500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 140 Soulsavers - Broken

 

Mark Lanegan had a very keen sense of where he stood and wanted to be seen in terms of the lineage of Rock & Roll.

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 3 River

Coming up towards Christmas with a broken heart. 'Wishing you had a river you could skate away. on ' Joni is singing reputably about her broken relationship with Graham Nash. But the subject matter is ultimately far more interesting. Joni's subject matter is often love but the individual biographical specifics are not as interesting as the idea of love and the lies we tell ourselves about it..

Often when you're in love you say you're going to be in love ith the same person in the same way forever. But the metaphor of the river here is very powerful. When someone you love dies you assume that everything stops. But of course it never does . And that's something you must come to terms with . To try to live in the moment.

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 190 Yea Ming & The Rumour - Residue

 

Bay Area guitar band Yea Ming & The Rumours park their fourth album Residue. . Delivery halfway between Nico and Hope Sandoval. Yo La Tengo and Camera Obscura/ Songs that chime for Trur Believers and True Romantics . This is undemanding easy listening Indie with a heart half broken and a record collection of pure classics.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,428 Les Big Byrd

 

I'm sure you've often asked yourself this pertinent and relevant question; 'So what exactly do Scandinavians actually bring to the table....' In reply i'd have to say. 'Well this !!!' Grab yourself a seat at your desk or wherever you choose to perform your labours in your flat or home. Pur on your headphones and give Les Big Byrd's new album Ruin Everything a blast. Within a couple of minutes all will be clear. That my friend is what Scandinavians bring to the table. 

I went out yeterday to have a discussion about the state of Rock & Roll with Nick who owns Beatdown Records  the Record Emporium across the road from my flat at the top of the rise flowing past the Catholic Cathedral and down the steady slope towards Newcastle Central Station. The State of Rock & Roll needs to be discussed and who better for this kind of summit than two middle to late middle aged men like Nick and myself . I've come in on previous occasions and Daisy, Nick's pretty teenage daughter has been helping her dad behind the counter. Daisy knows. She tends to pat Nick on the head and disppear off to Beatbox backroom and leave us to it.  Busying herself with more important matters.

Back to the Rock & Roll summit of gestern nachmittag. Nick and I discuss all things Rick Rubin. Earth changing Johnny Cash albums now already a quarter of a century or more behind us, which said and say something fundamental about life itself, the human condition, made the fundamental readings on some key texts. 

I meanwhile saw the sleeve of Ruin Everything which immediately makes you want to own it.It's the sleeve of the year so far. At least for me.  I resisted the coveting urge which is very strong among record buyers like me bid my farewells to Nick and went down for thirty lengths at the fitness centre.  A couple of great chats and a stew in the sauna and then I came back to listen to Ruin Everything again on my headphones and sailed into Saturday afternoon with my windows open to allow the sun's breezes to cool my flat and beckon us to the evning.

I'm listening to it again now on my television set. We're just past Summer Solstice but July and August look promising and it's good to hear a rip roaring Rock & Roll record with occasional calming interludes from the land of Thor and Odin on a Sunday morning before I head for church. I've just listened to SomethIn' Else by Cannonball Adderly to ease the sleep from my limbs. Now I want something to summon the blood and embolden  me for the skirmishes of the day. 

Ruin Everything ticks those boxes. It's gloriously dystopian. In all the right ways. Hawkwind, Les Bid Byrd's Scandinavian forefathers, The Stooges & MC5, Spacemen 3 and Spiritualised, Suicide and so forth. In genreal it's just a glorious blissed sound. A record as good as its sleeve.... 

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 141 Destroyer - Destroyer's Rubies

 

While I was doing my Literature degree, i was highly taken by a character in Thomas Pynchon's V who thought os himself in the third person. now, I sometimes wonder if a great many of us do. Destroyer certainly does and makes artistic currency out of it.

