Music of the Day, 4 June 2025

not all, but close

Of late, my mind has been filled with a different pastime than music; hence my silence. But it hasn’t been nearly as pleasant, and that realization this morning led to a terrific song popping up on the radio station in my mind.

I’ve mentioned that I’m a knitter, but I’ve not talked much about it because I didn’t think there’d be much interest. Now that I need to, I’ll try to keep it minimal and relevant. So, three things to understand: knitting can be very straightforward or quite complex; I like to challenge myself with more complex projects¹; and knitting brings out the perfectionist in me like few other things do.

I learned to knit primarily so I could make beautiful, complex sweaters in the Nordic tradition—meaning stranded colorwork knitting, in which the knitter switches among potentially several colors while maintaining an even tension across all the stitches and rows. Once I got the basics of knitting down, I realized I’d need to improve my skills a lot before attempting such a project, and so delayed trying any colorwork for years.

Over the past two years, I’ve knit and reknit a four-color sweater for my daughter three times. I’ve unknit it three times as well.² My colorwork has always been too tight compared to the rest of the sweater, so it doesn’t look quite right and isn’t comfortable.

Wanting a distraction from the colorwork project, I set out to knit a more plain sweater for myself. I’ve tried three patterns and I think the same number of yarns in various combinations… and have ripped all of them too, because something wasn’t to my satisfaction with each attempt.

Waking up this morning, I was thinking about my recent slump in knitting and how nothing seems to be going right for me with it. That woke up my inner radio station, which served up this delight:

“All Wrong” is from Morphine’s second studio album, Cure for Pain. I’m highly tempted to say it’s my favorite album mostly because of this track, but I’ve not listened to all of the band’s albums in a very long time. The evocative lyrics are great—especially since lyricist/singer Mark Sandman doesn’t identify what’s wrong about the relationship or person. But it’s the music that really shines for me.

It isn’t nearly as spare as some of Morphine’s music, so there’s more depth; and the trio of Dana Colley (saxes), Jerome Deupree (drums), and Sandman (bass, guitar, and organ³) play off one another very well. Headphones will reveal something underneath the drums and sax in the chorus … to me it almost sounds like water flowing, but it clearly isn’t that, as it’s too percussive. What does it sound like to you?

And what the heck is that funky, freaky solo? Is that a bari sax put through some kind of distortion? I tried to find information on “All Wrong” to learn more, but had no luck. [June 6 update: a dear friend and professional musician who plays sax and several other instruments confirmed my suspicion: it’s the sax modified with a wah effect.] Ultimately, it doesn’t matter: it’s all gorgeous music from a band I adore, and it popping up today brought a much-needed laugh, and a reminder to not take my knitting so seriously. All the things that have gone wrong lately will start to go right soon enough.

If you’re curious about what Nordic stranded knitting can look like, here’s a taste:

Image copyright Kristin Drysdale, from her book “The Nordic Knitting Primer”

I didn’t want to put the image above the video and thereby mislead about this post’s content. In these sweaters, just the yoke is stranded colorwork; in many Scandinavian sweaters, the entire thing is stranded. The extra strands of yarn provide even more warmth.

1. “Complex” can refer to various aspects of a project, including: stitch pattern(s); construction of the item/garment; type(s) of yarn used; and color(s) of yarn called for in the pattern. Some patterns need certain characteristics in the yarn to look their best; e.g., a soft, drapey yarn will not show cables or ribbed patterns well, as it won’t hold its shape well

2. This is often referred to as “frogging,” presumably because the knitter is ripping apart their work (“rip it” sounding like some frogs’ calls). Most of the time, if this is done carefully, the yarn can be reused

3. I don’t think there’s any organ in “All Wrong”, though