rea carey

It's been a music-filled day for me. Though it was 77 degrees today in Chicago, I stayed indoors until 3 p.m. recording the song referenced in the last post. Then I went to the Chicago Country Music Festival - three stages, dozens of performers, a short bike ride away, and totally free! - and saw one amazing band, one frattish New Country pop star, and one so-so honky tonkish performer. The first, Justin Townes Earle, not only has a very cool Americana sound (think O Brother Where Art Thou) but also performs very tightly with just three guys, the lead singer strumming ragtime and country blues patterns, and the mandolin/harmonica player and the fiddler both doing perfect backup vocals. Earle also had a natural charisma that Luke Bryan, the Nashville pop star, didn't have. He said things like, "Daaaaaay-am, I got sweat in ma eye!" and "This here fiddler is from that dirty little finger we call Florida" and stooped into his microphone and retreated to the back of the stage hanging over his guitar like a limp marionette when the fingerpicking got especially intense. They covered Woodie Guthrie in three-part harmony. Earle is going to be in NYC for three shows around October 23, so do yourself a favor and go see him play.

Luke Bryan was fine and well-rehearsed, but lacked the life and rough edges that made Earle's band so interesting. Bryan was a young pretty Nashville star who wore tight black jeans over his shapely gams - my God that man has large thighs - and turned his back to the audience while dancing in order to delight the ladies with the view of his biscuits. He threw picks in the crowd, giggled erratically at his own jokes, and shouted things like, "Where my hillbillies at! Where my rednecks at!" so I was already disinclined to like him. With those last comments, a cheer went up in the crowd. Though some African-American women raised their hands too, I felt like that moment (and the one a few seconds later, when Bryan raised the queen-sized American flag at stage left in triumph) was the closest I'll come to a McCain rally. (Well, other than watching Triumph of the Will.) He had a couple catchy tunes about having farm muscles and being a country man and boys of farms holding girls in their arms.

The last group I barely saw because there was a man wearing a black pajamas suit (the pants were cut down into short shorts) with large white skulls printed all over them dancing on tiptoes with a beer in his hand and another one balanced on top of his head. I wasn't sure if anyone else was seeing this, but then the singer of the band said, "Whoa, looka that!"

I biked happily home after that with many tunes in my head, and decided to apply myself to the 8-track again. So I recorded another song. This one is older; I wrote it in 2005 about my boss at the time, the now executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Rea Carey. It's just too bad her name happens to rhyme with "gay marry" and she works for an LGBT advocacy organization. The song is not really any kind of country, but at least it didn't turn into a ska song, which it threatened to become halfway through the recording.

Here's the song. Enjoy!