Fanatic! I can never be sure where these notes find you. Where I am is consistently hot day after day, although a few hours ago, I noticed some of the trees outside were starting to shed their leaves, in perhaps the slightest of insinuations of the season coming to an end. August is a peak month for listening to music! At least in the part of the world I live in, it is summer’s crescendo.

I’ve found that often something I’m anticipating isn’t as good as the thoughts I have about it, where the actual thing wasn’t nearly as good as how I’d pictured it. The food in the advertisement is always better looking than what hits the table. I think advertisers understand the human mind creates the advertised version, all the while knowing the actual isn’t going to be nearly as good. We’re at once a highly complex species but also often surprisingly open to suggestion.

I’ve really come to enjoy anticipating things even though I know it’s probably best to be “in the moment” as much as possible. The imagination is without limit. The real world holds nothing but limits.

One of the reasons I really like August is because it makes me think about September, which is the start of my three favorite months of the year. So, I enjoy the relentless heat of August as best I can, knowing September is only days away. I might prefer thinking about September than actually being in September. I’m not saying September, October and November are letdowns, it’s just that I’m really enjoying thoughts of autumn and the cooling temperatures while the weather is stuck on the simmer setting. By the time the temperature actually starts dropping, I’ll pretty much have forgotten how damn hot it is at present. This is one of the reasons I try to listen to music seasonally, in an effort to get as much as possible out of time and place. I enjoy the long sunsets, knowing the cycle of early darkness (which I far more prefer) is on the way. Wow. That took a lot of words. Not sorry!

Last week I told you my new book, Stay Fanatic!!! Vol. 4 had come back from the printer. I really hope you get a chance to check it out. You can get it right here.

We have five Saturdays together in August. Soon we’ll be coming to the end of our visits with Charles M. Bogert and his frogs. One of the reasons we start our summer shows with a track of his, is because they sound cool and I relate to this great herpetologist and his mission to document the sounds of frogs and toads in North America. He was in his own way a fanatic.

For tonight, we’ve prepared what you’ll hopefully find to be a compelling warm-to-hot weather soundtrack. It’s the mix tape feel we were after and I think we got it.

Have a great night of listening, a music-filled and carefully hydrated week upcoming and STAY FANATIC!!!

–– Henry