As I was walking this morning, nothing particularly blogworthy popped into my cruller, perhaps because the “Dixie Flyer” (What a great name) kept banging around inside my head. When I returned home, I was happy as a clam to find it on YouTube, and even happier to see that Mark Knopfler made one of his unannounced appearances in the clip. (I saw Mark Knopfler stand in the background with the band and play for an hour with Eric Clapton in concert before he was announced to the audience.)
I’ve been a Randy Newman fan for years. His tunes quite often are not toe-tappers; hell, some of them are downright dark, or dripping with sarcasm. They are most definitely not background music, rather they require active listening.
My favorite part of the song describes the greeting by his family that Randy Newman (apparently as a small boy) and his mama received upon their arrival in New Orleans aboard the Dixie Flyer in 1943.