Rickie Lee Jones - The Horses

Exactly! That's the thing that I love about Walter's music. Sure, he's a great musician, but there's also a pride of craft and use of literary techniques that stands apart from other pop music.

@Matthew Kerns And it's all of it together I think. If any one of us thought we had command of any one or two techniques, tricks, formats, changes, lyrical formulas, Musical skill on and on we would be doing something other than hanging here but to posess so many very unique qualities is the essence of being WB.

Singing words: REally, who can mouth..

"Who will feast on this buzzard's banquet? Who will render my heroic bust? Who will choke on my lachrymose musings? Who will eat my zero dust? Who will wear this puke-streaked tunic? Who shall gorge on this cup of spleen? Who will sing about the good, bad and ugly? And all and everything in between?"

Cleanly, really! How many takes for that verse!

The "edge" WB brought is WB, it's all and everything he was that is that edge IMO.

@TBD I love this post, and all the others in the latter part of his thread (we've wandered afield of the Horses; that's fine. I'm just glad whenever anybody has anything to say to one another about their impressions of WB's 'thing'.)

Of course we wish there was more conversation among our visitors. But I’m the first to admit it's near impossible to elucidate the deeper stuff W has and manages to convey, even in these little snippets as he does.

And of course I love the more concrete exchanges too, (eg "is that a live bass? sounds like a pad to me" etc). And I'd be grateful/interested in all of it, any of it (the silence can get pretty deafening sometimes! lol). But god bless those who attempt to apply words to that which is by definition almost wordless. After all, …Writing about music is like dancing about architecture (mangled ‘quote’ from Laurie Anderson)

Yet there's been so much of that attempt here on the boards, so much of it so great…and Matt and I continue to brainstorm how we might set aside or make a specific place for a certain type of writing/observation. You know, I've considered that the ability to put into words the difficult stuff requires some of the very same skills and soul that we are trying to describe in Walter's work. So Gold Stars and Red Ribbons! — and mostly great admiration and appreciation -- for those who try, and so often succeed.