Tuesday, August 15, 2006

What kind of idiot doesn't even know about wild mountain honey?

Tower had a big sale t'other day, and I scooped up a handful of CDs. Some had been on my want list a while and some were impulse purchases. It's funny how sometimes what you think you'll like doesn't really appeal after it fully sinks in, while you can be surprised by other material that you'd previously written off. Such is the case for me with the new Steve Miller greatest hits album. Steve Miller can be horribly clichéd ("you got to go through hell before you get to heaven"), eye-rollingly goofy ("some call me the pompatus of love"), unhelpfully trite ("shoe the children with no shoes on their feet"), awkwardly silly ("I'm a space cowboy; bet you weren't ready for that"), and just plain boneheaded ("she don't even know about wild mountain honey"). Still and yet, I find myself playing these songs more often than I'd have guessed.

Yeah, his stuff is corny and cheesy. But sometimes your life is at a point when you embrace blind, reason-free optimism. You want to believe you can fly like an eagle, that there's a solution, that you don't have to live in a world that's heartless, that you can keep on dancing and be alive, that --- yes, Virginia --- there is a Pompatus of Love.

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