"Change His Ways" by Robert Palmer (1988)

Aside from cloying humidity and beaded necklaces designed to elicit fleeting nudity from soused dames, southern Louisiana is known for a delightful musical melange of R&B and Creole called zydeco. Largely driven by accordion and guitar, zydeco is custom built for filling the dance floor with ebullient joy, so no matter your age, color, or creed, it's pretty hard to sit still once those propulsive rhythms kick in. So naturally, zydeco connects with people who live for dance music. People like Robert Palmer.

"Change His Ways," a tale of the ebb and flow of a love affair, is a musical outlier on Heavy Nova, but it does feature Palmer's trademark vocal harmonies as the foundation to the zydeco flavors, adding layers of sweetener to a song that doesn't need it but benefits from it. And I haven't even mentioned the yodeling yet. Palmer's peripatetic zest for genre-hopping may be off-putting to some, but tracks like "Change His Ways" offer further evidence that Palmer can serve the song, no matter the genre. Or the yodeling.

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"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...

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Upon reflection, I’ve had a fortunate life in the area of work. As a freshly minted teenager, I would visit Evergreen Park Grocery and dream of someday working there like my father did, and at the age of 14, I got $2/hour to live out that dream, such as it was. From there, I yearned to try other occupations, from record stores to teaching, and I’d be chuffed to tell Young Erick that both of those things happened in due course. ( Oh, and Young Erick, one of them got you to meet David Bowie, and one of them got you to own houses and cars, so I’ll let you ponder on which one was better. ) I even got to DJ a bit here and there, and while it never hit the heights of a professional radio gig, it was certainly better than the summer I played preset cassettes on my boom box for a nerd camp dance while my unrequited crush stayed in her room. What I never crossed off my professional life list was acting, either regular or voice, but while I still yearn for that big breakthrough -- seriously, ask...

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