I have no idea where this came from. It has apparently been in my music collection for quite a long time; it seems to have come from iTunes, but I have no recollection of downloading it, and there isn’t anything else from King of Spain on my hard drive. Nevertheless, I found this last night playing through my library at random, and I discovered that it is awesome and I love it, so hooray for serendipity.

So there’s this Hawaiian dude who is, like, really good at the ukulele. See?

“About as helpful as you can be without being any help at all”:

Please don’t judge Katie Herzig’s music by the fact that it has made it into a great many shows that you like making fun of. (“Private Practice,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” etc.) And it’s really OK if that’s where you found her. Personally, I blame the guys at Aurgasm for introducing me to her stuff last year, and I’ve been slowly adding tracks to my library in a piecemeal fashion. I noticed last week that “Lost and Found,” from the new album “The Waking Sleep,” was trending on iTunes and some skillful Googling reveals that it was, in fact, on “Grey’s” recently, so that explains that. Which annoys me, because “Lost and Found” was probably my favorite song off “The Waking Sleep.” And god knows I can’t profile something that just showed up on mass teevee last week. So let’s go back to the last album instead.

This particular track has a live version, from her concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco, which I think is just tremendous — but I can’t find it in on YouTube, so you’re stuck with the version from “Apple Tree.” Which isn’t bad at all!

“Who?”

This guy:

I first encountered Oliver Swain this past summer. Stephen Quinn was talking about CBC Vancouver’s series of lunchtime concerts — at which Swain played sometime in July — and played this track by way of introducing his music. Driving in the car when this came on, I had to sit through the entire thing, even though I ended up in the parking lot at Wal-Mart with no recollection of why I was there or where I’d been going in the first place.

This is the best version of “Big Machine” I can find on YouTube; unfortunately, most of the other copies are home video shot at concerts with less-than-perfect acoustics. Having said that, I strongly encourage you to run out and buy his album on iTunes right now, because it’s the kind of music Mumford & Sons wish they made.

The title track from the latest studio album (2006). One of the things I love dearly about Colvin is that she’s only inclined to record when she actually feels like she has something to say. This can be frustrating sometimes because you’re forever waiting for something new and interesting — Sarah McLachlan, I’m looking at you — but when the results sound like this it’s oh-so-worth the wait.

So it turns out we’re going to do a pair of tracks from “A Few Small Repairs.” This one’s been in my mind since last week, when we went out to Alberta (my first time back in two years) for a day and a bit, and I found myself driving down the arrow-straight highways we never see in this part of the world. And for some reason, this was the song that was playing in my head the entire weekend. It’s not about the prairies, and Kansas is a long way from southern Alberta, but for some reason I think about life in small towns and the yearning for escape and, sometimes, the utter futility of the whole thing.

I wished hard enough to hurt
Drove fast enough to catch the moon
But I must have been dreaming again
’cause there’s nothing around the bend
Except for that flat, fine line
Of the Wichita skyline

It turns out there’s no video for this song. You don’t need one.

I recently stumbled upon a (very small) poem by the Jodo Shinshu poet Asahara Saichi:

84,000 delusions
84,000 lights
84,000 joys abounding

I have no idea if Shawn Colvin knew about this poem when she wrote this song. My understanding is that “84,000” is a number used in Buddhism — not just Jodo Shinshu teachings — as a shorthand for “a lot”, so it isn’t unreasonable to think the song drew some level of inspiration from either the saying or the poem. In this case, Saichi is talking about the great ecstasy that comes with the enlightenment of a severely deluded mind.

Which makes the context for “84,000 Different Delusions” interesting: “A Few Small Repairs” is sometimes described as a concept album exploring the emotions that come in the wake of a divorce, and if you were to think of the idea of divorce (or the ending of a fundamentally flawed and unhappy relationship) as a kind of enlightenment, well, it’s not much of a stretch to see how one could find abounding joy once one sees the light.

If late August was the time of The Northern Pikes, September seems to be the month of Shawn Colvin (and Paula Cole, but that’s a Soundcheck for another week). We’re fast approaching what is easily my favorite time of year around here, with the shortening days, the turning leaves, and the bright afternoon sunshine; Shawn Colvin is, for some reason, inexorably linked with all of this in my mind. So this month, I’m going to show off some of her best work.

Not the highest quality offering, but a good song from a great, under-appreciated Canadian band, with some amazing Crystal Taliefero backing vocals in there. There’s something about late summer that makes me think about The Northern Pikes.