Unknown Lao Singer | SLV CD 24

Have your ass kicked by a sample track 

Grab the whole CD here and treat yourself to a TKO. 

This album, found in a Lao grocery store in northwest Dallas this weekend, has so many "OMG It's So Effing Awesome I Almost Can't Stand It" moments I don't even know how to talk about it. First, whoever this woman is, she has the single most soulful voice I've ever heard. Second, have you listened to this woman's voice? 

There's a very famous line of poetry by James Wright--the last line of his poem, "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota"--which reads, simply: "I have wasted my life." Now, I've always scoffed at that line, at that poem, at James Wright, and in turn at practically the whole state of Minnesota (where I spent six years of my adult life, and thus have, I believe, earned the right to scoff at it). To me, that sentiment runs exactly counter to the one line of poetry I can honestly say I've always lived by: Frank O'Hara's "I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life" from "Meditations in an Emergency," which I'm thinking might actually be the greatest poem ever written by an American. 

 That said ... when I first listened to this album? It was, alas, James Wright's line that I thought of.