Olde News: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/The_Agrarians/

https://freemusicarchive.org/blog/meet-the-agrarians/

See: The Prisoners of Life!

SO, YOU`RE THE ONE? by Olde(r) Love(rs):

https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/so-youre-the-one

These songs were written and recorded at home from November 5, 2024, through December 26, 2024.

Prisoners of Life:

https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/track/prisoners-of-life

Turn now your mind away from Everything Monstrous:

https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/dandy-cane-brandishing

Have then That Confidence. 

Let these be "The American Days."

At times in my life, I've kept it better together.

Your present?  This Now--with all of its trappings!

Let these be The American Days

--whatever that yet might mean!

Who decides what's invasive?

Who can carry you or me?

These are The Deeds; these are The Moments; these are The Ways:

Today is The Lesson: ...It's worth repairing.

Meditate on Cosmic Goodness:

That Art Thou!

& All Such Bother!

Love cannot Out Eternal

The Ocean

&

Even Ocean fades and falls... fades and falls away...

Springing Verses cannot match

The Passions as those passions go through paces...

& run their courses...

Signing-Off: https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/track/american-days

Five to One: https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/twitch-glisten

"44 1/4": https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/44-1-4

Some Reflections on This Present Age:

* Ripe & full, our God will show me all that dust.

* Everything is seasonal: Wind and Winter and Spring and Finery.

* Leaves: They will land as our winds will weave them.

* Just because it comes from within you doesn't mean it comes from you.

* Oh, you, my so-tender friend: Stay with me and pass this time now.

* And if you share your secret, do I have to believe it?

* I know that you'd like a poem that will tell you "You're beautiful! You're wild! And you're worth every look!"

* One life to live: Many lives to touch.

* That clinging vibe of peaceful nighttime can't wait itself to attend on us.

* There is no winning: There never was: And still there's always been that story...

* How 'bout a lighthouse to peek through your storm?

Promotional Single:  https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/track/youre-beautiful

Some concluding reflections from Dr. Johnson:

It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward....

A large work is difficult because it is large, even though all its parts might singly be performed with facility; where there are many things to be done, each must be allowed its share of time and labour, in the proportion only which it bears to the whole; nor can it be expected, thatthe stones which form the dome of a temple, should be squared and polished like the diamond of a ring....

Of the event of this work, for which, having laboured it with so much application, I cannot but have some degree of parental fondness, it isnatural to form conjectures....

When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years....

I look with pleasure on my [work], however defective, and deliver it to the world with the spirit of a man that has endeavoured well. That it will immediately become popular I have not promised to myself: a few wild blunders, and risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity was ever free, may for a time furnish folly with laughter, and harden ignorance in contempt; but useful diligence will at last prevail....

In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author, and the world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that which it condemns; yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the [current work] was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow: and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed....

I may surely be contented without the praise of perfection, which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquility, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

"Stay with me, and watch a little while: Another law will come on down."

You're a healthy French model: https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/track/everythings-meant-to-be

You're a hungry French model: https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/high-romance-2

Everything's Meant To Be: On "High Romance": Do not give your time or your heart away.

Well, you're here right now.  Won't you won't be back again?

I am The Patience.  The Patience Found "Most Infuriating."

Be my Valentine?

M.

"Animal Heats" of The Rope River Blues Band

"All these are crushing questions; but whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same. And it would be astonishing to find how soon the change is felt if we had no kindred changes to compare with it. To share lodgings with a brilliant dinner-companion, or to see your favorite politician in the Ministry, may bring about changes quite as rapid: in these cases too we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.... I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin." -- from Middlemarch by George Eliot

https://roperiverbluesband.bandcamp.com/album/field-stream-animal-heat

"Summer's Almost Gone; Summer Never Ends."

 "Summer's Almost Gone; Summer Never Ends."

https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/sir-richards-theatre-hour

Show Me to My Wessex Heights.

https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/show-me-to-my-wessex-heights

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand 
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand, 
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly, 
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be. 

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man's friend - 
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend: 
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I, But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky. 

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways - Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days: 
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things - 
Men with a wintry sneer, and women with tart disparagings. 

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was, 
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this, 
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis. 

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the moon, Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune; 
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passed 
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast. 

There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night, 
There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a shroud of white, 
There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near, 
I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear. 

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers, 
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers; 
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know; 
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go. 

So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west, 
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest, 
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me, 
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty. 

- Thomas Hardy (December 1896)

"Islands' Memories"

If you have 32 minutes to consider, I have completed a strange thought:

https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/islands-memories

New Path(o)s' Playing Fields

New Path(o)s' Playing Fields: https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/new-path-o-s-playing-fields

The next morning, when Thomasin withdrew the curtains of her bedroom window, there stood the Maypole in the middle of the green, its top cutting into the sky. It had sprung up in the night, or rather early morning, like Jack’s bean-stalk. She opened the casement to get a better view of the garlands and posies that adorned it. The sweet perfume of the flowers had already spread into the surrounding air, which, being free from every taint, conducted to her lips a full measure of the fragrance received from the spire of blossom in its midst. At the top of the pole were crossed hoops decked with small flowers; beneath these came a milk-white zone of Maybloom; then a zone of bluebells, then of cowslips, then of lilacs, then of ragged-robins, daffodils, and so on, till the lowest stage was reached. Thomasin noticed all these, and was delighted that the May revel was to be so near.

