psychology dector

After 61 years of making music and defining the age of folk music as well as world music, pop music, and top-40 music, Paul Simon is looking at retiring, The New York Times reported last week.   This is a musician who started his career at the tender age of thirteen and has not stopped at 74 years young. “It’s an act of courage to let go,” he says in the article.   “I am going to see what happens if I let go.   Then I’m going to see, who am I?   Or am I just this person that was defined by what I did?   And if that’s gone, if you have to make up yourself, who are you?” He seems a bit long in the tooth to be questioning himself or his vital importance to musical history.   Simon is a consummate musician, songwriter, lyricist, poet.   I remember walking into a freshmen literature class during my undergraduate years and picking up the course anthology to see not only the usual fare of poets and writers, but there, in the midst of Robert Frost, Emily Dic...

Years ago, I was working two jobs and going to school full time.   Rarely did the two jobs overlap, but one of the few times they did was on a particular New Year’s Eve in the mid-1980s. I worked security at a shopping mall forty hours a week.   The job was good because it paid better than flipping burgers and it offered plenty of down time to study for my classes.   My second job involved playing keyboards in various bands in dives around L.A. and at weddings and bar mitzvahs.   At the mall, I met many off duty LAPD officers who moonlighted as additional security.   All of the officers and my fellow security personnel knew I was a musician, and most of them also were familiar with the places where I played. One New Year’s Eve, I had to work my regular shift at the mall before running home to change, load up my equipment, and get myself to Hollywood to play at a Filipino night club called The Bayanihan .   A friend of mine recommended me for the job. ...

Music history is littered with the dead, many of whom died young from suicide or vices.   It is therefore always interesting to wonder what if:   what if this artist had lived on?   How would he or she have changed the musical landscape? English folk musician Nick Drake was someone who could have changed the world of late 1960s-1970s poet-balladeers.   In fact, he did change the world just in his too short span of years and three albums.   There are no live recordings of Drake, no concert films.   Just his albums— “Five Leaves Left” (1969), “Bryter Layter” (1971), and “Pink Moon” (1972)—and various demos he made containing some new material or alternate recordings of the album cuts.   He died in 1974 at the age of 26 from an overdose of anti-depressants.   There is some discrepancy over whether he was a suicide or an accidental death as he was being treated for lifelong depression and mental illness. Drake’s music was rediscovered in the 1990...

From The Morning A day once dawned And it was beautiful A day once dawned from the ground Then the night she fell And the air was beautiful The night she fell all around So look see the days The endless colored ways And go play the game that you learnt From the morning And now we rise And we are everywhere And now we rise from the ground And see she flies And she is everywhere See she flies all around So look see the sights The endless summer nights And go play the game that you learnt From the morning                               Nick Drake (1948-1974) Nick Drake was a singer-songwriter from the late 60s and early 70s.   He was brilliant and transcendent as a poet balladeer, yet also deeply troubled.   His problem was depression, and neither marijuana or anti-depressants helped.   He recorded three albums in his brief career before he ...