(This Blog was originally posted on this date 2 years ago. As we celebrate our revamped site, we thought it was fitting to repost the blog that was the beginning of Cometary.)

Postcards are a lot like songs. Each is comprised of two forms of communication, picture and text in the case of the postcard, music and lyrics in the case of the song. This isn’t why the COMETS are POSTCARD COMETS, of course; the name uses the adjectival sense of postcard, meaning distillation and brevity. It’s not a novel, it’s not even a letter. It’s a postcard.
Postcards are a previous century’s version of text messaging, a quick thought in a compact space. The message itself can be trite, cryptic, even indecipherable. It can brighten your day or touch your heart. Generally, the glossy picture is the postcard’s attention grabber but the words are what makes it worth sending.
That’s kind of how songs work for me. An attractive melody is diminished by a lyric that does not resonate. Alternatively, if a song has a pedestrian melody and a great lyric, I still enjoy it. But I don’t enjoy it often. It seems to me that for a song to be a repeatable pleasure, both the lyric and the music have to be strong and complementary.
And what about performance? The analogy weakens here. Very little of a postcard’s appeal is based in penmanship although extreme scribbling can certainly obliterate its meaning. Conversely, the performance animates a song. Or smothers it.
The performance contextualizes a song as well. Take the R&B classic War, for instance. Edwin Starr’s original is incensed, aggressive and angry. Joan Osborne’s more recent version is full of sadness and regret, as if resigned to the everlasting vitality of human folly. Very different readings and I like them both. Or what about Layla, Derek and the Dominoes contrasted with Clapton’s unplugged reading? Same song, same artist, very different emotional contexts.
I’m sure you can think of other, possibly better, examples. I’m pretty much done here. This particular postcard is taking on the attributes of a letter. Or a novel.
Or a song by Yes.
David Partridge