There will be two blogs today, most likely. I have two things I would like to talk about/reveal to you, dear reader. Here is the first...

When I was home for Christmas, my mom and I were driving to Ft. Wayne to go to my grandmother's house. She put this CD in the player: Carol King, Tapestry. It was produced the year I was born (1979) and I'll admit, I immediately thought "oh great." But then she put it in. EVERY song is amazing. EVERY song. The title song makes me want to cry and rejoice at the same time, and that is a strange and beautiful feeling. Here are the lyrics:

"My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the ever-changing view
A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and seem impossible to hold

Once amid the soft silver sadness in the sky
There came a man of fortune, a drifter passing by
He wore a torn and tattered cloth around his leathered hide
And a coat of many colors, yellow green on either side

He moved with some uncertainty, as if he didn't know
Just what he was there for, or where he ought to go
Once he reached for something golden hanging from a tree
And his hand came down empty

Soon within my tapestry along the rutted road
He sat down on a river rock and turned into a toad
It seemed that he had fallen into someone's wicked spell
And I wept to see him suffer, though I didn't know him well

As I watched in sorrow, there suddenly appeared
A figure gray and ghostly beneath a flowing beard
In times of deepest darkness, I've seen him dressed in black
Now my tapestry's unravelling; he's come to take me back
He's come to take me back"

Can you feel the sadness and the joy when you read those lyrics? Can you hear the beauty, can you see the story? Why don't more people write songs like this anymore? Why is it mostly rap and junk and all about the material world? This song is, for lack of a better word, deep and moving. Powerful.