Over the Rhine has been my favorite band for about 30 years now, give or take. This song, Given Road, from this gorgeous record, Love & Revelation, is one of the most haunting, stirring songs they’ve ever recorded. I encourage you to listen. Best savored at maximum volume.

I COULDN'T NOT WRITE THIS REACTION TO RAISE THE ROOF

Green Library Online Exhibit Supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement This is important. You should visit it. 65 Stories: Say Their Names (a Stanford Libraries exhibit) Raise the Roof by MeShell Ndegeocello (Read by Staceyann Chin) “Raise the Roof” is a song from her forthcoming album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin by Meshell Ndegeocello. It speaks about the Black American experience. I will never, as no white person will ever, be able to know precisely what that experience is like.

Waking up this morning, which is a little overcast causing it to look like a grey muggy sauna out there, with a few songs from k.d. lang’s Ingenue. It’s one of very few albums I listen to that doesn’t have a single skippable song. “So It Shall Be” is my favorite this morning.

This song just spoke to a place in me that really needed to hear it. I’ve got to get my life together. “Wise Up” by Aimee Mann song.link/us/i/1544…

MAESTRO: THE MUSIC OF LEONARD BERNSTEIN

Browsing Apple Music for another reason, I stumbled onto a playlist of new music selections from film and television. I stopped scrolling when I saw Maestro: The Music of Leonard Bernstein. The song featured in the playlist is the second movement of The Chichester Psalms, which is the most dramatic of the three movements in the piece. I loved singing it in high school and later as an adult in the Columbus Gay Men’s Chorus with the Columbus Children’s Choir.

GET ME NEIL ON THE LINE, NO I CAN’T HOLD

Michael and I took a walk to the branch library. We can see the building from our back door, but you can’t walk there in a straight line because the fenced off baseball fields and playground are in the way. (We just love those fenced off baseball fields and playground. They aren’t a nuisance at all, and neither are the parents who bring their kids to them in the summer, who take up all the street parking and yell and scream and yell and cheer and yell and yell.

STRANGE THINGS: MY REACTION TO THE SONG

I drafted this little paragraph after I listened to a song by Abigail Washburn & The Sparrow Quartet. The song is called Strange Things and it lives on an eponymously titled album. Abigail Washburn is a clawhammer banjo playing singer songwriter. She plays bluegrass, speaks and sings in Mandarin, is married to Béla Fleck, and has a very short, but very powerful and memorable TED talk about the importance of music and the power it has to connect people and cultures (Building US-China Relations … by Banjo).