Kick back the ol’ feet, turn off my palm pilot and my halogen lamp, put my laptop into ‘hibernate’ mode, close the door, and plug my mp3 player into my oversize, albeit banged up and old, computer speakers, turn on an Allison Krauss and I am in another world. Thing is, it probably ain’t back on the porch. I’ve been there, and that’s different. So why is it so pleasing what Allison Krauss does – and why is she making ‘bluegrass’ palatable to normal folk around the country and globe? Because it isn’t the real thing. But, truly, am I the real thing? Is Ralph Stanley… or for that matter, any of those folks sitting on the porch in the rural south, singing into some sort of contraption for some sort of sweet-talking boy from the north?

Can the ‘real thing’ be re-created, modified, re-mixed, written just like the real thing from scratch? Sting said in an AP article on Feb. 7, 2004 of his song, “My Ain True Love” on the Cold Mountain soundtrack:

“It’s the complete opposite of what I give myself when I make an album. I can do and say and feel what I like when I make a record. When I went to see “Cold Mountain,” and they said there’s room for a song here, I was tied to the film. I was tied to the mood, tied to the characters, tied to the language people would have used in those times.”

I know that I’m a fake, but I can sing with soul. And Sting certainly can. Why is that? And is it the same soul that Almeda Riddle sings with, or Mrs. Sidney Carter, or any of the other ‘field’ recordings from folks’ front porches have?

The lute in the western world today is a marginalized and odd instrument, played by baroque musicians and middle-easterners, and collected by antiques dealers and aging rock stars. The European lute, descended from its role as part of the continuo in western classical music, like the harpsichord, mostly just gathers dust because of its role as the ‘backup’ for boring and not-well-done radio baroque performed by barely-professionals that don’t understand the meaning of resonance. The Arabic lute (il ‘ud), similar in Arabic music to the guitar in American pop music or the piano in classical music, is still the backbone, though it is increasingly buried (in modern Arabic music) by other sounds from keyboards, electric instruments and drums.

After sitting pretty as the ‘prince of all instruments’ for 4,000 years, the lute is second in the western world to amplified and more powerful instruments, and in the eastern world to synthesizers and accordions with quarter tones and amplifiers. Singing to the lull of an instrument, or trading ballads until late into the night, is no longer the entertainment of the evening, and needs something flashy to properly draw folks’ attention.

Just wanted to point you to a new finding — a portrait of Mozart that’s been hiding for a good while — gettin’ old… of Mozart, in fact, getting old — it was painted in 1790, a year before his death.

Johann Georg Edlinger painted it, and it’s in the Gemaeldegalerie in Berlin. A fellow, Wolfgang Seiller, a Mozart expert did some serious computer analysis and found it to be genuine.

Mr. Mozart would have been 249 in January.

Check out his aging portrait here (www.classical-composers.org)

Jeshua Erickson is a master and a hack, a songsmith and a dreamer. His songs make me shiver down to my little hairs and at the same time look into the mirror with disgust. He makes me question the role I play in the suffering of the world, and the role I play in the lives of others. All with a few words and a few chords.

Swords into Plowshares is Jeshua’s masterpiece until now, but, God willing, not his only. As a songwriter, Jeshua is an orchid in full bloom and a spring sparrow feeding us his words: He gets it, and he chews it up, and he opens our mouths and he opens our ears, and he pours in this mash of truth. His fingers find a way to pull out what they need to, and his voice strains against its strings. And his words hit the place deep below the gut where everything counts twice.