Frank Kogan

Damn, I missed this. Was wavering between 8 and 9 anyway, which would have taken another five hours out of my life. In the blurb I might have gone into a long incoherent story around the fact that four years ago on a drive with relatives to Mystic Seaport we went through New London and passed the Williams School and I said to incomprehending family members, "You don't know who Cassie is and you most likely will never hear her, but this is where she went to high school." And from that unpromising beginning I continued talking about Cassie, despite only a tiny possibility that they would ever care about her, and despite the certainty that they didn't care about her at that moment. Was then (in my blurb, not the car trip) going to ask if Cassie could be inexplicably alluring even when reduced to little blips, and answer, "Yes." Perhaps would have added an anecdote about the time in Radio On that I countered Phil Dellio's takedown of Clint Eastwood's skill as an actor with a long, eloquent defense of Clint's acting, and Phil praised me highly for how I managed to come up with twenty synonyms for "boring." In any event, I'd rate ten or fifteen Cassie tracks even higher than this, almost all of them unreleased. I think there's maybe one post-first album track I dislike. Favorites are "Summer Charm" and "Turn The Lights Off."

Katherine, if you're interested, the "Boney Joan Rule" is where I definitively fail to explain Cassie's allure. Don't think she's blank, do think she's recessive, think that, as she recedes, the space is filled with massive desire. Doubt that any other singer should even try this. Which doesn't mean there's no other singer who moves me in a Cassie way. I think I've written here that I get the same Cassie feeling from Dev (or for Dev), despite Dev not being recessive at all but rather being a scrappy outgoing little clubrat: the same drifting sexiness permeating her atmosphere.