Destroyer's Rubies comes from 2006 and is restless, dramatic and ever so slightly unhinged. It is also authorly. It feels like a fantastic weekend trawling bars in Manhattan with your most melodramatic and unhinged friend with some highly improbable near escapes from tragedy but somehow living to tell the tale. .

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 4 Amelia

 

'Like Icarus descending...'

Amelia Earhardt is a mythical figure in North American discourse. Some of Joni's songs make you feel almost obliged to sit down and listen intently and even do some folow up research. What you think about this probably defines what you feel ultimately about Joni/ liking her is not always a casual arrangement, but one which may result in wrinkles.

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 191 The Cribs

 

It's Monday morning and I'm heading towards my start at ten. The Cribs have their ninth album and I'm not familiar with their previous eight. But I'm listening to Selling A Vibe again. I had it on loop last night and it actually sounds alright although I find it difficult to put my feelings into precise words,

It's just Pop Music innit? This actually sounds a but Glam to me and certainly has me on a flying carpet to short trouser days. A glass half full approach.Thumbs up from me.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,427 Hanging Stars

 

The Hanging Stars were playing down the road from me six short years ago. A bus ride away from the Centre of Newcastle where I live. In a bar in Gosforth High Street. I was looking forward to seeing them play. Considering inviting a friend down who I've since fallen out with. I seem to have fallen out with a few since then. But  I wonder if I'm alone. It seems to be the times.

Anyhow, the gig was cancelled because COVID night was impending. The night from which we haven't yet completely emerged it seems. But The Hanging Stars have hung on in there.Just a Day is their sixth album and there are no evident changes in their signature sound.It's comforting.  

This record makes me think of one of the most memorable days of my life. A glorious sunny day in 1984 when my sister and I walked from our lovely three storeyed family home in Teddington. opposite Bushy Park. All the way along Queens Road and across the bridge to Kingston and a record shop which specialised in the Paisley Underground sound and all the ringing American guitar bands that The Melody Maker were championing at the time. 

I had a chat with the guy behind the counter and bought Reckoning the second album by R.E.M. I'd been wearing down my copy of Murmur and had high hopes that Reckoning was going to be Murmur Part II. I'd lost myself in it entirely and just wanted the same thing again, an indication of my limitations but I'm proud looking back that my heart and instincts were in exactly the right place. I still play Reckoning every couple of weeks. 

 Alison and I walked back in the burning, golden sunlight home to 111 Queens Road. I went upstairs and put Reckoning on my record player and found I didn't know what I was listening to. I was slightly nonplussed.  It turned out Reckoning was not Murmur Part 2 as I'd hoped. It was something else. R.E.M. were ahead of the game. Certainly ahead of mine. I was a follower essentially. I probably still am. 

Just a Day is not in Reckoning's league. It hedges its bets and gives the listener what they want. What they've learned to expect. I'm actually quite pleased it does.  This is a well worn sound forty years and more on. Sixty years since My Tambourine Man. 

 It's a record for those for whom Gene Clark was their favourite Byrd. Who think Big Star lost the plot rather when Chris Bell flew the coop and still haven't recovered from Gerry Love's departure from Teenage Fanclub.And probably never will. Who go to record shop blow outs on a Saturday morning hoping to chance upon choice New Riders of the Purple Sage, Flying Burrito Brothers  and Poco albums in the bargain bin. People like me. This is a great record. For people like me .... 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,380 Pet Shop Boys - Actually

 

Some of the  Pet Shop Boys is self consciously shallow and throwaway. But suddenly they cut deeper and you realise that these are pen portraits of  late Eighties loves, lives and deaths. The hedonism and the sadness and the mundanity .The economics of emotional exchanges in days which frankly often  felt like grim times, They picked up the baton from The Smiths. 

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 142 Scissors Sisters - Scissors Sisters

 

Not an artist that particularly set my world on fire at the time and they're not one that are doing so particularly now.. A band either chimes with you I find. Or it doesn't .This is simply too high pitched.

