With Apologies To Babel

I fell in love with "Sigh No More." Mumford & Sons debut CD.

Wore the damn thing out. Melted it down and shot it into my veins, achieving a musical high better than sex.

Mystical, magical, beautiful.

Scarfed up "Babel", the follow up, and couldn't quite get the same high.

I don't know why. I don't know what I was expecting, I don't know where my head or my heart or my soul were at, but wherever they were located was not on the same plane or in the same vibe as "Babel."
So the CD got set aside for a while. Collected dust.

It called to me a week or so ago. I picked it up and jammed it into the CD player of The Big Ride and my head was blown off. Right through the roof of my magnificent new car.

I am tired of shoveling snow off my front seat.

My God, this album is delicious. Fragrant. Every bit as good as the first one.

So religiously inspiring that Jesus has commuted with me to work a couple of times tapping his toes and nodding his head. He just appears next to me and throws me a look daring me to say anything.

Or to criticize his singing.

The man cannot sing. Little known fact.

I sing unabashedly and, damn, I am good. Jesus does not like to be shown up so I don't sing when he is grooving next to me. Not easy but I figure it is a decent trade off for a shot at eternal heaven.

It's funny how subjective pleasure is. When I first listened to "Babe;" it was just OK. Now I cannot get enough.

Obviously the music hasn't changed, so what has changed in me?

I couldn't tell you. But I got a little more pleasure, a little more escape in my life and I will take that every time.

Mumford & Sons won a Grammy for "Babel". They should have won a Grammy for "Sigh No More" but the record industry doesn't work like that. The world doesn't work like that.

It's like the big wigs decided "Hey, we can't give a Grammy to these dudes for their first album, that would be unacceptable."

It's like Bruce Dern and the Oscars. If I was a betting man I would bet that Dern gets an Oscar for Nebraska. I haven't seen the damn movie yet, much to my chagrin, but I know it rocks. Everything I have read dribbles superlatives.

He'll get the Oscar because he is 77. "Let's give Bruce the Oscar, for Christ sake, before he dies."

I have dug his acting for years. Understated and powerful. He came close in 1978 as Best Supporting Actor in "Coming Home." Jack Nicholson said that Dern was "the best of the new breed of actors who had been born just before WWII and were coming into their own in the 1970's."

But I digress.

Whatever the politics, whatever the universal vibe, whatever is wrong with my head, "Babel" is an excellent musical meal.

Uplifting, inspirational and soaring.

Dig it, baby.