Just a short to illustrate a point. I signed-off my brain dump yesterday (day before?) to give me head-space for the writing (again), before next week’s distraction of another conference(!).
I was still finishing off my review of Mark Solms’ (2026) “The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing“ – it really is very good and deserves to be read widely – so I owe him a coherent review. Now 100% read and about 85% through writing the review. [Prelim / partial read & review here.]
Throughout the 25 years of Psybertron, apart from the outdoor life, the main second string to my human world grounding beyond work and the page has been music; live music viscerally and the poetry of our singer songwriters, any form evolved from blues / folk rock. In fact I’ll be at another gig tonight, but I was distracted this morning by a Facebook post from one of those singer-songwriter poets: Tommy “Never gonna be a rock-star” Womack, someone we got to know and love in Nashville.
I saw Tom Petty on his first 1977 UK tour, in London, supporting Nils Lofgren (later with Southside Johnny and later to this day with Springsteen’s E Street band). Those were the days. Whatever, I’d always conflated Petty’s guitarist with Lofgren until after getting to know Mike Campbell through later albums and tours. With Benny Tench, the sound of the Heartbreakers.
Here he is talking about that earliest enduring song “American Girl” – he’s the guitarist so obviously he knows his guitar, the boy can play, but the whole song, the structure, the whys and wherefores of chord choices and progressions, the contributions from the other parts, even the odd line of poetry, it’s all there embodied in him and in the clips of riffs and licks he shares. Impossible not to feel the whole song. Quality will always out.
Humbling, as Tommy commented.
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