I had occasion this morning to hear a song I haven’t heard in a couple years, and this made me think of the guy who introduced me to it. Like many friends these days, he’s not one I’ve ever actually met: I know him only through his online handle, “FLJerseyBoy” (three guesses what first got my attention about that), and his blog, A Dog Starv’d.
If you follow that link you’ll know a couple things about him (and his blog) pretty much immediately. You’ll know that he’s much more politically vocal there than I’d ever dream of being here, and you’ll know that he pretty much ran out of blogging fuel after less than a year, his last post going up in June 2008. Since then he seems to have disappeared. I’ve made numerous attempts to contact him, to no avail. Wherever he is, I hope he’s all right. (Maybe he’ll come across this post and contact me.)
The New Jersey/Florida connection aside, one thing I liked about his blog was that — although ostensibly about politics — it reflected FLJerseyBoy’s apparent inability not to be “distracted” by other matters. (Boy, do I relate to that.)
And one of my favorite, non-political posts of his was titled — as is this one — “The Hinge Around Which a Song Swings.”
In it, he took about 750 words to pick apart a song barely three minutes long. An instrumental, at that — and, for the most part, he focuses on a single instant. That post by FLJerseyBoy very much provided the template for my What’s in a Song? series: lay out what you know about the song, talk about its psychological effect(s), and provide it for listening. In the rest of this RAMH post, I’ll paste what he had to say, verbatim, and trust that he (or his ghost) won’t mind.
(He made one mistake of fact, which I’ll correct here. He also provided a sample from the song in three different digital forms; here, you’ll get just the MP3 — but you’ll get, too, the whole thing.)
So here’s FLJerseyBoy, on “Je M’Ennuie.”
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