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If I Had A Boat

 I was in Colorado in the summer of 2017, because my friends Greg and Cally were getting married in the mountains. I know it was 2017, because it was not long after I’d returned home from the hospital after being hit by a car on Easter Friday. If memory serves, it was also two visible solar eclipses ago, here in North America. Because I sat on Cally’s parents’ driveway to observe it. Later, I was at Red Rocks Amphitheater, in the museum. We couldn’t go into the theater, because hip-hop country (still an odd subgenre, in my mind) star Sam Hunt was doing a sound check for his performance there later that evening. He got himself off my Bad List when I saw him much later in St. Louis.

Anyway, if you go into the museum, you’ll see clips of performances from Red Rocks over the years. And I saw the clip of Lyle Lovett singing the song which is the title of this post. I probably watched it 6 or 7 times in a row. It felt like the greatest song I’d ever heard.

As a rule, I don’t like “indie” music; it seems like an in-group signifier that other people who like vastly more popular music are stupid and basic. And I admittedly at one point only knew Lyle as the poor guy who was only briefly married to America’s sweetheart, Julia Roberts. But he’s a good musician and songwriter.

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