Elevate Me Baby - Big Joe Williams

It’s a long interview, but wide-ranging & earnest.

“Boiling me alive from the inside”—yes, that’s how it feels.

I’m channeling Gil Scott-Heron as I read this.

Cassandra Louise Bogan is somewhat of a poet’s poet – and that’s sort of a mixed blessing. Earning that title means that other folks who work at the craft of poetry recognize the things she’s able to do even…

Cassandra bitterly dismissing the gift of prophecy as a trick in this masterful poem of compressed characterization by Louise Bogan. It tears through her like a song she writes—and so I do so, with my rough-hewn voice at the Parlando Project. #PoetryAloud #NPM2026

frankhudson.org/2026/04/20/c...

Inside baseball, but today I finally did a complete mix in different software from the one I’ve used for over 25 years.

Still feels a little like I’m working in the dark wearing mittens, but the old software I’m trying to replace hasn’t gotten wanted new
substantial new features in over a decade.

Elliott Smith, The Kinks, Waterloo Sunset cover [Live on the Jon Brion Show] YouTube video by Junk Bond Trader

The late Elliott Smith performing a cover of The Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset" live on The Jon Brion Show in 2000 m.youtube.com/watch?v=LFbQ...

I’ve come to the thought that Bowie put in the dolphins incongruously in “Heroes” as a nod to Fred Neil’s song “The Dolphins” either from Neil’s own version, or possibly Tim Buckley’s.

btw: the Woody Guthrie Kracken Busters with the exacerbated Dewey cracked me up.

comic panel about woody guthrie singing an anti-sea monster song

new Kraken Busters: today we learn why the strip is called "The Kraken Busters."

Also: for the first time, a Kraken Busters installment with an audio companion piece

keithpille.com/the-kraken-b...

#comicoop

A colourful collage with a young brown haired woman with a bouffant and another smaller blonde woman drawn over in Andy Warhol screening style, with advertising slogans and a can of Libby’s creamed rice, these are against old floral wallpaper, surrounded by drawings of a starscape, leopard print and shapes that look like internal organs

Chore of Enchantment
Collage made from Wills Cigarettes & PG Tips collector’s cards, 1960s wallpaper, Vogue & Parade & Women’s Realm magazines, watercolour, acrylic marker & felt tip

I liked that, even though it seems to have not included the “where did that come from…” dolphins swim verse. But you had me with the filter-sweep feedback there anyway.

Wonderful. As I stated reading it my mind played music to itself because of its words and these words:

“Count them, 1, 2 loves
Which is my face
Which is a building
Which is on fire”

What I loved was the shear variety of those early Top 40 era playlists—pop was just insane with conceptual differences in those years.

Chronically wounded me, kept me from ever being able to answer “What kind of music do you like?”

I awoke early this morning to the white magic of April snowfall in Minnesota & to delight in the tale of Yeats casting out Crowley by invoking the spell of bad debts to the landlord.

I’ll leave it to you to wonder if poetry needs more wizard battles during this #NPM2026 #NationalPoetryMonth

Reflections In Blue Just a few days ago I was posting my rough and untrained voice singing with orchestral instruments. Today I’ve got nothing but a small and plainly ordained acoustic guitar and I’m going…

If this poem I made into a song was intended for kids, it presents them with a near-Blakean cosmic scene: the sea the iris of the earth’s eye—the blue earth globe the birds egg that births us.

Part of the Parlando Project’s celebration of #NationalPoetryMonth #PoemsAloud #poetry #music

He made a great record, the ‘70s NYC boho version of Merle Travis’ “Sixteen Tons” with delusory waitstaff & retail clerks instead of miners, acedia instead of coal dust on their backs. As Scott reminds us: this guy came to town a poet, & he turned out some of the sharpest lyrics from that scene.

#unpopularopinion #RSD Robert Johnson should have made his new remixes a Record Store Day exclusive

Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet: A Decade Here's a song I made from a sweet poem of enduring love by Amy Lowell. This in another in this year's April National Poetry Month series were I'm performing poems found in Louis Undermeyer's between-t...

Amy Lowell wrote of the transit from desire to devotion. I made her poem into a short song as part of the Parlando Project’s #NationalPoetryMonth series.

parlando.libsyn.com/a-decade

Aspires to be a water bed?

The Library of Alexandria story that could have changed how we heard Charlie Patton et al was that when Paramount recording co. In Wisconsin went broke they just dumped all their masters in a river.

…but for this listener, capable of some real achievement.

Favorite deep cuts: “Kosmic Blues” where she almost goes Tuvan throat singing in the coda & the cover of Moondog’s “All Is Loneliness” from the Mainstream LP

…trying to see how far one can take expressing those emotions.

As to Big Brother: they were essentially a proto punk band, so try listening to them like you’d listen to Iggy & the Stooges for a different appreciation framework. Yes, she was an uneven performer, pitchy, prone to oversinging…

I hear you. comparing her POMH version (particularly the live at Monterey version that made her career) Erma Franklin’s is like comparing Patty Waters’ version of “Black is the Color of my True Loves’s Hair” to Nina Simone’s—all 4 are emotionally expressive, but Joplin like Waters is…

…compared to the often worn-out 78s that were all that could be used to dub the presentation of many others of his era.

But again, personally I can still recall hearing that 1961 LP for the 1st time—and by the time I got through the track “Come On In My Kitchen” I was captured.

Does seem to have more treble-range information from this disk than previously released versions of this recording.

No disrespect to Johnson’s genius—but on the ‘61 King of the Delta Blues Singers LP, his playing was able to make more impact because Columbia had access to the best source records

Some rich description in these longer poems. Favorite passage for me:

“Our downward faces in puddles

discern the sky’s face”

I may have just recorded the basic tracks for what will be the 900th Parlando Project released musical performance.

I started planning the Parlando Project in 2015 thinking I might do an impressively large number of combinations of literary poetry with original music—maybe as many as 100!

Amy Lowell’s “A Decade” Our most recent post in our April National Poetry month series using poems found in Louis Untermeyer’s between-the-world-wars Modern American Poetry contained some quotes from a long poem, contempo…

And here’s an Amy Lowell poem I’ve just finished performing about long love: frankhudson.org/2026/04/15/a...

November - Amy Lowell The vine leaves against the brick walls of my house, Are rusty and broken. Dead leaves gather under the pine-trees, The brittle boughs of lilac-bushes Sweep against the stars. And I sit under a lamp Trying to write down the emptiness of my heart. Even the cat will not stay with me, But prefers the rain Under the meagre shelter of a cellar window.

#NationalPoetryMonth #NPM2026 #poetry #music #PoemsAloud Here’s one on the longing side, and a musical performance of it: frankhudson.org/2019/11/08/a...

Paragraph from Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry: “Miss Lowell was not at home among the emotions. She triumphed in the visual world, in the reflection of reflections, in capturing the minute disturbances of light and movement. It has been said that, though a poet, she failed as a humanist, that she never touched deep feelings because she never knew where to look for them."

Here’s an attempt, written after her death and posthumous Pulitzer Prize, to sum up the poetry of Amy Lowell.

Is that so?

I’ve found within her poems some examples of passionate poems of love and longing. 🧵

from “A Letter to Robert Frost” Last time in our National Poetry Month series of musical settings of poems and poets included in Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry  we heard from the poems of a leading practitioner of ligh…

As I take pains to point out, I am a naive composer working with inexact tools—and Art Song’s not my thing—but I made a few quotes from Hillyer’s poem into an approximate short response from a male poet & professor character to Lowell & her “sisters” in your opera: frankhudson.org/2026/04/12/f...