Say Huhh!

Follow me here through the tangles of my own Saturday morning mind.

I've been meaning to post something about Norah Jones for a while, simply because I have a funny story to tell. But I need a particular type of morning to inspire me to write about or listen to light jazziness: one like today in NYC. A gloomy, windy, definitely fall, sit around in your PJs shivering and sniffling cuz your heat's not on yet and you have a cold, think about a second cup of coffee, weekend morning.

I sit down fully intending to write about this funny Norah Jones story, and idly do a search on an mp3 blog aggregator to see if there's anything out there about her lately that's intriguing, and I stumble on this reference to a collaboration she did with the Peter Malick Group a few years ago called "New York City."

That leads me on a wild goose chase through the Internet frontiers of MySpace postings and probably illegal Russian language Web sites, after about 20 minutes of which I do some more stumbling onto Peter Malick's MySpace page. There, I find a song called "F Train."

If you dig back through the archives a bit [here], you will quickly spot a possible obsession on my part with the F train, which is the worst subway train on the planet. I was previously amused to discover that at least one musician shared my obsession. Imagine my surprise that there are not one, but two songs, out there on the topic. How many more might there be? How many more people share my obsession? I've been wanting to put together a mix CD of my favorite NYC songs for a while (more stumbling this morning: big list of NYC songs on Wikipedia), but might I be able to put together an entire CD of songs about the F train? The mind boggles.

So my apologies, but the funny story about Norah Jones will have to wait for another day. Instead, I direct you to Malick's page for his song, and repost Mike Doughty's song for comparison's sake. In my mind, Malick's take wins: as I've said before, the Doughty song is a little too cheerful and happy about the F train. Malick, instead, seems to be talking about the train through the ramblings of a possibly homeless, gruff, definitely drunk man, which is much more in line with my own experience. And there's a lot of standing around on the platform, waiting, too. "Say huhhh! F Train."

Mike Doughty - Thank You Lord For Sending Me The F Train