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 193 Robber Robber - Two Wheel's Move the Soul

 

Every day it seems brings fresh drama . I feel I'm at the best time and this is really living. the world is in flames and it feels great to be alive and await what each new dawn brings. I'm travelling South but first must find listening fate to take me from one class to the next. Today Robber, Robber's Two Wheel's Move the Soul.

Desperate frantic, noise. Somewhere between the poles of My Bloody Valentine and Deerhunter. Claustrophobic, Clawing for the daylight. Plenty of .space for melody. Robber, Robber hail from Vermont . Two Wheel's Move the Soul is fine, fresh  product. It makes being in a band sound like the 'best idea' That's enough. Onto the next, . 

Song(s) of the Day # 4,426 Black Keys

 

You sense with Rock & Roll bands that they just can't resist one more shift at the seam. With the sense that this is 'the one'. Or even if it doesn't turn out to be exactly that. This this is what they like to do best and perhaps this far into the game, they really don't know any other way.

So to Black Keys and their latest album Peaches. It's their fourteenth in all since they first headed out from Akron, Ohio, one of the great Rock & Roll cities in 2001. They always had a mythic Blues and Garage sounds and never more so than here.

It all sounds great at the end of a week with the weekend looming. It's a set of covers that encourage you to hunt down the originals. No sign of the well drying up any time just yet.    

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,381 Duster - Stratosphere

 

They were dressed for success. But success it never came. Possibly because they were wearing spacesuits. San Jose. California trio, Duster released their first album Stratosphere in 1998, something of a 'space' concept and it's pretty much the indie hep cat's dream cult record although it's only really come to inhabit that status given the passage of time, being barely noticed except by proper devotees when it came out.

Locating the tender spot between Slint and Pavement, if Stratosphere hadn't actually been recorded and put out there it would probably have had to be invented. It really doesn't do anything that those two bands didn't do themselves comprehensively over the years, which is probably why they are so much more generally revered and remembered, but it's a fine album nonetheless.

There's an understated minimalist grace to proceedings throughout. The album cover describes the record it houses well. You suspect the band spent a fair bit of time staring at their shoes and effects pedals onstage.Sometimes there are vocals, sometimes there aren't. It doesn't really seem to matter much either way. Duster maintain their poise.

Other names could be thrown in as potential influences. Wire's Pink Flag is probably the year zero as far as this particular musical sub-genre is concerned. Pere Ubu and Mission of Burma are somewhere in Stratosphere's DNA too. But really it's a definitively Nineties American Indie record, intent on maintaining a defeatist shrug, all the while sending Mayday signals to an oblivious Ground Control before drifting out of range once and for all. The rest is static...

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 143 Danielson - Ships

 

This throws the indie kitchen sink of twee and ennu into the mix song after song. It's an Eternal Sunshine kind of record. 

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 194 Pictish Trail - Life Slime

 

The sun is up, But today it rises in a Canterbury sky for me at least. A friend is on Mount Everest. Another is dealing with he death of his father, Another is in Baghdad, Bombs and rockets are exploding a mile away frim where he us waking up. Pictish Trail's new album Life Slime is spinning on headphones as I sit at my desk in the box room of my parents house.

It's rather magical. Spacey. Dancey, Rising up from earth's orbit and into space. We live in the moment and time where we are and myst make the most if it, This will more than do me for today.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,425 Yea Ming & The Rumours

 

Bay Area guitar band Yea Ming & The Rumours park their fourth album Residue. . Delivery halfway between Nico and Hope Sandoval. Yo La Tengo and Camera Obscura/ Songs that chime for Trur Believers and True Romantics . This is undemanding easy listening Indie with a heart half broken and a record collection of pure classics.

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 5 A Case of You

 

Talking about love and how it comes and goes and how that can hurt.

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,382 Primal Scream - Exterminator

 

Phew! Rock & Roll. Primal Scream were frequently utterly preposterous but Exterminator certainly cut the mustard. I was in Catania, Sicily, enjoying one of the best years of my life and bought it on CD when it came out during that year and played it frequently. I'm playing it now and its heady and uncompromising as ever. Stick it to the man Bobby ! Woo! 

