It's feels suspiciously like navel-gazing nostalgia, but I recently picked up Huey Lewis & the News' "Sports." Sometimes you can, after all, go home again: This was one of those times.
But in the quarter century between transferring it from vinyl to cassette (so that I could play it on my walkman) and transferring it from CD to an MP3 hard drive, my eyes have opened to the power of craftsmanship. Because that's what makes this album shine. These guys are so dang polished that you don't really notice how they slip between pop and rock and doo-wop and blues and even rockabilly.
In the proverbial nutshell, they make it seem easy to be good at what they do for living. Something I thought--even well into college--that I could manage. Only now do I appreciate how much work and pure stubbornness goes into such "effortlessness." Which should be depressing (for a recovering slacker like m'self), except that there's a love of craft involved--not to mention the mule-headed refusal to be pigeon-holed. I like to think that was the case for the band. Particularly in the risk it took for a rock/blues/pop band to cover Hank Williams' "Honky Tonk Blues," even its turbo-charged version.
And for that reason, that song's the one my adult self likes the best, even as the scraps of teenager left in me smile at the ones she remembers from Top 40 radio waaaaay too darned many years ago.
