And our next host, from whose amazing home I started typing this entry, has apparently spent his life on passionate pursuits, one of which is great food (hurrah for us!), another of which is collecting. His collections are vast: tens of thousands of music CDs, almost all of which are great and/or important for some reason; hundreds of great movies; live music DVDs; graphic novels; books about World War I, psychology, poetry, child development, and who knows what else.
He has a bookshelf two stories high that houses nothing but material about Bob Dylan, but his first and truest musical love is Van Morrison, and we spent hours watching live DVD footage of his hero. I hesitate to admit I was a bit skeptical about endless Van Morrison videos, but all that viewing did me good, especially VM Live at Montreux, 1980. During that night’s concert, I worked harder and spent more as a singer than I think maybe I ever have, almost hyper-aware of the dynamics and melodic movement of each song. It was exhausting but exhilarating.
Fast forward 36 hours. We’re sitting around a country dinner table, eating Belgian beef stew with frites, mayonnaise, endive salad, and applesauce. Our group of six is made up of Doug, myself, our hosts Annette and Patrick, and two songwriters we shared the afternoon’s show with: Inneke23 (Belgium) and Little Birdie (Canada). At some point, I find myself defending the love of sports. Someone made the offhand comment dismissing sports games as unimportant, inconsequential, what does it matter if you miss one stupid game your favorite team plays? It’s silly when people get so riled up about it all.
I didn’t make any points during this conversation anywhere near as well as I wanted. But as I sat there stammering out parallels between what we as musicians do and strive for and what athletes train for, I was picturing our friend Kees, the Van Morrison fanatic, who with his friend Bart has traveled the world to see scores of concerts by this icon, who owns more music than he can listen to for the rest of his life, and whose labor of love (a listening room concert series) provides income, a place to stay, and unbelievably great meals for songwriters who come through the Netherlands.