GordonWrightMusic.com Beta

Google Alerts are funny.

I live hundreds of alternate lives vicariously through the headlines emailed to me. I’m a vein specialist one day, and then the next I’m both a renowned riding instructor and deceased arctic composer.

Granted, I could just google myself any day and learn all of this instantly. And naturally, if my name were John Smith, this would be a pretty boring game. But these inbox bulletins add a temporal relevance — as though I, Gordon Wright, have just done something newsworthy.

Some, though, aren’t happy. Poor Gordon Wright. All I can say is, thank goodness for cross stitching.

A while back, my friend Stanklin suggested we come up with a term to describe the those artists that take a while to grow on you. The most flagrant example in our own lives needed no mention — Crowded House, of course.

I bought Woodface at a used CD store with Stanklin back in high school. I was blown away by the Beatlesque “It’s Only Natural” (which we’d heard on the then-independent KGSR) and thought it might be worth the $6. An old guy was scouring the bin next to me and couldn’t contain himself. “That’s a great record!”

“Oh… cool, thanks…”

“I don’t know why anyone would return it! I just wish I could go back to when I first discovered it!”

“Wow, well, great, I’m looking forward to it… Um…”

So we took the disk home, pleased at the find and the story about the old man, but also concerned at his zeal. One listen to the record’s disjointed and cheeky opener, “Chocolate Cake,” (“Tammy Baker’s got a lot on her plate”… you get the idea) and we knew this wasn’t going to go well. By the time I got to the syrupy “All I Ask,” I just wrote it off.

Some year or so later, for some unknown reason, I put the disk back in. I skipped track one. And then the record came to life. This time, I heard the brilliant bridge (“the finger of blame has turned upon itself”) in “Fall at Your Feet” (hear it yourself, by the way, over on the band’s website). The plaintive “Four Season in One Day” (most tasteful cursing in a song) seemed poignant and poetic. And I couldn’t get the songs out of my head.

It wasn’t long before Stanklin was on board, too. By the time the follow-up was released, we were hungry converts, pestering people in used CD stores, and praising a wise old man who had once tried to show us the light…

Maybe people just felt relieved to talk about something aside from the presidential race. Or perhaps people are starved for a little bling and red carpet after the writers withheld our dose of “Desperate Housewives” for so long.

Whatever the case, people got excited about the Grammy Awards this year. I heard recaps from friends, coworkers, family. But I didn’t watch. Not only that, I completely forgot it was on. In fact, I wrote off the Grammys years ago. Not out of any bitterness or jealousy, mind you, but simply because they never seem relevant to what I was pursuing musically. Sure, I enjoyed seeing Eminem and Elton duet, but the awards themselves meant nothing.

This year, people seem particularly shocked about Herbie Hancock’s big win. Indeed, Quincy Jones’s disarming exclamation — “unbelievable, man!” — was one of those great award show moments (so great I heard it replayed later). I even know it happened at 10:40pm CST, because I got a euphoric text from Jazzy Jeff.

Hey, good for Herbie! Too bad it wasn’t for one of his more ambitious or landmark records. But this hardly seems such a surprise to me. Remember when Steely Dan won?