Because I’d rather explain how I came across the song in the last post because I’m feeling worlds of nostalgic right now and I let that song lull me to sleep last night/this morning so I’ve always loved classical music as most of you know I refer to Yo-Yo Ma as my uncle but maybe it was in the year 2000 I found out about a violinist named Hilary Hahn and a friend loaned me her first album where she plays solo Bach and it was amazing so then I decided to follow her career because she’s only three years  younger than I and seemed to be a really good role model which is what I was looking for at that point in my life because I was returning to a proper course after having careened into some prodigal years and so there’s that and I respected Hilary’s patience with her career and her seeming deliberateness with choices she was making for her life in addition to her writing online and in her album jacket notes, and after buying her Bach album I found her Beethoven/Bernstein and then the Barber/Meyer CD came out and I read in the jacket notes that a double-bassist/composer named Edgar Meyer commissioned Hilary for that concerto and so I wondered who Edgar Meyer is and I started looking up things about him because after listening to the concerto I was more or less blown away. Double basses are flippin huge. I also found out about a collaborative album (in the course of researching chamber music with Richard Stoltzman or Sabine Meyer, Emmanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma because I was also trying to improve my clarinet playing by listening to awesome clarinet music) called Appalachian Journey that involves Mr. Ma, Edgar Meyer, and violinist/fiddler Mark O’Connor, which features vocalists like James Taylor and Alison Krauss and the idea of hybridizing bluegrass and chamber music fascinated me because I really truly appreciate talent no matter where it is and I also adore James Taylor and Alison Krauss because they can both respectively guitar and fiddle as well as stir nostalgia through their voices and this album does not disappoint because nostalgia crept up on me last night and made me look for that Stephen Foster to share with you and it was hard to let myself fall asleep to that song because I enjoyed watching the performance, the communication between the musicians, the eye contact and other cues to let different instruments stand out whenever Alison wasn’t singing, the way Alison looks at the instrumentalists through the final chord and her smile when it ends, and then the perfect stillness between the last note and applause just makes me so happy and so maybe I watched the video three or maybe four times before I lay down and closed my eyes while the song played again and this morning, although my eyes are really dry and I can’t quite remember (much less explain) all of a dream I had where I was crowd-surfing in my high school bleachers in a sports bra and underwear and then there was my marching band self watching very nervously my nearly-naked self hoping that nobody else was watching her, I feel pretty good.