When afternoon came people began to gather on the green, and Yeobright was interested enough to look out upon them from the open window of his room. Soon after this Thomasin walked out from the door immediately below and turned her eyes up to her cousin’s face. She was dressed more gaily than Yeobright had ever seen her dressed since the time of Wildeve’s death, eighteen months before; since the day of her marriage even she had not exhibited herself to such advantage.

“How pretty you look today, Thomasin!” he said. “Is it because of the Maypole?”

“Not altogether.” And then she blushed and dropped her eyes, which he did not specially observe, though her manner seemed to him to be rather peculiar, considering that she was only addressing himself. Could it be possible that she had put on her summer clothes to please him?

He recalled her conduct towards him throughout the last few weeks, when they had often been working together in the garden, just as they had formerly done when they were boy and girl under his mother’s eye. What if her interest in him were not so entirely that of a relative as it had formerly been? To Yeobright any possibility of this sort was a serious matter; and he almost felt troubled at the thought of it. Every pulse of loverlike feeling which had not been stilled during Eustacia’s lifetime had gone into the grave with her. His passion for her had occurred too far on in his manhood to leave fuel enough on hand for another fire of that sort, as may happen with more boyish loves. Even supposing him capable of loving again, that love would be a plant of slow and laboured growth, and in the end only small and sickly, like an autumn-hatched bird.

                                                                        from The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

"To Push to Prayer"

"To Push to Prayer": https://olderlovers.bandcamp.com/album/to-push-to-prayer

"Colder Moods; Older Bloods": A Retrospective (2006-2017)

The good people of the Free Music Archive inquired, and this is of the inquisition:

https://freemusicarchive.org/blog/meet-the-agrarians/

"Some Ones To Turn To"

"Want Something."

"Work"

"I know also," said Candide, "that we must cultivate our garden." "You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle." "Let us work," said Martin, "without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable." The whole little society entered into this laudable design, according to their different abilities. Their little plot of land produced plentiful crops. Cunegonde was, indeed, very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry cook; Paquette worked at embroidery; the old woman looked after the linen. They were all, not excepting Friar Giroflée, of some service or other; for he made a good joiner, and became a very honest man. Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts." "All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden."

HeadBeautyWaterTalk

"MEN in great place are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or state; servants of fame; and servants of business. So as they have no freedom; neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times. It is a strange desire, to seek power and to lose liberty: or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man’s self. The rising unto place is laborious; and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base; and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing." - Francis Bacon

(Somewhat) Occasional Songwriting; "Just Let Me Be(,) God": "Hey, Francis" Blues

"Nothing has been said here at any length of the great culture of the Troubadours as it appeared in Provence or Languedoc, great as was their influence in history and their influence on St. Francis. Something more may be said of them when we come to summarise his relation to history; it is enough to note here in a few sentences the facts about them that were relevant to him, and especially the particular point now in question, which was the most relevant of all. Everybody knows who the Troubadours were; everybody knows that very early in the Middle Ages, in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, there arose a civilisation in Southern France which threatened to rival or eclipse the rising tradition of Paris. Its chief product was a school of poetry, or rather more especially a school of poets. They were primarily love-poets, though they were often also satirists and critics of things in general. Their picturesque posture in history is largely due to the fact that they sang their own poems and often played their own accompaniments, on the light musical instruments of the period; they were minstrels as well as men of letters. Allied to their love-poetry were other institutions of a decorative and fanciful kind concerned with the same theme. There was what was called the "Gay Science," the attempt to reduce to a sort of system the fine shades of flirtation and philandering. There were the things called Courts of Love, in which the same delicate subjects were dealt with with legal pomp and pedantry. There is one point in this part of the business that must be remembered in relation to St. Francis. There were manifest moral dangers in all this superb sentimentalism; but it is a mistake to suppose that its only danger of exaggeration was in the direction of sensualism. There was a strain in the southern romance that was actually an excess of spirituality; just as the pessimist heresy it produced was in one sense an excess of spirituality. The love was not always animal; sometimes it was so airy as to be almost allegorical. The reader realises that the lady is the most beautiful being that can possibly exist, only he has occasional doubts as to whether she does exist. Dante owed something to the Troubadours; and the critical debates about his ideal woman are an excellent example of these doubts. We know that Beatrice was not his wife, but we should in any case be equally sure that she was not his mistress; and some critics have even suggested that she was nothing at all, so to speak, except his muse. This idea of Beatrice as an allegorical figure is, I believe, unsound; it would seem unsound to any man who has read the Vita Nuova and has been in love. But the very fact that it is possible to suggest it illustrates something abstract and scholastic in these medieval passions. But though they were abstract passions they were very passionate passions. These men could feel almost like lovers, even about allegories and abstractions. It is necessary to remember this in order to realise that St. Francis was talking the true language of a troubadour when he said that he also had a most glorious and gracious lady and that her name was Poverty." - G. K. Chesterton

"The Hanging Shadow & The Weeping Blade" b/w "Another River(,) Childe" or, "His Other Crunk Jam Band, Vol. II"