Heaneyland!

The Jungle Line

Sorry to be running late on telling you what to do; has been a busy week. Last night and this morning I ripped a bunch of CDs for Soren, a friend-of-a-blog-friend who, at age 44, had a stroke and is currently in the hospital in Park Slope. He's a music nut like myself, and while he hasn't regained the ability to speak (he can understand what people say to him, though), he's been enjoying listening to music. But they've been giving him lots of mainstream stuff to listen to -- Simon & Garfunkel and that sort of thing -- and while there's nothing wrong with Simon & Garfunkel, his tastes are much more wide-ranging. Rose saw his list of his top 99 albums and saw many she recognized from my collection (including some true obscurities, like Peter Blegvad's "King Strut") and thought, well, I bet Francis can help him out with getting some listening material that's more to his liking. It wasn't hard to put myself in his place and imagine his frustration, so I made him two MP3 CDs with albums from his list and a few other things I already had on my hard drive that were in the same vein. Anyway, I thought I'd put up a song from one of the CDs I ripped for him.

Since we had a Joni Mitchell cover as a bonus track last week, I thought a proper Joni Mitchell song was a good choice this week. This is from one of my favorites of her albums, "The Hissing of Summer Lawns", when her writing really started to leave folk music behind to become experimental jazz-pop. This song incorporates a field recording of drummers from Burundi, long before David Byrne and Paul Simon went global in the service of songwriting. Check it on out people, it's "The Jungle Line". (I see I'm skating close to the edge of my download limit; let me know if it goes over and I'll re-upload elsewhere.)

Update with a further thing you can do because I tell you to: Soren (aka Scraps) is an insuranceless freelance journalist. If you'd like to donate to help cover his health care expenses, you may do so here.