Seventeen years ago, the conversation went something like this:

Me: Springsteen's playing in Miami on November 24. Let's go.
Keith: Nah, I don't think so.
Me: Whaddaya mean?
Keith: He's only got a couple of good songs, and Human Touch is a piece of crap. He's not even with the E Street Band anymore.

Think about those words for a second. Putting aside the grammatically incorrect double negative, it's a remarkable concept. Compare it with with Woody Allen, who, in Annie Hall, said that life was "full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly."

Better still, compare it with Thoreau, who wrote that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Some of you may have noticed that there's a new ad on the left sidebar. It's for a book called The Light In Darkness by my good friend Lawrence Kirsch. Longtime listeners of the podcast will remember when he appeared on the show to talk about his first book, For You, and when we paid tribute to the memory of E Street Band organist Danny Federici.