Now that I’ve got such a great setup for hearing music closer to the way the recording engineers originally intended, I’m hearing a lot more of the intricate artistic and technical expression. Not only can I boggle at the discovery of, “Oh, there’s a bass player on this record,” but now I can marvel at, “Intriguing choice to accent the rhythm with castinettes!” I’ve really been drawn into one record lately since it so well-produced and engineered (Stephen Lipson is involved), and it’s something that has been around a long time already. Annie Lennox came out big in the early 80’s, cool and intimidating with short, orange hair and slapping a riding crop. It turns out she was always really nice and a phenomenal soul singer, and not a dominatrix robot. I liked the Eurythmics a lot in the 80’s, but I guess I wasn’t ready until this last weekend to try Annie’s solo “Diva” from 1992. I just listened through a few times – now I’m deeply impacted and hooked.

I wrote before about how things might have been different if I had a clue and listed to cool music when I was a kid. Annie Lennox is already great and I already went through years of being hooked on “Bare,” but for some reason I never tried “Diva”. That record is from 1992, holy crap. That’s a long time ago and now it seems like something, though slightly dated, that is so good that it might have made for many occasions of being more cheerful in life. If nothing else, it’s got lots of sweet bassline to show off how great headphones are. I’m not sure I can entice my wife to try it out since she’s only interested if it’s somehow related to Harry Potter or Howard Shore. I’m in luck! Annie Lennox is now famous for knocking “Return of the King” out of the park too.

Not included in the Lord of the Rings soundtrack is Gerry Rafferty, but there’s more music I regret missing for the last several decades. I remember hearing the alto sax riff from “Baker Street” blaring through tinny PA speakers at Saturdy drive-in theater flea markets. That song always stuck in my head and a few years ago it started to break out into my direct conscious thought a lot more, though I had no idea who it was. Isn’t that annoying when you’ve got just an abstract loop of music stuck on replay and you can’t describe it any better than, “this saxophone bit?” I tried to think of any lyrics or distinguishing features of any kind, but I came up with nothing. After scouring the late night infomercials for TimeLife collections I finally did figure it out and I’ve tracked it down: Gerry Rafferty – City to City. It’s a really genuine, nice album and again, I could have held happier prospects if I listened to that once in a while.