Your ends help my means
What about tip-offs from readers?
It's a good idea, thank you.
For somebody who's sent me a list of their personal "desert island voices", the recent 'Redbird' from Heather Nova is due an entry, at least part of one. Suzanne guessed more than correctly, it was on my shelf within two or three days of arriving in the shops.
The other one? Er ... Kate Bush. A cheeky mini-mail, that, partly in French, from François: "comment ? shame on you ! tu n'as pas encore commenté le tout nouveau kate bush". I didn't know it was out yet (and replied the "old" Kate Bush isn't here yet either). My friend, 'Aerial' is also a double album with a fat booklet.
Anyway, it'll be a pleasure. I'm sure a woman's done a fine song about presentable men with frayed collars, so never mind one new shirt less.
The chance of writing up everybody I'd like to explore before Christmas is none! I'm too busy but it doesn't matter: you'll get bored if I endlessly say music is not a product and gifts don't have deadlines. 'Aerial' is the latest answer to a comment opening one of the most comprehensive fan sites I've seen for any musician:
"It's unlikely that Kate Bush will ever tour again, and equally unlikely that she will release another album or CD" (Sylvia says at Kate the muse, which is well stocked until at least late 2002).
Since I've mentioned the downsides of fan sites (worship and "Oh wow!" forums get wearisome), let me balance those remarks by recalling some such sites constitute great resources packed with reliable information you won't find on the "official" ones.
Priorities lie in the qualities
Several entries about iPods and iTunes, which greatly help make this place possible, haven't been deleted but though every day I see new iPods everywhere I'll no longer let woes with those get in the way of the women.
"When the day is short
And the nights are long
It's a different world
Where the rules are wrong,"
sings Martha Wainwright on an album that made many waves this year, partly because of a song called 'Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole' about a man I saw in concert a very long time ago, her father.
The video on her site is of 'When the Day is Short' and times she "will go home with whoever is sure". Martha today became the latest in my week's listening, which has also notably included Martina Sorbara (her 'The Cure for Bad Deeds' of 2003 has me very hungry for more) and London-born Lucy Woodward.
I have no choice but to go on dropping in names and home sites with very little comment, to keep you abreast of my ceaseless exploring. The day is indeed short, the night long, but working hours don't change, do they? Fortunately, music bends the rules of time.
 All three of those albums -- Woodward's is fortuitously, in this context, called 'While You Can' -- are first-rate and strongly recommended. She's on the left, in the kind of photo many people dub "Not a dumb girl", since declaring herself to be a 'Dumb Girl' in "mistakes" of the heart came in the first song I heard after telling you of Liz Phair's.
Hot with lyrics, all three defy categorisation as musicians. For iTunes, Woodward and Sorbara of one of my unusual iMixes in hand -- this one's 'Crossing the Limits', a selection of songs that do with some very successful surprises.
To maintain coherence of content -- what a song's words happen to be about -- and radically change musical style on the way is an ability that makes for immense enjoyment.
Telling you how to maintain your iPod and play safe and smart with iTunes is vital; you go crazy -- perhaps simply less so than me -- when they don't work properly and Apple does little to help. Neither the women nor you will thank me for frequent front-page interruptions on how to do it. So for the moment, those entries are parked in 'The Orchard' but they have no long-term place there either.
Often it feels like "a different world where the rules are wrong" when days are too short to do all we'd want, creatively and with love, but we live in it together and have to put up with its disharmonies and wrong-headed rules unless we make better ones.
When I write up Martina, we'll find a witty woman who can ask God "Did the devil put you up to this?" That's in a Sorbara song worth a visit to the iTMS on its own, 'This Ship.'
I shall make time, say while iTunes is doing what it is now -- importing more music -- to create a third log section for that "technical" stuff. Here's what non-geeks have put me up to doing with it: I'll turn it into language you want, easy to follow and with the best links for you to pick up where I leave off.
That's called improvisation when done by Patricia Barber or Cassandra Wilson and many others. It's been a long time, hasn't it, since we've listened to their like, "trad" or "modern"?
You want this log to rock? So do I.
iTunes is filling in a gap or two. Give me time with the women as well. I'll improvise often. I could have sworn I'd written about jazz poet-musician Annette Peacock ('I'm the One is her place) already for she knows a thing or two.
"Every bend of winter brings you to the new spring," she reminds us in one song on 'An Acrobat's Heart'. And who can argue with an avant-garde, meditative pianist who sings "Honesty is so sexy"? Getting tedious and technical around women sure ain't my idea of jazz.
Pooled talents are good news
Here are a couple of notes for the ladies.
They're not blue notes either, thanks to a small handful so far of you music-makers as generous as Martha Wainwright, whose video is for keeps. I appreciate the green lights for that Internet broadcasting scheme.
The good news in return -- it's funny Martha should title a song 'Factory' though not the one where I earn a living -- we seem to have a deal there at my boss's suggestion, based on what's here. AFP won't pay me extra for it but that's fine since instead I get more free time to be professional about passion.
The request was I write more about you not just here but in news agency feature stories and with regard to who's "making news". This would give singer-songwriters a potential public broadened to millions and I'm full of ideas for young, new musicians in particular.
My request and I'm told there's "no reason why not" was to be able to sign such articles with the name I use here -- Taliesin is no nom de plume but my second one -- while I also want lots of time for ... well, she belongs in 'The Orchard'.
I've been thinking about its implications and now gladly said "Yes".
Concert tours would be a good place to start and a chance we can all rejoice in to give you a boost like that sometimes. Who says business and pleasure don't mix? They can with a little of what you "chicks" have got since talent's no use without it: imagination.
1:17:33 AM link 
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