slipjig3 | Three musical items

1) Well, I seem to have broken my years-long songwriting drought over the last month or so. The trouble is, it's all filk, dammit. What's wrong with me? (Yes, I know, it's a perfectly valid musical genre, but after 20+ years of writing serious and depressing folk music, it's a major shock to the system.)

2) Dammit, dammit, dammit. The only reason I haven't started crying and whimpering over my wish for an octave mandolin was the fact that they were way, way too expensive—far enough beyond my level of affordability that they weren't even worth considering. So what did the bastards at Lark in the Morning do? They made them almost affordable. >Almost. Juuuuust barely out of reach. Bastards.

3) Thanks to the tireless efforts of

mentalmakeup and

gardenfey, I've been listening to Richard Thompson's latest, Sweet Warrior, on pretty much constant repeat for several days now. It's all in the good-to-damn-good quality range (as expected), but I have to share the one track that I am absolutely obsessed with:

"Johnny's Far Away," Richard Thompson (mp3)

That's a YouSendIt link. If you're not a Richard Thompson fan and want to know what all my ranting is about, listen to this. I want to start an Irish folk-rock band just so we can cover this.