the sea, that gambler

I have lucky stars. I work for an amazing company called Pump Audio, and my job is to listen to music. Not just any music, this stuff is created by independent artists from all over the world.

I hear a lot of tunes, and appreciate them all in different ways, but sometimes a song just warms me to the core of my soul and makes me want to listen over and over and play it through speakers big enough to wash through the whole Hudson River. Makes me want to play it to all my friends and listen to it on my drive home even though my ears are as tired as my body would be if I was a farmer at the end of a long day.

I used to host the mid-day show for an independent radio station, and my favorite days to DJ were always the rainy ones. Soft days, you know, the kind when you want to be wearing your favorite shirt. When I moved out to Vancouver for a year in 2004, my friends in Portland and Seattle warned me of the never-ending rainy stretches. Don't get me wrong, sunshine is great, but I loved every one of those rainy days, and heck, I still do, even now that I'm back in New York where the sun comes out a little more often than it does in Vancouver.

Music just sounds better on rainy days... the grey sky makes all the colors pop out against it. Driving home, your windshield wipers are keeping time to a Josh Ritter song that sounds so good you'll sit in the car till it's over even though you're already parked in the driveway. Or how about sleeping in on a stormy morning, cuddling with your lover under the blankets and making love to just about any Bob Dylan record. That's what it's all about.

So instead of making you mixes or podcasts or radio shows, I'm just gonna use this little site to keep track of some beautiful songs that you can listen to when it's raining or not. Oh yeah, these songs will also sound good on the train. So either way, they'll come in handy at some point.

Let's start things off with a video-track from "That Sea, The Gambler" by Gregory Alan Isakov (this is his new solo record; he also plays in The Freight).

Black and Blue