Whether your baby is a person, a project, shiny object, or possibility, here's to moments of forgetting desk-pounding frustrations, showers w/o hot water, letdowns, and shocks, enough to smile or fall asleep.

Lyrics. Better than Carly's Haven't Got Time for the Pain? No question.

While the video here plays it straight, my favorite take of this song on YouTube is from a guy who spends the whole time switching between five pictures and a mess of overlays. That's it. The good things for him?

A few people have told me that this blog sounds happy, makes my life sound happy, and I gotta agree with them. I'm working on persuading myself to be a happier person and am okay with a Davy Crockett run* around my life to do so. The blog can take some of the running.

*Long story involving a tape that beeped to tell you to turn the pages.

But for every C.C. Rider or two that pop to mind — that song not for the lyrics, really, but more for the great kick-out at the chorus — there's a Heard It Through the Grapevine. When you hear the song's writer has died, you don't even need the song to come on the radio to have it stick with you. You get the same sad feeling you get seeing somone's wedding pictures set to music or riding shotgun past an old place.

I went looking for Grapevine in Dave Marsh's 1001 songs at The Heart of Rock and Soul tonight and forgot the song was #1 in the book, not for any big reason but simply to start somewhere, according to Marsh.

 "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" isn't a plea to save a love affair, it's Marvin Gaye's essay on salvaging the human spirit. The record distills four hundred years of paranoia and talking drum gossip into three minutes and fifteen seconds of anguished soul-searching. The proof's as readily accessible as your next unexpected encounter on the radio the with fretful, self-absorbed vocal that makes the record a lost continent of music and emotion.

How does something so familiar remain surprising for twenty years [now almost thirty]? To begin with, Gaye plays out the singing with his characteristic amalgam of power and elegance, sophistication and instinct: now horse, now soaring, sometimes spitting out imprecations with frightening clarity, sometimes almost chanting in pure street slang, sometimes pleading at the edge of incoherence, twisting, shortening, and elongating syllables to capture emotions words can't define. And Gaye does this not just in a line or two or three but continuously. As a result, a record that's of absolutely stereotypical length creates a world that seems to last forever.

Marsh goes on to write how Whitfield "creates a masterpiece," how "that ultrapercussive beat on the tambourine is the sound of the rumor reaching home," rumor or just life unknown, and the rest of the record about the consequences. You can read the rest of the take here.

On Friday on the radio, I hear Jackson Browne's Somebody's Baby. On Saturday on the radio, I hear Montell Jordan's This Is How We Do It. On Sunday I do not drive. Not for religious reasons or anything, just didn't need to drive anywhere. On Monday I hear the song Will Smith sampled for Men in Black. But not the song itself, which isn't so interesting to me. But then on Tuesday I hear Sexyback mashed up with Marvin Gaye's Got to Give It Up. In days since I can't find it online anywhere.

Today was my Friday on CNN's war schedule. I'm sorry for not writing much recently, but this week I've had the pleasure to discover Atlanta's 4:30 a.m. traffic and the pain to re-discover its 5 p.m. traffic. In between those drivetimes, it's been war, war, war.

The album of the past week can only be Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On." Love runs laughing down some blocks of Detroit and goes stumbling down crying in others. It stops to hold the junkie in the alley and to listen to the mumblers on the corner. It tunes out the spouting ideologue and turns to the person sharing the bus bench — brother, mother, protester, soldier. "What else is new my friend, besides what I read?"