Alphabet Soup Week 30: The O Tracks

I reflect on peace and gratitude as I pause to allow my body a couple days to heal after twenty days on the trail. And ten tasty new tracks!

It's an overcast and breezy Wednesday morning, on a perfect day for walking, and I'm sitting alone on a bench overlooking Perranporth Beach. My wife Tina left a couple of hours ago for the 12.5 mile walk to Portreath. And I didn’t (clearly).

A week ago I was really struggling with my left knee as the torn cartilage was causing a fair bit of pain and swelling. I'd just about reconciled myself to the fact that I'd potentially be walking with pain for the rest of the hike. Then things improved considerably and I found myself walking almost entirely pain free for a couple days. Until yesterday.

This time it wasn't the knee but the tendons in my ankle (either the tibialis anterior or the extensor tendon, not quite sure which). I've encountered this issue off and on over the years and it remains the only injury that's actually ever derailed a hike entirely. So it's something I take seriously. Last time it was bad was in 2019, in the midst of what was supposed to be a 320-mile solo hike I had undertaken between jobs. I tried to push through the pain. Ultimately the injury brought me down and I found myself having to cancel the remainder of the hike ten days in...

[ I literally just got shat on by a seagull. Awesome. Thankfully only on my outstretched pants leg. ]

Where was I? Yeah, so I've previously had to prematurely end a big hike because of tendonitis in the ankle. And I don’t want to have to do it again.

I made the decision last night that the wisest course of action was to rest up for a couple days. We have 25 miles scheduled over the next two days. While it's possible that the tendon issue could resolve itself, it's also possible, and perhaps more likely, that two long days of walking pushes my body past its limits. Last time it took the better part of a month to fully recover. And that’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

Given that I’ve nothing else to do today, I've fired up this week's Alphabet Soup post and have begun writing the intro (obvs) and drafting the song blurbs. And I'm finding myself overwhelmed by two complementary and related feelings: peace and gratitude.

I'm not gonna lie, last night while eating supper I was at a low point, feeling very demoralized about the likely decision to have to skip some walking days. But thankfully, during my 30 years of recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, I've been gifted with a set of spiritual tools that can help me navigate any situation. And they kicked in.

The most obvious is from Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer: serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. While many people are aware of the first three lines, many aren't aware of the remainder of the prayer, which I paraphrase below (removing the overtly Christian references):

Living one day at a time,

Enjoying one moment at a time,

Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,

Taking the world as it is,

Not as I would have it,

Trusting that all will be right,

If I surrender my will,

That I may be reasonably happy in this life,

And supremely happy in the next.

While I'm not a religious person, I do have a very robust and direct relationship with a power greater than myself, my own conception of God. This idea of surrendering my will simply means getting out of self and making decisions that aren’t based on ego, selfishness, or self-centeredness. What I've learned over the years is that I can surrender and ask for guidance and that guidance will come. Make of that what you will, but I don't feel the need to question it too deeply.

I've found that following such guidance has always provided the "right" outcome. That certainly doesn't mean I always get the outcome that I want; often I don’t. But I've learned to live with whatever comes to pass - and here's where the acceptance comes in, especially when the outcome isn’t perhaps what I’d desired. Often it’s only in hindsight that the outcome makes sense, usually within the context of lessons that needed to be learned or experiences that needed to be lived. Over the course of decades of practicing surrender and acceptance I've come to develop a deep and unshakable faith that all will be well and that this, too, shall pass.

I've heard it said that faith simply means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse. And, because of my faith, I'm sitting here at peace. At peace with taking a couple days out of my planned waking itinerary, giving myself the opportunity to heal, and seeing where I am physically on Friday. And I'm filled with gratitude for the tools and wisdom that have been passed on to me by those who have shown me the way over the last three decades.

Let's jump into this week's playlist!

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ALPHABET SOUP WEEK 30: The O Tracks

This week’s selections:

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TRACK: “One More Day” from April (2007)

ARTIST: Vast

VAST is the one man band of singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jon Crosby. I first fell in love with the their (his?) music with their 1998 debut Visual Audio Sensory Theater (hence the band name: VAST) which was stunning and quite unlike anything I'd heard with its mixture of Benedictine chanting, hard guitar and electronic and orchestral music. One More Day is taken from the band's fifth album, 2007's April, which remains my favorite of theirs.

