Can't stop listening to Rogue's Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, and Chanteys. This is not surprising, as I have a longstanding - if juvenile and unoriginal - thing about the high seas, as it were. Chalk it up to finally getting the best novel, Moby Dick, about 8 years ago. And then realizing that Jaws is probably the best of late 20th-century American film.*
Here is what I would like to say about this collection and the fact that I've had it playing a good 4 hours a night since Tuesday (for the uh... record, there are 43 songs). If you must be unrepentantly maudlin, do it well.
If you hit the iTunes and buy one or two of these, you'll want to go for both Baby Gramps pieces ("Cape Cod Girls" and "The Old Man of the Sea"), "Mingulay Boat Song," the two John C. Reilly (yes, that John C. Reilly) pieces, and... well, I'm taken with most of them. I keep forgetting this is sort of a novelty thing.
* It occurs to me that I've never used this medium to put together a defense of these two claims (Moby Dick and Jaws as the respective peaks of their categories). Maybe someday.
Posted by dave at January 25, 2007 6:59 PM | TrackBack