TRANSIENCE is my theme here, suggested to me by my good friend Pete.  It’s a broad notion to ignite the imagination…
Moments – spectacular and passing….
Brief encounters, moments of chance, passing through, travelling far and wide, being on the move.
Seasons, cycles, death and rebirth.
Enjoy what you’ve got while you’ve got it, changing seasons, shifting tides. The comings and goings of our lives. Place, people, love, loss.
Be grateful, be present, change is a constant.
Transitions, transvergence, transgender. Transient states of being, different stages of life….

I’m dipping back in time as well as presenting some very new music including a track released yesterday by Jeff Lang from his forthcoming album More Life. 

Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings sing a rare duet – Howdy, Howdy is mystifying, suggestive, perhaps contrary. There are songs on Woodland that make me wonder if they are breaking up?
They swap lines like :
You and me are always gonna be howdy howdy
You and me always walk that lonesome valley
I’m don’t understand a lot of american culture, but what does ‘you and me are always gonna be howdy howdy’ mean?  You and I are always going to be friends that can say hello when we bump into each other, while we each walk in solitude?   See what you think….

I’m really enjoying Ray LaMontagne‘s new album Long Way Home. Lachlan Bryan and The Wildes (Melb) have just released two tracks, and I’m going to finish the show with Sarah Carroll‘s new recording.  Both these Victorian artists are heading to Sydney soon, to tour their new wares.

The artist now known as Mo’Ju used to be in wonderful Newcastle collective Mojo Juju & The Snake Oil Merchants (how I miss them). Their song Transient Being was the first tune I thought of when I began thinking about the theme of transience.

Sydney-based artist Jo Meares was kind enough to make several excellent song suggestions, and let me play this fragile and moving demo Hard Times.

Classics from other decades include the title track from George Harrison‘s album All Things Must Pass… it was his third solo album, and his first solo  release since the breakup of The Beatles.  Happens to the Heart  from Leonard Cohen’s Thanks for the Dance has become an extremely important piece for me.  It was to be Cohen’s final album, filled with portent and heart-breakingly beautiful lines… the gentle passing on of terrible wisdoms.
I was always workin’ steady but I never called it art
I got my shit together meeting Christ and reading Marx
It failed my little fire but it spread a dying spark
Go tell the young Messiah what happens to the heart

Zulya Kamalova too recently passed from this world.  An extraordinary musician and human being, and a key figure in the Melbourne music scene, and a national treasure in her other homelands. As tribute I play a song from Tales of Subliming by Zulya & The Children of the Underground.