"Beatles pancakes"

Elodie Lauten, Piano Works Revisited
T-Model Ford & GravelRoad, Taledragger
Todd Reynolds, Outerborough
Kurt Elling, The Gate
Lucinda Williams, Blessed (streaming at NPR)

Five quick things and I'm out:

1. Maya asked for "Beatles pancakes" at Louie's this weekend and Fred gave the order a conceptual twist. One day a smart contemporary gallery is going to pick him up and do a retrospective of his work. Remember the Enterprise?
2. On the way to Louie's we heard a snippet of Kurt Elling doing an idiosyncratic take on "Norwegian Wood" during an NPR interview about his new album "The Gate." It got quiet in the back seat with Maya and her friend until they shrieked in unison, "Oh. My. God. This is 'Norwegian Wood'! And it isn't the Beatles!" I said, "Yeah, it's a cover version. This guy's doing his own version of it." to which Maya replied, "Ewwwww. He shouldn't do that." Critics.
3. I popped into the ailing Compact Disc Store and completely blew my record store cool by purchasing the CD the clerk was playing on the sound system. It's up there with wearng the concert shirt to school the next day, which I would always do. Elodie Lauter not only crafted these breathtaking minimalist, jazz-touched piano works that hypnotized me so in the shop and completes my being, sliding thousand-sided pegs into thousand-sided holes, calming the bees with Charlemagne Palestine-meets-McCoy Tyner-meets-"Radiohead" cosmic density, but according to the liner notes, also wrote "Do the Dog" with her father, a song that later got swiped up by the Specials and brought them enough money to get her first synthesizer *. This is why record stores and liner notes are important.
4. T-Model Ford goes well with gardening. As does this spring weather.
5. Book finish line stuff. I started to say something and then cut myself off with "Just do it." So I am.

Elodie Lauten performs Sonate Modale live at Music Gallery in Toronto, Canada in 1985.

* OK, this story seemed a little off. I remember now that "Do the Dog" is an old Rufus Thomas tune ska'd up by the Specials, and this account has Allen Ginsberg buying her a farfisa organ as the seminal moment, so who knows. Elodie Lauten, if you are out there and want to set the story straight, holla. I love your piano music whether you ever did the dog or not or where that organ came from.