the Speeding Blitz) and it fixed itself. I'm hoping it does so again.

In the meantime, there's something so crazy-wonderful about a loud, strong opera note (I'm on Andrea Bocelli by the way) jamming a misbehaving speaker back in line. Imagine it - a note so forceful that it shifts from mono to stereo as you're listening to it. If we ever get back to Cherry Blossom, we need to use that technique in a song. Raph'd be all over it...

Check your calendar but it would seem that March is Blue Rodeo month!

Or so it seems to me. Between the LA trip, the week-long vacation, the short week last week and the Easter holiday, I can swear to you that I've been listening to Blue Rodeo for just about the full month.

Much as I love the Blue Rodeo and as much as a few key songs did tie into some sunny weather (Blue Rodeo works best as a spring-time band, I think) - I was anxious and delighted when the changer finally flipped over to something new.

Credentials? Yes, please.

Who, I mean who, is Rufus Blaq exactly? And is this CD for real?

Kind of an interesting chaser to 80 tracks of Big Band goodness.