Before I reveal this Project’s most listened to musical piece, some short notes about a couple of things that didn’t appear at the top of the stats which informed this all-time (so far) Top-Ten.

No LYL Band songs. This Project grew out of music that I’ve been making with keyboard player and vocalist Dave Moore for more than 45 years as the LYL Band. From the start of playing together we sometimes included poetry or other peoples’ words they had not designed to sung or performed. This continued after the Parlando Project launched, and they make up a portion of pieces shared here throughout the years. Many of these Top Ten pieces are worked-out and worked-on arrangements, often done “one-man-band” style where I play and track each part, discarding inferior takes and thinking through what works best. But, when Dave and I play together, we track “live” in the purest/rawest sense: most often one-take and without really introducing the song to each other. I usually provide Dave with a chord sheet for the pieces I bring to a session – Dave sometimes does for me when he’s singing one. It’s extraordinarily spontaneous. Given that neither of us are virtuosos or trained improvisors, that this ever works well enough to present something worth retrospective listening surprises and pleases me. As time passes, as cultural expectations of craft and technology engender rising baselines of sound quality and tightness in recording, I still treasure that kind of music. Against Artificial Intelligence it brings Art-farcical Intransigence.

No recent songs. Nothing from the last six years made it to the Top Ten. I should have expected this. While blog readership has steeply increased over the ten years, listenership has had a much flatter curve, so the longer a piece has been available, the more likely it is to have gathered higher listens. Most new pieces gather a blip over the first couple of weeks from those who follow here, but then there is the “long tail” where listens accrue over time. When I look at daily stats reports the list of pieces getting a listen on the past day is typically 40-60 listings long.

The Top Ten is full of stuff from 2018-2020, and seeing this I wondered if this was a sweet spot in the Project’s development. It was a time where I could spend four-days-a-week working on composition and recording, largely unhindered – and I can hear some of the concentrated care and regular, scheduled, luxurious, time in the Top Ten I’ve been presenting to you this week. I also envy the level of energy and endurance I could marshal as a younger person. But still I tell myself: I’ve learned things over the years of doing this – even garnered some improved recording technology and techniques – and I think (comparing best to best) that I can at least equal the level of those earlier pieces.

So what was the piece with the most listens out of the more than 900 I’ve published here since 2016? Emily Dickinson’s “Ample make this Bed,”  that broadly referencing and deeply felt ode to love, to rest, to death from 2018 – a piece I did shortly after visiting the Dickinson Homestead museum in Amherst that summer.

Listening to it now eight summers later I marvel at the number of tracks making up this recording: drum-set, bass, electric piano, some synth line in there, my chant-not-quite-singing vocal, and that patient, excellent, and fair electric guitar solo. Could I equal it now? I can’t say for sure – it’s hard to judge “equal” between differing kinds of musical expression too – but I’d be happy if any piece I complete next week would work as well as this one does.

Here’s the audio player to hear that performance. Your player “called home?” This alternative, a highlighted link that will open a new tab with the audio player your way of reading this blog suppresses.

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“Or if you want something visual, that’s not too abysmal” as one of the recent additions to the choir invisible sang, here’s the lyric video of this recording of “Ample make this Bed”  I did a few years later.

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And before I leave this post, thanks to everyone who’s ever listened to one of these Parlando Project musical pieces, and more than double thanks to those who have listened to more than one.