Three-Minute Worlds.

Folk Religion on the FM Dial.

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX.

A feature of the C-of-C-C Newsletter dealing with retirement, senescence, infinity, and beyond…written from my anteroom of eternity.

—Justin Aldmann

Someone here at the newsletter once noted that songs are little worlds. They have a beginning and an end, and a logic all their own. I’ve come to think that’s truer than any philosophy book I ever cracked open.

I spent my formative years wandering those worlds, one three-minute sermon at a time. Sometimes they offered escape, sometimes instruction, and sometimes they trained me to expect things the world couldn’t quite deliver.

Nick Hornby nailed it in his book High Fidelity—the same one they turned into that movie with John Cusack moping around his record shop:

“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands—literally thousands—of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss…”

And Frank Zappa, never one to whisper, weighed in:

“I hate love songs. I think one of the reasons for the bad mental health condition of the US is that people grow up listening to love songs. It’s a training that in your subconscience creates a desire for a fantasy situation, that will never become real for you…”

They were both right—partly. But on this, I’ll take the liberty to disagree with them.

Because if love songs are illusions, they’re the kind of illusions that keep the species going. They are the evolutionary sugar-coating on a life that would be too stark without them. The dream of love—endless, unbreakable, ecstatic—has probably coaxed more men and women into marriage, parenthood, and plain survival than any rational argument ever could. In that sense, the illusions have a purpose. They get us up in the morning. They keep us trying again.

By 1969, it felt like the music itself was losing the last glimmer of innocence. The Doors were crooning funeral marches. The Rolling Stones were predicting the storm coming over the horizon. Even the Beatles were letting darkness seep in. A lot of the other kids were drifting toward the heaviest sounds—Led Zeppelin just starting up, and Black Sabbath lurking, ready to teach everyone how to turn up the gloom even louder.

The Doors invited you into the abyss. Poco left the porch light on.

It was a Gothic turn—a Dionysian celebration of entropy. Maybe some people needed that catharsis, but to me, it felt like trading one illusion for another, swapping the sweetness of hope for the intoxication of despair.

And if I’m honest, maybe my half–Southern Italian temperament just couldn’t grok that atmosphere. My people come from a place where the sun still matters, where melody is meant to lift you up, not drag you deeper into the cave. We’ve always been suspicious of anything that made darkness into an aesthetic. Maybe that made me an oddball back then—but it’s an oddball I could live with.

And yes, I know Frank Zappa himself was Southern Italian—Sicilian, in fact. You’d think that would have made us kindred spirits. I can say I never liked his music—it was too caustic, too restless, too determined to shatter any tune before it had a chance to settle.

I have to admit, part of me always hesitated around anything Sicilian, even in music. My grandfather from Apulia used to warn me, in that half-serious, half-muttering way old men have, “Watch out for the Sicilians.” He never got specific—he just let the warning hang there like a damp curtain.

And when I was very young, my grandmother from Lucania would point at two neighborhood girls who told dirty jokes and cursed like sailors, and say with disgust, “They’re Sicilian.” She didn’t mean it as an observation—she meant it as a diagnosis.

Back then, Southern Italy wasn’t some unified province. It was a patchwork of little kingdoms and duchies, each convinced the next valley over was full of scoundrels and cutthroats. Maybe that old prejudice stuck to me more than I’d like to admit. And maybe that’s a lesson too—that sometimes prejudice comes from a shard of folk wisdom, possibly distorted and exaggerated along the way. You don’t have to believe every suspicion you inherit, but you shouldn’t ignore why it existed in the first place.

But I always liked Zappa the man. For all his reputation as a wild iconoclast, he was in many ways a cultural conservative. He stayed married to the same woman all his life. He raised four kids in a stable home while half his generation was out chasing oblivion. He despised drugs and called out the phoniness of the counterculture even as he skewered it in song. He had a certain old-world Mediterranean practicality that never deserted him, no matter how strange the music got.

Maybe that’s the other side of our Southern Italian inheritance. We come from a culture that values family, discipline, and keeping your feet on the ground—even if your head’s in the clouds. Zappa and I expressed it differently, but I suspect we both wanted the same thing at the bottom of it all—something you could stand on.

And then I found Poco’s Pickin’ Up the Pieces, and it felt like an arm thrown around my shoulders:

Songs are spells you can hum—small enchantments against the dark.

🎶There’s just a little bit of magic in the country music we’re singin’…

🎶Somebody yelled out at me, “hey country music and company kind of make it on a Sunday afternoon…”

🎶Oh Lord, I know that the day will come when the both of us will sit down and strum on our guitars.

🎶And you’ll see I really am a lot like you.”

🎶

That record turned me around. One song did that. It reminded me that music could be an act of reassembly, not just a lament. It was proof that the pieces could be gathered up again, and made into something worth living in.

🎶It comes from the backwoods of meadows and memories.

🎶Sunshine encased in honey-sweet rhymes.

—A reminder that even as the world splinters, you can still build a small, bright shelter from the fragments.

I don’t buy the notion that music is just escapism or simulacra. It’s a real thing in the real world. Songs are like scale models of lost wholeness—imperfect, approximate, but more honest than the empty chatter of progress. They tether you to your people, to your place, and to the best parts of yourself.

I have seen what happens when the soundtrack changes around you. When your neighbors no longer recognize your songs, and you don’t recognize theirs. That’s cultural replacement up close: when you lose not only the land under your feet but the melody in your ears.

But not every song betrayed me. Not every melody was a false promise. Some of them—like that Poco album—became a folk religion I still carry.

So I still pray to the Black Swan. Maybe there will be another improbable event. Or maybe there won’t need to be—because these songs themselves have always been part of the Real. Not a back door to it. Not a distraction. A little world complete in itself, worth inhabiting as long as I’m here.

And when the time comes to close the box, I suspect I’ll still be humming.

—Justin Aldmann