I had the opportunity to walk through a part of Central Park I'd never been to yesterday. With my street vendor ice cream melting down my fingers, I stopped in the shade to listen to the carousel's Wurlitzer tinkling and crashing. The sounds travel beautifully across the little algae-skinned ponds and over the curves of the landscaping. The song: Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead

Naturally, all I could think of was Strangers On A Train + The Catcher In The Rye.

... with A Day In The Life in my head, the final track on The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The clustered, soaring, improvised orchestra is an inspiring, brilliant, diamond of a moment in music.  The recording session is recounted with aplomb in Geoff Emerick's Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording The Beatles. It's early, and I'm late, so I won't try to curb the hyperbole.  This is why I love music.

I don't know, I just have this thing for Elton John songs.  (Rather, Elton John and Bernie Taupin songs). Someone Saved My Life Tonight shuffled on my iPod while I was running today (after The Velvet Underground, before Joan Jett), and I felt like that butterfly, free to fly, fly away, high away...  Granted, I admittedly and genuinely appreciate easy-listening music more than most.  But there's something in the complexity, the pent-up (homo)sexuality, the perfect arrangements of these songs that resonates with me. I loved that Lars von Trier used Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (and so many other AM Gold runners-up) in Breaking The Waves.  I tried to learn it on guitar so I could sing along, like a snotty gay courtesan:

You can't plant me in your penthouse / I'm going back to my plow.

I felt a rock-n-roll kinship with the Max (of Max and Paddy's Road To Nowhere) when he sincerely serenaded an ex-girlfriend with I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues.

There are plenty of clunkers in his catalog, but these have a place in my heart and on my iPod.