Roadsinger

[Juniper]

Anybody listen to the new-ish collection from Yusuf a/k/a Cat Stevens a/k/a "Steve"?

It's good. It's really good, for a sixty-ish guy who hasn't done music for thirty years.

Now, I was born a bit too late for the whole Cat Stevens phenomenon. I'm about a decade too young. But, even as an eighties kid, I always admired the earlier stuff more -- Zeppelin, Neil Young, etc. and Cat was part of it. At the time though I thought: what a wimp. Sensitive folk singers just weren't my thing.

But I'm old now, ha ha. And for some reason I just started listening to Stevens' old stuff and damn, it's awesome.

Have you ever fallen in love with someone who doesn't even exist anymore? I suppose it's the same as falling for a fictional character, and I've been known to do that too. Hello, Jamie Fraser and Heathcliff.

But the whole Yusuf/Cat thing just speaks to me. I'm so tired of the screwy politics going on now--tea party, blah, whatever. It makes me yawn. It's all overblown rhetoric, to the point where neither side knows the truth and it all becomes ignorant ranting.

I am married to an avowed conservative republican, who is addicted to Hannity and Beck and Fox News. It makes me crazy. Can't he see that he's not getting the whole story? No spin zone, my ass. I agree with a lot of the concepts, but the facts? Nope.

I don't want high-minded concepts, I want facts. And those are sadly hard to come by anymore, despite our "free" press.

So, maybe Muslims aren't the American-hating, Christian-hating, woman-hating, violent people we believe them to be? Maybe they are ordinary people who love their children and devote their lives to a higher power who is, coincidentally, the same higher power that many other religions seek as well.

All I know is this--we need facts, not rhetoric.

I also know that good music is good music, no matter who makes it.