10 Great Things (Feb. 4 edition)

Del McCoury, being a billionaire, the one good Duran Duran song, and much more

Welcome to the new readers who have arrived since I introduced my Substack earlier this week! And as always, thanks to those of you who came over from my old newsletter. We’re all family now. I’m a cousin. Sorry, that’s the rule.

Today’s post is basically what my old newsletter was like — a few words, plus a list of links to my 10 favorite things of the week. Those of you who have been around a while might notice a difference or two. Because I’m doing other posts now, some weeks this post might just be links. Also, Substack makes it easy to embed photos and video and such, so sometimes, instead of making you click through to somewhere else, I’ll just put it right here for you to look at or listen to.

None of this is the final form — if you have ideas for ways to make this better, drop them in the comments or just reply to this post. I’m so glad y’all are here.

Before we get to the links, a quick pitch: If you haven’t subscribed to The Writing Shed, please do. You can subscribe for free … or if you’re inclined to pay a little something to support this work, I’d be grateful.

10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. My guest on SouthBound this week was bluegrass legend Del McCoury, who can still hit the high notes at age 83. A tidbit from the show: He and his band never take the stage with a setlist — they just pick something when they get out there, or take a request.

2. Something else we talked about was McCoury’s cover of Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” which I think is one of the great songs of the last 50 years. Here’s Thompson’s original:

Del’s cover:

And another cover I love, by Mary Lou Lord:

What a great damn song.

3. My weekly for WFAE was about snow, three weekends in a row, and how spring is making its stand anyway.

4. Eli Saslow, a must-read no matter what the subject, on the thoughts of a billionaire.

5. Dog Time: As I work on my book on the Westminster Dog Show and the bond between dogs and their people, I’m saving this spot for dog stories. This week, from Saturday Night Live:

6. Joe Burrow is the quarterback who has taken the Cincinnati Bengals to a Super Bowl nobody expected them to make. Kent Babb goes to Burrow’s broken Ohio hometown to find the people who believed in him first — and needed to.

7. I ripped through the latest Jack Reacher novel, BETTER OFF DEAD, in three nights. Lee Child’s brother, Andrew, is helping write the books these days … if I had to guess, I’d say Lee comes up with the story and Andrew writes it, because the writing feels just a hair more slack than top-shelf Reacher. But this was still a blast to read.

8. And you can best bet we’ll be watching the new Jack Reacher TV series this weekend:

9. Writing longhand as a way to think differently. I write longhand in my journal every night, and maybe it makes me a little more reflective, but I’m not sure if I have it in me to write a whole story longhand these days. My brain is tied to the keyboard.

10. Duran Duran played AUSTIN CITY LIMITS, which is a sentence I never thought would exist. I was never a fan back when they were huge, and I’m still not, but they have one song I always liked, and they were nice enough to play it in this set:

I have to admit, Simon Le Bon still sounds pretty good.

— TT