One of the amazing things you learn as you get older is that the same stupidity and horror of life goes on. The continuity is irrespective of how convinced you were in your twenties that your generation was special and would irrevocably change things for the better. Here are two new CDs from veteran folk musicians and writers who've been through a lot of life.

Eric Bogle was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, later moving on to Australia; probably his best known work is the anti-war song "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda." You can find a slightly different take on Bogle's work in a review of his 2000 recording, Endangered Species. The Colour of Dreams is the more emphatic and brutal of the two albums lyrically; arrangements are taken from a variety of country and pop subgenres and are just as emphatic as the lyrics. The saddest is "As If He Knows," a short story of the Australian light cavalry horses that were shot rather than selling them to possible Arab owners in Lebanon after Word War I.

Most of Bogle's stories, though, effect only people, and seem more brittle than sad. "Daniel Smiling" is about Daniel Valerio, beaten to death by his stepfather, and is accompanied by a heavy rock beat. "Global Economy," spoken-sung to a cute funky reggae tune, is about a topic dear to the heart of the Northwest. Bogle likes Globalization about as much as we do. "No Abuse," a view of a drug overdose in Sydney, figuratively shouts:

"This kid has been on his last jag
So zip him up in a body bag."

"Ibrahim" is about Muslim refugees kept in Australian barbed wire limbo for years. "Elizabeth" is no one's fault, a child fallen to SIDS before she can fall on her own. "Dreamtime" is about the removal of aboriginal children from their families. The tragedies and injustices come so fast that there's hardly time to recover in the milder intervening topics: Australian urbanization, Elvis' grave, the perky folk enhanced chain of life illuminated in the candle it by the Dalai Lama. But this is what we need, right, someone to bonk us over the head? And then to be brought home to this:

"One by one the walls come tumbin' down...
And not by weapons or machines
But by people armed with nothing more than dreams."

Tom Paxton is an American, born in Chicago and best known for writing "The Last Thing On My Mind." You can read about his earlier days in a review of the 2000 recording Best Of the Vanguard Years and top it off with a review of his recent 2001 recording with Ann Hills Under American Skies. His Looking For the Moon and its country-folk arrangements (Nanci Griffith sings harmony on two tracks) are gentle by comparison to Bogle's recording. The moon on the cover could be setting over my own Columbia Hills and the great Columbia River...by parallel music from home for many of us. Paxton's world is one of the Land and the Roads. We hear this on the title track:

"This city has ten million dreams
Not one of them is mine
So I turn myself around and walk away."

Many pretty stories are on this album. On "My Pony Knows the Way":

"The night air might just sober me some
My head is pounding like a Cherokee drum
But my pony-my pony knows the way."

The land and the rivers are everywhere, whether it be the "...Shenandoah with the wood smoke in the trees," or "...my river, One road of dancing light," or "Gears keep changing as they climb that hill." The lyrics may remind you of those of Ian Tyson. Despite the tranquility, some of Paxton's themes are similar to Bogle's. The high school of "Early Snow" shuts down forever; the Old Route 66 is gone from "My Oklahoma Lullaby;" in Bogle's "The Koala Kafe" even the elementary school's shut down. Progress drives us to the cities, where for so many of us the goal is to retire in the country that we left. So what's the point of progress? Good question.

Despite different emphases, both Bogle and Paxton include songs about the Big Twin Towers Crash on their albums, a grim anniversary. Perhaps for us all, it was an event of a lifetime. Paxton sets fiction inside the stairwell in "The Bravest." "'Get out! Get out!,' they yelled at us 'The whole thing's going to go.' They didn't have to tell us twice." Bogle describes his own personal remembrance in "One Morning In Bar Harbor. "In the woodlands, the birds were singing As the first few leaves were turning from green to golden brown." It was there that he "watched sheer bloody murder happening right before my eyes." Paxton's character goes to funerals for fireman, people he doesn't know. Bogle can't go back to Bar Harbor, for memories of peace and terror that each make the other more obscene.

Life is like the last paragraph of a review, the more you've written, the harder it is to know what to say in conclusion. Both these honored folk musicians have done a much better job than I have of putting things together to say, "Give me the power to change things I can and the wisdom to accept things I cannot."

[Judith Gennett]

 Appleseed's web site for Tom Paxton is here:

Eric Bogle's home page is here.