Doughty and blowers

Mike Doughty has a new solo album out, “Haughty Melodic ". For those of us who’ve been trading around live bootlegs of his shows, easily 2/3 of the tracks are ones we’ve heard before… but they’ve been nicely produced, fleshed out with more instrumentation (I really like the clarinet on “Madeline and Nine,” the backing vocals on “His Truth is Marching On” are a nice touch, and there’s some awesome banjo on “Busting up a Starbux,” along with some blatty Morphine-style alto/bass sax…) and there are 5 tracks new to me on it, so the $9.99 to buy it from the iTunes Music Store was a no-brainer. I may yet pick it up in a store, just to have the lyric sheets.

Drove into Davis Square to get a smoothie for breakfast, and walked past a middle-aged Chinese man using a leaf blower to clean the sidewalk in front of the Au Bon Pain. It occurred to me, watching him, that one can’t really use a leaf blower to clean anything. It just redistributes the dust away from your own patch of ground and onto your neighbors’. Noisy, fume-spewing, and not nearly as effective as just sweeping up the dust and pitching it – ah, America. Like Doughty says: “I love my country so much, man / like an exasperating friend.”