Ohrenschmaus

I was down in Dixie Land,
played a silver fiddle
Played it loud and then the man
broke it down the middle.

There has been this book by Navid Kermani on the soothing effect of Neil Young’s music on his crying baby boy. I believe that this song which may or may not be mentioned in the book has an even stronger therapeutic effect on the listener than the average Neil Young song. As besides his high-pitch child voice it features an instrument which can express emotions like few others: the pedal steel guitar. The voice & the instrument are like brother and sister. They enter in a whining competition which the instrument must win due to it’s better capability to defamiliarise a tune by seemingly changing it’s speed and having this psychedelic effect on the listener. Somehow this strange duet with an almost dog-like feeling of harmony is exactly what I needed right now. The day has been a disaster and I astonish myself in somehow managing not to break into a dog’s bark after all the shit I had to take today. Let’s see what tomorrow will bring, it can get worse, I am 100% sure.

This entry was posted on März 16, 2010 at 21:51 and is filed under 70s, a day a second, ENG, musi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.