No Logo and insurrection were in the air. Primal Scream knew a bandwagon when they saw it and jumped aboard.  I meanwhile was writing a very bad novel where I chucked the checklist of the zeitgeist at the wall when I got back from my lessons or early in the morning. I hoped something would stick. Precious little did, 

I stuck with teaching but I'm glad I wrote the novel . Everyone should write a novel, plant a tree and have a baby  they say. One out of three ain't bad. I was having the time of my life. Perhaps its time for my second novel or maybe I should focus on the other two next ! 

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 195 The Orielles - Only You Left

 

Halifax' finest Orielles are back with a fourth album Only You Left which finds them again heading off to distant shores once more. They don't like the conventional. If this leads to slightly inconclusive junctures occasionally you cant but commend their modus vivendi. 

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 144 Movietone - The Sand & The Stars

 

'The secret music of the secret Briatol'

I don't know Movietone, but a cursory listen to The Sand & The Stars makes me suspect I should know them better. Another undiscovered planet. They're  Gloomy Indie, though perhaps the apt term is Post Rock. They have muscular and wistful epiphanies. 

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 6 Big Yellow Taxi

 

This is joyous and throwaway. as are the most precious and profound moments. In Pop Music as in life.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,424 Zoh Amba

 

I came across Eyes Full by Zoh Amba completely by chance late on Sunday night. I listened to it again on coming home from the Jazz jam yesterday evening without a full context either time as I generally think that's the best way to listening if you can.

It sounds like much of the best music in that it seems as if it was directly transmitted from outer space.  Or else America which is often one of the closest things we've got at our immediate disposal for that sensation. If you're looking for an earthly comparison it strikes me as a mutant strain of Appalachian blues.

There's plenty of grief and plenty of joy and plenty of purest emotion that's somewhere in between. The singer seems to be a country cousin of Big Thief's Adrienne Lenker which is hearty recommendation alone and some of it sounds like it was recorded in a blender frankly. It all has a giddy drive and vision. 

250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 8 Can - Future Days

 

You cannot help but wonder at Can. They plot lunar landscapes. Impossible but remarkable highways. I started listening to them today at seven as I went into my working day. I've been teaching since eight. Slotting in and out of online classes. Now I'm done for Wednesday and looking to the evening and Can spins again. One for the ages. 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,383 Manuel Gottsching - E2 - E4

 

This is a wonderful exercise. To run up and down these lists and spend a random hour in the company of a magical album I may never listen to again but whose company I enjoyed incredibly this afternoon.

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 145 My Chemical Revenge - Sweet Revenge

 

A form of expression that's never done anything for me . We can't all be so open minded alas.

1967 Top 40 8th June # 17 The Hollies

 

The kind of song you visualise comong out of radios and your dearly departed listening to on their transitors as they went about their days. 

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 196 Jana Horn - Jana Horn

 

The streets are wet with rain and it feels like we're ready for Spring. Jana Horn's latest album is spinning. Ingenue beauty. Sybille Baier. Vashti Bunyan,, David Lynch. Slightly offkey outsider music. It's all better on the outside. That's the way to the inside. 

Jana is playing at The Cumberland Arms at the beginning of March. I need to get my ticket and see if I can fid myself someone to go with. Donald Trump has decided he has a right to Greenland. Minerals? The world for the time being keeps turning. 

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 7 Chelsea Morning

 

I always associate Chelsea Morning with Terri Garr. Her role as a rather grim waitress in Afterhours with Rat Traps in her living room. It's not fair to the song itself which is about the act of becoming, Of 'putting on the day.'

Song(s) of the Day # 4,423 Nirvana

 

I'm up early, and I'm listening to Nirvana. No, not that one, though I might give Nevermind a spin later. But the original Nirvana, the Baroque Pop London band from the original Psychedelic dawn. Chamber Pop of the simplest, most innocent and appealing sort. Like finding yourself on the carpet again. In front of Children's hour.

