Sheryl Crow’s has been one of my favorite artists quite for some time. Much of her music really moves me and the lyrics are often spot on with feelings I have. She hits that connection I don’t often get  where I feel an artist is accurately expressing things I’ve experienced. The Red Hot Chili Peppers do it with “Soul to Squeeze”. Garbage does it with “Medication” on the 2.0 album. But Sheryl Crow knocks it down more often than any other single artist.

Unsurprisingly, songs that strike me are mostly explorations on feelings and usually have somewhat of a melancholy tone. A couple of Saturdays ago while going to finish firing the last kiln in Bountiful I was set for a moody song and iTunes obliged me as dawn was breaking over the mountains by serving up Sheryl Crow’s “Good is Good”. This is an odd one for me in that so many of the lines really score:

When your friends are gone
You thought were so worth keeping
You feel you don’t belong
And you don’t know why

and

She put your books out on the sidewalk
Now they’re blowing ’round
They won’t help you when you’re down

The one issue I’ve had with this particular song ever since the first time I heard it is with the part of the chorus that goes:

And everytime you hear the rolling thunder
You turn around before the lightening strikes

And the fact that lightning proceeds the thunder kind of grates on me, and I feel that it’s kind of the heart of the song. I’ve spent a long time thinking about it and I believe that I’m just being too literal. Maybe you turn away from the storm as it starts and avoid closer lightning. Maybe it’s just a song and I shouldn’t pick at nits. But that morning driving along the freeway, for the first time, the unordered sequence didn’t seem to matter and I just soaked up the rest of the chorus.

And does it ever make you stop and wonder
If all your good times pass you by

The video for Good is Good

Once upon a time somebody didn’t listen to the instructions on how to make a pinch pot. They further didn’t listen to the suggestions on what needed to be done to make it eligible to be worthy of being graded, much less fired. This pot ended up on the reject shelf and abandoned by it’s student creator. It failed on so many levels it was kept around for a couple semesters as an anonymous example of what not to do. One day I thought it would be funny to scratch my name into the bottom of this weighty clay monstrosity. Eventually one semester I was helping with a new class of students learning beginning hand-built pottery. As it happened this more-than-humble-pot was being used as an example and Diane, the instructor, said, “I don’t even know who made this pot,” and glanced at the bottom. She immediately looked at me with a stern look, and exclaimed, “You did not make this pot!”

This got a good laugh from the class.

After a few more semesters went by John, Diane’s husband and the wheel throwing instructor at the time, became concerned that people might see this pot on the shelves and not realize that it was a warning and not an ideal, so the pot was decorated with a marker to warn people that this was not to be emulated.

Now this was in the long, long ago, and more than a decade has gone by. The pot is no longer used as an example of what not to do, but simply stayed on a little corner of a shelf with the visible warning. Today, as the last of the remaining ware was being disposed of, Diane brought this pot to me and said that she thought I should have it.

I wonder how long it will clutter my studio before it meets an apt ending.