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TRACK: “Oscillate Wildly” from Louder Than Bombs (1987)

ARTIST: The Smiths

It's amazing how one song, or a series of songs (like one side of a cassette) can immediately take you back to a very specific time and place. For me, side two of The Smiths' compilation Louder Than Bombs takes me back to the summer of 1987.

I'd been a little too laissez-faire in the operation of my motor scooter and, as a result, had managed to flip it (and myself) while taking a shortcut across a grassy field, which had a prominent mound that I didn't notice until too late. I probably flew about 15 feet, doing a complete flip in the process, before landing safely on my rear end. All would have been well had my scooter not also taken a similar trajectory, landing a moment later on my left shoulder, breaking my collar bone.

After a visit to the hospital I found myself holed up in a single bed at my grandmother's house feeling sorry for myself. I'd been consigned there because my parents were away and had lent our family home to my dad's sister and husband for their honeymoon. I was in pain and a little lonely, with my wings significantly clipped (can you imagine how devastating that was for a 16-year old whose parents were away? So many lost opportunities!)

I’d brought my own little cassette boombox and a small selection of albums with me. But the Smiths compilation is the only thing I played for the entire 8 to 10 days I was housebound and healing. I absolutely adored side two of the album and played that side almost exclusively. Starting with Ask and ending with Asleep, it represents one of my favorite album sides of all time without a bad track to be found. Oscillate Wildly, the only instrumental track on the compilation, was the B-side on the How Soon is Now? single and never appeared on a studio album.

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TRACK: “Once Upon A Time In The West” from Alchemy Live (1984)

ARTIST: Dire Straits

Here's another band and performance that has vivid memories associated with it. I'd never paid much attention to Dire Straits until 1988 when I spent most of the summer hanging out at my friend Fraser's house. Of course, I'd heard the bigger hits from 1985's Brothers in Arms, you'd have had to be living under a rock not to, but I still considered them to be "old people's music" (whatever the hell that means). What can I say? At the age of 17, my musical tastes were (putting it kindly) extremely limited, fairly juvenile and certainly unrefined.

That summer I discovered that both Fraser and his father had a large collection of new-to-me music that would open me up to previously unknown musical genres and serve to significantly expand my musical universe. One of those influential albums was the 1984 double CD Alchemy: Dire Straits Live.

The opening track, a 13-minute rendition of Once Upon a Time in the West from 1979's Communiqué was a revelation. After a minute-long plaintive keyboard intro from Alan Clark, Mark Knopfler plucks a single note on his Schecter Strat and, after a beat, the rest of the band kicks in. But it was once the song really began in earnest at the 1:40 mark that my interest was piqued. There’s an almost reggae-like groove laid down by bassist John Illsley that carries the song and provides the perfect palette for Knopfler's sublime guitar work.

Although I had no idea what Knopfler was mumbling about, this opening track to one of the best live albums ever turned me into an instant convert to the band. I'd go on to own most of their albums although none would ever be quite as favored as Alchemy (Brothers in Arms came close).

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As you make your way through this week’s playlist, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do any of these tracks really stand out for you? What do you like? What don’t you like?

Please click the button below to leave a comment.

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TRACK: “Overkill (Live)” from Brazil '96 (1998)

ARTIST: Men at Work

From one great live performance to another, although unfortunately the version to which I refer doesn't appear on Spotify. For me, the quality of a vocalist's live performance has always been a significant component in my evaluation of their overall body of work.

In the case of this song, the live rendition of Overkill, which originally appeared on Men at Work's second album, 1983's Cargo, Colin Hay's lead vocals are on point as are Stephen Hadley's backing vocals. At 3:05 in the video below, when Hay launches into the reprise of the first verse in his higher register, it's almost divine.

The album, Brazil '96, was recorded live at the Olympia music venue in Sao Paolo, Brazil and released in 1998. The band was almost completely reconstituted for the South American tour, with Colin Hay and Greg Ham being the only members of the original incarnation of the band that had seen so much success in the early 80s.

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TRACK: “One On One” from Starting All Over Again; The Best Of Hall & Oates (1982)

ARTIST: Hall & Oates

Although I loved their many hit songs, I never owned a studio album by the duo Hall & Oates, relying instead on the double CD collection Starting All Over Again; The Best Of Hall And Oates to scratch that itch for their particular blend of soul, rock, pop and R&B. Only recently had I even heard one of their albums in full - 1973's Abandoned Luncheonette - after it was featured by friend of Joy in the Journey Kevin Alexander on his perpetually wonderful On Repeat Records Substack. That album became one of my top Substack discoveries of 2023 and prompted me to begin digging into their catalog.

