A while back I wrote a posting (“Marquess of the Gardens of Aranjuez, His Finest Work in the 1995 UK Film, Brassed Off”) where I played around with the possibility of exploring the differences between your early musical+general education and mine; and for that, I started gathering items from around the internet, which are still in my workbasket. Below are a few scraps:
But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I also noted, in my travels around the internet, that your career website is now up on Squarespace, administered by some bloke named Simon Lunt-Grifter, but with NO concert information! I note as well, that someone (this selfsame Grifter?) updated your Wikipedia entry back in February, with a more complete listing of your recordings and some additional information about your past and projects that weren’t previously there—although nothing I hadn’t previously looked up, with some effort, and ALREADY knew and wrote about.
My blog regularly gets visitors from the US and the UK (as well the rest of the world). Frequently I get a singular visitor who lingers, reading dozens of my postings at a time, downloading dozens of my music files, and it makes me happy to imagine that somebody out there might have stumbled onto my blog and discovered it an open treasure trove they were welcome to take from. I’m in love with you and want to give you nice things (including good reviews when warranted, and the story of my life)—but because I’m in love I also want to give the world nice things too, and that turns out to be your music.
What I object to is laying out a banquet and having one of your grubby dogsbodies take my offerings with two hands and stuffing their pockets on the assumption that I was already on the same team, so why not?
Well, here’s the thing. I was never a member of Team Gyllenhaal, never a member of Team Mamoulian, and I’m certainly not a member of Team Wilson. I know I said in “To My Beloved Conductor on His 50th and 51st Birthdays and Beyond; Plus John+His Sinfonia of London Play British Classics at the BBC Proms, 2022” that if you were my boyfriend and you had a struggling rock group, there’d be posters on every lamppost in San Francisco.
But this isn’t San Francisco.
And you don’t have a struggling rock group.
And you aren’t—well, you know.
That I’m so enduringly in love with you is one of the mysteries of life, the only mystery right now worthy of my beads.
My heart’s in your hands, dear. We’ll talk about it one day over beers.
~Cantara
PS – Would I still be in love with you if you weren’t a musician? Maybe. I took shop in high school too, you know.
"I'll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart" 