I have been running back to this album for years! I was resistant to Arthur Russell at first. The Spotify algorithim was serving me up That's Us/Wild Combination so constantly in 2018, it was grating on me. I gave in a couple of months later - so glad I overcame my stubbornness. This winter,I find myself listening to this album on a loop - again! The New York Public Library is home to the Arthur Russell archives. I plan to go check them out. If I see anything interesting, I'll update this pop-up with new material.
I love ghazal music. Mehdi Hassan, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Iqbal Bano — etc. After I made whistlemania, I thought about making ghazalgobbler.com but I'll leave that for another day! I worry it doesn't translate. or, that I'll do a bad job translating my love for it. I am also into qawwali, have had a life-long interest in Sufism. Lack the required tools of interpretation. The poetry can be lost on me, the couplets and the meter. I am only used to colloquial Urdu. Literary Urdu has so much Farsi in it. Don't know Persian. There are symbolic settings you need to be familiar with. Like the garden, where the poet adopts the persona of a bulbul bird, singing to the beloved, often a rose. The theme is always unfulfilled desire! Reminds me of the Oscar Wilde short story about the Nightingale and the Rose. Nervous I miss the references, mostly have Western ones instead. I love this song, love it for its lyrics, music, mood, voice — I wonder if its mood might touch you too.