I started this podcast last fall. I began the series with this final episode and worked backwards. As I did so, I realized what I meant by the American singer-songwriters. They are heroes, just flat out. They are archetypes, they represent. There are wonderful singer-songwriters whose work is part of the entire language of a generation or two, but the writer herself, not…a star. Not a unique personality that others copy. Neil Diamond, Carole King, great, great writers who both began as writers in the early 60s and whose work translated, or who reinvented their work for a new decade. But…as personalities, they were not particularly unique. Anyone could be Neil Diamond on stage. He was kind of an Elvis impersonator—on stage. The pantsuit-thing. But his writing was very personal, and before he did all that Christian-middle-America stuff his writing was subtle. “Solitary Man” has its own very unique melodic character. I don’t know much about music terms and scales but…whatever that is, it really hit me deep inside, and hit me deep inside when I was only ten-years-old.
