“From Philip Larkin’s poem ‘For Sidney Bechet’: ‘On me your voice falls as they say love should/Like an enormous yes.’ Offering humanity its necessary dosage of Enormous Yesness: who wouldn’t want that job?

“Except that it’s not mine, so one does the next best thing: listens, listens, and sometimes, if one is lucky, falls in love with a particular musician’s entire body of work, coming to know their soul as well as–or perhaps better than–one’s own.”

–Ray Robertson, from the introduction to his Lives of the Poets (With Guitars): Thirteen Outsiders Who Changed Modern Music (2016)

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