Song Of The Day 12/3/2014: D.J. Rogers - "It's Good to Be Alive"



Housekeeper's Holiday: Someone was talking about D.J. Rogers, and I went out to find some of his stuff. I can't remember who it was. It was a current R&B singer. Might've been Aloe Blacc. It could've been Drake. I can't remember. [Note: It was Aloe Blacc. -- Ed.] I went looking for him. Having been chasing down rare or previously under-appreciated R&B and soul music for my own personal agenda over the last year or so, Rogers sounded like the kind of figure I could share a desk with.

You know, it's not out of line to say that sometimes I can be a bit... oh, you know, saturnine. I get lost in my own head, start fussing over personal inventory, get engulfed in past misdeeds and errors I don't think I've accepted complete culpability for or compensated, left the burners on the stove turned on, keep giving my information to digital marketers and then get irresponsibly irate with them when they send me response cards in the mail, mistaken my children for bellhops -- whatever. Stuff we all do. Anyway, I get in a right gloomy state of mind. But then I put on an irrepressibly happy anthem from a '70s soul artist, like Bill Withers' "Lovely Day" or Stevie's "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing" or War's "All Day Music," and I just forget everything Commissioner Bad News has littered all over my driveway and feel instantly better. I regard my progress. I clean up the kitchen. I mistake my kids for leprechauns. I start believing again. Even if the turf beneath my shoes melts down into rubbery molten lava and I lose everything below my kneecaps, by God, I get happy again. That's what D.J. Rogers' "It's Good to Be Alive" does to me. It now joins that canon.

Then I read the Rolling Stone Top 50 album list for the year and get all despondent again, but it doesn't last. Or it bothers me for years. Look, whichever way the hurricane blows, all right?

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