Many of my younger (read “hipper”) Facebook friends have regular status updates that read, “Joe Cool is listening to Still Sound by Toro Y Moi  on Spotify.”  Or something similar.

I’m behind the times (what else is new), so somehow I haven’t gotten around to letting everyone know what I’m listening to at any time.  Plus, my children would be mortified.  They run from the room when my iPod is in the dock.

But every now and then I listen to something and want to tell someone.  I have to do it the old-fashioned way:  through my blog.

I don’t usually drive in to work, but today was different.  And so instead of the iPod, I picked up a couple of CDs (you remember them) – Norman Blake’s Live at McCabe’s (which I’ve written about before) and the Tony Rice/Norman Blake duet album.  These are two beautifully simple albums that are anything but simple musically.

Blake and Rice are in the upper pantheon of acoustic country/bluegrass/newgrass guitarists.  They’ve both played on seminal albums that set the direction for acoustic music for a generation:  Blake on Will the Circle Be Unbroken and Rice on the inaugural offering of The David Grisman Quintet.  But on the two CDs in my car’s player today you get to hear them at their most basic.  Most tracks just feature a vocal and one or two guitars (or the occasional mandolin and guitar).  With the sun roof open and the windows down on a glorious early spring day, I could have been on a country road instead of 16th Street.

More to come…

DJB