"I've Got the Hots for the Smarts"...

Richard Thompson is an English guitarist/songwriter who's one of my favorite players and writers out there. Wonderfully dry sense of humor and a hell of a guitar player. He's got a new album coming out August 9th, thought that's not really what I'm pointing out here.

Instead, I'm pointing out that he's also a hell of a writer of some quirkier songs that he seems to have an absolute blast writing and playing but that he doesn't seem too eager to release on his CD's (though I'm hoping that the rumored five-cd set coming out this winter will have some of the rarities). One in particular that I really loved listening to when I last saw RT in concert in Newport this spring was called "The Hots for the Smarts" about wanting a woman "who applies her lotion/in a Brownian motion", a song that I'm just dying to have as a theme for the AP and honors chemistry students in the classes I teach.

Luckily he performed a number of these odder songs in a recent live performnace that can be found in the WFUV archives. Here's the direct link to the show. "The Hots for the Smarts" comes at about the 19-minute mark.

There are, of course, other songs of his that are in this quirky vein: "Alexander Graham Bell", "I Agree with Pat Metheny", "Dear Janet Jackson", "Madonna's Wedding", "Dog Eat Dog in Denmark", and so many others. Wonderful stuff to listen to, though I do also recommend his amazing released work as well, especially "Persuasion" from his Action-Packed collection, Mock Tudor and Watching the Dark - the latter being a three-cd collection of some of his finest work, likely to be dwarfed by the afore-mentioned five-cd set hopefully coming soon.