One on One originally appeared on the duo's eleventh studio album 1983's H₂O, which produced three top ten singles. The track peaked at number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 with the album peaking at number three on the Billboard 200, making it their highest charting full-length.

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TRACK: “Oh Yoko!” from Working Class Hero - The Definitive Lennon (1971)

ARTIST: John Lennon

I'm not gonna pretend to know enough about the situation to understand why people seem to hate Yoko Ono so much. There's this overriding sentiment that she was somehow responsible for the breakup of The Beatles, but by all accounts the band members were already under incredible strain and no longer satisfied with their working relationship by the time she entered the equation. Perhaps her presence simply exacerbated the already existing tensions.

What I do know about Yoko Ono is that she's the subject of one of my favorite John Lennon songs ever, the beautiful Oh Yoko! which appeared on his second studio album, 1971's Imagine. I first heard this song in the 1988 documentary John Lennon: Imagine and fell in love with it instantly.

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TRACK: “Omaha” from August and Everything After (1993)

ARTIST: Counting Crows

A second appearance from Counting Crows as their track Perfect Blue Buildings from the same album, their 1993 debut August and Everything After, appeared way back in week 5. Omaha was the second track from an incredible album, one which would have certainly been a top five release for me that year, quite possibly at number one although fine releases by Mazzy Star, Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Blind Melon and PJ Harvey would've given it a run for its money.

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TRACK: “Oh Very Young” from Greatest Hits (1983)

ARTIST: Cat Stevens

For many years the only Cat Stevens album I'd ever listened to was the 1983 (CD release date) Greatest Hits collection. But in my third year of college I was introduced to some of his individual albums by one of my best pals, a music loving Egyptian-Acadian from the South Shore of Nova Scotia. Nessim was one of two friends (in addition to Fraser who I mentioned above in the blurb on Dire Straits) that significantly expanded my musical universe into new and wonderful areas.

In my piratical days of the early 2000s I'd eventually come to digitally “own” a handful of Stevens' studio albums including Buddha and the Chocolate Box, the 1974 album on which Oh Very Young appears. The song reached number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the album peaked at number 2 on the Billboard 100 and would go on to be certified platinum in the US.

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TRACK: “Oh Mary” from 12 Songs (2005)

ARTIST: Neil Diamond

By the time Neil Diamond released 12 Songs in 2005 it had been over two decades since he'd had anything resembling a hit song (1982's Heartlight). But as he had done previously with late-era Johnny Cash, along came Rick Rubin to produce a brace of phenomenal albums in the form of 2005's 12 Songs and 2008’s Home Before Dark.

As someone who'd loved Diamond's music most of my life, although granted it was primarily his output from the 70s that I adored, I was excited to be able to enjoy new music from this legendary singer-songwriter. Rubin assembled many of the same artists that had participated in Johnny Cash's work with American Recordings (Rubin's label) and produced what would become one of Diamond's most successful releases in decades.

The album debuted at number 4 on the Billboard 200 chart, only to be bettered by the 2008 follow-up which would peak at number one, making Diamond, who was 67 at the time, the oldest performer to have a number one album.

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TRACK: “Only In Your Heart” from History: America's Greatest Hits (1986)

ARTIST: America

We wrap up this week’s playlist with Only In Your Heart by America, another band who's musical output was only ever represented in my CD library by their greatest hits collection, the 1986 (CD release date) History: America's Greatest Hits. This was a collection I'd originally owned on cassette before upgrading to CD in the late 80s and it’s absolutely jam packed with soft rock gems.

The song originally appeared on the band's second album 1972's Homecoming which peaked at number 2 on the Billboard 200.

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Week 3 on the South West Coast Path

Below is a selection of photos from the last four days of hiking the South West Coast Path (prior to my two days of rest):

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Here’s the link to the running playlist which is updated on a weekly basis as each new installment is published:

ALPHABET SOUP RUNNING PLAYLIST

Tracks missing from the Spotify playlist:

• Allegory by Murray Attaway (Week 02)

• Face Me and Smile by The Lover Speaks (Week 12)

• From Your Mouth by God Lives Underwater (Week 13)

• This Can’t Go On! by The Lover Speaks (Week 23)

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