Artists That I Love - Episode 1 - John Gorka

When I started posting on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, I blatantly stole Bob Cesca's routine of posting an interesting video as the first post of the day. He calls it "Morning Awesome" and I chose to call it that too. Hopefully, the fact that I'm hipping you to Bob's excellent political commentary site; "Bob Cesca's Goddamn Awesome Blog" will go some way towards earning his forgiveness - and help to avoid an ugly internets lawsuit. As if Bob knows I exist. Bob posts the vids right there on his site but, because of Twitter's 140 character limit, I can only supply a link and hope that my fellow twitterers will click through to what I want them to see. In my case, these are songs by favourite artists whose careers, for one reason or another, have played out somewhere slightly below the popular music radar. I've kept a list of all the links with the intention of sharing them here on my site, where an unlimited spew of characters is possible (and often, in my case, probable).

I've been experiencing an overabundance of mental disarray this week - with both taxes and an out-of-date contract rider calling for my undivided attention - so it took until last night to realize that I could probably embed the youtube videos the same way my good friend Bob does.

Once I learned how, I couldn't decide what song to post first, so I experimented with a random (but very sweet) video of two teenagers singing the first verse of a song I wrote forty years ago. Sarah and Kayla are the least well-exposed artists on my list, so they've turned out to be a very good place to start.

Today I'd like to present John Gorka, singing "Love is Our Cross to Bear" in what looks like someone's basement, but is probably a small club. Please notice his amazing songwriting and captivating voice.

If you like this one, check "Armed With a Broken Heart" and "Gypsy Life" - which contains one of my favourite observations on life as a gypsy: "People love you when they know you're leaving soon".