I'm listening to The Story Of Simon Simopath their debut album. It came out on Island Records in 1967. All innocent wonder and the sense that the world is turning from black and white to colour at last. That will do me. I'm ready for whatever the day has to throw at me . 

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 8 Urge For Going

'I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town.'

You write a song. Create poetry . And art. Then Put it on the B side of a seven inch single. 

 

Charlie Watts

 

Modern Lovers

 

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,384 Bill Evans Trio - Waltz For Debby

 

The ideal early evening record. As shadows gather. 

1967 Top 40 8th June # 18 Nancy Sinatra & Frank Sinatra

 

I've always thought there was something wierd and perverse about this song and the the way that a father and daughter sang it to each other. Nobody I've ever mentioned this too has shared my opinion. I guess you call it Show Business.

250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 9 Pixies - Bossanova

 

Watching the World Cup with the volume off. Reading about Lenny Kaye's friendship with Lou Reed and their shared passion for horror comics. Listening to  Pixies'  Bossanova at high volume. True Romance and Rock & Roll are not dead. 

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 197 Doug Gillard

 

A quiet work day is a difficult thing for me these days/.I have nothing to do. So why not just enjoy doing nothing. It was something you didn't have the slightest difficulty with as a child. But now you feel you must be doing something. Running up some hill. Worrying about something.

But I'm, not going to. I'm listening to Doug Gilliard's new album Parallel Stride . It's straight as you go. Neat licks and chord changes. Doug sounds like the guy in Urge Overkill and the band sound like a Power Pop band from 1974 or a New Wave Band from 1979. It's a place where men are always playing with the Queen of Hearts.And the Joker ain't the only fool.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,421 Jenny Gillespie Mason

 

This appears to be a Golden Age for diaphonous hazy Folk Albums which recall the earlier Golden Age  for such stuff. The sixties and early seventies. The days of Bashti. Bridget St John and Nicky D. Jenny Gillespie Mason has been in Sis but now she's branching out on her own winding hillside path with In The Safety of the Light. It's all Folky Flutes and autumnal melody. Much of this is inspired and sublime.

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 146 Ween - White Pepper

 

Ween were ahead of the curve in some respect in that they offered the whole Nostalgiafest experience before it became de rigeur. White Pepper could have come out in 1973. It's AOR Radio for those who weren't around for Foghat and Captain & Tenneille.

1967 Top 40 8th June # 19 P P Arnold

 

There's a purity and simplicity to everything about this that is still quite astonishing. Written by Cat Stevens.

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 198 Jenny On Holiday - Quicksand Heart

 

Jenny Hollingsworth peels off Let's Eat Grandma for an excursion of her own as Jenny on Holiday and Quicksand Heart a holiday properly in the Pop Sun. Pitchfork detects Replacements Cindi Lauper and Prefab Sprout within its grooves. I'm not sure I can but the record's groovy..

It's all rather like a helium balloon appearing in the sky on a greyer than grey day. Light as a feather. Not remotely challenging or particularly interesting lyrically but what were you expecting Knut Hamsen's Hunger. ? I imagine Nick Cave will be along with fresh product presently. The third cool new record in three days on It Starts With a Birthstone. January Blues? Not here.

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 147 Silver Jews - Bright Flight

 

Strange things happened in the New Millennium. The Canon adjusted and bent out of shape. Nick Cave and Mark E. Smith became near mythical figures. And David Berman and Bill Callahan and Cat Power  rose to prominence as a Holy Trinity for the Alternative Set.  

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,385 Bill Joel - 52nd Street

 

What to say about Billy Joel. A short man who dreamed large. Listening to his records generally made me wonder what New Jersey was like.They never really made me yearn to want to go there.

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 9 Woodstock

 

Mithchell was unable to appear at Woodstock and was bitterly upset not to do so. So she wrote this Listening to it now it feels like a magical enterprise captured. Cynicism be damned. The dream of avoiding being a cog in something turning. 

