Caught up on New Yorkers this weekend. From a Sam Shepard profile:

Though Shepard lacked East Coast sophistication—he was poorly read in those days—he brought news of what he called “the whacked out corridors of broken-off America”: its blue highways, its wilderness, its wasteland, its animal kingdom, its haunted lost souls, its violence. “People want a street angel. They want a saint with a cowboy mouth,” a prescient character in one of Shepard’s early one-acts said. Shepard, it turned out, was the answer to those prayers. He got a job busing tables at the Village Gate, and began to write in earnest. “I had a sense that a voice existed that needed expression, that there was a voice that wasn’t being voiced,” he said. “There were so many voices that I didn’t know where to start. I felt kind of like a weird stenographer. . . . There were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down. I was fascinated by how they structured themselves.”

Outside magazine pages, friend Greg surfaced two striking quotes in his status messages last week. From Joseph Campbell, "It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." From F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over."

In that vein… maybe in that vein, for me at least… friend Casey posted four mash-ups for his readers' Super Bowl parties. The standout for me was Mighty Mike's Use the Same Old Song, where the Four Tops meet the Kings of Leon. I honestly haven't been able to stop listening to it.

A passage from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul leaps to mind. Marsh writes how The Same Old Song was "the immediate follow-up to the Four Tops' first big hit, I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)" and the second song sounded the same as the first. Against its critics, he defends The Same Old Song as being what's known and so much more.

… The Same Old Song is a better record. If it's the same sax solo, it's bigger and brighter here; if the melody hardly varies, the bass line is bolder, the drums kick just a hair harder, and there's nothing quite as thrilling on I Can't Help Myself as The Same Old Song's vibes part. It's a probably a toss-up between the two lead vocals…. The lyrics are a big improvement over the cloying "Sugar pie honey bunch / You know that I love you" (even if they do begin "You're sweet as a honey bee."

Or maybe it's just like the song says: "I keep hearing the part that used to touch our heart."

You hear the old song, and the moon and stars end up in the pool every night. But there's a third song, a next night and new voices.

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