Song(s) of the Day # 4,420 The Strawbs

 

I started this blog in 2013 with no clear destination in sight ,because it seemed like a good way to occupy myself, because writing was one of the things which I most liked to do and I wanted to try to get better if I could . I'm still at my desk writing pretty much on a daily basis thirteen years on and haven't run dry quite yet and don't intend to.

A lot has happened to me in terms of my life in the meantime but that's not why I write here. This is not an exercise in emotional bloodletting, angst ot grief or distress. I don't really like that kind of writing or engage in those kind of exercises if I can avoid doing so.

The records I like most are the ones that show you a whole vision, an imaginative universe to inhabit and feed on. Losing yourself for forty minutes or so in an entirely plausible and self sustaining alternate terrain and topography that you'd never have imagined possible. I have one today. 

I've just bought The Strawbs Grave New World on the Newcastle Quayside and now I'm sitting listening to it in my living room on loop as the world turns and the afternoon thickens and drifts ito Sunday evening. Grave New World  beckons you into a world as blessed and magical as the happiest childhood memories. A sylvan grove to pause and billow and spread the quilt for repast in the best imaginable company.  

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,386 The Clash - Give Em Enough Rope

 

I've heard a lot of nonsense about The Clash in the last few years. That The Damned were better than them. That they were just a London thing. That they weren't Punk Rock. That they were just about selling trousers. 'Oh I don't like Joe Strummer's voice.' Lots and lots of Pish & Nonsense. 

The band signed to a major. They didn't play Top Of The Pops. They were a mass of contradictions and a fantastic, fantastic thing from start to chaotic end. There's not a band on earth, still, that can hold a candle to them. They offer heroism in spades.

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 148 Maher Shalal Hash Baz -- From a Summer to Another Summer: An Egypt To another Egypt

 

This is what television's were invented for . To play whimsical, joyful albums on. Well done John Logie Baird ! A whi,msical compilation of fine and tender pieces. From the Japanes underground of the early Eighties to the warm embrace of Stephen Pastel.  Get away from the herd. 

It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 199 Voka Gentle - Domestic Bliss

 

Domestic Bliss? Surely an oxymoron A vain imagining. But in this case it happens to be the latest album from Voka Gentle a band for London who may be in the gutter and poseurs of am expressive dayglo sort but at least they're looking at the stars as they head for the hills as Dr.s Wilde and Bowie would prescribe, Even if the album cover is bad Salvador Dali and no mistake !

This is a bit of a ragbag but isn't lacking in daring or ambition. Even though occasionally I'm reminded of The Thompson Twins. Doctor Doctor !!! It's not running on the spot at least. It might be lacking in shape and substance on occasion but  its decorative, varued  and throws shapes.  I give it 7.5, it's It Starts With a Birthstone's song / album of the day. I salute its bravura. Who precisely is Torpedo Mike and why are Voka Gentle staring back down my telescope ? Your guess is as good as mine. 

250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 10 Elastica - Elastica

 

You gotta pick a pocket or...... I don't really care how Elastica are viewed these days. Strangely enough for such a bunch of brazen arriviste chancers, I think a case could be made that they were actually ahead of their time rather than behind it. As for their belated follow up to this glorious debut when they decide they would actually rather sound like The Fall than Blondie, Wire or The Stranglers. Hmm.....

Song(s) of the Day # 4,419 Jalen N'Gonda

 

Music isn't always particularly in 2026 I must say. Take Jalen N'Gonda's latest album Doctrine of Love. It's Neo Soul of the coolest stripe. They follow the Motown template to the tee. All the T's crossed and the I's dotted. But you wonder why to listen to this rather than a classic which came out in 1972.  I'm not entirely sure how to answer you. 

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 10 Help Me.

 

Joni's only Top Ten US Singleshit. About the act of falling in love. Not an easy thing. Joni was somewhat dismissive of this but said it 'sounded good on the radio.' I'd say she's selling a thing of great beauty somewhat short.